We finish our look at the next words in the Our Father as we continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
***
That hope that there might really be, at the end of all things, what Tolkien called “joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”[1] is what Jesus’ is getting at when he tells us our Father is a heavenly Father. It answers profoundly another element in pagan life that I experienced countless times, forming a sort of leitmotif of my pre-Christian life. It was a thing I kept well under wraps for the simple reason that it was an experience that lies right at the root of who I am and formed the underpinning of every good desire, action, and choice I have ever made. It was an experience so intensely personal to me that I did not talk about it, even with myself. I figured I was, well, crazy and would no more have brought it up in casual conversation than I would have gone for a stroll buck naked in a shopping mall. Indeed, I might still be a pagan had I not made the acquaintance of a Cambridge don named C.S. Lewis who had plucked up the courage to say, “You are not alone. I also have experienced, not so much the presence as the absence of that ‘unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Kahn, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.’”[2]
He called it by various names: Desire, Joy, sehnsucht, the appetite for heaven. He wrote about it in words that still bring tears to my eyes, making clear that the seeming lack of desire for heaven was mere illusion:
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often if I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we ever desired anything else. You may have noticed to books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that… Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and it all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it…. But if it should really become manifest…you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.[3]
Lewis made an instant friend of me because he was describing perfectly my deepest interior experience growing up. Only he didn’t just describe it. He made sense of it:
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not mean that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.[4]
This, at long last, made sense both of the longing and of the frustration of this passing world. There really is Something behind it all. But the Something is not a capricious Power or a malicious Joker. It is not an It at all, but a He; the source of all the beauty and the ultimate fulfillment of all desire. Indeed, precisely the reason creation was a “subjected to futility” (Romans 8:20) is so that we, who are so prone to doing so, would not batten on it and seek to satisfy ourselves with it. He has “put eternity into man’s mind” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and arranged all things so that “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” as Augustine said.[5]
Of course, mere desire is not a proof of sanctity. It is merely a proof of humanity. My point is not to illustrate Lewis’ (and still less my) cause for canonization. Rather it is to make clear that, in fact, the hunger for heaven is indeed a burning fire in our hearts and that Jesus really is addressing something right at the core of our being when he tells us that our Father is in heaven. It’s not sugary religious talk, but a statement of fact about who God really is—everlasting ecstasy, the fulfillment of our deepest longings, the Hope toward which all our little hopes flow as tiny rivulets join larger streams till they pour as a mighty river out into the endless sea of his glory. When Jesus calls us to address Our Father in this way, he models for us (and assists us in emulating himself) in setting our minds, right from the start, on heavenly realities—which are the real story—and taking our distracted hearts and minds off of earthly frippery. In doing so, he prepares us to do the main thing that prayer is about, which is not “asking for stuff” (though that’s part of it) but is instead speaking forth the praise of his glory in the words “Hallowed be Thy Name.”
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1966), pp. 82-84.
[2] C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 204.
[3] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1976), p. 145-147.
[4] Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 120.
[5] Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1. Available on-line at http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/augconfessions/bk1.html as of March 3, 2011.
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