BitterSweetLife

It struck me recently, the unnatural isolation of our lives. Our living conditions, even the best of them, are disquietingly wrong. Our lives possess a degree of separation from their Source that is surreal—C.S. Lewis called it a “great divorce.” The more I think about it, the more I see this truth as obvious but hidden, the disconnected strangeness of our lives.

We are like a child in a dysfunctional home. Our dwelling is a single-parent household, our situation effective abandonment—except that we perpetuate it ourselves. We are not statistics. We are not marginalized children.

We remain stubbornly in custody of an earth that treats us poorly, prevented by our own perversity from reunion with a loving father. He watches us from a legal distance; we do not see him. His heart is heavy, and we are saddened, and do not know why.

Christ wants all his children with him, and sometimes chooses peremptorily to bring them home. The rest of us live on in this unnatural state of things, this strange plantation, a dim-lit Never-Never Land, Island of Lost Boys—do we ever come to see it? Mercifully, the Father finally reclaims those who are his, even when we fail to realize how foreign our lives have become.

Ironically, we may catalogue our sense of alienation without diagnosing or even guessing at its source. Most of the time our degree of separation does not register fully, but we can be sure for God it does. As Christ mourned:

“Jerusalem…how often I’ve ached to embrace your children, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you wouldn’t let me” (Matthew 23:37, The Bible).

For us, it’s different. The knowledge of seclusion rises naturally enough:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that the sense of loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon peculiar to myself and a few other solitary people, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. – Thomas Wolfe

But having stumbled over this “central and inevitable fact,” how do we employ it? Irrationally, we continue in this unbright nursery, stumbling through shadowlands, splashing in the shallows, crying over bruises and sand burns, while the Father calls us to the blue Atlantic, the Caribbean radiance of life as he lives it.

There is a sense in which God watches from a towertop or through a window as his children play outside and below—“unable” to go to them because his children will not have him.

Or more aptly, we children alternatively romp or sulk in a halogen-lit playroom while God observes from the outside world of soaring mountains, sunlit meadows, azure lakes, a living, growing cosmos. Our orphan-status is an artificial construct. We remain in this shabby playroom because we ignore the doorknobs.

I wonder at our reluctance to meet our estranged Father. Is it because we fear to meet him? Or because we fear who we’ve become? At any rate, lucky are those who have never entered the chronic dysfunction, or who swallowed their pride and allowed the Father to heal the breach. As Wolfe queries—

Which of has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

—to which I say, Some of us do, Some of us have not, Some of us never were. One day there will be a great setting-to-rights. Earth will become an empty nursery.