A life of wistful hope
I want a new earth, but I also want to experience the joy of this one.
Think of Reepicheep madly paddling in his coracle (and no doubt giggling with glee and curled whiskers) on his way to the Utter East, anticipating a reunion with a Lion he once met.
Or think of Elrond, Galadriel and a small host of elves setting out for the farthest western lands to an eternity without death, less risk and less need for courage. Leaving the little people, like us, stuck in the middle between two horizons.
They tell us that the Christian faith can be summarized as creation, fall, redemption and eschaton. As if it falls on a rigid timeline with a before and after. I believe that, but I also believe that each child is a new creation; that the fall occurs daily in my lifetime; that redemption really is a new birth, a new Creation. And that so far, the end times have occurred with unfailing succession. As Nicolas Berdyaev explained, revolutions like the Russian Communist Revolution were really apocalypses in time.
And we look for fulfillment: a better time without Time, perhaps. My late friend John Hiemstra, when he was weak and aging fast, used to tell me, “Curt Gesch, I know it will be good to be in heaven with Christ, but I really love my garden.”
His world is my world: a world of love, hate, wars and peacemaking. A time for emotional breakdowns and the soothing consolation of friends. I want a new earth, but I also want to experience the joy of new books, the solid tug of a rainbow trout on my hand-tied Orange Marmalade dry fly, another flight of mallards and pintails cupping their wings and coming into the decoys, misplaying some notes on the piano but catching the bounce or sombre largissimo of a psalm tune.
Is it too much to say that I experience the creation, the fall, the redemption and the eschaton as I sit here in my upstairs room in Quick, B.C.? Here, between the horizons of Utter East and Utter West?
Moments of darkness, moments sublime.
Editor’s note: Reepicheep appears in C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Elrond, Galadriel and company are elves in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
