Trusting the Impossible
And the point of wonder
I swear I've heard the echoes of a voice
Like a dream that you feel, but you don't remember
– John Mark McMillan, Mercury and Lightning
As someone who grew up in a religious home I have spent a good amount of time being told that I only believe what I believe because it’s what my parents believe. This has always annoyed me. In part this is because neither one of my parents were believers at all until a few heartbeats before I came into the world, and if they could choose it for themselves then surely so could I. In part it’s because I readily disagree with them on a great many other things, and have done since the age of about two. More than that though, it bothered me because the experiences which led me to believe were mine, not anyone else’s. For almost as long as I have been alive I can recall moments where I have looked at what is in the world and felt a sense of wonder; finding an insect under a rock at two, seeing my first kingfisher at ten, going to my first gig at twelve. It always made sense to me to direct those feelings somewhere outside of me, not just to wonder but to wonder at something.
Wonder itself is an interesting feeling. It’s not just appreciation but something more. I remember watching the sunset with my wife from a hotel balcony, standing there late at night as it dropped below the bay. That fading sun pulled at me. It didn’t just make me happy, it didn’t just release a pop of serotonin somewhere in my head. It spoke to a part of me deep down, and that part of me wanted to reach out across the water and touch it. That’s wonder. I long for the impossible, and every now and then in little quiet moments I get to touch and taste it, like the skin of the world is stretched thin and I see shadows moving on the other side like shadow puppets on a child’s wall.
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
- CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
Any academic will tell you that just because you want something to be true, it doesn’t mean you should believe it. In fact they will say that you should avoid believing it, that the bar of proof should be higher for that thing than it is for other things, in order to compensate for your bias. They are right, I think, about every question except the one which matters most. When I was younger I used to watch a lot of debates about the existence of God. What you would learn after watching a few of these debates is that no-one on either side was ever going to change their mind. It didn’t matter what new arguments they heard or what new evidence they saw or how badly they were dunked on by the intellect across from them, they would swim doggedly on in the stream of their own thinking. They were like tug of war matches, and anyone who's ever watched one of those knows that nothing moves all that much; the two sides pull against one another until one tires and collapses back a few feet from where they started. This, to me, seemed a bad way of making sense of the world and the things which are beyond us.
There are some Christians out there who will tell you that they are absolutely, completely, 100% convinced that they are right, according to the arguments they have read and the evidence they have investigated. I am not one of them. This has, on occasion, derailed the conversation in the church lobby. I am very close to fully convinced, but only very close. There are gaps in the story which wait to be filled in. In my defence, I think this is how it is supposed to work. I don’t think we’re little computers whose job it is to puzzle out God’s existence by pouring through the natural with a magnifying glass in hand. We are living breathing organic things being offered a relationship, and the job of reason is to determine whether or not it is wise to trust that offer. Which it does, on balance. I believe there is enough evidence to say this path is most likely the right path; at the very least it is not obviously wrong. Yet there is still a little leap of faith involved, a little gap to step across, under which rolls the flood that carried Noah and the sword in Joshua’s hands and a hundred other little things which I struggle to reconcile. For better or worse the longing is the thing which carries me over the gap.
Sometimes, when I can't sleep
It's just a matter of time before I'm hearing things
Swore I could feel you through the walls
But that's impossible
I want to believe (I want to believe)
That if I go outside, I'll see a tractor beam
Coming to take me to where I'm from
I want to go home
– Phoebe Bridgers, Chinese Satellite
I don’t believe I am alone in that longing for something beyond what I see. If you pushed me, I would say that that longing was coded deep down in our being somewhere. I would call it an essential part of the human condition. Quite a lot of life feels as though it was designed to drown out that voice, by people who want to consume our labour and our relationships, who would happily plaster every square inch of our souls with branded apparel. Still I think it remains. If you turn your ear a little you can hear it all over.
Someone once asked me why I married my wife, and the best answer I could give back was ‘because I wanted to’. I don’t think this is all that different. My heart longs for something beyond me, and as I have studied and searched I have found the object of that longing in Christ. There is lots of debate to be had about the choice to believe Him and believe in Him, but I think that debate is more like due diligence than anything else. It is the process by which we determine whether the thing which seems too good to be true can in fact be true. Whether the impossible can indeed be possible. Like a safety checklist before a skydive: it’s important, but on it’s own it’s not enough to make you step out of the plane. Unless your desire to feel the wind in your hair is greater than your fear that something might still go wrong, you will remain standing at the door, waiting. Which is fine, for a little while, but it’s not how I want to live my life. It is better to take the risk in pursuit of the thing you really want than to sit and ask ‘what if?’.