09/27/2026
TAKING UP QUEST....
We must return to the journey. Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we must pick up the trail and follow the map that we have at hand. Desire, both the whispers and the shouts, is the map we have been given to find the only life worth living. You may think you are following the map of desire when all you are doing is serving it slavishly, unthinkingly. It is not the same. We must listen to desire, look at it carefully, let it guide us through the false routes and dead ends.
C.S. Lewis advises us, I knew too well how easily the longing accepts false objects and through what dark ways the pursuit of them leads us. But I also saw that the Desire itself contains the corrective of these errors. The only fatal error was pretend you had passed from desire to fruition, when, in reality, you had found either nothing. or desire itself, or the satisfaction of some different desire. The dialectic Desire, faithfully followed, would retrieve all mistakes, head you off from all false paths, and force you to live through...a sort of (experimental) proof.
The only fatal error is to pretend that we have found the life we prize. To mistake the water hole for the sea. To settle for the same old thing. Fry called such a life "the sleep of prisoners." You might remember the movie "The Shawshank Redemption," the story of prison life in the Northeast in the 1940's. The film focuses on the journey of two men's hearts through the trials and temptations of incarceration. Red, the ringleader and the most seasoned of the prisoners, explains what happens when you live within those walls too long: "At first, these walls, you hate them. The make you crazy. Aftera while you get used to 'em, don't notice 'em anymore. Then comes the day you realize you need them." That is the most tragic day of all---to prefer slavery to freedom, to prefer death to life. We must not stay in this sleep. The time has come for us to wake, to arise from our slumber. As the scriptures say, "Wake up, O sleeper rise from the dead" (Ephesians 5:14). And so MacDonald prayed,
When I can no more stir my soul to move, And my life is but the ashes of a fire, When I can but remember that my heart Once used it live and love, long and aspire--- Oh, be thou then the first, the one thou art; Be thou the calling, before all answering love, And in me wake hope, fear boundless desire.
(Diary of an Old Soul)
Bringing our heart along in our life's journey is the most important mission of our lives---and the hardest. It all turns on what we do with our desire. If you will look around, you will see that most people have abandoned the journey. They have lost heart. They are camped in places of resignation or indulgence, or trapped in prisons of despair. Life provides any number of reasons and occasions to abandon desire. Certainly, one of the primary reasons is that it creates for us our deepest dilemmas. To desire something and not to have
it --- is this not the source of nearly all our pain and sorrow?
