BP 86 
I sit in a chair outside in the middle of February and gaze at a world around me that is shockingly different than the one I inhabited only hours ago. There is no snow or subzero temperatures. I hear no howling wind and see no ice on which I must walk with nimble care.
In their place, I see palm trees with their delicate fronds alternately flowing and then waving in the afternoon breeze. I behold blood-red bougainvillea flowers as delicate as gossamer. I see flora that flourishes nowhere within a thousand-mile radius of where I live, green growth on the ground that resembles grass, and diamond-encrusted azure waters that sparkle in the sun. There is warmth.
In contrast to the bleak of urban winter, I am in heaven.
I intentionally attempt to absorb the beauty of the world that presses gently against my physical awareness like a compassionate embrace. I work hard to take it in, to internalize it into my soul. I sit in my chair and rehearse the majesty of it all. I do my best to memorize it all. Surely, I will rise from where I sit and be able to take it with me.
Reluctantly, I get up and walk away and the beauty is left behind right where I left it. Somehow, I am not able to take it inside my soul and make it one with me. I am on the outside of it, and it is on the outside of me.
Nature, the arena where many claim to find God or feel close to Him. I would not disagree. I only am disappointed that I cannot hug it to my breast and take it back to Minnesota. Even then, it would be outside of me and not inside of me.
Maybe the experience of being one flesh sexually and emotionally in marriage is the closest thing we humans will attain to that will feel close to internalizing beauty and the presence of something outside ourselves. Or a friendship like that of David and Jonathan that had nothing to do with sexuality and everything to do with the godly love of two brothers that reflected Jesus’ brotherly love for us.
Maybe we were not made to unite with things but with someone. Trying to be one with the beauty of nature tantalizes our desires and arouses within us a sense of majesty but never feeds our deepest hunger. Those who attempt it will only come away with a fleeting sense of glory that soon fades the further one leaves it behind. We carry the beauty of nature away in a bucket with holes, and the bucket is our soul.
Speaking of nature, in his early years, C.S. Lewis was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and viewed nature through the eyes of a materialist. Listen to how the absence of God in his heart impacted his reflections about the natural world around him in a poem he wrote when he was 20 years old entitled, Satan Speaks:
I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law; ye have none other.
I am the flower and the dew drop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.
I am the battle’s filth and strain,
I am the widow’s empty pain.
I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.
I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason.
I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet,
This poem about the natural world was written by Lewis after he was discharged from the army following WWI. Clearly, at this young age, he was not a dispassionate atheist. His writing reflects that he was an angry atheist. His strong pessimistic skepticism about nature and life was no doubt impacted by the death of his mother when he was a young boy and by writers such as H.G. Wells who viewed the vast universe as cold and impersonal.
It was quite a miracle then, when the far-from-God Lewis was cornered by Jesus, and he surrendered in his early 30s (with the assistance of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings) to the Creator of nature.
Lewis’ dark view of nature changed after that. No, he never did see nature as an absolute proof for Jesus, but he did insist that the longings that natural beauty awakens within humans points to the existence of something or someone behind nature that transcends mere materialism. According to Lewis, a knowledge of the existence of Jesus, the personal Creator God, requires something more than simply the beauty of nature such as the Word of God and philosophical arguments from morality, from reason, and from the functional complexity of the world.
Lewis’ evolving spiritual journey from angry atheist to “amiable agnostic” to theist to believer in Jesus Christ led him to a point where he later commented about nature: “We want to be united with the beauty, to pass into it, to become part of it.”
I agree whole-heartedly. I feel the same desire to become a part of nature or, more accurately, to make it a part of me, down here in Florida as I experience its beauty beside the Gulf of Mexico against the backdrop of the recent memory of Minnesota winter only three hours away by aircraft. The contrast in climates, especially when paralleled (juxtaposed might be the best word) in such a time-compacted manner–one grueling and the other almost blissful–inspire my deep longing to ingest the pleasant one, the sublimely desirable one; sadly, without success.
On many occasions in life, I have felt the disappointment of not being able to attain oneness with the world around me. The pain can be acute. It is an ache that tells me that something is terribly amiss. The pit of the peach is there, but where is the fruit itself?
As alluded to above, I believe that the closest thing to that experience of oneness–apart from a unity with Jesus Himself–is the experience of a deep friendship that Heinz Kohut would call twinship and also the sexual and emotional intimacy of marriage.
There is also the counterfeit, of course–sexual oneness pursued apart from a desire for true godly intimacy. This substitute for genuine oneness tragically leads a person to settle for the explosive but fleeting experience of orgasm that only leaves a person more aware of his or her emptiness afterwards than before it was experienced. There is awakened then, a desire for more and more until sexual addiction becomes a way of life and we are seduced into believing that it is the norm.
Lust never sates, at least not for long. It always increases the insatiable hunger for more until it becomes a form of torture for the one inflicted by it and maybe for the ones who experience the acting out of that affliction.
Yes, we humans are so willing to settle for less when God has made us for so much more: for pure and holy experiences that usher us into His Presence and joy where genuine ecstasy abides.
Getting back to the main point . . . while on this trip, I have encountered yet again the truth that the beauty of this world cannot be captured, stored within the heart, and then later summoned in its full glory on demand. There are memories, even pictures and videos, of course, but they are far different than ingestion of the beauty of the moment for a lifetime. The experience of beauty drains through the holes in the soul’s bucket like water through open fingers. Maybe the worst of it is the unsatisfied yearning that remains along with the deep ache and the sadness. It is also an aloneness.
After years of living, I now know that I will never become one with the beauty of this world, and that it will never become one with me. But the inability to experience that oneness does not mean that I do not desire it or that I was not created for it, possibly in a different way than I have desired.
It is at times like this that I long for something beyond the beauty of the world. Like Lewis, I believe that the longing points to the existence of its fulfillment.
In quieter moments when I am removed from the distractions and busyness of the world around me, I long for a place I will be transported to (not by aircraft or car) that I will never have to leave or that I will not have to attempt to memorize and take with me (to no avail) because I cannot remain there. Yes, the day is coming when I will finally be summoned not just anywhere, but to the home my heart has been longing for since He called my heart to His heart. I will arrive there and never have to leave.
In the meantime, I groan. Yes, I smile and laugh and engage in the life and love others. Yet, somewhere deep inside, I long for something more. For home. For a place I will never have to leave.
So, is my desire ultimately for a place? For physical beauty? No, it is not. The place comes with a person, or should I say that the person of my deepest desire comes with a place. (Nature simply points to the existence of such a place but ultimately the Presence of the person). My deepest longing is for Jesus’ presence uninterrupted by my sin, by the distractions of this world, by the decline of body and mind, and by the accusations of the enemy. In the end, then, it is for my Creator and best friend that I long.
Thank God that until that glorious day is realized, He abides in me in the person of the Holy Spirit. Christ, then, is in me even at the current moment, the only thing or person that I am truly one with both in this world and in the next! Every other relationship including marriage and soul friendships give me a blessed foretaste of the ultimate oneness with God that will one day be fully satisfied when I am in His Presence.
So, I can observe nature and enjoy it and long to internalize its beauty that points to a glory beyond itself, but I will never be one with it. Thankfully, I will experience a deeper intimacy with other human as I pursue them with the love of God and encounter a deeper glory in friendships with the creatures made in God’s image. Ultimately, however, it is for Him that my soul longs. Only He will satisfy my deepest longings.
I experience that oneness with Him now to some degree, but one day, He will be fully formed in me, and I will be fully one with Him.
O Florida, your blissful beauty is to be enjoyed but not as an end in itself. You exist to point to the glory of Another. The beauty of nature awakens within me a longing, no, the longing for Him who lies behind all physical beauty. The One who can be internalized forever.
Thank you, Jesus, then, for the beauty of nature and the intimacy of relationships (especially those who share the common denominator of your Spirit) for they point to your existence. Most of all, I am overwhelmingly grateful for the abiding of you in me and me in you. Here is glory realized and the hunger satisfied—or at least fed as I only hunger for you more and more. For an eternity.
Be close to me, Jesus. Nothing else or no one else will quench my deepest thirst.
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved ~ Romans 8:22ff
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full ~ John 15:9-11
I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world ~ John 17:20-24