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Waking Up in a Dark Wood

Waking Up in a Dark Wood

Last updated on: July 26, 2015 at 1:04 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

Waking Up in a Dark Wood 2015-07-26T01:04:02-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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I woke up after doom had come and I had nobody to blame for it but myself.

My parents were excellent, my church winsome, and my education better than I deserved, but I wanted more. The best part of me wanted Jesus and a relationship with Him.

Maybe.

Or it could easily have been that all I wanted was something other than what I had. The luxury of happiness, security, and enough to eat gave me the freedom to long for more. I was not Oliver Twist asking for more gruel to feed my empty orphan belly, I was a well-fed American asking for mystery to sate my soul.

Weirdness was always lurking in my desire for more. I read books about ancient Egypt and built “cat-god” shrines, tore them down in religious zeal, and went back and read some more books on ancient Egypt. I may have been the only person to explore fields and woods around Penfield New York looking for elves. I think I kept playing the alto recorder because it made sad sounds.

Just thinking about Don Juan of Austria and the Battle of Lepanto could consume an afternoon. Better still was finding a team like the one on the Enterprise on Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, McCoy were brothers, colleagues, and explorers. I knew Kirk would never let Spock die: ever.

Most of all I wanted a romance of the sort I saw in Errol Flynn movies rerun occasionally on television. Out there, I was sure, there was She and She would be my beloved. I was in love with being in love.

My nature was romantic… I wanted an intense life, every day to have italics in it. Friends who are no religious assume that my Christianity was part of romance for me but it was not. Christianity demands duty and holiness. Duty is the least romantic word to the adolescent mind. God wanted all my love and I wanted to give all my love to She who was to come.

I knew that there was a religious form of romanticism and wished I wanted it. I did not. What I wanted had nothing to do with God and everything to do with She if I could ever find She. If hell existed, then hell was worth it for She.

Even I was not stupid enough to maintain that fiction for long!

As a result sometimes I thought of my romantic nature as simply my sin nature. My romantic nature was fallen, twisted, and broken and hurt other people. I knew Christians who wanted me to “settle down,” not be so “weird,” and to like what they liked. They were mystified by a twenty-something who liked fairy tales. They sanctified their unromantic natures and demonized the odd . . . an odd thing to do in a religion that contains the book of Ezekiel.

Sadly this made it easy for me to dismiss what they had so say. I found their prudent, careful approach to life unattractive. They were the sort that turned premarital counseling into a discussion of budgets and retirement planning.

The problem was not with romance or the romantic life but with my use of it. Too often what I called friendship, adventure, or love was just what I wanted to do or have. My grand passions often turned out to be dressed up sins. I wanted a soul mate, someone to be my deepest equal, but it did not take much to confuse that desire with selfishness.

Since I liked romance why not declare that part of me the best part and quit worrying? Indulge the romance! This had the advantage of being fun, a lot more fun than hating myself, yet there was a critical error in the advice. To be romantic might be me but that did not tell what I should do about it.

My actions did not get automatic awesomeness just because they flowed from my deepest nature. I could hurt people while being true to myself and my sincerity would not help them (or me!) at all.

And so it goes when we attempt to escape our nature either by denying what it is or by proclaiming it “good.” The problem may “just be in my heads” but this is not very comforting since all our experience is just in my head. Where else would it be?

What it could not be for me was reason cut off from romance. Analytic philosophy in graduate school was clarifying. Philosophy, especially logic, made so many rough ideas plain and crooked reasoning straight. Symbolic logic was hard for me, but I remember the day when I got it and knew how to solve proofs.

Most of all I learned the path of the dialectic from a man who still mentors me. He taught me to question everything, bewilderingly so, rebuilding my thinking with careful hypothesizes, and then wrapping it all up into a worldview. He made this journey romantic because the end might be a vision of the Beautiful.

I wanted to see the Beautiful.

Reason, the dialectic, was a way to goodness, truth, and beauty but not the only way. The arts were a way. I knew God’s revelation was another way. They all could work together.

I remember sitting in class studying the text of Republic with friends and our worthy guide and feeling the joy of the dialectical way. Flashes of insight were beautiful when I heard them from other discussants. Yet.

Something more was always out there and I wanted the more. I was not content with longing as some are because I wanted more so badly.

Church was good and often profoundly moving at every level. Classroom work was good and full of truth. My relationships were solid and sometimes better. Nothing was together. I was experiencing romance but not living a romantic life.

I heard the obvious Christian “answers” but they did not work for me. I found secularism intellectually impossible and aesthetically nightmarish. I kept trying to do right but often enough my attempts failed.

What woke me up was the realization of my selfishness. Married: I was failing as husband. Parenthood: I was not a great Dad. Friendship: I was not an adequate friend. Having wanted more, I was experiencing less.

I woke up from my dreams lost. How? Not intellectually: I wish I could have been. I did not wish Christianity to be true but I could not think my way out of it and I tried. Not physically: I was healthy and comfortable.

I was a Christian but I was lost. I wanted more. Finally my attempts to find more ended up in a horrific mess. This romantic was doomed.

But Jesus saved me … With an absolute romance

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