Forgive me. I am thinking out loud again. I am trying to figure out what I think about a concept and have to either talk about it or write about it to get any clarity. And I need help. I need someone to hear me think so that I can imagine what they would say if they were here, or invite them into this moment so that they can comment and help me. This is the plague of a verbal processor. Ask me what I think about something and the answer is almost always, “I don’t know” until I hear myself say it out loud. So, forgive me. This isn’t literature. It is scratchings in the dark, hoping for light.
I am reading a book written 85 years ago, by a best selling author almost forgotten in our time. Charles Williams was a poet, novelist, literary critic and, perhaps most interestingly, a friend of three of the most loved and more famous people of our own time. Along with C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers, all of whom continue to sell millions of volumes a year, Williams was amazing in his own right. Missiologist Michael Frost has invited his friends recently to post the book jacket covers on Facebook, of the 20 most impactful novels they have ever read. One of mine was Williams novel, WAR IN HEAVEN. Williams wrote what some have termed “Supernatural Thrillers.” I can tell you this: when I finished WAR IN HEAVEN, I could no longer look at the world without seeing more than I had ever seen before. The world was changed for me. Or rather, I was changed, and suddenly I had new lenses on my eyes that allowed me to see mystery, and wonder, and beauty, and evil, and people in a completely new light.
Today I am reading one of Williams non-fiction works called, THE FORGIVENESS OF SINS. The book is dedicated to THE INKLINGS. The Inklings, if you don’t know, were a group of writers (Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, Owen Barfield, and Williams himself) who regularly met to discuss their writing projects in process, and submit them for critique and discussion. Could you imagine a podcast where such luminaries and serious thinkers, such big hearts, such marvelous erudition, such humorous banter, were it to occur in our day? I might never listen to anything else!
Anyway, on page 3 of the introduction there is a phrase that Williams uses that launched me off into this post. I can’t stop thinking about it, conceptually. I think it has broader implications than the context in which Williams was applying it. He was writing about the difficulty we have in saying anything accurately about the concept of forgiveness. All of our discussions fall stunningly short of the sublime apex of what forgiveness means. We probe it with cliches and theories and obtuse arguments barely touching its heat. Like children before a fire, we are drawn to its warmth and light, and yet fear to touch it lest we be consumed by the pulsing power of its essence.
But I’m not going to write about forgiveness today. I want to walk down an avenue that Williams just opened up for me with a five word phrase. Here it is:
“a gas-mask against heaven”
So many thoughts whistle through my brain. What is a gas-mask against heaven? What are the gas-masks we have, we use against the intrusion of heaven into our sphere of thinking? Is it possible that I have a gas-mask that insulates me from breathing the air of heaven, of heavenly thoughts? Have I set up defensive shields to keep me from experiencing the divine? Why am I not brave enough to rip off the mask, the layers of masks, that keep me from a deeper understanding of who God is and what He desires of me? How would identifying the masks help me to be the man God wants me to be? How do I do that? Maybe that is what Williams was trying to help his readers with in the novel I read some 40 years ago? Maybe I need to read it again. Or maybe reading it again is just another way to postpone taking off the mask now?
Maybe writing this post is a gas mask against heaven? I don’t know. I need guidance. I need to pray. I need my friends to pray.
Would you pray with me, that together, we would yield to the Spirit of the Living God and take off anything that keeps us from breathing the airs of heaven?
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