The Narrow Way is Expansive

I've been to Glacier National Park 3 times in the last 4 years. It's not easy to get to. It's not on the way to anywhere. I go there, and will continue to go there, because I love gasping as my heart leaps through my chest and I'm reminded of how remarkably small I am - cosmologically speaking. I've been to a handful of places in my life that caused me to stop and weep as I get about as close as imaginably possible to what C.S. Lewis said we all secretly long for: not simply to see the beauty but "to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I've been on a handful of hikes in the park and my favorites inevitably lead out of the trees into sweeping vistas, huge drop-offs and very narrow trails. It's always a bit disorienting as you try not to fall to your death as you resist looking down so you can keep your eyes on the scene in front of you. My first time on the Highline trail was a doozy. The trail had shrunk to about 3 feet wide with a drop of a few hundred feet and you could see mountains for miles. I found myself involuntarily whispering "My God! My God!" as a kind of overflowing prayer of gratitude while also becoming increasingly aware of how far down I was looking. Oddly enough, I didn't think, even for a second, "This trail is terribly confining - so narrow." Also, and perhaps more odd given the nature of our current age, I wasn't caught up into deep reflection on who I am and how I can finally be free to express myself and my desires. No, in that moment and in that place I was free. Free to forget about myself almost entirely and to marvel and to tremble at the sheer size and weight and color and hardness of reality as it exists completely independent of my own anxieties, lusts or insecurities.

Modern American life is obsessed with the liberated self. Selves unencumbered by nature or God or God's law. So much of our recent and ongoing arguments about equality and justice and gender and sexuality are so muddled up by false notions of liberation that we can't get anywhere. We get sucked into staring at our own navels or other people's (which gets a little weird) and find ourselves fighting in a vacuum of our own insecurities, anxieties and emotions. It is frankly like standing on that trail, closing my eyes, trying to feel something inside and move accordingly. But we are forgetting that there is a world that is simply there, with a particular order and design and beauty, that is, quite frankly, independent of what you think of it. It was made and ordered by God. He didn't make it for you. It wasn't custom designed with your preferences in mind. It's not a blank canvas on which you are to write your own story. It is a world with an order, a beauty, a morality hard-wired into it and then - grace upon grace, described and revealed by God in his book. He gives us laws fitted for this world He made. He gives us wisdom so as to help us all not be fools in this world He made. He even gives us stories and songs and promises and warnings. He has made a world and placed us in it. And it is a world designed in all kinds of ways that you are absolutely going to hate. You'll find whole bits of it designed in poor taste. Big nasty smells and poor color choices. Where he designed the trail 3 feet wide, you'll have expected 6. He likes to bring hail and rain at exactly the worst moments. But here's the thing about this world that He made.... He didn't ask for design input from you. He didn't get anyone to sign off. There were no safety or equity inspections.

Given a world like that, we are all confronted with two staggeringly different approaches. One, increasingly attempted in our current society, is to put me and my feelings- and by extension humans and humans' feelings at the center of everything. I become the measure of beauty, liberation, equality and justice. We redefine the world and ethics and beauty and sexuality and gender and justice around ourselves. At first this feels so expansive! We get what we want! It feels so free! But such a world is so terribly small. In the end I find myself alone with my tastes, my preferences, my own self-righteousness, my own desires and my own foolishness. I can only be confronted by my own conflicting desires, other people's conflicting desires and the stubborn consequences of all these desires.

But another life is possible - actually its eventually unavoidable. It looks very, very narrow. It's filled with all kinds of doctrines and ethical norms and family structures and babies and endlessly mundane days and churchy people and early mornings with loads of laundry and blisters and learning to say no to yourself (a lot!). Its a whole life where you learn to bring your appetites and feelings and thoughts into line with something outside of yourself - and that is frankly hard, painful work. Learning to believe what God says, to trust what God commands - to bring your life and your appetites and your definitions into conformity with this Word seems, at times, restrictive and confining. But, I mean wow, it is beautiful. There are these marvelous turns where you behold something other than yourself and your own hopes and dreams and desires. Here is a joy rooted in something other than the endless pursuit of your own self-actualization. Here is sanity and liberation and an expansive beauty and joy that can only be found along a narrow road.

So may we give up endless quests to discover ourselves, and learn to lift our gaze to see the God who is simply and wonderfully there. May be overwhelmed with gratitude for a world with rules and a design that is put in front of us without our consent. May we tremble at the steep drops, gasp at the prominent vistas, and learn to enjoy the cool meadows. But above everything else, may we have the gift of forgetting ourselves.