I was raised with Midwestern sensibilities by native Iowans who delighted in the richness of extended family and deep connections to the land.  We moved to Baltimore when I was seven and our orientation remained toward family and my grandfather’s farm.  Consequently, I did not discover the wonder of the ocean until I was in high school.  A friend on the cross-country team invited me to join a Bible study of vibrant young adults that rented a house in Rehoboth Delaware for a week each summer.  It was the best of all worlds.  Rich meaningful discussions discovering the wonder of Jesus, greasy Grotto’s cheese pizza in the evenings, and hours of great fun frolicking in the ocean.  That was once I learned to avoid three things: getting stung by jellyfish, swallowing salt water, and getting ground into the sand by crashing waves.  I quickly learned the best way to handle the waves was either to ride them or dive into them.  Riding them was a thrill and diving into them led to an underwater world that was calm, cool, and quiet as the breakers rolled over me.

C.S. Lewis created an entire imaginative world on Perelandra (Venus) in his book by that name where its inhabitants live a life of bliss riding sweet water waves on floating vegetative islands.  Ransom, the main character of the trilogy of which Perendra is a part, is invited by God to travel to this unfallen paradise to help its mother Tinidril and her husband Tor withstand the tempter’s wiles and not follow the path of our mother and father, Eve and Adam.  Tinidril introduces Ransom to a world where she is carried by the goodness of God, never doubting that good was always unfolding, and that she was free to receive the good given rather than cling to the good she desired and was looking for.

David Benner offers a similar image of being carried by the water of God’s love in his book, Surrender to Love.  “Surrender is the discovery that we are in a river of love and that we float without having to do anything.”  (p 63) He reflects that Tertullian and early disciples of Jesus saw themselves as fish who are “born and live within the divine waters of the Spirit.  The Christian life is learning to be supported by these waters.”  (p 62)  Benner invites us to picture God’s love as a river flowing that we can step into, lay back, and allow ourselves to be carried, floating, without striving to be loved, simply receiving God’s faithful steadfast love always caring for us.  

For Lewis this image of being carried by the love of God was inspired by the wise elderly woman with young eyes in George MacDonald’s Phantastes who encourages a young Anodos, “A great good is coming—is coming—is coming to thee, Anodos and so over and over again.  I fancied that the sound reminded me of the voice of the ancient woman, in the cottage that was four-square.  I opened my eyes, and, for a moment, almost believed I saw her face, with its many wrinkles and its young eyes, looking at me from between two hoary branches of the beech overhead.  But when I looked more keenly, I saw only twigs and leaves, and the infinite sky, in tiny spots, gazing through between.  Yet I know that good is coming to me – that good is always coming, though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.” (p 185)

As I consider these images of God’s goodness carrying us through all the circumstances of life I am drawn to Jesus’s invitation to Peter to get out of the boat and to walk with him on the waves of a raging sea.  Amazingly, “Jumping out of the boat, Peter walked on the water to Jesus.  But when he looked down at the waves churning at his feet, he lost his nerve and began to sink.”  (Mt. 14:29-30 The Message)

Lewis’s embrace of these images of the security of God’s loving presence, care, and provision were hard earned through the experience of great loss.  He was blessed by a deep secure loving relationship his mother Flora.  She nurtured his love for reading and languages and imaginary worlds.  In 1907 however, Lewis’s 9 year old world would be shaken when his mother was diagnosed with cancer and after a several month battle would die in agony at home.  Lewis endured listening to his mother’s agony and later wrote in Surprised by Joy “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.  There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of joy; but no more of the old security.  It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.” (p 21. David Downing in Into the Region of Awe p 94)  His father in his great grief sent Lewis off to English boarding schools where he was bullied.  Then would come the horrors of the Great War and the loss of his dearest friends.  Lewis would be called on to care for his older brother Warnie who suffered from periodic alcoholic binges due to the traumas he experienced in the war.

Lewis had a poet’s disposition which experienced joy and suffering deeply.  “In fact his whole life was oriented & motivated by an almost uniquely persisting child’s sense of glory and of nightmare.  The adult events were received into a medium as pliable as wax, wide open to the glory, and equally vulnerable, with a man’s strength to feel is all, and a great scholar’s & writer’s skills to express and to interpret.” (Ruth Pitter in Alan Jacobs’ The Narnian p. xxiii).

Lewis, after the loss of his wife Joy to a three year battle with cancer, would come to profess through much grief “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to remember, to attend … in fact to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.” (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, p.75)

One of the gifts to us of Lewis’s long journey back to faith was his capacity with the help of George MacDonald and JRR Tolkien and Evelyn Underhill and figures like Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila to reimagine being adrift at sea as an invitation from a loving imminent God to release himself into His care.  He came to recognize through pain that “Only God deserves absolute surrender, because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.”  (David Benner p. 59)

Lewis’s gift to us is his capacity to reimagine his losses in the greater reality of God’s never ceasing steadfast love for us.  He would reimagine the loss of his mother in The Magician’s Nephew where Aslan would affirm Digory’s obedient trust with the gift of a Narnian apple that would heal his mother and provide the seed for the tree that would become the wardrobe connecting the Pevensie children to Narnia and Aslan.

This in no way minimizes the pain we experience.  Jesus weeps with us in our pain even as he wept with Mary and Martha in their loss of their brother and in his empathetic gaze into Mary’s face as he is headed to Golgotha and then again on the cross when asking John to care for her.  I find myself brought back again and again to Jerry Sittser’s encouragement to lean into, to dive into, both the great beauty and the great pain that makes up the most meaningful experiences of our lives this side of the New Heavens and New Earth.  In it all the offer of deep joy is real.  Lewis’s imagination is no longer vain.  True imagination helps us apprehend the unseen loving presence of Jesus actively shepherding and caring for us.  The great challenge for us as Ignatius and Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich and the great cloud of witnesses who have preceded us is to abandon our efforts to control the good we desire and dive into the oncoming waves of God’s goodness.  To dare to trust that we too can be carried by love of God whose presence displaces fear even in the face of death.

For all of us who have experienced great loss we recognize that these are not platitudes to be glibly spoken to those in pain.  There was a great cost to Ransom in his journey of surrender and he would bear his wound the rest of his life.  Bill Haley wisely designed  the Coracle Fellowship to spend ten months delving into the deep love of God for us so that we can ask securely not “Do You love me?” but rather “How are You loving me in this? It’s only as this foundation of secure attachment to Jesus that the focus shifts to recognizing how Jesus desires to be with us in our pain.  And then comes the invitation to abandon our lives to the secure care of the One we know loves us enough to pass through the pain of death so that we too can securely navigate with Him the waves of life and even death unafraid because He is with us.

Oh God in your mercy would you please continue by Your power Holy Spirit to enable us to apprehend Your love which is beyond our comprehension.  And may You empower us to so be with others in pain as You are with us.  May “the splendour, the love, and the strength be upon us.” (Perelandra p. 190)

As an encouragement here is Benner’s invitation to surrender to God’s love put to music: Surrender to Love David Brymer.

And for encouragement in the challenging journey of finding hope in hard places I again recommend Jerry Sittser’s A Grace Disguised and Curt Thompson’s The Deepest Place.