So great is our longing for experience beyond the ordinary crushing tide of mortal time that suburban moms are now resorting to mushrooms just to take the edge off an overscheduled life. In his memoir of lifelong love and conversion, Sheldon Vanauken comes to the realization that what he and his wife in their pagan days were seeking was eternity.
They had a strong sense of longing for a relationship that could be sustained without end. Not having access to the afterlife, they sought to experience timelessness through an alternative lifestyle devoted to beauty. In unbounded moments in contemplation of beauty, they had a forestaste of eternity.
How was it that they were exceptional in their choices when what we universally long for is meaningful connection to other people and a sense of timelessness?
Vanauken muses:
“If, indeed, we all have a kind of appetite for eternity, we have allowed ourselves to be caught up in a society that frustrates our longing at every turn. Half our inventions are advertised to save time—the washing machine, the fast car, the jet flight—but for what? Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the programme. There is, in fact, some truth in ‘the good old days’: no other civilization of the past was ever so harried by time.”
Like Anne Morrow Lindbergh writing in “Gift of the Sea” about the manic distractions and disruptions of modern life, Vanauken is another commentator in the mid-20th century. How amusing to see their frustration with technologies dwarfed by the dawn of the personal computer and the ever-present cellphone. To us, the good ol’ days surely means 1948, but to the people of feeling living then, even that was too atrociously scheduled with technology.
Their reflections on the inhumanity of interrupted time merit our attention all the more considering how much less saturated with “labor-saving devices” and “conveniences” their time was than ours today. If Vanauken and Lindbergh could see an incongruence with ultimate human longing in the way of life defined by cars and refrigerators, how much more apparent it should be to us.
And, in certain respects, it is. The growing popularity of minimalism, essentialism, and slow living reflect a growing awareness of a need for minimizing distraction.
The question that Vanauken addresses which is beyond the scope of Lindbergh’s work: What does it say about us that we have the longing in the first place?
Vanauken is in part prompted in his thinking by a letter from C.S. Lewis in which Lewis “asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there.” He asked, “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. Not always be, purely acquatic creatures?”
Vanauken answers, “It [our longing] suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity.” He notes our continual confusion at the passage of time, which seems at time to speed by without our perceiving it. No matter how long we live in time, the only existence we have ever consciously known, we fail to become accustomed to it. In fact, as people age, they seem more perplexed by time, and not only because of some sort of cognitive decline.
Vanauken concludes that we are right to speculate that “eternity exists and is our home.” What a beautiful thought. And yet, how inaccessible it seems. Paradoxically, to work toward eternity requires not more exertion but in a certain sense less, a willingness to become again like a little child.
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