Looking Through Life

"I was standing today in the dark toolshed.  The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam.  From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place...Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes.  Instantly, the whole picture vanished...Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun.  Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long.  The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity.  But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there - only tiny movements in the grey matter.

In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another.  Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled.  The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is 'only' tiny physical movements of grey matter.  But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment?  A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull.  Where is the rot to end?  The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin.  We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, instrinsically truer or better than looking along.  One must look both along and at everything."

C.S. Lewis, Meditation in a Toolshed, God in the Dock


This life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, and not through the eye

William Blake

For both C.S. Lewis and William Blake it is not enough to simply look at a thing and say you have seen it all.   Pondering Lewis' experience in the toolshed for just a moment we see what a shame it would be to see only the things in the toolshed (boards, tables, tools, etc.), and miss out on the trees, birds, sun, etc.

Going back to our previous discussion of meaning and worship for the believer.  A right understanding of worship is not an experience that happens for 30 minutes one day a week that we know took place because of a raised hand, the singing of a song, or other expression we can see or hear.  We make a cardinal mistake if we look only at those things for meaning (just like looking at money or fame or popularity would be a mistake).  Rather, we must look both at and along those things to what lies beyond them.  For a believer essence precedes existence so who we are should determine what we do.  We don't look at the lucrative singing career for meaning, we recognize the God who created us with the talent, opportunity and priviledge; submit those talents and abilities to Him for His purposes, adore Him for the gift, and live a life in singing that would honor the giver of the gift.  In other words, the meaning is inherent in the life and co-extensive with the life, so that even if an accident were to ruin the vocal chords and render the career over, the worship would continue and the meaning would remain equally strong.  Quite simply, if the meaning of our life is a fabrication of our own making, or a compilation or summation of temporal experiences, then life has no depth and when the object we choose to look at is gone and there is nothing beyond it, then life's meaning is lost as well.