With so much that separates people and threatens connection these days, it’s a welcome relief when a nation can unite in a shared experience. This Summer’s Paris Olympics and Paralympics launched most of us into a world of wonder, skill and inspiration.
Together, we cheer along our champions and imagine ourselves trialling new sports as the seeming effortless twists of Simone Biles, the strength and perseverance of Fay Rogers' swimming performance inspire us to new heights.
We sense a shared experience with them.
Of course, in reality, my inspiration remains just that; when I find myself in the swimming pool spluttering and struggling rather than smoothly gliding through the water. I am far from my comfort zone, far from emulating or experiencing a sense of familiarity and belonging in it.
Soon that shared experience with my sporting heroes is exposed as purely notional. These Olympic athletes, truly immersed in their sport, truly free, at ease. They belong in their field, on the track, in the water. And while we sit on our sofas, the swimmer alone is aware of his body and connected with the path it takes through the water.
However, there is a shared experience in this, common to all people. This longing for belonging, for at-oneness, for connectedness and finding ourselves utterly at home and immersed in something. This longing is a common agony and inspiration in all of us.
Far from being just another Christianese, this language is flooding our podcast chats, magazine articles, self-care-self-reflection culture. The longing for belonging has ironically become the united experience of men and women in our ever-increasing individualistic lives.
The grief of this irony though, is that the longing for becoming one with another is increasingly being displaced with the desire for being one with oneself.
Self-love, self-care, self-awareness, self-connectedness, balance in oneself, the passion, pursuit and purpose of one's life. This is the language of connectedness we are hearing more and more. Total immersion into oneself. Our immersion into our body's needs and pleasures promises satisfaction, rest, self-awareness. At one with ourselves, heart and body in fleeting connecting and unity.
When our thoughts, our actions and our desires run deeply, there is promise of assurance, peace, of true living. There is assurance of becoming one. However, as Puritan theologian and pastor Richard Sibbes also warns, ‘When our thoughts run deeply into earthly things, we become one with them,’ and we can find ourselves drowning rather than gliding. If we seek ever deeper immersion into ourselves and the things of this world, we will plummet into a sea of self-association and soullessness.
We work and strive by our own strength to redirect, to find air; all the while depriving the Spirit of life, His rightful role and place. We presume a divinity unto ourselves and of ourselves, forgetting our very life is found in our dependency.
Losing our way, losing ourselves amongst the distractions of the world, the busyness of our business, all the while drowning in the distractions.
If we ourselves become the goal of our surrender, the hope of our place of belonging, we deprive our souls from the only union that gives true life. There is only one person, one way, one life that assures a reality of immersive at-oneness that breathes true life, light and hope to our hearts.
The true life and task of a Christian, while dependent, is not one of despair or permission to passivity, or apathy. It is rigorous, zealous, holy extremity.
Extremity that must resist our world's defining, with busyness, self-promotion, an obsession with quantity, maximisation, whilst all the time never loosening our hold on the absolute, uncompromising path and way this calls for.
'For he is the best Christian that is the most reverent Christian, the most careful Christian, most jealous over his own heart.'[1]
The life of a Christian is the life of extremity. And too, this pursuit of 'more' must surrender to the path of moderation.
If we find ourselves too busy in things of this world, even things we name for the Lord but silence His voice to us amidst a sea of distraction and others' words; if we are too busy rushing from one business to another with no occasion to stop and breathe, to savour and surrender to the breath of the Spirit for our souls; we are immersing ourselves in a hopeless, downward, drowning drag of despair, losing connection with reality, others and ourselves.
And so he counsels:
‘if a man be lost let him lose himself in Christ and in the things of heaven; for if we be drowned in the world, it will breed discomfort."[2]
Let us never compromise on our goals, our inspirations, our hopes. Let us take the modelling of uncompromising perseverance we see in the Olympics, but let us fix our intended goal on life, on Christ Himself.
With Him, we can, and we must, always seek more, never settling for less. To make room for more of Christ and His Spirit, we must be extreme in our moderation of self, of things of this earth. We must clear the heart to make room for Him, to revere and honour ourselves as temples of the Spirit.
We can choose. We have that privilege, permission and responsibility. Into what, into whom, we immerse ourselves is up to us. But the choice is simple and is twofold: immersing ourselves in Christ, or immersing ourselves in anything or anyone else.
If our souls, says Sibbes, are ‘drowned in [the] delight of the body, this may grieve the Spirit as [we] defile his temple and take away so much of the soul.’
However, if we give our total abandon, immerse ourselves heart, soul, mind, body and strength into the living waters of Jesus, there we will find our soul’s rest, our soul’s life and our soul’s belonging and true union.
Notes:
[1] Richard Sibbes, A fountain sealed, Banner of Truth, volume 5, p422-23
[2] Richard Sibbes, p422-23
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