Dear Reader,
Over a month ago, I came to a verse in Isaiah that I don’t remember reading before, and which has been echoing in my mind since. In chapter 58, Isaiah writes, “they delight to draw near to God.” Without context, his statement most naturally reads as praise. Yet, it comes as the first in a litany of sins that the Lord instructs Isaiah to declare to the Israelites. This delight, God says, belies their true condition: “they delight to draw near to God as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God” (Isaiah 58:2).
My first reaction, and the reaction that I continue to have when it comes to mind, is dismay. Isaiah’s indictment targets not simply actions or professed motivations, but the very desires of their heart. In light of this passage, can I trust my own delight to be genuine? Can I trust that it truly indicates a life that practices righteousness and obeys God’s word?
In her powerful book Redeeming Power, Diane Langberg warns about the ease with which we deceive ourselves, both about ourselves and about others. We hear the words we want to hear, the words that tickle our ears theologically, and we stop there, uninterested in pressing forward into character, into congruence of word and deed. Langberg writes, “As God’s people, we are susceptible to being deceived by what we see, what we long for, and what we name good. We are too generous in our self-trust—willing to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt.”
Deceived by what we long for—this is the deception that Isaiah names. Other translations add the word “seem,” which interprets their sin as hypocrisy. If I press, though, I find that the problem is not simply that I seem to desire something that I don’t, but that my own desires are compromised. I desire something—and though the object of my desire may be good, the ground of my desire is not pure. I may identify a desire to go to the Lord’s house, and thus tick off an item on my spiritual checklist, without pressing deeper: why do I want to go? What do I hope to gain? Or, why do I want to serve? Desires are complex, and we must resist the ease of stopping at the first layer—and so deceive ourselves.
What we most easily see and identify does not always tell the truth. I love the way that George MacDonald explores this theme in his faerie stories. In Phantases, Anodos, the main character, journeys through a fairyland and is confronted with creatures and people that test his ability to see deeply and truly. He fails when deceived by the appearance of beauty—deceived because of the lust of his own heart. His desire for beauty is grounded in his own selfishness, and thus he cannot see through the beautiful disguise that the Maid of the Alder has taken to cover up her true form—gnarled and rotting wood.
How can Anodos be transformed so that his desires do not deceive him? How might we gain a sight that sees truly? With this question, we find ourselves back in the garden of Eden: here is the serpent, promising Eve that with a taste of the forbidden fruit, her eyes will be opened. So we see that even the desire to see can be compromised and lead us astray—if that desire is ultimately grounded in pride.
In the end, Anodos does have his vision transformed. Gradually, he recognizes his unworthiness to have the woman he desires, and with that confession the spell of deceitful beauty no longer threatens him. He continues, however, to go astray, until at the end of his journey he comes to a wedding ceremony. There, he senses that what he sees does not tell the full story, and he acts courageously to reveal the truth.
How, again, does this happen? For Anodos, MacDonald gives no simple explanation. Anodos grows humbler, wiser, as he travels, but even so Anodos is more pitiable than admirable as a character. Instead, his intuition at the wedding happens as a gift—a grace—that he does not deserve or expect.
Is this not also true for us? Our hearts are so tangled up with sin, our eyes so blind, that we are not capable of any self-transformation. We must plead for grace—and when we do, we will find that it has already been given.
An artist that I love to follow is Aiko, of Papercut Prayers. I love this papercut—both the intricacy of the work with the careful attention to detail required to create it, and the image itself. How deceptive the stump is! To those on the surface, all life and fruitfulness seem to be gone. And yet. The roots underground, the soil teeming with life—how much of our world is hidden from us, and how foolish we are to imagine that our vision encompasses it all.
From Words and Flesh: Pastoring in a Post-Truth World: “There’s no shortage of words floating around. But there remains some fundamental connection between words and flesh, the mysterious braid of thought, word, and deed, and when that relationship is wound with suspicion, doubt, and cynicism rather than love, we pretty quickly wind up slogging around in vertigo-inducing arbitrariness. With meaning in flux, our greater collective moral ambitions are eroded by our inability to even speak clearly to one another. The center is missing; “The glue is gone,” says Edward Hoagland. Freed from the supposed tyranny of our grand narratives, free to choose, we have cut the thread to history and to the transcendent, and genuine communion is the first casualty.”
From I’m a Philosopher. We Can’t Think Our Way Out of This Mess: “Needless to say, I’ve abandoned all hope that we can think our way out of the mess we’ve made of the world. The pathology that besets us in this cultural moment is a failure of imagination, specifically the failure to imagine the other as neighbor. Empathy is ultimately a feat of the imagination, and arguments are no therapy for a failed, shriveled imagination. It will be the arts that resuscitate the imagination.”
Show me how to know when a thing is evil
which I think is right and good,
how to know when what is lawful
comes from an evil principle,
such as desire for reputation or wealth by usury.
Give me grace to recall my needs,
my lack of knowing thy will in Scripture,
of wisdom to guide others,
of daily repentance, want of which keeps thee at bay,
of the spirit of prayer, having words without love,
of zeal for thy glory, seeking my own ends,
of joy in thee and thy will,
and love to others.
And let me not lay my pipe
too short of the fountain,
Never touching the eternal spring,
Never drawing down water from above.
Excerpt from “A Prayer for Self-Knowledge” from The Valley of Vision
On the road with you,
Laura
Letters for the Road: March 2021
Laura — I love the depth of these thoughts, the turning of desire and intention over and over to reveal both the pride and sin beneath them and the gift of grace that heals them and transform them. Thank you.