Friday, March 16, 2012
A Map of the Soul
I came across a very interesting idea in C.S. Lewis's work - I believe it was in Mere Christianity - where this comes up. He related a conversation he had with a veteran. The man stated he had no need for religion because he had experienced God in the desert one night after his plane had crashed. That feeling was so vivid and intense that it made a lasting impression on this gentleman. Lewis stated that he had no doubt the experience was real and that many of us have such experiences; however, he delineated it from religion in the following way. Basically, he said, if one wishes to speak about the ocean, a trip to the beach is far more intense an experience of the ocean than is looking at a map of the Atlantic. However, if one's desire is to get from London to New York, then the map is a better experience of the Atlantic than is a trip to the shore. Religion, he said, is like a map built out of the thoughts and experiences of centuries of believers before you. What do you think of that? I've been pondering the idea ever since I read it and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
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I remember reading that. For some reason it reminds me of how I tackle an entirely new subject that I MUST master for school.
ReplyDeleteWith my history classes, I was lucky. Having read history my whole life for fun, there were very few occasions when I didn't already have a 'ballpark' notion of the subject at hand.
But last term I took Maya Archaeology and did not know the first thing about it! If I'd been on Jeopardy and had an $800 Daily Double riding on it, I could not have told you even where they LIVED, much less anything else.
That's when I realized I had to tackle the subject from every side, take every approach. I drew maps, read the text, slogged through scholarly articles, drew maps again, went back and read child-level picture books to make sure I had the broadest-outlines down cold, sought out videos (because I need to SEE things) and eventually I finally began to feel, tentatively, that perhaps I now had a grasp of the ancient Maya. Thinking back on it, how much better it would have been if I could have gone on a dig! Seen for myself some preserved ruins, climbed up some temples...
At any rate, all of that work resulted in only the most fundamental, surface understanding of a single culture. GOD being infinitely more complex, more deep, more wide, than anything on earth we could wish to discover or study--well! We need both experience of Him and experience with Him, as well as all the map study we can fit in a lifetime, in order to have a "grasp" of Him now--to know Him better than that takes heaven.
In the meantime, as Mr. Lewis said, He does refresh us with pleasant inns along the way. :-)
Thanks! This touches on a student's question to me about why I chose religious studies as a major. Answering brought to mind my own serendipitous spiritual journey and all those interesting inns along the way.
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