Were You There?

"Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?" (Tolkien, The Two Towers)

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To walk The Warrior's Path is to take the pilgrimage that cannot be explained by human reason, to travel a Road that cannot be seen with mortal eyes. As we have made clear in "Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust” (see blog post #8 from 10/8/09) the journey along The Warrior's Path is impossible without the vibrant activity of an awakened Imagination. We must be able to dream in living color if we are to “wake from the evil enchantment of worldliness that has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years” (C.S. Lewis). The current era has pitted “adulthood” and “maturity” in an all-out war against the last vestiges of a lingering respect for the Truths that can only be apprehended through the awakened Imagination, leaving such things as merely the outdated furniture of the long-abandoned Nursery of our childhood.

And yet we must not believe what we have been taught. We must not let go of the Romance. Most especially now. Most especially here during Holy Week as we commemorate the Passion of our Lord, our Captain, our Savior, our Hero, our King.

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There is no greater indication that something deeply malignant wages relentless war against our hearts and minds than the fact that, of all the great Stories that have ever been told, the Greatest Story of All strangely enough happens to be the one we so frequently attend to without even the faintest whiff of Romantic delight. How is it that Harry Stamper’s sacrifice to save the earth from a world-killing meteor in the movie Armageddon, or Aslan’s lonely midnight walk to the Stone Table, or William Wallace’s betrayal and subsequent inhumane torture can all reduce us to heaving sobs…but the story of the Cross strikes us most of the time as a cold theological necessity? Is it merely that “familiarity breeds contempt”? Or is something fouler at work, deliberately and diabolically dulling our senses and deadening our emotions?

It is our prayer that you might look with fresh eyes upon the events that we remember this week, that you might enter in more deeply into the very real, very human drama that unfolded in the forthcoming hours. Step out of the dogmatic, rigid religiosity which demands that every facet of the Story exists merely for the purpose of moralizing. Dare to ask questions, and let your imagination fill in the spaces between the lines of the ancient texts, breathing new life into that cataclysmic event upon which all of human history hinges.

Refuse to let the weary and outworn moralizing of someone who has apparently drawn no closer to experiencing the events of our Lord’s Passion over the last 20 years in the pulpit be the definitive voice of your Holy Week.

Press on beyond that.

The Story is not about some mere historical figure who strutted his hour upon the stage some 2,000 years ago, and whom you can only now meet through the pages of the Bible. This Story is about your Jesus. That’s right – the same one you were talking to yesterday morning before the rest of the household was awake.

Yes, we were not there then, to see the events of His Passion first-hand.

But He is here now.

So walk through this weekend with Him. Walk through it with a Person, not with an Idea. The One who has made possible our escape from the kingdom of Darkness and freed us from the bonds of our slavery to the Dark Lord of this rebel planet has gone to Hell and back to win our freedom. This is the event, the Story upon which all other stories draw their vitality and their inspiration. No hero has ever risked more, dared more, loved more, suffered more, surmounted more. No moment was ever darker than the death of the Son of God. No moment was ever more incandescently happy than when death was turned backwards and all the Creation heard the rustling and a whisper of the Return of the King.

If you walk through the events of Holy Week with the eyes of your heart open wide and the Spirit of the still-living Jesus as your intimate companion, then you will be walking on Holy Ground, and you will need no Man to teach you the moral of the Story. For the Story is so vast, and rich, and deep that you will never be done exploring the richness and the Romance of this…the Greatest Story Ever Told.

Brothers and Sisters along The Warrior's Path, we are not of this world. May we increasingly come to live with the events of Easter weekend as the central reference point of all the calendar year.

Joyful to be penning these words once again,

Derrick and David