Catching Flight

New city, same conflict

ST. PAUL, in his first canonical letter to St. Timothy, famously wrote that “there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment” (6:6).

Contentment. What a concept.

Sara Maynard and I enjoyed a lovely chat about it earlier this summer in which she suggested to me that the tension between dynamism and contentment will likely be a defining feature of my life. It was a timely conversation given my frequent complaints about feeling “stuck in the matrix” in the weeks prior.

A few days later, I would interview for a pastoral internship in Alberta and would go on to be offered the job within a couple of weeks. It promised to be an upgrade from my previous gig in almost every way: shorter commute (by a country mile), more creative, more social, more aligned with my vocation (as far as I could tell), and far more suitable for writing on the side. I am officially one full workday into the new job and can already confirm that I was correct in my assessment thereof.

What I was slightly less correct about, however, was the effect that it would have on my soul. You see, I had come to blame a lot of my spiritual drift in the preceding weeks and months on the gruelling demands of the corporate grind. A two-hour-plus daily commute, for example, was always going to be a lethal hindrance to my prayer life, I thought.

These lines from Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Thought of Something Else,” came to capture the cry of my heart:

Another place!
it’s enough to grieve me—
that old dream of going,
of becoming a better man
just by getting up and going
to a better place.

Now that I am standing here, in my own version of the “better place,” I can finally admit that superior conditions do not necessarily make for a better man. Neither can they yield contentment. Not on their own, anyway.

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E.J. LaRow was kind enough to send me a draft of his forthcoming After Progress a few months ago. One of the main thinkers who influenced his book was the twentieth-century German philosopher Max Picard. In 1934, fifteen years after relocating to Switzerland, Picard published one of his most notable works—Die Flucht vor Gott (German for The Flight from God). I was nothing short of mesmerized when I first read excerpts from it in After Progress. This is why I decided to listen to the whole thing as I took the scenic route from Surrey, BC to Medicine Hat, AB over the weekend.

Its opening line was among its most quotable:

In every age, man has been in flight from God.

While Picard’s “man of faith” joyfully embraces his identity as God’s very image, the “man of the flight” seeks instead to “realize his own existence.” He has his eyes set on myriad “possibilities” through which he may attain to “fragments of his own nature” in a desperate bid to manually construct his own personhood. Rather than receiving his humanity, he is hellbent on achieving it.

As a result, his face appears lifeless—especially compared to that of the man of faith. According to Picard:

In the face of the flight, the eyes are no more than a pair of faint lamps—lamps which no longer glow for a single soul; only for themselves as they pass along the road of the flight.

In the face of faith, on the other hand, the eye “not only takes something as it gazes,” but “also gives, in its gaze, something to the thing.” Its generosity stems from a “superabundance” which the face of the flight can only dream of, “for it is the superabundance of God.”

Jesus used the words “healthy” and “unhealthy” when He contrasted these two lifestyles two thousand odd years before Picard:

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” — Matthew 6:22-23

It has been said that what Jesus is stressing in this passage is the importance of focus. In other words, what our hearts and minds choose to focus on can either bring light or darkness to our beings. Those who “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (v.33a) are focused on heaven and reflect its glory. Those who focus on the “things” (v.33b) which God has promised to those who seek Him first, on the other hand, miss out on His light—what Picard calls His superabundance.

Their resulting dissatisfaction — discontentment, if you will — can yield one of two outcomes. We can either double down, or we can surrender.

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IN THE CHAPTER TITLED “The Organization of the Flight,” Picard offers a glimmer of hope to the dissatisfied strivers — of whom I am, if you have not yet caught on, a card-carrying member:

In everything and in every man, there always remains a residue which will not yield itself to the flight. This residue — devoid of movement — constitutes a threat. For out of it can issue at any time the pause, the moment of reflection and of return.

Herein lies the central conflict: Part of me will not yield to the flight, and yet the other remains positively threatened by God. Picard continues:

There is one fear that is above all others: That when a man meets love, he may be reminded of God’s love in all its greatness. That he may gaze at God and, in his greatness, find something not yet loved. Then, the flight would not be held back. It would become quite impossible.

The flight from God is the root of all discontentment. Of course it is, since God is the ultimate Source of all goodness. Surrendering to His loving pursuit of our wayward souls, therefore, is the only way to become truly content. As Joshua Luke Smith shared at an Inkwell evening in Vancouver two weeks ago, the word “contentment” — when distilled down to its Latin roots — denotes a state of “being held together.”

It is God who holds all things together. It is He who pulls together our fragmented selves and reconstructs them into the perfect image He envisioned long before the foundation of the world. And it is “he, he and no other,” to quote Picard once more, “who wills to pursue the fleeing; so that he, the swiftest, may always be the nearest to those in flight.”