On Fixed and Floating Land

A month or so ago I was sitting on a quiet patio in the cool of the evening in small town Saskatchewan, talking with some friends about the ebb and flow of the Christian life. We were talking about things like finishing our studies, and our search for new ministry contexts, and friends going to distant parts of the world, and moves, and change, and newness, and this thought suddenly struck me that I'm still mulling over.

There's a kind of holy restlessness, it seems, pulsing at the heart of Christian communities.

I tried to put it into words then, and the best I could get at was that image of a "holy restlessness." Our God is a missionary God. He's a sending God. A Father who's constantly seeking; a Son who keeps making things new; a Spirit who blows wherever he wills. And this God, holy and restless, is constantly on the move, constantly sending, seeking, renewing and sending again.

I think that as Christian communities, we'll know we're really beating with the rhythm of this God's heart, because we'll find in our midst the same kind of holy restlessness: an impulse to send, and seek, and renew, and send again. An impulse that moves us to laugh with each other all the more richly, to weep with each other all the more deeply, to embrace each other all the more warmly, because we don't know when or how the sending God might send us out once again.

The tendency, of course, is rootedness. Cain wandered east and built a city; Noah was so named in the hope that he might give the harried Sons of Adam rest; Lot pitched his tent in the plain outside Sodom and settled down there.

But Abraham-- and the seed of Abraham in him-- answered God's call to become an alien and stranger in the world. Abraham, the patriarch of Faith, embraced a life of holy restlessness.

Perhaps one of the most vivid descriptions I've ever read of this is in C. S. Lewis' science fiction novel, Voyage to Venus. Lewis portrays the planet Venus as a world entirely untouched by death, inhabited by a sinless King and Queen. Aside from small spots of 'Fixed Land,' the entire surface of this perfect world is covered by ocean. The extraterrestrial Adam and Eve of this new Eden inhabit 'floating Islands' that drift wholly at the mercy of the waves. The Queen explains to Dr. Ransom, the hero of the novel, that God has forbidden them to dwell on the Fixed Lands: “We may land on them and walk on them. . . . But not stay there—not sleep there…"

As the story unfolds, a diabolical villain tempts this Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of living on the Fixed Land, arguing, “This law stands between you and settled life, all command of your own days." But after the temptation has been resisted and the evil overcome, Eve realizes the true grace of the law. In a passage that has always rung hauntingly profound for me, she explains: “The reason for not living on the Fixed Land is plain. … Why should I desire the Fixed except to make sure—to be able on one day to command where I should be the next and what should happen to me? It isto reject the wave—to take my hands out of God’s, to say to Him, ‘Not thus but thus’—to put in our own power what times should roll towards us.”

Well, these things are on my mind a lot these days, perhaps for obvious reasons. But I think it's a lesson God is calling me to learn all over again: what does it mean to choose to live on the floating island of His will? What does it mean to refuse the alluring self-determination of the Fixed Land?

What does it mean to embrace the holy restlessness of the Christian life?