Orbits and Orchestras

Hi, and welcome back to Unvisited Lands! Today's post about literature is a celebration of the way that stories can speak uniquely to experiences we all have. When someone shares a story about their life, we can suddenly realize that we're not alone.

That's one of my favorite aspects about stories. They connect people and give them courage, helping them realize that they're not in isolation. Similarly, at the heart of almost all stories is a single, universal message we desire, like rivers running to the heart of a single ocean. As writer J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out, many stories in different cultures and customs, in different climates and centuries, have retold the same story over and over. Throughout legends and mysteries, in the heart of folklore and fairytales, to the end of every row of bookshelves and binderies and bedtime narrations, it lingers. It's the story of good triumphing against evil, of noble sacrifice, and of ultimate Redemption that whispers to us of the true Story that actually happened. In the words of Tolkien:

"The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. . . . This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the ‘inner consistency of reality’. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits."

God has used these two concepts of stories to work in my life. He uses same-as-me stories and pointing-beyond stories to remind me that He still works in our hearts and that He is the one our hearts long for. Recently, I heard a testimony that someone shared about how God changed his life. Some of this person's experiences I could relate to, and I couldn't help but worship what God had done in this person's story, and what He was doing in mine.

Another testimony that I've found universally relatable is the story of C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist and writer from the 20th century. As I've blogged here at Unvisited Lands, Lewis was famous for talking about a desire for something "beyond," a desire he labeled "Joy." It tugged and pulled and shook his young heart as he moved from fantasy to firm atheism and finally into faith. It was then that he realized God was the object and fulfillment of his Joy all along.

The story of C.S. Lewis demonstrates the two great merits of story's unifying nature and their ability to point us to Jesus, the Hero of the True Story. I wanted to write a story that captured what Lewis referred to as being "surprised by Joy." The following story is a fictional reimagining of C.S. Lewis's life, but set in a different decade, in a different country, through different eyes.

I hope that this story helps you realize that you're not alone in your desire for a better place, for peace, and for Joy. I hope that the testimony of God's goodness and love in Lewis's life reminds you that the same God is near and that you're not alone.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." --C.S. Lewis

“Orbits and Orchestras”

Commander Charles Stephen Lewis, this is Mission Control. Come in, Commander. Are you ready? I sat in the darkened space capsule, my excited breath fogging up the cold windshield. I could feel the rumble of the engines beneath me and could see the dark sky above. My red-cloaked action figure was clutched in my gloved hand. “This is Commander Charlie, reporting in,” I said as I pressed the com link. “I am go for launch.” The room was almost dark. The atmosphere tingled with the smell of buttered popcorn, carbonated drinks, and the hum of excitement from the silhouettes sharing the big, dark room around me. The air felt like the star dust of space, dark and blue and watery, endless, and boundless and crystal. I felt like I was in a dream. I sat in the blacked-out theater, small in the chair. I was invisible in a capsule about to hurdle into the unknown. No one could see me. Tall adults walked in front of me to get to their seats, barely noticing my small frame swamped in the huge chair. I was lost in this eternal galaxy of wonder, with the beams of flashlights lighting up the rows the only bearings of stars to light my way. The buzz of excitement grew louder, but the world around me seemed to grow silent as a mechanical whir started in the darkness below. A huge, black theater screen slowly panned into view. I saw nervously in my chair, a pilot in a rocket before launch time. Not only was this expedition my first in a theater, but my first completely alone. No one seemed to notice me, my feet barely touching the ground. I had no idea what to expect. Far away, galaxies away, was the life I had once lived only moments before. Bad grades, small house, Uncle Terry who hardly ever left the living room. Life seemed pretty bleak to me as a six-year-old boy. But I wasn’t that boy anymore—I was a space voyager, sitting breathlessly in the star dust that seemed to hover around me in the deep and endless glossy magic of space. It was night in the room as I waited in anticipation. Would it be anything like after-school cartoons? Would it be as good as the old movie reruns my uncle played for me on weekends? The screen whirred, the only sound in my universe at that moment, until it had reached the max limit of expansion. There was a pause, and even the excitement around—the crunching of popcorn, the whispering and shuffling—ceased. We seemed to be floating midair through the cosmos. Then-- A note. A single, cold, beautiful, indescribable plink of the piano key. I’d heard piano music, but nothing as clear as this. Ms. Betty at school could play a fine enough song during music, but not like this. Another, sweeter note dropped after the first. It came slowly, captivating its audience. I won’t say I’d ever been much for music, but I suddenly loved it then. It came as a slow rhythm, falling like drops of water. The notes came slowly, then began to increase speed. One came. Then another. And another... The notes flew through the air like a river, a river of light. I couldn’t believe my eyes at the beautiful images that lit the space like a white-burning star. The opening shots were of a majestic forest, shots that panned and swooped and soared over the stomach-falling panorama, the tips of the clear, dark fir trees nearly bursting through the screen. Yet, I closed my eyes. It was that music... It seemed to lift me above the dusty dirt the school bus churned out from its hot rubber tires, away from the grey-walled shadows of math class, far from the empty house that was hot and desolate and stifling. I was flying like a spaceship through fields of stardust. I was here in the Milky Way, spinning in the white sparks of an orchestra. My chest felt warm and seemed to swell with the surge of music. What was that feeling? It made my closed eyes squeeze tight and my heart beat with resolve. That feeling was a whisper of something that meant beautiful. A minute later, the music stopped. The opening scene of the landscape gave way to dialogue, story plots, adventure, and famous actors. I sat breathlessly in my chair, still smelling the popcorn and the Coke. But I wasn’t lost dancing in the swift tides of a supernova, strapped in a capsule hurdling toward somewhere great. I was just in a movie theater. An hour and a half later, the movie let out and I was sent blinking unceremoniously into the bright lights of the mall next to the pungent food court. That feeling from the theater, which I could only label “meaning,” was still fluttering and sputtering deep inside me, occasionally welling up in memory when I saw the night sky. In class, we learned that about 10 years ago a famous astronaut named Neil Armstrong had gone up to the moon with his friends and had been the first one to walk around. They planted a big flag, and then ol’ Neil pulled out a golf ball and a golf club and took a big swing. The golf ball went flying like a rocket jet into the blackness of space. Ms. Betty said that because of gravity, the tiny little golf ball would come flying back like a boomerang every now and then, to circle the moon. The impression from the movie theater—much more than a feeling--, that indescribable, full, fledgling-flight was like that golf ball flying back again and again, for years to come. I didn’t know it then, but it was whispers that something Divine, something eternal, lay out there, past what I could see in the universe. Past the stars and planets, past burning comets, past the moon, and past the sweltering little school, and our lonely house. Past what I could even imagine. My job now—so many years later!—is to look at stars through a big telescope at NASA. I have a ream of Dot Matrix paper with charts on them that I trace and track, and a computer that spills out mathematical formulation of the planets. People say that we can describe the universe with numbers and observation. I don’t argue that it provides a bigger picture, but there will always be something more out there. It’s not emotion or fantasy or wishing, but that more that makes math so beautiful and truthful. It’s what gives music life. Its what made me love the stars. I had caught a glimpse of it in that darkened movie theater, in that world of galaxies and planets and purpose. Alone and awed, I had my first taste of a yearning that would appear on a timed rotation for years to come, although I seemed to never expect its hauntingly melodious arrival. God was working in my heart even as a little boy, using a glimpse, just the surface of the glory of Himself. And then—go for launch, Commander C.S. Lewis. And it had all started with a song.