The Kingdom Awaiting Our Return
After cuddling and a 5-minute sit of restless silence, prayers and last burst of raucous energy, my daughters settle into bed for books and stories. Because of the gap between their ages, this is a separate time, one with me, the other with Emily, alternating nights and books as we go. For my youngest, Lucia, our latest reads have been Winnie the Pooh and Charlotte’s Web. For Lily, C.S. Lewis’s Narnian tale The Horse and His Boy.
Like all of Lewis’s Narnia books it is a story of adventure and conflict, a tale of good versus evil and the always present possibility of redemption. But at its heart, The Horse and His Boy is a book about identity; the slow discovery through growth that we are not who we we’ve been told. In this case Shasta, a fisherman’s son, treated little better than a slave and soon to be sold as one, comes to discover that he is really from a different land, the kidnapped child of a king. It is a truth whose full realization does not come all at once, but requires time and teaching and trials to enable him to live into the reality of his royal station. Shasta has to repent of his past and turn toward the Truth that holds his future.
Repent may seem a strange word here. The way we use it in contemporary English reflects some wrong we’ve committed that must be corrected. How can one who was kidnapped against his will repent? The answer is that Shasta is called on to repent in the biblical sense, the sense that Jesus announces as he begins his ministry and calls the sons of fishermen to leave behind their lives for a new identity with him.
In our Gospel, the word Jesus uses for repent, means something very different from simply confessing sins and feeling sorry for them. Repent in the Greek of the New Testament is the word metanoia, which translates more literally to “change your mind,” “renew your mind,” “take on a different way of thinking.” This is what Jesus means when he calls on us to repent. It is that kind of repentance that the boy Shasta had to undergo in his transition from slavery to life as the heir to the throne. It is the kind of repentance that we all must undergo as we realize that like Shasta we are royals from another land who have had our true identities hidden from us.
Did you know that you are royals? Did you know that you were born for freedom and called to rule in cooperation with God? That is the vocation we were given in creation and it is the work to which Jesus called us in his ministry. Each one of us is supposed to operate a small kingdom in collaboration with God. It begins with the space of our very selves, but with God it can be extended if we learn to live in cooperation with God’s reign of freedom.
Contemplatives and poets have been the best at expressing these truths. There is a line from a W.H. Auden poem you can find in Hymn 463 that offers a vision of the adventure of discipleship. Speaking of Jesus, Auden writes,
He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.
As with Shasta in The Horse and His Boy, there is a kingdom that is awaiting our return. Jesus calls it the kingdom of heaven; it is the place where God’s will is done. Auden brilliantly contrasts God’s reign to the kingdom of Anxiety, the place where our wills are captive to the desire for power and control, affection and esteem, security and survival.
In anxiety we live in the uncertainty of bondage, moving from one master to another instead of finding refuge in the silence where we can simply be before God. We turn to our phones and our computers, twittering away at ephemera, scrolling for dopamine hits in return for the sacrifice of our attention on the altar of advertising. We bury ourselves in work, with the many and varied and so seemingly important tasks that must be checked from our lists. We pour our time into activities and relationships that hold our anxiety at bay for a moment until we are sold again to another master.
“[O]ne of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things,” Lewis remarks in The Horse and His Boy, “is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.” And so it is that Jesus came, not to bring a new Kingdom, for the kingdom of Heaven is eternal and has always existed, but so that we could learn again the ways of freedom; recover once more the life and habits and powers of Kingdom people who are able to exercise their will in concert with God.
To embrace this freedom, we must become students of Jesus, learning the ways of eternity, even now; seeking him in the Kingdom of anxiety where he is ready to show us the way out. It is a journey that will require us to give up our old selves and spend difficult days in the deserts of silence and solitude and stillness so that we may wrestle free from the masters we might be quick to run back to for safety.
As the great Anglican contemplative Evelyn Underhill describes it, “Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond... It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone within.”
This is the way of repentance, “the spring-cleaning of the soul,” that will set us on the path toward a life lived within the peace of God’s reign. So, let us leave behind the “kingdom of anxiety” and all the petty masters who try to hold us back. We are a people called to freedom, children of the King who is the creator and sustainer and ruler of all. There is a great city that has awaited our return for years, let us escape with Jesus, our Way, and begin our journey back. Amen.