Canter Bridge

The subtext that winds its way through much of biblical instruction and leavens it so that it rises not as something ludicrous but rather nourishing is that our Maker has a larger purpose in mind than we are normally capable of perceiving for ourselves. This is no easy truth, nor one whose veracity can be assessed by a minute or two of reflection.

It is rather one of those deep truths with which one comes to term only by long experimentation. That is, one chooses to live for a while—preferably not a short while—to see whether it works, whether it shines a heuristic light upon the events and paths of our life, whether it draws our movements and meanings into a more coherent, plausible, sensible construction than any competing hypothesis could do.

Few of us these days will take the time to pursue such a demanding, rigorous experiment. It simply requires more time and thoughtfulness than we believe we have available to us. So we hurry from one thing to the next, steeling ourself against the pain and gulping down the occasional pleasure on our frenzied sprint towards a destination we’ve not sat down to figure out.

One example of biblical instruction that only makes sense as part of this larger story and its deeper purposes is the idea that painful experience is more often than not a feature of our Creator’s loving instruction. That is, a God who loved us less might allows us a more convenient life than the One we actually have with us in this world. C.S. Lewis spoke eloquently of this paradoxical equation in The Problem of Pain. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews comes at the matter from a less philosophical angle:

Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?

Such an exhortation, absent the subtext that does its leavening work, sounds like a despicable and pious resignation to pain that might with a little effort be eliminated or at least evaded. Yet within the matrix of a larger purpose, it makes eminent sense of life’s bruises, scars, and sucking wounds. Or at least of some of them, giving hope at the same time that it may eventually prove adequate to larger ones that go untended in the present moment.

Yet the perceptual alchemy by which pain is converted in our minds into productive discipline is neither automatic not intuitive. It is not the way of this world to configure our distress in this life-giving way. To the contrary, the writer takes the liberty of assuming a certain commitment to the long, hard, slow-paced work of having our soul’s sight recalibrated, and this quite radically:

If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children. Moreover, we had human parents to discipline us, and we respected them. Should we not be even more willing to be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness. Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

Life, it seems, is meant to take a very long time.