Longings from the Land of Nod

Originally published in the 16 December 2002 edition of Canada's Western Catholic Reporter newspaper, and later in Celebrate Life Magazine (American Life League).

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I dreamed of sailing a grand tall ship. Initially, gentle billows swelled beneath her massive hull. Gradually the wind began to pick up and it filled the ship’s enormous sails. Silently the large ship started to move as though being pushed by an invisible hand. At first, the bow gently sliced through the water as we moved forward.

The great ship’s speed increased, and soon a marvelous adventure was full speed ahead! Waves crashed against the bow, sending bracing showers of salty spray over the deck to drench me. Seagulls flew squawking alongside the ship—cheering the vessel on to its unknown destination as we banked into a westerly wind. The wooden ship creaked and moaned as the gigantic boom pitched violently starboard and the wind-filled mainsail swung overhead across the deck. Every fiber of my body felt alive—at least in my dream.

Reality is quite different: I live on the land-locked prairie in an advanced state of multiple sclerosis; the closest ocean is a thousand miles away. My sailing dream came as I lay in bed drifting from consciousness, through the Land of Nod [1]toward deep sleep. The dream was so real! I could smell, taste and hear the wind and sea. Eventually a rude awakening came: My eyes flickered open to discover a body that was still half-lead, my electric wheelchair still waited beside my bed. There was no tall ship, only the walls of my bedroom bathed in blue moonlight streaming through my window. Bed sheets rustled, not sails.

Dream recurred

In months to come, the dream started to recur and I became suspicious there was something more than a desire to sail. It was a primal desire.[2] But desire for what? It was spiritual desire,[3] not physical desire or eroticism. My desire had different layers, like the skins of an onion. On the surface was a desire to be free from degenerative disease, the contraptions of disability, frustration and grief. At a deeper level was a yearning for the past—my own past. Another layer deeper still was a desire for the ages, but even that was not the whole of it. At the core of my ecstasy was a longing for something or somewhere else I sensed was just beyond me.

The dream has a generic quality: It does not reveal whether I am crippled or healthy, boy or man, or where the ship is headed. I am simply sitting in a ship observing and experiencing the sensations; all that’s important in my life before becomes insignificant in comparison to the sensation of sailing. The ship in my dream is always seeking yet never arriving. The strongest sensation of my dream is one of longing that transcends the sea, the salt, the wind and desires the source of it all.[4] It is the same fleeting desire or longing I experienced beginning in early childhood before disease, disability, sorrow or pain. It is the same longing that seems to follow humanity.[5]

Primordial longing

C.S. Lewis wrote about transcendent desire in his wonderful little book Surprised by Joy. Later he spoke about it as yearning for a “far off country” or Paradise. Lewis delivered a sermon at the Oxford Church of St. Mary, which he called “The Weight of Glory.” He said, in part:

"I am trying to tear open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take revenge on it by calling it names like “nostalgia” and “romanticism” and “adolescence”; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name."[6]

Lewis likened this desire for Paradise to the “echo of a tune we have yet to hear” or “the scent of a flower we have not yet found.”[7] These images strike a full chord for an incurably ill man like me. Suffering intensifies spiritual yearnings, desire, longing for that flower I cannot quite find; it lies somewhere just beyond the door of temporal reality. But what lies just beyond temporal reality that fuels this near-constant yearning? It is certainly not a sailboat, seagulls nor an ocean.

A desire just beyond reach

If someone were to magically plop me into a sailing ship tomorrow, I think it would merely break my heart to discover my fantasy was only a metaphor for something else, something grander, something other-worldly. It would fall short of the ecstasy I imagined; I would soon discover that the thrilling images of wind-filled sails and the sea were inadequate metaphors for something that transcends my feeble mind or ability to even conceptualize. The yearning is for paradise.

The tall ship of my dream cannot reach “the far off land” because the destination is beyond my temporal experience to imagine (or the experience of anyone this side of the grave).[8] I have only tantalizing hints of somewhere else that occasionally wells up from deep within,[9] alluring promises[10] and hope of a far off place[11] -- the scent of the “flower not yet found” to excite my longing.

Metaphors schmetaphors! The images turn bitter if dwelt upon. They only point toward the ancient joys of heaven.[12] They are not heaven. Nature is a poor reflection of paradise, and ships are for mortals of little faith.[13] I remain exiled with all Christians this side of the grave; we are spiritually drowsy, yearning, desiring for heaven’s ecstasy that cannot be satisfied in the natural world, only the next.

I must not rush headlong or prematurely into eternity to seek the object of my desire (Christ),[14] or escape the despair of life inside a diseased and withering carcass. That would presume upon God’s mercy and Divine plan: He is a God of light not darkness,[15] the Author of life,[16] not death. Without light there is no life.[17] Control of life is not mine to seize, plunging it into darkness—only God’s to give and take.[18] Freedom cannot be forced! Paradise rushes for no man’s agenda; the joy of Heaven cannot be pilfered. It is not to possess yet. I am being prepared, purified, refined in a fire, of affliction,[19] made fit for eternity. Foretastes must do for now.

Mystery and hope of life

Obsessing over foretastes, sensations or vapors of the soul is counterproductive and only reveals spiritual immaturity seeking escapism from a miserable fate. The mystery of life is growth, not desire. The hope of life is Christ, not escape from sorrow or pain. In fact, suffering, disability or pain can be a blessing. There is blessing in suffering; the sufferer must look for it and be open to what is being said by it. In his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne remarks about human interdependence: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” The same meditation deals with the fruits of human affliction:

“All mankind is of one Author, and one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; …God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation…for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured, and ripened by it, and made fit for God.”[20]

Dreams about ships and the sea are enjoyable and harmless. But we must not dwell upon snippets of spiritual ecstasy or fleeting moments of longings. C.S. Lewis said “joy is the serious business of heaven”[21] but growth is the serious business of our time on earth.

Jesus calls humanity to lives of meekness,[22] as He lived.[23] Meekness is more than being mild and gentle. It is a spiritual temperament of the soul that surrenders to the sovereign goodness of God regardless of circumstances. We accept, by faith in Christ, that our trials and sufferings are preparing us for eternity and that our trials and suffering are somehow making us fit to assume our holy citizenship in the Celestial City.[24] Sometimes the fastest way home is the longest road.

I have been chronically ill with multiple sclerosis for more than 23 years. My life has degenerated from being a normal, able-bodied, athletic husband and father to spending most of my days in an electric wheelchair. My next mailing address will probably be a nursing home. By most people’s standard, life is over for me at the age of 54. Some people believe my life was over by age of 30 years when the MS was first diagnosed. Not true.

The sicker I become, the more evident Christ’s presence becomes to me. Like the fourth figure in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego,[25] Christ is with me in the fire of multiple sclerosis: unlike Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego the fire has ravaged my body (but not my soul). Jesus sits with me even in the ashes of my misery and comforts me. He assures me there is a divine purpose to the fiery torments[26] and that we shall walk away from the scorching flames into the warm light of His Kingdom. He talks of water and wind that takes me away from the fire to where I do not yet know.[27] The image is so real—I can hear the wind and feel the spray of water on my face.

Once again, I am overcome by a transcendent longing. At last I understand that the ecstasy is inextricably linked to the divine attributes of God’s love. One day there will be no more foretastes but the real banquet—no more wandering, no more longings from the Land of Nod. I will be home. I will see the Object of my desire—Christ.[28]

Mark Pickup
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[1] Land of Nod” East of Eden (see Genesis 4.16). Nod means to wander, to be exiled (see verses 12 & 14). In a sense all of humanity is in Nod having sinned and cut off from Eden. For the purposes of this short essay, Nod serves as a play on words as in “to nod off to sleep.”
[2] Psalm 63.1; Isaiah 26.9a.
[3] Psalm 42.1-2.
[4] Genesis 1.1&10; Nehemiah 9.6; Hebrews 11.3.
[5] Ecclesiastes 3.11b
[6] C.S. Lewis, They asked for a Paper, (London: Geoffrey Bles Ltd. 1962), p. 200.
[7] Lewis, p. 200.
[8] See Isaiah 33.17&21.
[9] Luke 16.19-22, 2Corinthians 12.2-4; Revelation 21.2-4.
[10] Psalm 49.15; John 1.12-13, 3.16, 5.24-25, 6.40, 11.25.
[11] Hebrews 11.10, 12.22.
[12] Psalm 16.11.
[13] Matthew 14.25-31.
[14] Exodus 20.13. The command “Thou shalt not murder” is non-specific and so we must conclude it includes killing oneself. Saint Augustine in City of God (Book 1. Chapter 20) concluded that the command “Thou shalt not murder” extends to self-destruction.
[15] Genesis 1.3-4; 2Samuel 22.29; Psalm 119.105; John 1.4-5, 8.12;
[16] Genesis 1.26-27; Psalm 100.3; John 1.4.
[17] John 1.5&9
[18] Job 1.21 & 10.8-9
[19] See Isaiah 48.10b
[20] John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII.
[21] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, (London, Fontana Books, 1963), p. 95.
[22] Matthew 5.5. W.E. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words gives the following explanation of the word meek. “ Meek (adjective) PRAÜS or PRAOS denotes gentle or mild. As a noun: PRAÜTËS or PRAOTËS, denotes meekness. In its use in the Scripture, which has a fuller, deeper significance than in non-scriptural Greek writings, it consists not in a person’s outward behavior only; nor yet in his relations to his fellow man; as little in his mere natural disposition. Rather it is an inwrought grace of the soul; and the exercises of it are firstly and chiefly towards God. It is that temper of spirit in which we accept His dealings with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting; …”
[23] Matthew 11.29.
[24] John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Celestial City signifies heaven.
[25] Daniel 3.24-25.
[26] Isaiah 48.10; Psalm 119.67; 1Corinthians 3.13-15; 1Peter 1.7.
[27] John 3.5-8.
[28] Job 19.26-27; Psalm 17.15; Isaiah 33.17; 1Corinthians 13.12; Revelation 22.4.