Chasing the dragon and the longing for heaven
We are easily enchanted by our first great experiences: Our first great love, our first great journey to a foreign country, our first great achievement…all of these kind of things have a hold on us. We find ourselves thinking over them in our idle time and re-telling the stories to ourselves and to any willing audience. We re-live them through photos and videos and trophies and any other means we have to re-awaken the past.
But all these sweet memories come with the bitter after-taste that we cannot ever truly live them again. It’s a fools’ errand to try and we know instinctively how dangerous it is to try and awaken the dead. This is why drug users call the pursuit of that elusive first high, ‘Chasing the dragon’. It is in every way as dangerous and futile as hunting a mythological creature. And this experience is almost universal
So then if there is a God you have to wonder whether or not this is some kind of cruel cosmic joke?! Is it personally amusing for him to see his creatures foolishly pining after a past they can never re-capture? CS Lewis sees a different purpose in it. He observes:
“The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality…
But he concludes that these longings on fade because they are an echo of something real and much greater. He goes on:
“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. ... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthy pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing”.
In the end, perhaps its not dragons we are chasing but God.
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