The voice she loved most

In Prince Caspian, the true second book of The Chronicles of Narnia (to show how old I am, or at least how young I began reading, the commonly (and mistakenly) accepted reordering didn't happen til after I'd first read them, at least on the copies I had readily available to my perusal), Lucy (perhaps my favorite character in all of literature) wakes up to a voice Lewis describes as "the voice she loved most in the world." But she didn't know to whom the voice belonged. She just knew she loved it. It wasn't her father's voice, it wasn't her brother Peter's voice. But it was a voice, and she knew she loved it.

I cannot speak for Lewis (although as I re-read The Chronicles of Narnia, I learn that I often speak like Lewis), but his allowance for Lucy to love a voice she did not recognize, but to, at least, know the love, to feel the love for the voice (and subsequently, the voice's owner) reminded me of what it is like to know something deeper, something truer, something bigger exists. For some this means the knowledge that something like God exists without knowing God. I do believe we were created to be in communion with God, and to not be so leaves a true hole in our souls. But for me, even as I think and do my best to know God in the truest and deepest sense, sometimes, there's just a feeling that there is more than all of this to all of this. A feeling that deeper, beneath it all, rests something more glorious, more beautiful, more magnificent and brilliant than anything we can see now, anything we can touch now. It's just a feeling. Perhaps it's a hunch. But it's a form of knowledge that transcends words and it begins and ends with the love God chooses to reveal to us as he chooses to do so, when he chooses to do so.

The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu laments the necessity of words. Words, to him, are but symbols of reality, never reality itself, and having to use them is a failure to always already experience reality.

I don't always disagree with Chuang Tzu on this point, but the world in which we live-indeed, the world in which we have been placed-relies on words and at least part of our reality hinges upon words.

But deeper than all the words we could ever use lies something more real than anything we've ever seen and anything we could ever hope to describe. There's got to be a reason the ancient Hebrew people weren't allowed to write the name of God, after all.

-Zack

"There's a man down here not worried or afraid
That some politician forgot all the promises he made
And he's raising the dreams in the graveyards
Where we've laid down our dead
His name is Hope"
-John Mark McMillan