Kedo Peseyie
It is not always easy to describe a thing of beauty by using words. But often it is harder to make a person understand a thing of beauty by showing him or her that thing of beauty. I will try and tell you about a few beautiful things. But I will have to leave it largely to your own imagination to understand what I am really trying to say.
We learn from Wordsworth that some things are better left to the imagination. And then we learn from the likes of C.S. Lewis that in the end, our world of imagination could be the only world left standing and the only world that is really real. People like them teach us that if we are capable of imagining real beauty and absolute peace even in the absence of real beauty and peace, then there must really be such a thing or a place where things are immeasurably beautiful and infinitely peaceful.
I agree with such proposals wholeheartedly. And that’s why I want to tell you about a place that lies beyond our majestic mountains. Foreigners come to our land and tell us that our mountains are infinitely beautiful and that they have never seen anything like it before. Amusing. But what is even more amusing is that we believe them. They actually do us a disservice because by their spur of the moment comments, they limit our imaginations to the limited colours of our land and reduce us to our pride and prejudices of our own tribe and land. And so some of us think—“Maybe there really is no place more beautiful than these Naga Mountains.”
This reminds me of a man who forbids his children to watch Cartoon Network because this channel is full of crazy actions and colourful ideas that would otherwise never happen in our natural physical world. I thought about it and I said to myself that sometimes one may even find more reality in the Cartoon Network than reality TV. Think of some events in the Bible. A whale swallowing a man. A vine that grows up in a few minutes to give shelter to Jonah. The sun stopping for almost a day. An iron axe that floats in the surface of the water. The Sea dividing and balls of fire in the sky. These are scenes that would have great appeal in a cartoon show but would hardly appeal to our modern logical and calculated minds.
Someone once told me that somewhere beyond our mountains, there is a place where none of us have ever been. It is a beautiful place where valleys and mountains and plateaus follow one another with endless flower gardens spread out in between and connecting all of them. In the valley where this place begin and our Naga mountains end, there is a garden where everything we humans imagine to be infinitely beautiful and infinitely peaceful is present. And I believe him.
One day a young girl and a young boy of 7 and 8 years ventured out into the mountains and found themselves in that garden. What they saw captivated them so much that they lost all desire to return to their ordinary world. There were numerous colours all around. Wild lilies in more than a hundred different shades of yellow, white, pink and purple. Trees and soft grass in more than 250 different shades of green. They lived there for some days because there was enough to eat and enough to marvel at and enough trees to shelter them.
Then one day the little boy met a black and white crow. The crow offered him some berries and told him that the colours he sees in the garden are all an illusion, a trick caused by the reflection of the Sun. “This illusion makes you see only what you want to see. In the end nothing will matter. What truly matters is you and your survival here. So you might as well start using things to protect and pleasure yourself or you will be in danger one day”, the crow said.
The little boy ate the berries offered to him and thought about the crow’s theory. The more he thought about it he was convinced that is was entirely possible. And with each berry he ate he lost sight of a colour in the garden. He started despising the little girl and more colours vanished from his vision. He plucked away the flowers and threw them into the fire and still more colours vanished. This went on until the little boy became more miserable and his world became totally black and white. Now he saw no value in nature around him anymore. The only things that mattered to him were the berries and filled his stomach. The sound of the streams and the singing of the birds irritated him. Sitting at the garden and marvelling at the 500 different shades of blue, red and green became a highly irrelevant and a totally unprofitable exercise for him. He was now more concerned about food, comfort and pleasure. But he was always hungry, ever in discomfort and incessantly bored because all he saw was only black and white. And there was one thing he didn’t quite understand. If all of life is just an illusion, why does he increasingly feel pain, guilt and a desperate longing for colours in his life? And they all feel so real.
The little girl often sat by the window marvelling over the colourful sunset and counting all the different colours and shades in the sunset. She often counted all afternoon until the sun disappeared and the moon came up. Then she would start counting again pointing to the moon, the designs and the shades. When she grew tired, she said her prayers and went to sleep. She rarely asked for anything in her prayers. She only knew how to thank the Man over the sunset mountain whom she called, “the God of my colourful world”. And she always heard the God of her colourful world promising her that she would have more colours to count and marvel at beyond the sunset mountain. She always went to bed grateful and woke up with expectation because each day of her colourful life pointed to a greater day beyond that mountain.
The little boy often wondered what the girl was counting. All he could count was black and white, his berries and the birds he killed. He grew jealous of the little girl and the pleasure she derived from something he could not understand. He remembered how his world was colourful once upon a time. He also remembered how his world became a black and white dull place with every step he took away from marvel, awe and reverence to the power that creates and holds the different colours of life together. But he felt powerless to remove the dark glass covering his eyes. Yes, surely he needed the berries to fill his stomach but he could not see beyond his need.
Many of us are like the little boy who never understood or cared for anything that did not fit into his dull, black and white materialistic world. We have no healthy imagination left in us to help us envision eternity with God. Even the little imagination left in us is often labelled as illusory.
James W. Sire mentioned that there are two kinds of thinking: meditative thinking and calculative thinking. In meditative thinking we connect with God the Creator and it helps us to see the whole of life from the eternal perspective. Calculative thinking only connects us with our needs and wants and engages us in thinking about how materials and money can be acquired for our consumption. Someone said that today calculative thinking is the only way people are taught to think. How true. And how sad!
With all our gadgets and revelries, our world is still a dull, black and white place and our lives are far from entertained. People often say that one major problem among young people today is boredom.
I believe it would be highly beneficial and spiritually refreshing if we could put some healthy imagination back into our Christianity. That would definitely make the church more appealing and eternity more attainable. Heaven and eternity are the only ultimate realities that will endure forever. And only a healthy imagination well-informed by the Word of God can have a glimpse of God’s colourful Heaven and eternity.
