In the Olive Press with Jesus {part six: from within and without}

We are about halfway through the Lenten Season. Passion Week and Easter are just around the corner. This in-between time is tough work. The Ashes of Wednesday are washed off and we hunger for the sight of the lilies. The forty day ordeal–this time of self-reflection, of going inward and deeper, calling for repentance–enables us to discover that the continent of the inner soul is the real ‘lost continent’ and it seems so far away. How far?

Some time ago, I saw a film at the space museum in Washington, D. C., The Power of Ten. A man is lying on a beach, and the camera is 10 meters above him—10 to the power of one. The trip begins into space—10 to the power of 2, 10 the power of 10 and by now you are out among the Saturn rings. By the time you get to 10 to the power of 24, you are among stars that are light years from each other—billions of them infinitely larger than our ‘milky way.’ As I viewed this scene I began to ponder some questions: Who am I? Where am I going? Where will I be in a 100 years? Can an infinite God who is behind all of this care about me?

Then the camera reverses, speeding back to planet earth. And there is the man still basking in the Florida sun, but the camera doesn’t stop. It focuses on a square inch of skin on the man’s arm, and proceeds inward—10 to the minus power 1, 10 to the minus power 12 where you reach the cell, the basic unit of all life. And at 10 to the minus power of 24, you reach the atom. Our bodies are made up of billions and billions of these complicated, yet well organized atoms. If an atom were as big as the head on a pin, the atoms in a grain of sand would make a cube, a mile high, a mile wide, and a mile long.

I shared this little tidbit with a scientist-scholar and he remarked, “It is just as far within as it is without.” Well, where does this leave us?

We are talking about a Lenten Journey; the story of One who invaded the stream of history, fleshing Himself among us, God incarnate—as the poet W. H. Auden put it, “The Alien Unknown reveals Himself.” All the questions above have their locus in that Revelation and the immeasurableness of my world. The one without and the one within are under the custodial care of an infinite Creator, who dispatched the affairs of the universe in a twinkling of an eye. That being the case, the ‘inward journey’ leaves me with one resolve. It is summed up best for me by C. S. Lewis who said, “We are not imperfect creatures needing improvement, but rebels who must lay down their arms.”

When that happens, one covers far more territory that 10 to the minus power of 24; and in so doing, the journey is nearly complete and the ‘lost continent’ is found.