Swimming the Hellespont in the Mind

Ah, the wonder of the gym,that amazing place where the mind, desperate to distract itself from the cardio experience, tunes in with interest to interviews and reports on morning news shows that it would otherwise never notice. I can’t tell you how many diverse topics I have absorbed during these “it hurts so good” sessions at the end of my work-outs! But, because randomness is nowhere in God’s economy, I often walk away marveling at how He managed to burst something amazing upon my inner radar from the screens above the treadmills. After all, EVERYTHING serves His purposes! When you live with your inner window wide open, God fills it from every direction! (So sad that we Christians so often live in so much fear of being polluted that we often miss the joy of this “God-everywhere-ness”!) One particular morning, I happened to glance up and catch just one segment of an interview with the journalist, Lynn Sherr, who had just finished a new book about the sport of swimming (again, not something I would have necessarily paused for if I had been passing through the living room at home—I like the idea of swimming much, much more than the nostril-confounding practice of it!). It seems that Ms. Sherr is the best kind of journalist: the kind that is driven to create a personal experience to incarnate the ideas she is investigating. (They call it “passion,” but it is so much more….) Lynn Sherr had chosen to follow the tradition that Lord Byron began in 1810 and swim the Hellespont in modern-day Turkey, just as the mythological Leander was romanticized as having done in ancient times. Though the swim is definitely respectable in terms of athleticism, it was the symbolic significance that captured me. The Hellespont, she pointed out, is perceived as the boundary between Europe and Asia. With those words, I was gone. My cardio took on a new energy as I pondered the power of this amazing metaphor: Like Lord Byron before her, this American journalist had dramatically traversed the gap between “EAST” and “WEST”! She didn’t walk it as one would do on a bridge, nor did she row over on a boat: She experienced full-body contact with the turbulence and made it from one side of the physical and ideological gap to the other. Just woman and water—and desire! As one who was seemingly born with a spiritual quest in my very bones, I have had a lifelong fascination with the East-West divide in the minds of man and in the societies they produce. I was, of course, born in the West, raised in the West and cultured by the West, but it seemed that “Eastern” winds had also always blown through my soul. When the West taught me science, I saw the hand of an invisible Creator through it. When the West told me life was explainable and conquerable, I felt even more love for the wild and mystical. When the West told me to maximize my potential and make sure I achieved success, I somehow wanted to surprise them all by taking a circuitous path to some deeper enlightenment that would confound all their predictions and pierce their calcified imaginations with wonderment and awe! But all of this fascination was not just about dreaming or exercising some imaginative bent in my nature. It was rooted and fueled in a passion for truth and a deep-seated (and clearly God-implanted) sense that life must be more than prediction and explanation, evidence and material existence. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I wanted to shout it to the Western world: truth is not an idea, but an experience, one which transcends BOTH sides of the brain, both bents of the nature. Truth is where East meets West and the cross of Jesus Christ is the exact coordinate! ( Somewhere amidst all the fear among Christians of eastern religion, there should be at least an interest in understanding eastern modes of thought, for the very culture created to produce the Son of God was an Eastern culture!) It wasn’t until I read C. S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawntreader , that I found a descriptor for what was brewing deep within me. When I came to the prophecy that the “dryad” had spoken over the character Reepicheep at his birth, I found myself in a most amazing—I would say prophetic—way: Where sky and water meet, Where the waves grow sweet, Doubt not, Reepicheep, To find all you seek, There is the utter East. In Dawntreader, Reepicheep, after quoting the verse, says, “I suppose the spell of it has been over me all my life.” I could say exactly the same. When I found Jesus, I knew I had discovered the “UTTER EAST” and I found all I sought--not in a definitive way, like a computer print-out full of answers, but rather more like a fractal zoom—one that was constantly and wondrously changing the very nature of the questions involved! I saw that Jesus filled the empty space between subatomic particles, infusing the universe on every level! He revealed Himself to me as the “explanations unnecessary” place where questioning is submerged in just Being and a meta-narrative for it all finally begins to emerge. As He moved into the spiritual sphere inside of me, I watched with joy as the Eastern quest meet the Western questioning and formed a marriage for life! I obviously celebrate my odyssey of discovery. So, it came (and still comes) as a shock to me to learn that there are Christians who are not “fans” of my journey. I can’t imagine why this living fuel inside me would be anything but pleasant to someone who longs for more of God in their lives. It’s like rock and roll in a world of elevator music! It’s like amazing impressionistic canvases splashed with color in a gallery full of bad, brown attempts at realism! It’s like a rainbow after a grey and cloudy storm…..But, sadly, it isn’t everyone who dares to swim the Hellespont… And here the analogy grows even more profound. In the Hellespont, two great seas meet: the waters of the Mediterranean flow up and the Black Sea (via the Sea of Marmara) flow down. Because of that, opposing tidal actions are in play, making this narrow and winding body of water one of the most hazardous in the world. Unique turbulence arises here, both on the surface and below, so much so that sailing vessels often choose to wait in anchor for better conditions. The seascape in our minds is no different: there are often eddies of confusion when our logical bearings seem to be undermined by Spirit currents. We may feel that we are being pulled on by opposing forces—a dynamic tension that reason alone cannot resolve! Our emotions may be shouting both “Let go…” and “Hold on,” and we are not sure which voice is the one to follow! But, no matter how great your fear or resistance, I have to cry out to you that the crossing of the strait is worth the risk. The safe shores of reason will never afford you a full view of the God who spun the planets into orbit. It will only do you only good to see beyond the limitations of your western predictability and embrace some mystery—the edges of Spirit—perhaps for the first time. Does life really have to be that cut and dried for you to live and love it? Forgive those who promised you a perfectly programmable future and realize that in fact, maybe they were just those who were pausing during their quest to celebrate in Western terms the discovery of the Utter East! It feels like a risky thing to “lean not to your own understanding,” and expose your mental bearings to change, but the rewards are far greater than the physical riches of the Orient that Marco Polo sought and unveiled to an astounded Europe centuries ago! The rewards, when Jesus is directing the swim, are the riches of a spiritual realm! I have already said that this East/West thing was a lifelong quest for me, so it would be no surprise that the classic cartoon image of digging a hole from the United States all the way through to China once fascinated my youthful imagination. I now realize that China is not “under” the U.S., but it was a perfectly beautiful thing in my consciousness to conceive of a straight line connecting me to such a different and distant place. By age 4, I had already pondered and dismissed the feasibility of actually tunneling (like Wylie Coyote in a Roadrunner episode had done). But still, I was fascinated with the potential of arriving at this mysterious other world of the East. So, in all seriousness, I approached my parents for confirmation on the burning question in my soul. I asked them which way was east and they pointed to the windowed wall of my bedroom. I then pointed to the windows and said with great urgency, “If I walk that way and don’t stop, will I get to China?” I will pause to say that, had my young dreamer son asked me this, I might have crushed his emerging quest, replying with several reasons why that would be a BAD idea, fearful that he would try to embark on that journey immediately or later in the day after naptime! But, God was with my dear parents as they simply answered, “Yes, you would.” I remember feeling such joy, just to know it was possible. Later I would learn that there were rivers, oceans, mountains and more ocean separating my Texas home from my destination! It didn’t matter at the time: all I needed was the knowledge that I could get there. It is my joy to now share that “yes” with others: you, too, can get there. Every boundary this important will be the staging place of many battles, and this is true of both the literal Hellespont that Lynn Sherr swam, as well as the mental one that beckons us. Just like the physical strait in Turkey, the ideological gap is also a strategically important place for history to be made. The church can either continue to weigh in with linear explanations and moralism, choosing styles that support a cut-and-dried determinism and proclaiming only outward observances and behaviors as “right”, or it can launch out into the tricky but beautiful waters of change, realizing that there is an unexplored dimension of reality waiting ahead—a realm that God owns and displays readily to those who seek it out. The invisible world is real and it is the HOME, not the invention, of the Christian mind! The hunger for Spirit abides in us all—it has just been more broadly "permissioned" in Eastern thought. If you goal is just “east”, then maybe you don’t have what it takes to swim the Hellespont, but if you, like me, feel like the call of the UTTER EAST, by all means jump in. And, it must be said, for those of you who feel the need to defend western values, I promise you, no better celebration will be afforded you than the one on the other shore! The “UTTER EAST” is really where the West begins! In the fear of the Lord—that place where one is awed by the intoxicating view of all invisible truth belonging to God—THERE is the beginning of wisdom that involves BOTH sides of the brain. All roads meet in Him and all searches end there. He is the UTTER EAST. Swim the Hellespont in your mind with joy.