room
After the glory of the spectacle starts to fade, Church rooms look ugly. The fruits of artistic genius that were so alluring begin to turn: The statues look grotesque up close, the people are mean and selfish, he can’t rest in the hard, wooden pews that might break under him should he give them all his weight. When he suggests he can worship elsewhere, dozens of incurious eyes narrow at him, studying him with contempt.
"But this room is the only true house of worship!" A wild-eyed man beats his chest and rattles prayer beads. "We have the fullness of Truth!" he boasts. Such believers talk at the traveler, preaching insipid half-truths and insisting that he needs to be in their room if he really wants salvation, jabbing their grubby fingers into catechisms, insisting on what “it obviously says right there.”
Some of us knew ourselves as travelers before we came to rest in Christ’s Church. The traveler’s perpetually weary of every room he goes in and out of—a restlessness suffered as he flits from place to place only to find the same familiar four walls and a roof above him every time. Sometimes these are impressive, well-built monuments to artistic endeavor, drawing the eyes upwards to the heavens. These are grand cathedrals with God’s name on the doors. That’s what draws him in. And yet—
Claustrophobia sets-in and the traveler searches frantically for an escape into the wide open; as that escape fantasy grows to dominate his thoughts—as the details of all those furnishings which once held his attention fade into meaninglessness—he learns to even hate the rooms. Like a delirious passenger born in the belly of a whale, he resents every glistening distraction, every alluring sight, smell, and sound, that briefly draw him out of his awareness of hopeless confinement to putridly moribund cells. When living in a darkness like this, everyone and everything seems more and more deranged, hideous.
God uses some people’s hands and others’ minds, but none do His bidding to perfection. The traveler learns how even the most attractive rooms are the meager works of fumbling Italian or French sinners’ hands. Not one of the rationalist, airtight, cathedrals of the greatest minds of the Church has ever reached any further than an infinite distance from heaven.
Travelers won’t find peace so long as their hopes are dashed every time they think they’ve found the good place to rest because of what they find there. They’ll always be disappointed with everyone that greets them. Yes, we are meant to go through the Church and into the freedom God has established for us in His Kingdom; and yet, none of it looks quite the same once we see the true marks of the Church. In the right light, Christians discover that, in Christ, they’re not imprisoned in the belly of a whale, but rescued in an ark.