THE SECRET

An excerpt from "The Secret" by C. Baxter Kruger

 
Imagine an eight-year-old kid at the fair.  There he is, in the midst of everything 
a kid dreams about.  Exciting rides, caramel apples and cotton candy, games and 
prizes--all are within his reach.  And he is taking full advantage of the moment.  But 
suddenly he realizes that he has been separated from his parents.  He is lost.  Sheer
terror seizes his little soul.  In a split second he moves from having the time of his
life to being so panic-stricken that he no longer even knows there is a fair.  His
freedom to see and enjoy the good and wonderful things that are all around him has
vanished into thin air.
What this story is telling us is that what happens to our insides shapes the way
we experience what is outside of us.  Our insides can be so shredded we lose sight of
the great and awesome things that are all around us.  We no longer see them as great
and awesome.  And when that happens, we lose our freedom to enjoy them.
I think the kid at the fair is a parable of human life, it is a picture of what is
happening to us, of why our joy and contentment are so fleeting, of why life can be
so painful and meaningless.  Again and again we encounter something that
overwhelms our insides.  It may well be that we do not even know it.  The internal
shredding, so to speak, may not even reach the level of our conscious feelings, much
less the intensity of feelings that we see in the kid at the fair.  But the shredding is
happening, and the effect is the same.  The bewilderment inside short-circuits our
capacity to behold the glory of life around us and thus shuts down our freedom to
live in it.  And we don’t live in it.  Our living becomes as empty as the laughter of
the lady who did not get the punch line of the joke.
It is not that the glory goes away.  It is just that we can no longer see it.  We
look right into the smile of a little girl and see nothing.  There she stands, a sheer
miracle, the living embodiment of beauty, and she is smiling at  us, eager to share
life.  But we look right through her, smile and all.  We do the same with other
people, with flowers, with music, with work, and baseball.  Their wonder and glory
just don’t register with us.  They appear pale to us, mundane, even boring and
meaningless.  I don’t think that we are consciously aware of what is happening.
Rarely do we tell ourselves that this person or that flower is boring.  We just don’t
see them for what they are, and as a result, their presence does not touch us or mean
anything to us.  Before we know it we have flown through a week--maybe even
months and years--with our eyes glazed over.  We may be alive, but we have missed
out on living life. For we cannot relate to, much less enjoy, what we cannot see.  

Let me relate a story to you that illustrates what this kind of blindness does to
us.  It comes from C. S. Lewis’ splendid tale, The Chronicles of Narnia.
is of a beautiful land on a clear day.  The whole earth is full of glory, alive with a
radiance that only our best, most glorious days can hint at.  It is Narnia, the promised
and longed-for land.  Several of the heroes of the story are walking around with
increasing awe and irrepressible joy, never having even imagined anything so
beautiful, so intensely alive, so real, so good.    
But also present is a bitter little band of scowling Dwarfs.  They are not
exploring.  There is no light of wonder in their eyes.  They have no joy.  They are, in
fact, huddled in a tight circle on the ground.  Far from knowing themselves to be in a
beautiful land on a clear day, they believe they are trapped in a “pitch-black, poky,
smelly little hole of a stable.”
Lucy, one of the heroes of the story, shouts to the Dwarfs:  “But it isn’t dark,
you poor stupid Dwarfs.  Can’t you see?  Look up!  Look round!   Can’t you see the
sky and the trees and the flowers?  Can’t you see me?”
One of the scowling Dwarfs, named Diggle, blurts out in exasperation: “How in
the name of all Humbug can I see what ain’t there?  And how can I see you any more
than you can see me in this pitch darkness?”
Instantly a bolt of grief shoots through Lucy’s heart.  Then an idea comes to her.
She snatches up some wild violets and shoves them toward Diggle.  “Listen, Dwarf,”
she says,  “even if your eyes are wrong, perhaps your nose is all right: can you smell
that?”
 Smell he can, but far from smelling fresh violets, Diggle smells stable-litter,
and is so deeply offended he takes a swipe at her.  
At this point, the great lion Aslan appears.  Aslan is the supreme hero of the
story and the one responsible for the existence and the glory of Narnia.  Lucy, in her
bewildered grief over the blind Dwarfs, immediately implores Aslan to do something
to help them.  What follows is fascinating:
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane.  Instantly a glorious feast
appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and
trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right
hand.  But it wasn’t much use. They began eating and drinking
greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly.
They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of things
you might find in a Stable.  One said he was trying to eat hay and
another said he had got a bit of an old turnip and a third said he’d
found a raw cabbage leaf.  And they raised golden goblets of rich red
wine to their lips and said “Ugh!  Fancy drinking dirty water out of a
trough that a donkey’s been at!  Never thought we’d come to this”.
This is a truly tragic situation.  The Dwarfs sit in the open on a splendid
cloudless day.  Before them is a luscious feast called forth by the King (admittedly
you would have to be British to think of this as a feast, but use your imagination).
They have the golden goblets in their hands.  But, as Lucy said, their eyes are all
wrong, and so is everything else, dreadfully so.  They actually drink the rich red
wine of the promised land and taste only dirty water from a donkey’s trough!  
Note carefully that the problem is not that the Dwarfs have been excluded from
the glory of Narnia.  They are every bit as much in Narnia as are the heroes.  In fact,
it would be impossible for the Dwarfs to be any closer to Narnia than they already
are.  But their eyes are wrong.
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  And the absence of proper seeing leaves them
incapable of experiencing Narnia as  Narnia.  Like the kid at the fair, the Dwarfs’
blindness robs them of the joy of Narnia and thus leaves them scowling and bitter.

This is what happens to us.  It is not that we are excluded from Narnia, so to
speak.  The feast is ours.  We daily dine on the bounty of the King’s royal food and
raise his golden goblets of rich red wine.  But something rather like an optical
illusion keeps happening and we do not see properly.  We do not see who we really
are, where we are, and with what glory we are involved. And this optical illusion,
this absence of light, this absence of proper seeing, destroys our ability to experience
the feast as a feast, the fair as a fair, life as life.  Without seeing the glory we have no
freedom to live in it.  And life inevitably becomes a joyless, boring, meaningless
routine--sometimes, even dreadful.