No Japan Travelogue yet. I’ll be working on that this week for both you all and for Theopolis and have it out early next week.
Today I just want to share a scene from my fiction reading (which has been sparse as of late). As I tell each fellows cohort at Theopolis: be careful of becoming the kind of person who only reads non-fiction theology, or you risk becoming the kind of person who only reads non-fiction theology.
Toug is a young squire aspiring to knighthood in Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight volumes. He has been asked to enter into a covenant with two of his companions —a covenant in which each promises to help the others achieve their heart’s desire.
It’s Toug’s turn. If you’ve followed the narrative you know that Toug’s greatest desire is to be a noble knight like his mentor Sir Able of the Hight Heart. And yet, when his companions turn to him to hear his heart’s desire, he balks.
They wonder if he is unsure or hesitant or unwilling to enter into covenant with them. He’s not, he explains, “I have to say something else first.”
“Then do so” his companions urge him.
“I want to be a knight. Not just a regular knight. It would be wonderful to be a regular knight like Sir Garvaon or Sir Svon. But what I truly want —this isn’t my heart’s desire, not yet— is to be a knight like Sir Able. I want to be a knight that would jump on the dragon’s back.” (pp.538-539).
His companions look at him, a bit mystified and confused. Perhaps the reader does as well. “Well” we the readers might say if we were in the room with them, locked in the Giant’s castle at Utgard, “it certainly looks as if that is your heart’s desire, Toug.” Right? What did we miss? But Toug continues:
“I’m a squire now […] and probably I’ll be a knight sooner or later unless I get killed. So I have to learn fast. I know that if I wait ‘till I’m a knight and try to be like Sir Able then, it won’t work. I have to start before I am knighted.”
There are some things in life that I must start living into before I am that thing if I am to live-it-out excellently. A couple of examples come immediately to mind: a husband, a scholar, a deacon.
A young man who wants to be a good husband doesn’t wait till his wedding day to become husbandly. Neither does a man or woman who wants to be a great scholar wait until their tenure track offer to start doing scholarship. Nor does one suddenly become deaconly —the key question of a discernment committee is “is this man already showing signs of diaconal ministry prior to ordination?”
So Toug make his covenant with his companions saying “I want to do my duty.” That is knightly, and it is his being knightly ahead of him being knighted.
I think there are some implications here for Christian discipleship. It is easy to wait to grow in holiness or missional zeal or prayer or bible study once this imaginary “x, y, z” happens. But that misses the point of discipleship: these are all things that I am called to in Christ ahead of my having attained them.
For Toug he wants his desire’s to be knightly. No knight spends his days wishing to be a knight. Toug wants to trade his heart’s desire for the heart’s desire of the kind of man he wants to be. So much of Christian discipline is this kind of ordering of loves, not merely “I want” but “God give me the desire this thing that I do not want because I know it is what I ought to want". Amen.”