Strength Reconsidered

The human imagination gazes upon infinite possibilities. In this gaze, it may, if directed upwards, be filled with the vision of God, and so be receptive. Or it may look upon the world and recognize in it the created potential for making, and so actively mold the world. In The Cultivating Imagination, we will explore this nexus. On the one hand, these reflections aim to facilitate our openness to the sweet influence of divine grace raining down upon us. On the other, they are directed at the ways we work the land (of our world, societies, families, and hearts) to create desire paths that allow grace to more effectively water the land. In these two ways, the imagination fulfills the twin duties of love to God and neighbor.

for my father

W

e have to be strong. This is what this world demands. It is harsh, and it holds on to what it has with a tight grip, forcing us to wrestle what we need away from it. It opposes us at every turn. Not content with what it has, it also comes for the things that are ours, always striving to take them away, offering us nothing in return but longing and bereavement. Strength is what is required to take what we need, and to hang on to what we have.

We want to be strong. We want to be strong for our families and friends, for all those who depend on us. We want to be strong for ourselves, to believe that we are good, honorable, trustworthy: fierce defenders of our friends, fearsome to our foes. And we want to be strong for God, to do great things for His kingdom, to be counted among the heroes of faith.

But the reality is quite different. Our failures line up in a litany longer than we can bear to accuse us again and again not of abusing our too great strength, but of being in fact weak: too weak to secure what we need, too weak to hold to what we have; too weak to protect those we love, too weak to resist those who hate us; too weak to be good, too weak to be heroes. We are, indeed, too weak even to face our own failures, and so we drive them from our minds, editing our memories to support the fiction that we are decent people, that the world is not worse for our having been in it. 

But our hearts never truly forget what they have once experienced. The peculiar heartache of being the destroyer of worlds, of hurting others (and particularly those we ought most to have loved and protected) in the most fundamental and absolute of ways: this heartache leaves an indelible mark, and even when we have suppressed the memory, we cannot erase the miserable grief that still resides at the core of our being, waiting to sour our best moments.

In response to this weakness, we double down on strength: we try harder, we work harder, we love harder, hoping that this time it will be enough, that this time it will be different. But it doesn’t work. In fact, if we look closely, we will see that what we really do in our exertions of strength is prepare for the next failure, to set ourselves up to be the authors of the next tragedy, to prepare once again to declare to all the world our unfailing weakness.

It will always be this way so long as we continue to push down this path, because we are laboring under an illusion. We have misunderstood strength.

The image of the strong man is one who can resist innumerable foes, who can knock down the pillars of the temple, who can charge through the gap and seize what no one else can. This is the strength of striving. But that is only physical strength. While the physical is beautiful and good, its power pales in comparison to the spiritual. Furthermore, it is the spiritual that interprets the physical, not the other way around.

Spiritual strength is not measured by doing, but by being. It doesn’t need to overcome because it is never really threatened. God didn’t need to crush Satan’s rebellion: the mighty wave of his audacity crashed against the rock of the divine being and was utterly shattered, cast back whence it had come. The only mark it left on the Rock of Ages was the wetness of the tears of loving pity his foolishness drew forth. This is real strength: the strength of abiding.

Real strength doesn’t overcome by force, because force is the recourse of the weak. Those who cannot do what will last will do what cannot last. So, for instance, the other children wanted to attack me physically when I showed my intellect as a child not because they were stronger than me, but because they were weaker: because they couldn’t out-think me, they resorted to the threat (never realized) of violence.

Real strength doesn’t even, properly speaking, overcome force; rather, it disarms it. This is the lesson of the saints: all those strong men through the ages who ran at the people of God, all those emperors and warlords and religious leaders—however great the weapons they forged against the holy ones of God, they found their hands emptied when it came time to strike the blow, and raged at their inability to do anything meaningful. They strike the bodies of the saints with rocks, and the unharmed holy one offers them absolution for the very sin of murdering im. They threw young mothers and virgins to wild animals, but the deaths of these blessed women had already been revealed in dreams to have been a defeat of Satan. Saints Perpetua and Felicity fell to the sword, and in so doing, revealed the impotence of the sword. This is ever the way with martyrs: their embrace of death in the name of the Lord shows to all the world just how little a thing death is.

So we need to learn the lesson: the strength of striving leads naturally and inevitably to the breaking of that strength: he who lives by the sword not only dies by the sword, but dies by his own sword. [1]

The strength of abiding allows us to shake off everything that doesn’t matter (or that can only matter in submission to God) and to withstand the storms of the ages so that when the end of all ages comes, we may stand firmly before the Judge of the ages.

This is where the imagination comes in. Because we have been trained and catechized in the strength of striving, we turn to it instinctively and promptly: we almost can’t help it. It is just what we think it means to be alive. But our strength of striving will never be strong enough to face the forces marshaled against our souls. Numerous as our ploys, tactics, stratagems may be, we will always find ourselves with our backs to the sea, an overwhelming army of Egyptians bearing down on us. We want to scatter them in our Achillean rage, to toss them aside like chaff and sunder their strength. But it is not ours to overcome the world. Jesus does not say: Take heart: you shall overcome the world;” but “Take heart, for I have overcome the world.” [2] Revelation promises riches beyond our ability to comprehend to the one who overcomes; but we overcome by not being overcome, by not letting them remake us in their image, by proclaiming by our steadfastness the eternity and invulnerability of the gracious power of God. Just stand still, and you will see the salvation of the Lord. [3]

But this will require imagination, because it is so against our nature and experience. To be fallen and in rebellion against God is to be committed to a self-destructive and doomed enterprise of strength of striving. In the world of human affairs, it is doing that is prized. To form a vision of what the strength of abiding demands will require us to look beyond what makes sense to us, to look beyond all the evidence of our experience. It will require us to trust the ones who tell us that there is a better way: the saints and the theologians and the triune God. It will require us to allow the narrative of Scripture to turn the world upside down and show us a different logic than the one we grew up in. And it will require us to see that some things that will be misunderstood, hated, or excoriated as weakness by the world are in fact the very actions of strength.

Resistance and negative pressure are the native habitat of the strength of abiding in a world devoted to the strength of striving. But it will not last. All the turmoil of history and your heart are just the disturbances of rain striking the surface of the goodness of God. When the rain ceases, the waves peter out and the placid integrity of the divine virtues (which I might call shalom) will remain. The end result will not be stasis. The orchestra is discordant and chaotic while warming up, as each musician pursues his own needs; but it is all stilled for the tuning note that brings them all into proper relation to each other and sets the stage for what is to come. Likewise, it is only once the many agitated frettings of creatures have been stilled that the tuning of judgment may begin. And after that comes the symphony we came to hear.

Endnotes:

[1] Matthew 26:52 and Psalm 37:15

[2] John 16:33

[3] Exodus 14:13

The featured image, “Ely Ceiling Detail,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Junius Johnson

Junius Johnson is a scholar in the fields of historical and philosophical theology and has published four books in those areas. He is also a lover of story, passionate about beauty and the imagination, a seeker of wonder, a musician, and a deeply flawed sinner daily leaning on the grace of God in Christ. A lover of the Middle Ages, he especially loves to be transported to other worlds via fantasy, science fiction, and young adult literature. He teaches online enrichment courses for both children and adults in literature, theology, and Latin through Junius Johnson Academics.

www.juniusjohnson.com/