What I saw from the car, written on a plane then a train

This is about home, desire and heaven.

I’m starting this on the plane somewhere over the Peloponnese about to descend in to Athens (now home) after a short trip to England for a wedding in Beeston (was home) this past weekend. Between us Dawn and I have made such brief visits back to the motherland a number of times in the last seven years. Let’s see if I can remember all these solo visits (i.e. not the whole family) as a brief exercise to try and hold my mental deterioration at bay a little longer: my grandpa’s funeral, Dawn’s dad’s heart surgery, Tim and Nicky’s wedding (Dawn), UCCF staff conference (me), Beeston Free Mission Sunday (me) and Michael and Rachel’s commissioning service (Dawn). It’s one of the ways in which we are aware of the blessing of being in Athens - to be able to return easily and cheaply for a long weekend would simply not be possible for plenty of overseas-based friends, so we’re grateful to be able to.

This trip was, as almost always, a real pleasure and privilege. 

(As I listen to Doves' 'Kingdom of Rust - "My God, it takes an ocean of trust in the kingdom of rust" - I can feel the descent beginning - ear-drum pressure is increasing - which means the rest of this will be written at home in Athens.)

[Inevitably a good few days passed after landing, but I decided to just publish the blog as it came out without too much editing, so here’s the rest of my piece, now being written on the night train to Athens on my way back from Skopje.]

Simply because I love maps, and it breaks up the text, here’s my journey:

As you see, I didn’t go anywhere spectacular. Gatwick to Horsham at night, Horsham to Oxford on the M25/M40 (yawn - except that there was for once in many years no hold up whatsoever), Oxford to Beeston via Milton Keynes and the M1, Beeston to Bristol via the M42/M5, and Bristol to Gatwick via Tesco Express and the M4. Very prosaic. All these journeys were happily made on days of glorious sunshine and crystal clear horizons, giving me the pleasure of seeing England at her end-of-winter/almost-spring beautiful best. It really was stunning. This is a significant detail, as you’ll see if you read on.

Now Greece is a beautiful country - extremely so - as long as you get out of Athens, and most of Attica. But England is not too shabby either, even in the understated south. I saw ancient Oxford, and the view over Christchurch College from the top floor of the IFES/UCCF office. I had lunch by a log fire in an old Cotswold pub. I saw the agricultural Midlands with its perfect fields and hedges and copses, the lovely Malvern Hills, that great village by the Avon somewhere around Tewkesbury, the long stretch of non-urban M4 corridor. And 99% of this was accompanied by perfectly courteous British driving (the rude Audi by Newport Pagnell being just about the only exception) and a mixture of banal Radio 1 (they have no shame), patchy Radio 2 (new high score of 24 on Popmaster) and fascinating Radio 4 (first car ever without medium wave so no Five Live. Weird.)

Anyway. 

So I was thinking, somewhere along the M40 I think, that here were stretches of countryside and townscape that, as far as the Clarks are concerned, are far more desirable to live in than Athens. We fairly quickly grew fond of Athens. It’s a privilege to live in such a place, despite its chaos and its real difficulties. And in most significant ways we’re genuinely happy to be living there. We have no plans to leave. When we return to Greece after our summer visits to England, we are truly happy to be returning ‘home’. 

But really, if we were to make a plain choice about where we would ‘like’ to live, Athens wouldn’t be top of the list. 

But this is the point. If one was to make a list, what would be top? Even yesterday I was asked where would I most like to live of all the places I’ve ever lived? And I knew immediately where that would be. My semi-longing gazes across the lovely English countryside (I’ve had this idea over the past few years, probably provoked by our removal from it, that the English have a much stronger and more affectionate connection to our green and pleasant land than our cold, detached, joyless exterior might suggest! I do not include our ruined cityscapes in this affection) of course made me think about the many ways in which it would be great live in one of those places. 

The possibility of walks in the woods and fields (largely litter-free), of country pubs with real ale, a connection with our ancestral heritage and history, of living in a town with cycle paths, the possibility of the kids going to a local primary school with school sports teams and a more colourful and varied curriculum and range of clubs and activities, of a local library to make use of, of unlimited access to mature cheddar and Lincolnshire sausages to make our Saturday morning fry-ups that little bit more complete, of straightforward online bill payment and so on (not even one visit to a government ministry to register a new car, let alone the four it took to get our Alhambra properly into our name)…

I’ll stop there. You get the point.

I wasn’t feeling particularly downcast about any of these musings, though perhaps a little melancholy, nor was I feeling a particularly strong lust or desire for those (pretty superficial) things but in his kindness the Holy Spirit brought back to the front of my mind a verse that Dawn and I have treasured many times over the past years:

Abraham was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (Hebrews 11)

Two things were suddenly really clear. First, the desire I felt for the good things in life was not a bad one. I think in the past I have often thought that the right response to wondering how wonderful it might be to live somewhere ‘better’ is to suppress those desires because they’re superficial, distracting or idolatrous. But the truth is that though they could be all those things, they’re actually a pale reflection of the greater desire we should have, like Abraham did, for the city with foundations. They show that we’re built to have longings. 

A nicer house in a nice part of the world? Access to Sainsbury’s? Green fields? UK libraries and schools? Less administrative hassle? All good things and much to be appreciated. But come on, Jonathan, they’re not exactly brilliant ambitions. You can do better than that.

The second thing was that remembering the verse brought liberation to not worry about the apparent hassle of living in Athens. Wherever I live in the world, without godly contentment I will always long to be somewhere better. Last summer we drove along this road in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. 

It was intimidatingly wealthy. We were chuckling about how one would feel if, after working hard enough to be able to afford to buy a really nice house on The Ridgeway, Cuffley, your heart started lusting after the one next door which also has a pool. Or the other one with a tennis court. Or the one with half a mile of land stretching down to the river. And so on. How much is enough? Just a little bit more, JP Getty is said to have mused. So true, without contentment, and without the longer picture. 

I might wish I was back in Thorndyke Close, But I could be there, and then wish that a thousand small things could be better, without contentment and the longer picture. I could wish I was back in Zimbabwe with a cold beer by the table football table and the long, slow African hours to enjoy doing nothing. I could wish I had a different job with more satisfaction or better pay. I could wish my nicer house was a bit closer to the Lake District for easier access to Buttermere on that perfect summer’s day or Wastwater when the snows come. I could wish that we lived closer to those particular dear friends who we’d love to be able to visit more easily. There’s no way of being peacefully content and satisfied anywhere, doing anything, without godly contentment and the longer picture.

The hassles are real. The downsides to living anywhere are real (though almost always relative, let’s not forget). So it’s not a case of just having positive thoughts or being stoical when faced with the downsides of wherever we are or whatever we’re doing, and banishing the desires to be somewhere else or someone else. The reality, the deliberately ordained reality, is that life under the sun (or cloud depending on one’s geographical particularity!) is in that one sense meaningless, and to be lived as it was meant to be lived: that is, with our hearts set not on the next best thing we can imagine, which in the end is not as good as the next best thing after that, but on the ultimate good. That’s what Hebrews 11 means. It’s what Paul meant: 

‘…as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal’  (2 Cor 4)

The absence of the good things that I was imagining on my pleasant drive around southern England I can confidently and happily say fall very squarely into what Paul described as ‘slight momentary affliction’. So slight, so momentary, when compared to the far worse afflictions he himself had been suffering, and so many people are suffering elsewhere in the world. But laughably slight and momentary when compared to the eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

Again, it’s not that the hassles are not real. They are. It’s not that the desire to enjoy a better life is not real. It is. But it must be relativised, and put into its proper place, which is as a pointer to something better, something ultimately good, something and somewhere and someone who surpasses all the possible desires we’ve ever had, with the result that we’ll never have another longing, never another regret, never another pang of homesickness, never another ‘I wish that…’ - because we’ll be in the city with foundations whose designer and builder is God. An eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Beauty and perfection beyond anything the Cotswolds or the Lake District could offer.

It means we (not just the Clarks) can live fully committed to where we are and what we’re doing without wishing we were somewhere better doing something better as if that was an end in itself, or  some kind of ultimately satisfying thing, because it can’t be. The desire for something nicer, or the wish that we didn’t have the hassles and disappointments we do, should make us remember in a very real, practical, life-altering way, that there’s a greater joy to be desired and a more complete promise of no hassle, than we could possibly attain with our pathetically weak desires for things we can see now. So for the moment, no matter how lovely England might look, or how pleasant a life she might offer, or how many small ambitions I might harbour, there's something more lovely, more pleasant and more worthwhile. It's something we all ought to deliberately wait for all of the time.

Coincidentally, in between starting and ending this piece, I came across this quote, allegedly from St. Patrick:

"Daily I expect to be murdered or betrayed or reduced to slavery if the occasion arises, but I fear nothing, because of the promises of heaven."

People say all sorts of things about heaven these days, but usually they have the effect of downgrading heaven in favour of what goes on here and now. But that's not right, is it. The promises of heaven are so good, and they put our slight momentary afflictions in perspective, and free us to do good in this world, and free us to not desire the very good things of this world more than what the promises of heaven offer.