I always thought old age, death, or insanity would quiet their voices.
I’m not insane. At least not yet. And even though I’m not dead, I’m much older.
The voices are the songs, movies and art of the 1960’s. They were imprinted on me as my first impressions, my earliest memories.
The voices seemed like implied promises. Do whatever you want, whenever and with whomever. Peace, love and happiness for ourselves and for the world.
It was a dream that almost became reality.
“Almost” is the problem. It has always been that way. The serpent promised in the Garden of Eden that we would be like God, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5).
We now know evil, but we are no gods.
And yet, still, the voices…
We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden
– Woodstock, by Joni Mitchell
We’re all children of our time. We’re all, in our own way trying to get back to the garden, to bring to reality the bare whisper of a shared memory that there is a God, that he is good, and that all his promises come true.
“… the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence… The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
– The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis
Praise God! A new, restored garden is being made ready…
Revelation 22:1-5 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.