If there’s one thing I retained from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (besides adrenaline shot straight to my moody angst), it’s her analogy of the fig tree:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Friends, I’m so tired of wanting things.
There’s a malaise in desire, always this slow breath. Lethargic posture, crumpled up like the letters I’ll never send- not because I don’t want to, but because the need to deliver them has outpaced the results they’d garner. This is more than running on fumes; it’s becoming the fumes. No longer a solid state. Not here in the moment with you, always half somewhere else. Inability to act, a kind of static brooding. Not flesh enough to even embrace what I want when it’s finally available to me.
I don’t want anything big, mind you. Like Plath’s Esther (Ee Gee), I desire the basic things all broken human hearts demand- security, love, acceptance, accolades- in all the various shades we express them:
The pride and comfort of financial success.
The assurance of stalwart friendships.
Requited covenantal love.
A serene spirituality.
Acclaim from respected critics.
Normal longings.
Sometimes I make excuses for this strange chaos, like: “I’m just waiting for God to reveal His will to me” or “I don’t want to make the wrong decision.”
And thus, I cast the blame on God for something else he’s seemingly not giving me: permission. Cutting myself off from him in this disgruntled manner, I dwell further on my self, on my wants, on my discontents.
I stop working. I can’t even play well anymore.
I sit criss-cross applesauce in the crotch of my fig tree and watch all the opportunities ripen and rot, fall heavy with sugar into my lap, and with gritted teeth grind out, “Not my fault.”
Idolatry of wholly seeking lesser glory than Christ is a downward spiral and, in the end, has the potential for eternal conscious torment. When I’m in the thick of idolatry, I feel the knife edge of this isolation from God still and solemn at the brink of my being.
My will being done is a kind of hell.
In his Letters To Malcolm, C. S. Lewis writes,
“The only way in which I can make real to myself … the heinousness of sin is to remember that every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us—an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof “God did it” and “I did it” are both true descriptions. We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument.… Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.”
At their core, these wants are God-breathed, blessings given to compliment and express the chief end of man: to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Our Heavenly Father could have made us automatons, could have made single-circuit creatures, but thought it better to play out our stories, intricacies rife with confusion and joy, because there would always be a strain of beauty in it that would magnify His name.
What a gorgeous extravagance.
And yet I spit on it every time I pursue what I want over Yahweh who created not only me, but my capability to desire, the thoughts and emotions that accompany that desire, and all subjects to be desired. Pathetically tragic. The figs keep falling because I’m paralyzed by my idolatrous yearning to pluck them. My heart is all-consumed with temporal pleasures, my arms tangled in the branches because my will is not stayed on what moth and rust can’t destroy.
Kierkegaard famously said that “purity of heart is to will one thing.” Unless that one thing be Christ, I can’t act. I can’t live. I will forever distort the good with my seeking its supremacy.
The figs- blessings through which God is magnified -rot.
So how do I reach? And what for?
Oh Christ, be my heart’s obsession.
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” – Galatians 2:20
If this is as true for me as it was for St. Paul, then the first shift of my heart must be toward thankfulness.
I am not my own.
My will is no longer for my own ends.
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
In attempting to wrap my head around the magnitude of what Christ has done for me, my salvation through grace alone by the atonement of his blood, my soul can’t resist to sing praise that is willed toward One thing.
I can’t yearn for anything greater because the only thing I need I already have. Thus, these joys are put back into their proper alignment: as happy gifts and not my very lifeblood. My idols now appear nearly as absurd as my yearning for them. A golden calf I held so precious turns into a poorly-gilded sow.
There is no creature better than its Creator.
There is no security surer than the Rock of Ages.
There is no truer Friend than He who laid down His life for me.
There is no husband more devoted than the Bridegroom who chose me before the foundations of the world.
Jesus, be glorified in my human confusion. May the strain of Your constant goodness be perfectly visible in all my calamities. Open my fists. Purify my heart to will only Your will be done. I pray for grace to trust You more.
“O Christ, in thee my soul hath found,
and found in thee alone,
the peace, the joy I sought so long,
the bliss till now unknown.
Now none but Christ can satisfy,
none other name for me!
There’s love and life and lasting joy,
Christ Jesus, found in thee.
I sighed for rest and happiness,
I yearned for them, not thee;
but while I passed my Saviour by,
his love laid hold on me.
I tried the broken cisterns, ah!
But how the waters failed;
even as I stooped to drink they fled,
and mocked me as I wailed.
The pleasures lost I sadly mourned,
but never wept for thee,
till grace the sightless eyes received,
thy loveliness to see.”
⁃ “None But Christ Can Satisfy” by Francis Bevan