Along The Beam

Along the Beam

Once upon a time I trusted my eyes fully and without hesitation. But the older I get, the less I rely on them to tell me all that I need to know.

More and more, I trust not just what I can assess empirically, but also what becomes known to me in the process of experiencing a thing. I used to refuse to budge unless I could see and understand the next steps to be taken. Now I am more willing to suspend entrenched beliefs or secret disbeliefs and simply, as C. S. Lewis says, “look along the beam.”

In his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed,” Lewis describes the distinction between looking at a thing and looking along it. Looking at a beam of light in a dark toolshed, he saw only the light but saw nothing by it. But when he moved into the beam of light, letting it fall on his eyes, he saw, framed by a crack in the door, the leaves on a tree outside and the sun.^a

There is much to be said for contemplating the beam, for examining a thing by standing apart from it and gazing at it to learn and observe. But there are things that may be apprehended fully only by gazing along the beam—by stepping into the light and letting it illumine what it will. I can give a hundred good reasons why I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and have placed my faith in him. I can point to eyewitness testimony, the detail of Scripture, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and more. But those proofs are arrived at by examining the gospel the way a scientist would examine some theory or specimen. They tell a part, but not the whole.

I believe the gospel is true because God has revealed its veracity as I have gazed at the world along the illuminating beam of his love. By the gospel, everything is clearer. By it, I am changed in ways I could never have imagined or dared to hope. “I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen,” said Lewis, “not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”^b

Me, too, Jack. Me, too.

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

Colossians 1:15, NASB

^a C. S. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 230–31.

^b C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 140.