What do you imagine when you envision a quest? Do you picture nine companions setting out on a mission to save Middle Earth? Or rebel fighter pilots preserving hope? What about a conquest? Does that noun conjure a different storyline? Do you imagine ranks of imperial soldiers imposing order across the galaxy? Or aliens invading New York?
The heroes and villains that populate our most popular stories pursue their desires with a chosen posture that generates life or produces death. How do you approach your desires? Do you pursue your desires like an adventurer setting out on a quest, knowing, like Bilbo, that if you come back at all, you will not be the same? Or do you hunt down your desires like a conqueror? Do you subdue the object of your desires no matter the cost? Even if it corrodes the thing that captivates you?
A quest and conquest embody two postures that pursue desires, longing and obsession. A quest pursues the illusive, risking everything to gain a glimpse into some mystery. It yearns to draw near the object of desire that lies barely out of reach, even if the quest only tastes a morsel belonging to the mystery. A quest ultimately longs to encounter truth, goodness, and beauty, ever awakened but never satisfied by the wonder of those three transcendentals. Those who venture on quests expose themselves to peril. Exposure to those wonders forever transforms the explorers. A conquest demands domination. It masters the object of desire and slaughters everything that threatens to free the desired thing from its grasp. Like a quest, a conquest possesses transformative powers, but a conquest perverts the conqueror and their affections and morphs the conquered into shadow.
A quest longs because it loves, and that longing preserves and deepens love. A conquest obsesses because it craves possession. Longing reveals a love that sanctifies, a love that restores and transforms beyond imagination. Obsession discloses a poisoned love that kills. Do you approach your desires with longing or obsession?
Obsession misplaces desires for the true, good, and beautiful below lesser passions. The cry behind that original desire for truth, goodness, and beauty craves communion with Christ who incarnates truth, goodness, and beauty. A conquest, rather than drawing into communion with those transcendentals, attempts to possess stolen scraps. The conqueror views their role as the source or guardian of those instated lesser passions or severed and shattered fragments belonging to truth, goodness, and beauty. Those fragments fade into vague and defiled shadows of the original. Longing shifts into obsession, a quest into a conquest, when love turns eccentric, a deviation from rightly ordered loves that distorts the love and its object so that it lacks the truth, goodness, and beauty intended.
Conquest, the picture of obsessions, sets up the conqueror as superior to the object of desire, and the pursuit replaces wonder with lust. Obsession craves control. It instates those fragments of truth, goodness, and beauty, willing to dispatch anybody who threatens the instatement of those things. In a galaxy far, far away, the Empire desires order, a facet of beauty. Those loyal to the Empire view themselves as dispensaries of order throughout the galaxy. Obsession imposes twisted affections, exerting control, exalting perversions of good things.
Obsession discloses a poisoned love that kills. Someone lost to obsession demands to be needed and demands need by whatever means necessary. Obsession disables. It cripples anything or anyone who threatens to free the object of desire and even the object of desire itself in an attempt to ensure dependence on the conqueror.
A quest pictures longing’s approach to desire. The adventurer risks everything to commune with a mystery that lies beyond their grasp. They count a brush with that elusive Joy worth the cost, whatever the cost. The conqueror misses out because obsession refuses to be captured. One who quests falls prey to Joy. They fall in love, and that love drives their longing. C.S. Lewis identifies that mystery, the object of the longing, as Joy or Sehnsucht. His works, fiction and nonfiction, explore this peculiar kind of longing, merging desire and loss. Joy invades the sensate, breaking through those thin places, making seen the unseen. Joy heightens longing, making its presence known in the sweetest melancholy. Joy calls us into the presence of God—the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful—allowing us to experience tangible communion if only for an instant. While separation still exists from the divine, the divine breaks in upon the brokenness, awakening desire, ever heightened and not fulfilled.
Mystery lies at the end of a quest. The explorer never quite knows what the end of their venture holds. Maybe they’ll meet success. Maybe not. So too, mystery shrouds Joy. You never know when you’ll encounter that mysterious communion. Maybe a melody awakes the unseen? Maybe a night at the symphony ends with no notes piercing through the seen? You never know. This unexpected inbreaking of Joy remains an act of grace, always.
Quests always require sacrifice. Embarking on a quest requires an openness to the unknown, including an openness to loss and transformation. Like explorers resigned to their fate, longing surrenders to transformation. Surrender reveals the love that underlies the longing, a love that sanctifies. Like the Beast whose love surrenders the Beauty, love that longs bears transformation. Longing fosters a readiness towards sacrifice along with a readiness towards new life. That disposition towards life seeks out life and fights to preserve hope. It endangers its own life for the sake of that which is true, good, and beautiful. Even in the midst of total darkness, longing knows from experience that the unseen still exists beyond the seen.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis takes his readers on a quest to the very edge of his magical land. Dangers threaten the quest, tempting the heroes to obtain lesser goals and even evil things, anything to keep the heroes from tipping over the edge of the world and into the whispered wonders that lie beyond, calling across the sea.
A painting sweeps three children from our world into Narnia. Edmund and Lucy along with their cousin Eustace find themselves aboard a ship, sailing to the end of the world with Caspian and his crew. Caspian embarks on a quest to find seven lost lords, while Reepicheep, a talking mouse, pursues an even higher quest. The mouse hopes to discover the utter east and the unknown that lies beyond, perhaps Aslan’s country. A poem describing the edge of the sea spellbound young Reepicheep. The Joy bleeding through those words captured the little mouse, and he continues to recite a stanza that draws his longing to that Joy, awakening an ever-deepening longing for waves turned sweet. Over the course of the voyage, obstacles distort the crew’s longings for the mysteries hidden by the sea. Rather than longing for the truth about the seven lords or the goodness, the children along with Caspian and his crew long for lesser things, and those longings slip into obsessions. Only Reepicheep remains thoroughly romanced by his longing for the utter east. At the end of the book, Reepicheep tips over the edge into the midst of the master, entering into communion with all that wonder.
Reepicheep remains true. His longing attests to his commitment to his love. Does your posture reveal a longing that breathes life, a longing sourced in love, or an obsession that corrodes? Learning to long requires love. Exposure to love induces longing. A love that sanctifies, a love that restores and transforms beyond imagination, already belongs to you.
A Case Study: An Enchanted Rose and Redeemed Longing
In a tale as old as time, an enchantress transforms a prince into a hideous beast. Her spell reveals the brutish nature of the prince, obsessed with beauty, while an enchanted rose, a beauty that cannot be possessed or controlled, determines the fate of the Beast. One day, an inventor plucks a single rose from the castle gardens. The Beast imprisons the inventor forever, but Belle, beauty embodied, sacrifices her forever for her father. Like the rose, Belle cannot be possessed or controlled even if the castle grounds contain her whole existence. Her presence triggers a transformation that touches the entire castle and even the Beast becomes less beastly. He throws snowballs, delights in storytelling, and even dances. The Beast learns to long for the Beauty, and that longing transforms the Beast. When he sees Belle’s father through her eyes, the Beast lets the Beauty go. He sacrifices everything for her—no possession betraying obsession, but, instead, a longing that reveals transformation. While Belle breaks the enchantment, Belle’s release signals the transformation of the Beast, no longer a beast but someone who’s learned to love. Certain as the sun rising in the east, longing bears transformation.
