Hound of Heaven

"I fled Him!" The opening lines of Francis Thompson's famous poem, The Hound of Heaven, is a fitting way to start speaking of a world pursuing joy. The paradox of fleeing something (or in this case Someone) is the very energy needed to pursue something. This act of fleeing is the story of my life.

I often know what is right and run the other way. I flee! I do not desire the pain and suffering that come with the adventure. This is a common mindset of the modern mind. We desire adventure and danger, even heroism, but the suffering that comes with such a life, we would like to disregard all together. So we flee! We run into the darkness, but at least no one will find us out. We parade in our miseries and find comfort in our ambiguity.

And yet, in all our fleeing, we find that we have no more strength to keep up the fight no longer, and in fact who we have been running from and where we started seem to be exactly where we should have fled to right away. And so we find that life is a journey, sought by living questions and pursuing truth. We will not be disappointed in this adventure. It is here that we will find T.S. Eliot's words to be true:

We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.