Waiting for the World to Fall

I heard the Jars of Clay song “Waiting for the World to Fall” from the album Music Inspired by The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on Pandora a few times this week, and it moved me so much that I thought that I would mention it here.

For those that have not heard the song, here is an excellent fan-video that overlays the song with clips from early parts of the movie where the Pevensie children have yet to discover what lies within the wardrobe.

Here are the lyrics (Copyright: ©2005 Bridge Building):

I'm afraid it's been too long
to try to find the reasons why
I let my world close in around
a smaller patch of fading sky
But now I've grown beyond the walls
to where I've never been
And it's still winter in my wonderland

Chorus

I'm waiting for the world to fall
I'm waiting for the scene to change
I'm waiting when the colors come
I'm waiting to let my world come undone
I close my eyes and try to see
the world unbroken underneath
The farther off and already
it just might make the life I lead
A little more than make-believe
when all my skies are painted blue
And the clouds don't ever change
the shape of who I am to You

Chorus

I'm waiting for the world to fall
I'm waiting for the scene to change
I'm waiting when the colors come
I'm waiting to let my world come undone
When I catch the light of falling stars my view is changing me
My view is changing me
I'm waiting

The lyrics and tone of the song capture and evoke the deep longing that we all feel for transcendence. As Marc Newman points out in his review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:

There is no way to completely describe the feeling you get when you experience a moving passage of music, tremble beneath the array of stars on a dark and moonless mountain night, or even when you bask in the afterglow of a particularly wonderful day. C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, called this feeling sehnsucht, which, roughly translated, means longing.

The longing of sehnsucht is not a thing to be grasped. It is always in passing, like an image that strikes upon the senses and is gone. … It is a kind of desire that knows it cannot be fulfilled here, yet is worth desiring and seeking after nonetheless.

Wonder

Lewis argued that humans long “to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.” We were made for awe. Unfortunately, the modern privileging of scientific fact as the “only” reliable type of truth often tries to push aside the competing truth claims of intuition and revelation. But the longing for transcendence -- the desire of human nature to move beyond that nature into something beyond – will not be denied.

As I reflected on this, it also reminded me of N.T. Wright’s idea of our quest for the transcendent and the spiritual as the “echoes of a voice” in his book Simply Christian:

“If anything like the Christian story is in fact true (in other words, if there is a God whom we can know most clearly in Jesus), this interest is exactly what we should expect; because in Jesus we glimpse a God who loves people and wants them to know and respond to that love. (p. 24)

James Sire, in his excellent review of Wright’s book, notes that: 

Wright identifies four main "echoes of a voice" (recalling Peter Berger's "signals of transcendence"): "the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty."

Each points to a realm beyond the material. Ultimately, Wright argues, these voices join the more direct revelation of God to become "the voice of Jesus, calling us to follow him into God's new world—the world in which the hints, signposts, and echoes of the present world turn into the reality of the next one."

Dan Haseltine points out in his comments on the song that Narnia embodies that sense of longing, but as a fantasy is able to capture our imaginations and provide a glimpse into the discovery of the transcendent reality that lies behind our oft mundane lives:

The song is really a song about discovery.

It's kind of being in a world where things maybe aren't as they should be or kind of living a mundane existence and wanting something more and then getting a glimpse of what that really is like and having your world kind of shift, your paradigm change, and that's what we loved about this story, was just the way there was this great movement and discovery of a whole new world.

As the writer of Ecclesiastes states:

⁹ What do workers gain from their toil? ¹⁰ I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. ¹¹ He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

I’m waiting…