Walk With Me (2 page)

Into the Orchard of Earthly Delights

Along Desolate Canyon to Revenge Chasm

Through the Darkest Night

Up to the Highlands

Scripture References and Sources

Acknowledgments

C
eleste grew up in Slouching City. Peter grew up in Upright Village. Both on their way to the King’s City, they meet at a gathering hut, fall in love, and become partners in the journey. Using John Bunyan’s pioneering allegory of
Pilgrim’s Progress
as a model, Annie Wald tells a
Pilgrim’s Progress
story for married couples.

Marriage is wonderful. Marriage is difficult. Most of us know that without really thinking about it. But few of us have an imagination capable of comprehending both the dazzling days and the dark nights that lie ahead. Annie Wald brings her considerable skills as a writer of fiction to explore the intricacies involved in both the ecstasies and the difficulties encountered in the country of marriage. Her use of John Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
as an allegory of the complexities involved in the Christian life provides images and circumstances that prevent us from turning the subject of marriage into a laundry list of things to be done and avoided.

Such laundry lists are a drug on the market: do this; don’t do that—accompanied by promises of a better life if we are just determined and persistent enough to keep the rules. But the
results are not very impressive. The fact is, we need a story if we are going to understand our marriages as a living, inter-relational, creative exploration in the ways of love—God’s perfect love and our imperfect loves. For love cannot be explained or defined. It is the deepest, most complex participation in the human condition and requires grace and creativity—not rules and principles. A story is precisely the kind of language designed to deal with the unique conditions of married love—not a handbook, not a therapeutic technique, but a story that integrates God’s love and ours in the marriage covenant.

It is significant that stories are given such a prominent role in revealing God and God’s ways to us. In both the Old and New Testaments of our Christian Scriptures, stories are the major verbal means of bringing God’s Word to us. For that we can be grateful, for story is our most accessible form of speech. Young and old love stories; literate and illiterate alike tell and listen to stories. Neither stupidity nor sophistication puts us outside the magnetic field of story. The only serious rival to story in terms of accessibility and attraction is song, and there are plenty of those in the Bible too.

But there is another reason for the appropriateness of story as a major means of bringing God’s Word into our lives. Story doesn’t just tell us something and leave it there—it invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story. We feel the emotions, get caught up in the drama, identify with the characters, see into nooks and crannies of life that we had overlooked, and realize there is more to this business of
being human than we had yet explored. If the storyteller is good, doors and windows open. Annie Wald and John Bunyan are good storytellers, good in both the artistic and moral sense.

One characteristic of Scripture stories is a certain reticence. They don’t tell us too much. They leave a lot of blanks in the narration, an implicit invitation to enter the stories, just as we are, and find how we fit into it.
Walk with Me
is a story like that. It respects our freedom; it doesn’t manipulate us, doesn’t force us. It shows us a spacious world in which God creates and saves and blesses. First through our imaginations and then through our faith—imagination and faith are close kin here—we are offered a place in the story, invited into this large story that takes place under the broad skies of God’s purposes, in contrast to the gossipy anecdotes that we cook up in the stuffy closet of the self.

The form in which language comes to us is as important as its content. If we mistake its form, we will almost certainly respond wrongly to its content. If we mistake a recipe for lamb stew for a set of clues for finding buried treasure, no matter how carefully we read it, we will end up as poor as ever and hungry besides. Ordinarily, we learn these discriminations early and well and give equal weight to both form and content in determining meaning.

But sometimes when we are faced with the task of Christian living, and in this case, the task of Christian marriage, we don’t do that. We pick out rules or advice or “principles”—
de-story
them from the story of God—then apply what we read apart from the story of God. We try to dress the story, this
marriage pilgrimage story, in the latest Paris silk gown of theology or outfit it in a sturdy three-piece suit of ethics, so we can deal with it on our terms, not God’s. The simple story is soon, like David under Saul’s armor, so encumbered with moral admonitions, theological constructs, and scholarly debates that it can hardly move. One of the tasks of this book, quite brilliantly executed, is to keep the story out in front.

A major consequence of learning to “read” our lives in the pilgrimage allegory of Celeste and Peter is a sense of affirmation and freedom. We don’t have to fit into prefabricated moral or mental or religious boxes before we are admitted into the company of God—we are taken seriously just as we are and given a place in God’s story, for it is, after all,
God’s
story; none of us are the leading characters in the story of our marriage.

Parents preparing their children for marriage, pastors preparing their parishioners for marriage, and married couples who need a “story” for their marriage will find this book a treasure.

I
dreamed a dream of love, and in my dream I saw a lonely traveler, Celeste, and another lonely traveler, Peter. Each was walking on the way to the King’s City, for they wanted to live life as it was meant to be, whole and holy in a world set right.

Celeste had just started on the journey, for she had grown up in Slouching City where no one ever talked about the King of Love or the rule of His realm. The inhabitants there were clever and cunning, and they were always inventing new machines to do the work of living. But in recent generations the once-magnificent city had begun to sink into a slow and dismal ruin. When it rained, the old drains overflowed with sewage and left a perpetual odor in the air. The outer ramparts were crumbling, and the fences were in dreadful condition. Still, people liked to boast about how
wonderful it was to live in a place where they could do whatever they pleased.

As a child, Celeste had often walked among the broken ramparts. If she pushed away the ivy and scraped off the moss, she found, chiseled into the stones, fragments of ancient songs that told of a King’s love for the torn world and His Son who came as the Servant to mend the tear. Like almost everyone else in Slouching City, Celeste’s parents thought the songs were nonsense. But Celeste’s grandfather still knew the old melodies. Every time he sang songs of the Servant’s selfless love and the restored wholeness He wanted to give, Celeste felt a deep ache in her soul.

After her grandfather died, she tried to hold on to the promise of the beautiful songs. But her friends teased her when she mentioned the King or the hope of His city. So she grew up and learned the ways of the world: how to push to get ahead and how to grab all she could. Most of the time, she thought she was happy enough, but there were moments when she realized that deep down she felt very lonely. Although life in Slouching City was full of comfort and ease, there was no machine that could create love or keep it alive when it began to fade. As the years went by, she yearned to find a love that would never change or die.

Then one day she found the King’s guidebook her grandfather had left. She went back to the broken ramparts to read it. Captivated by the poems and history and visions and stories, she hummed along as she read, for she could hear the echo of her grandfather’s songs. Soon tears began to stream down her cheeks; to her grown-up heart the old songs sounded even more hopeful than before.

Every afternoon Celeste returned to the ramparts to study the
guidebook and learn more about the King. Just as the songs had said, He loved every person in the world. He had sent His Son, the Servant, not to condemn men and women, but to bring them back home to His city where they would be part of His family forever. For He loved them enough to give them His life, first by dying for them and then by giving them His very Breath.

The more Celeste read the guidebook, the more she longed to experience the love of the King and to make her way to His city. But every time she thought about starting the journey, she gave up the idea. All of her outfits were stained and ripped from years of playing in the back lanes of Slouching City. She didn’t see how she would be allowed into the King’s City wearing such shabby clothes. The doorkeeper would think she was an imposter—not a daughter of the King—and turn her out.