What is Fullness?
When you survey the deconversion stories of people who have left Christianity, one theme comes up over and over again: the loss of fullness within the Christian story of reality.
In A Secular Age, philosopher Charles Taylor defines fullness as a sense that life is often “richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more what it should be…” It is a sense of the goodness behind things that can “help to orient us morally and spiritually” by giving us a sense of the beyond, the transcendent, or the truly important things in life.
You can also define fullness by identifying it with the three Transcendental Virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty. When we experience something that is good, true, or beautiful - be it through a relationship, an act of kindness, the birth of a child, a sunset, the longing for eternity glimpsed between two lines of a poem, the stab of pain and joy you feel as the credits roll on great film - we have a sense that something transcendent is breaking through the clouds of everyday life like a ray of light and that in the light there is fullness.
And in the fullness there is also truth.
What Does Fullness Have to Do With How We Shape Our Beliefs?
Fullness attracts plausibility like a magnet.
When we find something believable, it is often because in it we have had an experience with something good, true, or beautiful in connection with that belief.
When someone is kind to us, we want to believe them and believe in them. When we experience goodness, be it in the pages of a book, in a well-cooked meal after a hungry day, or in the justice of a wrong suddenly set to rights, the goodness carves a place for itself inside us. There is almost a compulsion to respond to it with welcome and relief. Both religious and non-religious people all look up toward the West when a sunset catches their eye and their breath. The religious watchers know there is someone to thank. But everyone with a bit of sensitivity feels wonder tugging at them, even if they only attribute it to molecules of dust in the atmosphere. That is fullness too.
German biblical scholarship has created a wonderful phrase that I am going to bastardize for my own purposes: sitz em leben. Sitz em leben means “setting in life.” In biblical criticism, it means roughly “the context of a passage,” the social, temporal, and cultural setting into which the text was written. Christian attempts at communicating the goodness of God also have a sitz em leben, a nest of fullness (or the lack thereof) in which the message of the reality of God is carefully rested. The response to the message of the gospel does not depend only upon the content of the gospel, nor on the condition of the heart and will of the hearer only. It depends also on the sitz em leben, the setting, the nest.
Why?
Because plausibility follows fullness; it makes us want to believe in it. We want to rearrange our categories to account for it and to get more of it. Fullness is its own justification and does its work at both the conscious level and the preconscious level. It is harder to believe something is untrue if we have experienced it to be good. It is harder to believe something is wrong if we have seen its beauty.
The Example of L’Abri
I used to work and live at a branch of a Christian community and study center in England called L’Abri. People come to L’Abri from all over the world to study Christianity, to have an experience of community, and to try to find both questions and answers.
English L’Abri is a place of fullness. It is housed in a grand, old manor house with fields and forested hills stretching out in every direction. All you have to do to hear birdsong is remember to listen for it. People encounter fullness in the form of a group of people huddled around the fireplace on a cold night, in a friendly “good morning” as they sleepily shuffle down the stairs to breakfast, in the beauty of the gardens, in the attention their questions receive, in fast apologies when something goes wrong, in laughter and applause at their well-intentioned foibles on the volleyball court, and in ubiquitous cups of tea (it is England, after all).
All of this has an effect on the believableness of the Christianity that people encounter at L’Abri. The ideas they hear agree with the beauty they see. The truths they consider are also manifested in their lived experiences as the ideas take on physical form in a warm welcome or the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass window in the stairwell. If the guests who come to L’Abri experience fullness there, it poses a question that must be answered as concretely as if an actual question had been posed. What of God?
But L’Abri is just one example of the many strongholds of God’s fullness he has planted throughout his creation. They are not all institutions with a mission and a staff. They are families, sunsets, old trees, meals around dinner tables, unexpected reconciliations with old friends, and unforgettable books. God’s fullness is rampant in the world, it is irrepressible and effervescent and can strike us anywhere.
But What Happens To Your Faith When You Lose Your Fullness?
However, the effects of fullness on plausibility cut both ways.
If plausibility follows fullness (goodness, beauty, truth); its opposite (malice, ugliness, falsehood) repels it. When we are living through a season of high fullness, our beliefs tend to be more stable. However, when fullness ebbs it can feel like the foundation under our feet begins to shake, like life itself is collapsing around our heads.
This was exactly the experience of Meghan O’Gieblyn.
In Interior States, O’Gieblyn gives a vivid description of the role the loss of fullness played in her own movement away from the Christian faith. She wrote:
“Losing faith in God in the 21st century is an anachronistic experience. You end up contending with the kinds of things the West dealt with more than a hundred years ago: materialism, the end of history, the death of the soul. When I think back on that period of my life, what I recall most viscerally is an unnamable sense of dread…
“At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse—drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate—were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhemling despair at the absence of God.”
The pain of O’Gieblyn’s loss of fullness was both the effect and the engine of her deconversion. You cannot find more fundamental ideas than the ones O’Gieblyn is wrestling with. The nature of the supernatural. The inevitability of death. The meaning of life. The sacredness of the body. It would have put pressure on anyone’s framework.
Her experience of the beauty and the hardship in life were once interpreted through a Christian framework and that framework held everything in place and buffered her from life’s existential shocks. But then it all started to come apart. Ideas that had once anchored her experience of life had now become implausible and that implausibility released anxiety and a deep sense of loss of fullness. Her memory of that time is one of “unnameable dread.”
Was it the hardship that came first and her Christian framework that suffered second? Or was it the loss of the framework that triggered the hardship? The answer is probably yes to both questions. Our plausibility frameworks are fueled and nourished by our experience of life-sustaining fullness. When they fail, our frameworks are shocked with turbulence and are primed to shift.
O’Gieblyn goes on:
“There were days I woke in a panic, certain that I’d lost some essential part of myself in the fume of a blackout, and would work my fingers across my nose, my lips, my eyebrows, and my ears until I assured myself that everything was intact. My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat…
“[This was] to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it.”
Like tectonic plates, when fundamental ideas shift in the face of the loss of fullness, they release seismic energy in waves that are felt throughout one’s life. O’Gieblyn is describing a place where the ground beneath her feet has begun to shake. By definition, beliefs that are stable resist change, but when beliefs shake, they can shift. When fullness ebbs, it can create the feeling that “something is wrong here and I need to find a way to make it right.”
In those moments, one’s entire framework can become pressurized. Because we are drawn to fullness (and are made for it), we try to resolve that pressure—and the malaise that accompanies it—as quickly as possible. When we lose ideas we used to stand on, the discomfort that comes with the loss makes us launch a quest for new ideas upon which to build a foundation. With such pressures, if fullness is not regained within the Christian framework, it is often cast aside.
Leaving the Church Because of Loss of Fullness
The church has a mixed record when it comes to fullness. All too often the church falls woefully short of its high ideals. Though the beauty of the church constantly midwifes people into faith, there is simultaneously an exodus from Christianity because of the lack of fullness people have experienced in Christian contexts.
If your pastor treats you unkindly, it will have a corrosive effect on the believableness of any sermon you hear him preach. If you experience trauma in the context of church, it will be harder to believe anything else that is said, explained, or exemplified. All the distorted power dynamics that other organizations suffer through are also present in the church, only this time there is a spiritual spin on it all. When the boss speaks for God things can get confusing, especially if the boss is a bully. Though Jesus warned about us about “rendering to Caesar,” the church is not immune to trading on the world’s coin, waving its banners, and aping its ways. Rather, it is all too common.
Let’s imagine you are sitting in church drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup under fluorescent lights in a prefabricated building with a drop ceiling and no art on the walls while listening to a sermon on the richness and beauty of God’s creation. What will happen to the plausibility of gospel in that context? In that all-too-realistic example, the medium and the message disagree and the resulting dissonance can make it difficult to experience the idea of God’s beauty as having reality. It is jarring. It can plant a splinter deep in the mind of the aesthetically sensitive that will continue to disturb until it is removed one way or the other.
On one hand, if you are suffering like Meghan O’Gieblyn, who can blame you for trying to trade in your Christianity for something else? When you are drowning, you need air. The whole world can condense down into getting that breath of air, that taste of fullness. If Christianity didn’t stop you from falling into the water that you’re drowning in, maybe it was never the source of salvation that it seemed to be? Maybe you need to go looking for help elsewhere?
On the other hand, if Christainity has failed to live up to its ideals, the solution might not be that you need to abandon it in search of something else. Rather, you might need more of the things that can be encountered inside the Christian story of reality, not less.
The Places of the People of God Are Supposed to Be Characterized By Fullness
Though the church is far from perfect, countless people have come into Christianity because of the fullness they have experienced in the church. Conversion stories are full of the kindness of strangers for no other reason than the fact that the receiver of the kindness was a human and the giver of the kindness was a Christian.
When J. R. R. Tolkien envisioned his strongholds of beauty in the fantasy world of Middle Earth, he was using words to paint pictures of what the church was supposed to be. So he created communities that were strongholds against the darkness that loomed in his stories. Rivendell. Lothlorien. Valinor. The Shire. They were places where goodness, beauty, and truth could gather together and become strong. When the characters from the story enter those places, it is almost as if the fullness they experience casts a magical spell on them.
Tolkien describes Rivendell this way:
"[Rivendell] was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. Evil things did not come into that valley."
and
“…Such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and anxiety were lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but ceased to have any power over the present."
And of Lothlorien, Tolkien wrote:
“The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name… In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien, there was no stain.”
You almost have to wax into fantasy if you want to speak about what the church could be if it became nearly itself. Tolkien’s visions were fantasy, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t real.
Tolkien’s depictions of Middle Earth are exactly what it is supposed to feel like when you become part of the people of God. When your journey takes you into the company of fellow saints and you feed on the fullness in the places and communities that they have built, it is supposed to take your breath away, to feel like a spell has been cast and you should want the spell to keep going and going and going.
You Are Never Safe From God’s Fullness
That the church often fails to live up to its own ideals is undeniable. But let’s talk for a moment about the ideals. What is the connection between God, his people, and fullness supposed to be?
In the Christian view of the world, God is the source of all goodness. That is part of what is going on in the first chapter of the Bible. As God orders existence from the chaos of non-being, he pronounces each stage “good.” From there flows the idea that God is the origin of all goodness, all fullness.
That means that when you are experiencing fullness, you are standing on holy ground. And when you are standing on holy ground, you are near the Holy One. So, to adapt Lewis’ line about reading good books, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful about his experience of fullness.”
Fullness is all God’s territory, even if the channel it comes through does not have a sticker on it that says, “Made In Christianity.” God’s fullness jumps across chasms of belief because his kindness runs everywhere throughout the world he has made. No one is safe from it, even those who give no thanks.
Jesus tried to get people to see this when he said, “God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Theologians call God’s general goodness to creation “common grace” and distinguish it from “special grace” (God’s particular calling of his people toward salvation). But this neat distinction doesn’t even get us halfway to understanding what God is up to when his fullness stalks through the world. His voice echoes in the most unexpected places and in the most unexpected ways. It is anything but common. It is striking, like a viper.
C. S. Lewis knew this. That is why he titled his autobiography Surprised By Joy. He first heard the strains of the heavenly kingdom in the old Norse sagas as a settled atheist. The beauty of the old stories appealed to his literary mind. When he read that “Baldur the beautiful is dead! Is dead!” he wept because, though he had never heard about “common grace” and would have scoffed at a theological explanation of his experience, he knew that death had no place in the world. He knew that the way it swept away the strongholds of goodness and truth in the world was wrong. He longed for deathless beauty. And when he finally did kneel down and give his life to God he described himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England” and said that the “hound of Heaven” had finally chased him down. But it hunted him through his longing for fullness, until, surprised by joy, he gave himself to joy’s creator.
So we are never safe from God’s fullness because it is a fullness we were made for.
Contrary to the shrill prophesies of the New Atheists that the world would be a better place if we could just scrub all organized religion from its surface, it is the spirit of God stalking through the world that makes it liveable at all. Fullness is not the chance collision of atoms or mechanical spurtings of neurotransmitters in our brain. Fullness has a person behind it, God. That is why it is so effervescent, so prowling, so untameable, and so desirable. Men will trade kingdoms for it. They will overturn their lives to chase the rumor of it. And they get terribly confused about where it is to be found and what can truly tap it.
So plausibility follows fullness like a magnet. And if we follow it far enough, it will lead us to its source, the God who made all things and pronounced them good. God has scattered his goodness broadcast like a generous sower. And, just as Lewis discovered, he uses it to call his people back to himself.
So if you hunted the fullness in church but found only malaise, you have other options than abandoning Christianity altogether.
Though the shadow falls over the whole world, God remains committed to his creation. Though you might feel, with Meghan O’Gieblyn, that your days are full of panic, that the unnameable dread closes around you, that you cannot tell the difference between yourself and your own reflection, God is still at hand. Though it hurts when we read about Rivendell and the Shire precisely because they are beautiful and our own places feel so far from that beauty, God still issues his invitations into his fullness. God still waits in all the places we encounter fullness, proclaiming: “I am good. I am beauty. Come and be freed by my truth. Come drink without cost and buy from me without money. Come put on new garments and a new self. They are stained with blood that can make you white as snow.”
When the Bible talks about what happens when a human makes their home in God, things get poetic pretty fast. Salt seas turn fresh. Trees burst into blossom and clap their hands. The sun becomes redundant in the beauty of God’s light. Gardens grow. Mountains flow with wine. People live forever.
That is Christainity. That is why Christians in whose lives God’s beauty has been fanned into flames can become terrible bastions against the darkness. After all, Tolkien’s elves were only just people in whose lives the peace of God had reached full blossom. That is the truth in the fiction. People like that really exist. In them, God’s beauty has flowered over the years of their lives into an immense fullness. Tolkien’s places are real too. They are places where the people of God have settled down and built lives together from which God’s fullness emanates in ever-expanding circles. Go find them. When you do, follow Polonius’ advice to Laertes: “Grapple them to yourself with hoops of steel” until you become one of them.
Trace the fullness back to its source.
Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)
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