Driving Through Cornfields: Past the End of the World
Timothy Willard
10 min read ⭑
Before you dive in, an introduction. The essay below comes from Timothy Willard, our new Writer-in-Residence. Tim will be contributing regular long-form pieces to Rapt, right alongside our interviews, book excerpts and classics. He’s also taken on a second job. He’s building a roster of contributing essayists for Rapt, gathering some of the finest faith-focused writers working today so we can bring you more original writing. You will be seeing his byline often, and we could not be happier about it.
Welcome, Tim!
You can learn a lot from a supermoon.
Tonight I’m driving my 20-year-old Land Rover on the backroads near my house. The cab smells like sweet corn, and the air blowing my hair is hot with the promise of summer’s last push. It’s a steamy Carolina July twilight. The moon hangs low and massive, about to wane like the summer light after solstice. The corn rows lie beneath a fine wisp, like a bridal veil for the woods along Shannon Road.
A touch of gold, or is it rose, dabs the distant clouds, making the countryside glow like a vintage photo, saturated with an analog starch that color wheels don’t wield.
The moon shines blood orange behind a blur of atmospherics that’s not quite cloud and not quite mist, and it takes me back 20 years when I was a twentysomething touring the country in a mint-green Ford Econoline van with my two best friends, playing acoustic sets in little bookstores, off-the-map universities and small New England churches. The touring days came five years after my expulsion from college, five years after finding God at a woodpile crying out for direction and one year after the original band members quit, leaving me, my best friend and the handful of acoustic songs we wrote as an attempt to dig deeper into God. The big breath mint, as we called the van, became our sanctuary, our university — it’s where I’d first read G.K. Chesterton and Augustine — and our camper.
One night we rolled into Island Pond, Vermont, late. The drive there? Snow everywhere, the kind of snow that muffles the world so you can hear yourself think.
We were headed to stay with Roy Carlson and his wife, June, and to play at a few churches over the next week. The Carlsons were new friends from our previous tour. They owned a big farm nestled in the hills. Roy was like a Vermont cowboy disguised as a pastor. He was big on God and on trusting God to do big things. You immediately loved Roy when you met him. Once, as he was walking us around the property, he said, “You see all of this? Well, I own it as far as you can see.”
What I wouldn’t give for that kind of snow right now, I think as I hang my arm out the Rover window, sweeping through the sticky summer air.
Getty Images; Unplash+
The Vermont winter moon was brilliant that night, maybe not technically a supermoon, but super enough to transfix the night. They say the sky light changes depending on what is and isn’t in the air. Summer air is full of dust and pollen and water. Winter air not so much — not so much of anything. The moonlight fired into the sky with little resistance, making the whole landscape shimmer like it was alive. You could see the edge of the tree line against the fields, but the fields themselves were indistinguishable — one continuous white quilt draped over the land.
When we arrived, Roy offered us a horseback ride. It was close to midnight. My friends, Ethan and Aubrey, looked at me like, is he serious?
He was.
And we didn’t hesitate. Sometimes you only get one chance.
He fetched three horses, and soon we were out there, riding Roy’s endless horizon, galloping under the moon. I hadn’t ridden in years, but none of that mattered. The air stung my face; my eyes watered with tears of cold and joy; I couldn’t stop smiling.
I’m sure that’s happened to you — a time outside of time where you cling to an experience so dear, so indelible that time freezes for the gravity of the moment, and you can’t wipe the smile from your face? I call it relational time dilation — time expanding in the sheer density of a moment heavy with beauty.
I remember shouting into the night, a wild, wordless whoo-hoo. A jocund liturgy. A holy frivolity.
We’d loop back to the farmhouse and then head out again. It was pure delight. No smartphones — there couldn’t be because they didn’t exist! No unseen pressures to perform for a digital crowd embedded in the veneer of a feed, no anxious wondering if we should post to stories or the feed.
There was the moment. And that was all.
We didn’t even know where we were going. We just kept riding. It felt like we were riding to get lost. We were like nightingales caught in continual exultation.
Looking back now, I realize what made that night holy and outside of time was a mixture of adrenaline — produced by the very physical enmeshment of my body on the horse pulsing up and down, my breath caught in gasps and yells and excited breathing, the realness of me in the gravitational field of the moment — and the play of moonlight on snow.
And the light. That’s half the memory. Moonlight reflecting on the snow — snowlight — making the midnight sky alive even in darkness. Light framed the ride in meaning. Light keeps the memory radiant. And the light, like tonight’s light, orange and hazy as it is, holds my thoughts, teaching me: about me, about the world, about God.
And God’s Gift to Us Is the Long Way Home and the Astonishment of Existence
I’m taking the long way home this time — the heavy air breathing through the truck making my arms stick to the door vinyl.
I’m rounding the final corner before I arrive back at my house. Just last week, at around the same time, at the same turn, in the winds of a thunderstorm, I spied a fox in the ferns, his tail and ears tossing and flitting in the stormy gales. I wonder aloud if he’s wandering the woods and if tonight he’s in my ferns. How I think of him now each ride home — a tiny thing not asking for attention, but present and rippling in my imagination.
The pine shadows darken the street, jagged and surreal, like cutouts from a film background. I arrived home too quickly, I whisper to myself, still caught in the memory of the Vermont snow ride.
You know how it is. You remember odd things about the experience — the horse under you, strong and sturdy, the snow-ground moving beneath you like a Van Gogh painting, and you know it all meant something, but what happened to your thoughts from those moments?
In dense moments like that, there is only the time as it is lived. No past, not even a future, but the now. And when you find yourself in such a time, you’re almost unaware — of time, futurity, anxiety, worry, despair. You just are. You pull the reins. You breathe deeply. You yell to friends.
Is, are, was, were — verbs that signal being. Beauty, said Aquinas, is the splendor of being.
We were caught, that Vermont night, in the splendor of being. That’s why you don’t feel time in those rich and weighty moments. Because you’re shimmering like an angel. Caught in the worship of being. And that’s not a romanticized visual. Ancient painters used a golden halo to represent the holy — the presence of something supernatural. And you feel it, don’t you? When you shimmer. When another person glows. My wife, when she was pregnant with our daughters, glowed because the life within her created something invisible and seen all at once. She glowed. And you shimmer.
I think of beauty as the felt fullness of God spread all over the whole world — all of creation is his! Creation isn’t God. But it is full of his glory (Isa. 6:3).
Existence is there because God created it; it is marked with his fingerprints. C.S. Lewis reminded us that God is so full of existence that he can give it away. And existence isn’t only the material things we see and touch and smell and hear and taste. Existence is you thinking right now; it’s me writing these words; it’s you thinking about the words. It’s you sitting with your friend Jonathan and hearing him tell you about his day.
These wonderful lived moments somehow touch God, because the moments in existence originate with him, and we can almost feel the pleroma, or fullness that the New Testament writers wrote about, pour into us: the fullness of moments, the beauty and splendor of being, the weight of God’s presence in the invisible aspects of daily life.
Like this sticky-windows-down cornfield drive, thick with God’s glory of tiny moments that almost defy my frail language.
“For in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28a, NLT).
The orange moon is. And I am.
And God’s Gift to Us Is the Weight of Love in the World
I roll slowly by the dimming houses. And there’s a fire burning. I can’t see it, but I smell it. Maybe if I stop and listen, I could hear their conversation or laughter. Maybe this ordinary burnt-orange moonlit night has turned into their Vermont ride — carried by stories, memories and laughter to a place not unlike Roy Carlson’s endless snowy fields.
Maybe they’re not on horses at all. Maybe they’re walking, listening to the snow crunch beneath their feet. And maybe their weighty moment isn’t grand at all but burdened with grief. Like my grief of the last six years — a wilderness time, quiet and eerily sullen, like August. You know, that August day around the 18th where you see the yellow on treetops and the woods smell like decay and you feel like you smell like the woods. Maybe their grief is the loss of a job, the death of a dream or the simple realization that time is running out. Maybe the fire, crackling and smoking as it is, spreading prayer like incense from a thurible, is more than a midnight horse ride on virgin snow. A “more” only heavenly eyes can see.
Gravity holds the world together. And so does love. Gravity is not some random ethereal force; it is a geometric reaction of the fabric of the universe to a dense body. Love is the geometric reaction of our relational fabric to acts of emptying by human beings, one to another. Love holds the fabric of human life together and, like gravity, it bends time while infusing it with deep meaning.
A quiet conversation with your friend Sarah over coffee at the corner café at an hour too early to mention can last for an eternity when the bonds of grace wrap the moments in a loving tapestry. The conversation is gravitational and the bonds dense and the time, still.
You see, Einstein didn’t only discover the fabric of the universe; he gave us a diagnostic for the fabric of the universe’s soul. Heavy objects in spacetime don’t just bend light along with the fabric of time; they give us an analog for our own celestial reality, our own gravitational architecture and a vision of what it means to exist. And that vision is what Augustine said — my weight is my love. We are drawn to the dense things of life: relationships, experiences, beautiful images and moments, and terrifying skies and haunting stories. My weight is my love.
“When you’re caught in the revel of a dance, your body moving to the music, your heart smiling like your dumb, beautiful cheeks, your friends surrounding you with the blessing of their laughter, you’re not unaware of the shadow of time or the darkness of the soul.”
And God’s Gift to Us Is Sight, to See and Be Seen, to Interpret and Interrogate the World
And with our love, we interpret the world. But not from a strictly material foundation. Like the stars, we have mass, but unlike the stars, we know our own weight; we can sense the density of our lives, and God gives us a heart and a mind so we can seek the meaning of it all.
UY Scuti, that massive burning lantern of a star, will one day burn out completely. And when that happens, that star doesn’t just cease to be; it is likely to leave a hole in space, dense with massive gravity. We, too, burn with ferocious fires — like all the stars we see and forget about each night and day. We, too, were created as lanterns in the darkness. We, too, consume space with our mass and weight. We, too, can burn out. We, too, can be seen from afar.
But we are not stars.
We are humans.
And we possess sight; with our physical eyes we can see the stars, and with the sight of our hearts we can contemplate their beauty. With the eyes of our souls, we can ponder their meaning. And with the density of our minds, we can draw out the deeper meanings of the splendors of this world. Like how August gives us fall’s color and how the dying of one season brings us into the life of another and how it all gives us a framework for moving in and out of the years of our lives.
These deeper meanings invite us not only to inhabit the world, but to interrogate it. To interpret its beauty. To see it not just as a material thing, but as a subject to engage. How we see this universe determines how we will live in it. And how we will love in it.
The moonlight tonight — what can I say? Have you ever let its enchantment draw you into a frenzy of thought too deep for words? It’s made me thick tonight, dense with nostalgia, heavy with the Spirit and eager to ask the world, “Any more secrets you want to share?”
And God’s Gift to Us Is the Passing of Days and the Jig of Now
I park the Rover and step onto my driveway. The red oaks tower, hiding the hazy moon. Just a dot of stars now in a patch of sky above the trees. The cicadas drone on, and the air stills. But the mucky July air puts me back to an even earlier age: my teens, when time was nothing and the world of now had no limit.
It was just yesterday that I was running around Cunningham Falls in the Maryland mountains with my brother, sleeping on the ground next to the fire, sparks flying up in the poplar limbs toward the Appalachian harvest moon. Free days and nights. Fearless naivete. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and that is the truth of all of life, even the world. But like most true things, it is only half of a story. The ignorance of youth is precisely what makes youth timeless. The air in those days was not light but heavy with meaning we didn’t even realize we were living within.
The Teacher, who wrote that brilliantly confusing book, Ecclesiastes, did not write it as a teenager or a twentysomething wrecking the world with wonder and the strength of his ignorance. He wrote from the back of the world, an aged man who saw the truth of days emptied of the fear of God — he reported on only the part of the world that operates “under the sun.” In those lines chasing after the wind, he’s an observer of time’s shadow. And the boy he once was, the youth eating and drinking and merrymaking, is now, coaxed by the turning seasons, an older man dancing in the jig of now.
When you’re caught in the revel of a dance, your body moving to the music, your heart smiling like your dumb, beautiful cheeks, your friends surrounding you with the blessing of their laughter, you’re not unaware of the shadow of time or the darkness of the soul. You are, quite simply and beautifully, fighting against them in the cheerful war that does not obliterate time but freezes it.
In youth, time holds no sway over the decisions we do and don’t make. We simply barrel into the days, shrugging off the clock with willing strength to watch every sunrise from the now of the endless summers to the winters of forever. In youth we are all Achilles, striving for glories and triumphs, challenging the rivers and mountains themselves. In youth we have no need for hope. Hope is reserved for the old because “they have seen the end of the End of the World,” as G.K. Chesterton put it.
I throw my Rover keys on the sideboard. The downstairs is quiet. I’ve journeyed a million miles in a half hour. I’ve been to three different moons in three different ages. I’ve bent time and light; I’ve loved and felt its weight. I’ve grieved and tasted the bitter incense of loss. I have shrugged off the day, yes, even a year and years, and feel stronger for it. I have shrugged off the noise and cynicism of the age, of my age, and feel younger without it.
I sit on the couch and close my eyes, and think to myself, I am in the jig today. And I am ignorant and foolhardy in dance. I am in the jig today, with my dumb smile and naive mind.
And I am infinite, ageless, ancient and young all at once — for I am young and bedazzled by fire lanterns in the sky, quiet foxes in my ferns and the secret of midnight snow rides in my heart. I am Achilles. A man, rampant. A time traveler in the cosmos of God, joyful in the madness of time, heavy with the gravity of love.
Timothy Willard is Rapt’s Writer-in-Residence. He studied theology at King’s College London, where his research explored beauty and imagination in the writings of C.S. Lewis. He also spent two years living and studying in Oxford and has written four books, including The Beauty Chasers, Veneer and Home Behind the Sun. He lives in Waxhaw, North Carolina, with his wife and three daughters.