Lessons from Gulliver

I recently read a book called Gulliver’s Travels.
I’ve been trying to get into Classic Literature lately, and I thought it would be good to read about a traveling adventurer given that my own journey with Atlantic this summer would have me traveling across an unfamiliar country to be caught up in all sorts of unforeseen adventures…

Bad idea.

I immediately began to regret this decision.
I was so bored with this book. All I could do was force myself to finish reading it. I mean it IS a cool concept for a story. This guy goes off traveling and finds these different islands filled with strange types of people. In some places he’s a giant, other places he’s relative to a field mouse, and still other places he’s an inferior to the flawlessness of his surroundings.
It’s this last one that makes the book worth reading I think…

The whole book is written from the perspective of the traveler, and (especially towards the end) he shows disapproval and increasing amounts of contempt for the corrupt nature of the world he once was so happily apart of.
See I’d rather just hate the book and be done with it, but I keep having this nagging thought in my mind that there’s something really profound about what the author was doing. In no way did I love reading this book, and I think it takes a fair bit of patience and maybe even a bit of discipline to get through it,…BUT… I do think there is something extremely relatable about this story.

Every one of us is on a journey. (We can all relate to the traveling soul).

We all go through phases of exaggerated self-importance.
We all feel insecure and miniscule at other times too.
And no one who tastes of the divine and perfect Kingdom can return to the broken and fallible World without an awareness of the tragic difference between the two.

The reality of this last point is what strikes me most to be the Story of every Christian.
Once we taste and see, there’s no going back. The selfish misconceptions about what was ‘good’ and ‘true’ are changed forever. We can’t return to worldly living without being aware that this is not what we were meant for. Taking hold of the eternal life to which we’ve been called, means that we really notice the empty handedness that’s apart of worldly living.

All this is just to say: I read a book. I didn’t like it at first. Then I thought about it a bit, and found myself thankful that the book was written because it caused me to recognize this: Just as Gulliver’s happy little world was ruined for him by coming into contact with a virtuous glimpse of a life-worth-living, so are we daily urged to pray ‘may your Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven’ by coming into contact with the living God as he meets us and gives us a taste of His eternal life.