A couple of months ago, Airbnb released this ad emphasizing their latest offering: experiences.

It’s a great ad, one that anyone who has planned international travel can appreciate.  I don’t think things are as black-or-white as the ad suggests, but there can definitely be a tendency to say “been there” without really “doing that.”  It’s immersion that matters, the ad says.  It’s making the food and not just eating it. It’s lighting a candle and praying a prayer in the cathedral an not just taking pictures of magnificent windows.

There is a heavy experimental aspect to Curt Thompson’s The Soul of Desire.  In fact, most of the book is Thompson’s attempt at helping the reader understand the dynamic of his “confessional communities.”  That’s part of why “community” is part of the book’s subtitle (which is replicated as the title of this post).

Beyond community, Thompson wants the reader to understand the place of longing and beauty in the “long game” of what God is doing in the new creation.  And he sees neuroscience as a significant key to things.  Most of us hear lots about community at church (or at least in the “Christian living” books we might read), but it feels like less is said about longing and beauty.  Perhaps rightly so: they are less tangible and more ambiguous than community.  Whereas community is writ large across the pages of the Bible, longing and beauty (though present) usually aren’t considered marquee attractions.  When you dig a little deeper, they appear: in particular biblical figures, in the Psalms, on prophetic imagery, and in the words and questions of Jesus.

I suppose the genius move that Thompson makes (a move he makes on the shoulders of Augustine and Lewis and Smith amongst others) is to make room for longing and beauty in community.  Longing and beauty are things to talk about with others, with longing rooted internally and beauty rooted externally.  Strangely enough, both draw us on, are ways that God can lead us to a better place because they are both framed in community.  But because they aren’t explicitly evangelistic/biblical (but aren’t they, though?), we don’t quite know what to do with them in the long run (and they aren’t exactly full-blown courses in seminary).  These two things, just like community, can be made part of a checklist, but they are also key to a particularly Christian experience.  The danger is that, like some kinds of travel, they become some kind of middle/upper-class trend that doesn’t go beyond that particle niche.  I think this is the kind of travel that no one should take for granted, a reminder that “wherever you go, there you are,” and that maybe tourism does the most good when it helps you love home better.

Or think of it this way: longing points us to what can be made beautiful, to a community that becomes beautiful and creates a kind of beauty together.  And that beauty, because it is rooted in Christ, is a part of the new creation and a hint of what Christians are waiting for.

Just a few thoughts about the big picture of the book before turning my attention to two things in particular.  Please take them for whatever they are worth.