Stories to Remind Us...

The hero of Patrick Rothfuss' novel, The Wise Man's Fear, is from a band of traveling performers, proud gypsies who call themselves the Edema Ruh.  Some friends ask the protagonist to tell a story and so he tells them the tale of an old wandering beggar who stumbled upon a crossroads late one evening where several groups of travelers have set up camp.  The old man goes from campfire to campfire, hoping for a bite to eat and a seat by the fire - but each time he is denied or chased off.  Finally, the beggar comes to a band of wagons where he finds kindness and hospitality.  The old man begins to cry.  His hosts ask him what's wrong.


He replies, "I am a silly old man...  You have been kinder to me than anyone in years, and I am sorry I cannot repay you."

"We are the Edema Ruh.  The thing we value most is something everyone possesses....  You could tell us your story." (p. 284)

When the tale ends, the hero's friends are confused.  "Is that the end?...  It didn't end the way I thought it would," he said.

"What did you expect?"

"I was waiting to find out who the beggar really was.  I thought as soon as someone was nice to him, he would turn out to be Taborlin the Great.  Then he would give them his walking stick and a sack of money and...  I don't know.  Make something magical happen....  Old beggars in stories are never really old beggars."

"In real life old beggars are almost always old beggars," I pointed out.  "But I know what kind of story you two are talking about.  Those are stories we tell other people to enteratain them.  This story is different.  It's one we tell each other."

"Why tell us a story if it's not entertaining?"

"To help us remember.  To teach us --" I made a vague gesture -- "[who we are]." (p.286)

Stories are powerful.  They speak to deep places within us, reaching past the part of our brains that deal with interesting facts...  As Buechner says, stories reach down to the place inside of us where dreams are born.  (See Telling the Truth, p. 4)  Stories speak to the parts of us that define us.  We are a people of stories.  Our deepest connections with others are with those who get us - those who know our story, and whose story is in turn known by us.  Stories, the deep narratives, remind us who we are.

The Bible tells a story.  Sure it's not entirely narrative - it's full of poetry and wisdom literature, letters, laws and the preaching of the prophets.  But the book as a whole tells a story - it bears witness to a people's encounter with the living God.  (I am surely biased by my love of narrative, but whatever the Bible is, one has to admit that it does NOT read like a philosophy or theology text book.)


Some wonder why the all-powerful God of the universe would choose to reveal himself through ancient texts - or through stories instead of theological descriptions.  But I find it fitting that God's self revelation comes through narrative.  Stories speak to deeper realities, to complexities that challenge simplistic descriptions.  If you're describing a machine, then some sort of technical manual serves best.  Some churches try to offer a simplified technical manual version of God.  More than a few visions of the Almighty - even within the church today - envision a kind of a God who is little more than a cosmic automaton - producing prescribed consequences in response humanity's varied actions.


But the God of the Bible is something different - something terrible and wonderful and unpredictable...  The incredible witness of the Bible is that God is person.  Transcendent yet living...  God is person, the creator in real relationship with the created.  

Why am I a Christian?  One of the biggest reasons is here.  I fell in love with the story of the Bible.  I fell in love with the God to whom it bears witness.  A God of power and passion...  A creator who so deeply loved his creation that he became one of them, gave himself for them...  It's a story that speaks to me - that reminds me who I am.

The Pendulum

I was reading a friend's post from the Labyrinth and it got me thinking...  The pendulum is always swinging.


I love his vision of the world, summed up in the sidebar quote by Borges:
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny."


There is a sense of mystery and awe at the scope of possibility -- an admission that the world is beyond us,  that God is beyond us -- and a recognition of the beauty that comes with that reality.  There is a seeking for truth and meaning, a desire to burst forth from boxes and categories that have contained us.  There is an openness to discover whatever the world may hold...


The librarian in Borges' story laments the loss of so many precious books - books each full of their own unique stories, even if those stories be gibberish.  For the librarian, each book has its own inherent value, rooted in its uniqueness.  Every book is special...


There is a moment in Pixar's The Incredibles where the villain reveals his master plan to sell his inventions...   Then, "everyone can be super!  And when everyone's super, no one will be."  As Dash put it earlier - saying that everyone's special, is just another way of saying that no one is...
The pendulum swings ever back and forth...  Back and forth between identity and inclusivity.  The church, like all movements, is caught in the balance.  


Move too far toward identity and you find yourself trapped in exclusivity - setting litmus tests and forcing out those who don't measure up.  These are the 'totalities' of Emmanuel Levinas.  These are the narrow definitions of truth, the definitions of what it means to be human that leave out too much.  No system can hope to be both consistent and complete (thank you Kurt Gödel), and so in our efforts toward consistent definition, we lose truths, unable to see past the blinders of our narrow definitions.    


And so we are wise to heed the librarian's warning.  We are wise not to destroy so quickly those books which we do not immediately understand.  God is beyond us.  To claim that we have a complete understanding of the mind and workings of the Almighty is arrogant and dangerous.


But there is danger too in the other direction.  When we become so open, so focused on inclusivity that all is truth, then we lose any sense of identity.  We cease to have meaning.  It is the reverse of the pendulum, Gödel's 'Catch-22'.  If we strive for completeness, the inclusion of all truths, then we cannot be consistent.  We will invariably include some falsehoods.


I admire the agnostic - the one sane enough to admit that he or she does not know everything, that he or she cannot hope to fully understand the universe.  The agnostic is always open, always seeking truth.  That's different than the universalist, different perhaps than even our friend librarian.  The universalist claims that all things are truth, all paths are wisdom, all books are equally special...  which is really just another way of saying that none of them are.


We live in the tension - ever seeking balance between the swings of the pendulum.  We cannot hope to have a complete understanding of the Almighty Living God.  If such were possible, then God would not be God.  But neither do we pretend to understand nothing.  I believe that God has revealed God's self to us - not God's whole self, but pieces of the reality of who God is.  I find that revelation in the world around me and in the words and ideas of others throughout the centuries.  As a Christian I find that revelation most poignant in the testimony of Scripture and the person of Jesus. 


We do not know what the world holds.  We cannot grasp or contain God.  So speaks the Lord to Moses out of the depths of the burning bush, "I will be who I will be."  And so we need the librarian's openness.  But we also value the truth revealed to us it is a gift.  We do not shun the truth by declaring all things true.

Paracelsus

My friend and I are both lovers of the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges.  Borges wrote a story called The Rose of Paracelsus.  In it a stranger comes to the aged alchemist, Paracelsus, and asks to be his disciple.  He brings with him a rose.  He has heard of the legend of Paracelsus - that he can throw a rose into the fire, let it burn to ash - and then with a word restore the flower again.  If the old man will let him but witness that miracle, then the stranger pledges to offer up his life as the alchemist's disciple.

"If I did what you ask... the miracle would not bring you the belief you seek.  Put aside, then, the rose," Paracelsus says.

In a rush the young man, full of suspicious passion throws the rose into the flames where its color fades and it is reduced to ashes.

"Paracelsus sat unmoving.  He said with strange simplicity:
'All the physicians and all the pharmacists in Basel say I am a fraud.  Perhaps they are right.  There are the ashes that were the rose, and that shall be the rose no more.'
"The young man was ashamed.  Paracelsus was a charlatan, or a mere visionary, and he, an intruder, had come through his door and forced him now to confess that his famed magic arts were false."

The stranger makes an apology - filled with pity for the old man...  He makes his awkward apology then stumbles out the door...

Many find themselves in this place, I imagine.  The faith of their youth laid bare, they have lost the mystery.  They have seen behind the curtain...  They have found their churches filled with old men speaking riddles without meaning.  The magic is gone.  And so they walk away.  With anger at being deceived, perhaps.  Or maybe like the young stranger, they leave with pity - gently replacing the curtain and walking away.

But perhaps there is still magic to be found...  Life in the ashes...

I love the ending to Borges' tale:
"Paracelsus was then alone.  Before putting out the lamp and returning to his weary chair, he poured the delicate fistful of ashes from one hand into the concave other, and he whispered a single word.  The rose appeared again."

Dear Reader,

"It's odd, he thought... how sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together even more than sharing a faith.  The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself....  Doubt is not great treachery as [some] seem to think.  Doubt is human."

-Graham Greene, from his novel Monsignor Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes' hero, Don Quixote, wandered the world with his loyal companion, Sancho Panza, trying to make it a better place - he fancied himself a defender of the powerless.  He often made a fool of himself -- battling barbers and tilting at windmills.  By the second book, others who have heard of his exploits make sport of him, sending him on quests and imagined adventures.  Even Quixote's friends send along the arrogant Samson Carrasco to bring him home.

At the beginning of their journey, I laughed at the comic exploits of these adventurers, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.  But as the story continued I found myself cheering for Quixote - not laughing at him.  I celebrated his victory over Carrasco's "Knight of the Wood".  There was a nobility - a goodness - to his faith.

Centuries later, Graham Greene imagined a new ending to the tale of Don Quixote.  After the adventures -- long after the windmills -- the old man settles down as a Monsignor in the Catholic Church in Greene's version.  Sancho Panza becomes governor of a small leftist state.  And the two friends remain faithful companions.  A piece of their discussion on faith and doubt is quoted above...

Consider this the beginning of a conversation.  A conversation between you and me.  A conversation with other voices too.  This is not a debate -- not a battle of wits and sophistry, each side seeking victory.  No, this is simply a conversation between friends seeking truth.

A friend proposed the idea of this open conversation.  His journal is subtitled "Why I am not a Christian."  And so this page where you have found yourself in the abyss of cyberspace might be titled, "Why I am a Christian."

For I am a Christian.  I believe.  I believe and I doubt...  Perhaps it is best said that I choose to believe.  I cannot prove my faith - and so those looking for such an apologetic in these pages will be sorely disappointed.  That is not to say that my faith flies in spite of reason.  Quite to the contrary.  I find good reason to believe.  But that falls far short of proof.  I fell in love with the story of the Bible and with the God to whom it testifies.  I have experienced God as ever faithful in my own life.  I have been blessed.  And so I choose to believe.

I believe and I doubt.  Faith and doubt are not mutually exclusive as some imagine.  They are entwined, married.  And their child is hope.