Writing, at its very core, is about saying something. It doesn’t have to be profound, and it doesn’t have to be beautiful as some might label it. But for me as a writer of faith, it has to be true. When I think about it, every change that happened in my life was connected to someone or something communicating truth to me – by words or by experiences.
I experienced a change of viewpoint by trying out the doughnuts at the Doughnut Vault on Franklin in downtown Chicago. I didn’t know it, but until that point I hadn’t truly had a doughnut. Everything else kind of paled in comparison. That’s a subjective reality right there, and some people would say it’s a small one (I disagree, the importance of doughnuts is gargantuan, just like the chestnut-glazed or the blackberry jelly-filled at DV).
The point remains. When I was open to tasting something new, I was able to receive truths that I hadn’t understood before. They were already true – but I hadn’t realized it.
Layers of Revelation
The illumination of our minds and souls and spirits deals primarily with epiphanies – those moments where something unknown or little understood becomes known and understood. It’s the same in a relationship – as each little piece of a person is revealed to their companion, it’s an epiphany. The word suggests light shining, sudden realization, a vast paradigm shift, but it’s often not flashy or stunning or vast. It’s simple, like eating a great donut or learning that your friend prefers heavy metal music. Behind each epiphany are a myriad of other epiphanies, too. It’s an unending journey of discovery – in food, in people, and definitely in Divinity.
I love this about communication of truth. In essence, it’s about a continual peeling back of layer upon layer of truths, deeper and deeper into the heart of things, more intimate by the sentence, nearer, still nearer by the word. The increments – mind-bending or miniscule – don’t matter so much as proximity does.
Getting Under the surface
This sort of obsession with layers was similar to the French symbolism movement in poetry during the late 19th century. It was a revolt against the rigid formalism of the poetry of the time in favor of impressions and metaphor, and it cherished mystery over realism. Ironically, the poets who loosely organized as Symbolists rallied around a lack of precise meaning in order to capture the essence of reality itself. They attempted to be more real by being less exact.
Allow me a layer: in the simple shift from formalism to free metaphor we can find a deeper truth. These poets acknowledge that our world is more than surface deep – our feelings, our understandings, the matter that surrounds us. It’s as old as the theory of forms and the allegory of Plato’s cave, and older still. Essentially – appearance is only part of the picture. Something exists behind it all.
just sit on the chair
As Christians, this should be our natural state, but we too often act like it’s not. Too often we trade the truth of mysteries we don’t understand for the lie of claiming we know what’s what. Too often we champion our own “truths” instead of the truths of our Lord and Savior. Too often we assume that we are right because we do the right thing or think the right thing, instead of realizing the depths of our fallenness and the heights of the image of God in us. This place is not a battleground for surface-level faith. We must move past debating the color or type of chair and just sit down already. Sitting on it includes faith in much more abstract notions like gravity, mass, design, motion, rest… because the truth is that the things under the surface are also what we’re made for. Someday they won’t be abstractions to us – they’ll be more real realities than what we touch, taste, see, hear, and smell now.
But while we’re made for a new world, we were also once made for this one, fallen as it is now. So don’t mistake me for saying that the surface things don’t matter. My body is as much a part of my whole as my soul or spirit is, and it can act as a window into deeper realities when it is understood to be a distinct and important part.
Faith is not about reducing the whole to its parts. It’s about realizing there’s more than just matter and abstraction, there’s beauty within brokenness, and all of it exists together right now – and all of it matters. Instead of labeling, we should dive into the layers surrounding us with a curious faith, knowing that our God is bigger than our finite perspectives. We should, in some sense, be symbolists and materialists in one.
In other words, instead of debating the merits of the Vault’s donuts over Stan’s or Do-Rite’s, let’s go out and taste test them together.