self-portrait
my photo
self-portrait: the girl kneels by the side of the stream in one hand she clings to the trunk of a tree steady and straight like an arrow driven into the unmoving earth its bark does not cut her palm but calluses it the tree points upward and she does not let go the other hand is plunged into the current tides from every corner of the world run over it so that her skin has known the taste of a thousand lands and languages, loves and longings the waters move her hand as they will and all her life has been an attempt to be ambidextrous
Maybe the thing I ask God for the most is, “show me the way.” Just tell me what to do and I'll do it.
Which actually isn't true, if I take a ruthless look at my track record. But still, I just want to know something clear and defined and certain. Whatever is true, noble, right, Paul says, think about such things. Sounds good, except, what is true? What is noble? What is right?
I’m a child of this pluralistic world, this secular age as Charles Taylor calls it, where I’ve grown up knowing it’s possible to believe and live differently than I do. My value set is one of thousands, and those who purport to fall into my camp can be the ones who disagree with me the most.
I'm not just talking about apologetics—how do I know this set of doctrines is true, how do I know God exists, wait, how do I know that I know anything…and the existential spiral slants violently into nausea. Twenty One Pilots really did know how to articulate my generation’s vertigo in this ever-expanding sea of possible ways to live: “One thing consists of consistence / And it's that we're all battling fear / Oh dear, I don't know if we know why we're here / Oh my, too deep, please stop thinking.”
There is that element, of course, and if no Christian has not woken up in the middle of this night in a cold sweat wondering if they've staked their life on a fantasy, on a void, then they're not being honest with themselves.
But there’s also this day-to-day anxiety, this mundane and paralyzing echo of Francis Schaeffer: “how then shall we live?” If I accept the tenets of Christianity, then what do I do tomorrow? The fruits of the Spirit sound nice but honestly they’re uncomfortably vague.
I could elaborate on that but I won’t because I’m getting off track. The point of all of this is, that’s one side of me: the ache for a clear and vivid truth that casts a shadow so sharp I could outline its edges in ink and never worry about whether I stayed within its bounds. The tree trunk I can hold onto that points unwaveringly to the sky.
But then there’s the other side.
That side has been burned by the sun in too many countries to be content with a simple, one-size-fits-all salve. That side has drunk from too many cups, wells, and containers to claim naively that all water tastes the same.
That side has seen too many faces.
“Any human face is a claim on you,” Marilynne Robinson says, “because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”
I think there’s an answer somewhere, something about how these aren’t actually opposites, the yearning for truth and direction, and the understanding of—and delight in!—complexity and nuance. I’m a child of postmodernity. I know how individual each experience is and how we can’t shake that off, how it informs not just the conclusions we draw from what we see, but how far our eyes open and which direction they look and the strength of their peripheral gaze.
But I’m also a child of the Book that says I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. I know the story of the man who stared the speaker of those words in the face and said without irony, “What is truth?”
Maybe this is just another version of the artist and the academic dilemma—a false dilemma brought on by overthinking.
Maybe there is someone who can make us whole.
In Other Words…
Not a lot of reviews this week but still some good ones.
goodreads (books)
Anna Karenina (5 stars)
letterboxd (movies)
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (3.5 stars)
~ Aberdeen