Short Takes on Big Beliefs

Photo by Jonatan Pie on Unsplash

I’ve come to recognize lately how drawn I am to ideas that soar, to beliefs that somehow make the heart feel larger. I’ve dedicated a fair amount of time lately, after all, to writing about the Trinity, or flights of prayer, or reaching out to an immense God. One might rightly wonder if I’ve become so heavenly minded, as the saying goes, that I’m of questionable earthly good.

But there’s more to my fascinations. Behind the questing is a search for connecting points, for images or glimpses that resonate with others’ experiences, for turns of a story that help folks get in touch with their own brokenness and longings and fears.

I’ve long sensed that abstractions alone can cool anyone’s ardor. That mere concepts can deaden and bore. “And what is the use of a book,” muses one of children’s literature’s best-known characters at the beginning of her tale, “without pictures or conversation?” I came across the line from Alice in Wonderland at the front of a new book while browsing in a local shop, seeing why the author wanted it to start her exploration of important events in her life. That simple language expressed something important to me, too.

Lewis Carroll was reminding me through the enigmatic Alice that there are more ways to communicate than just with words. Sometimes the sharpest, most poignant, most affecting messages come through means other than merely verbal. What moves a soul has to do with more than mind or even heart but sometimes the gut.

I think this explains why the writers that most stay with me have told stories with gritty details. I think especially of Julian of Norwich, described by one writer as “a celebrated mystic and the first English female author known by name.” For all her high-flying theology, Julian used “familiar, close-to-home objects and images.” Simple things drew her attentiveness, like a hazelnut held in the palm of the hand, or a cloak or dress that, she said, tells us how God “is our clothing that enwraps us and enfolds us, embraces us and wholly encloses us, surrounding us out of tender love.” And her own life, while she was shy with revealing the details, shone with drama and intrigue.

Aren’t these the rhetorical flourishes that form images in our mind’s eye, that turn indifference into ardor, that stand a chance of galvanizing a soul’s imagination?

So I will continue to sort through my volumes of theology for growing insights, but also make sure I sift through my life: recurring images that baffle or move me, my failings over the years met with grace, my fears finally encountered and overcome by a close-by love that, while maybe a big idea, gets so embodied in what unfolds that I can feel it.