Dead Knots

I was interested  in abstractions.

And slowly, I came to realise there was more behind the abstract – I’ve said this before, too many times maybe. Which really shows how much I actually have appreciated this as more than a principle. When things linger in your being as something that still resonates, maybe the eventual click hasn’t yet happened, and maybe, there is still a lot more to go before eventually driving this down into a conviction.

Maybe this particular thought is one of those quiet movements that will fasten it a little more.

Perhaps it starts from the word “coherence”, a word that is more than a part of my vocabulary because it has become a word that highlights so much of my Christian growth (consciously, I have avoided using the word “experience”) Christianity is a coherent faith, and my subjective puts a premium on that explanatory effect (Others say – Relationship. Worth. Guilt-appeasement. Acceptance. Love. And whatever other language one can use to frame the truth of the gospel.)

Coherence has silenced the cry of my unanswered questions, my mind has settled into a tired maturity through the rigor of repeated arguments. The facts remain as they are, the interpretations stand as they always  have been, and I’m no longer stirred by a proposition that attacks my existential certainties by pure philosophy.

And so maybe (actually no, I still disagree. but to go along with the flow of logic anyway), doing Literature was a blessing in disguise. To say it superficially, Literature has given up on this enterprise of questioning the human condition, deciding instead to describe it. And utilising  all the powers that language allows, it dives into the construct of the narrative, unveiling what it can through the power of a story.

“…if we suddenly found ourselves on Mars and grew a pair of wings and a new respiratory system, it would not take us out of ourselves… Not as long as we have to use our same senses. Not as long as we’re stuck in our same consciousness.“

- Ilium, Dan Simmons

Man is fundamentally a reader. He merely chooses the ‘texts’ he wants to read. He chooses how much he wants to get out of the text, how much he wants to run away from text, even how much of the text he really wants to read anyway (In this light, the bible makes a lot more sense, but that’s something else altogether) There are texts that lie. Readers that lie. There are texts that were lies, but are really truths. And readers who really were honest about a pursuit of truth, but then later on get tangled in something that look much like lies.

My mind has settled. But it is now my heart that cries out. And no, coherence does nothing to settle it. Because a person is not a text. We are readers. We read texts. But a person is not a text. And I think that is the main problem.

This is probably why the questions that are closest to being argued against are the ones that brush so closely to persons. You know, the why does a good God allow suffering?, what about those who have no heard? kind of questions. Its not that they are unanswerable philosophically – You take the time and pains to follow a logical argument, and you’ll realise that it can be quite well argued. Its more that the answer is, not an answer.

Sadly, I frame these things now in the context of ministry. I see myself looking at the person’s predicament that led to the question. Making an assessment of his or her situation and circumstance. Drawing upon relevant arguments that hinge onto something that I can illustrate from their life (so it forms a more empathic argument). After satisfying all the intellectual grievances to corner the query into a boxed-up reasonableness, I finally invoke Deuteronomy 29:29. All in the name of ‘coherence’ (of course, I mean God. But honestly, I think my sinful nature might push this to the foreground)

But the questions that are the hardest are not these. Not  questions that are existential but questions of things that are going on in existence itself.

‘Coherence’ does nothing to settle it – Yet, in my language of faith, ‘coherence’ should. Feeling no longer the need to be vindicated in questions that have no answers in Philosophy, I need to come to terms with how there can be no answers in what is more than philosophy too.

Because the answer to life gives coherence enough, there is no need for relational closures. No need for emotional clarifications. No need for an attempt to unknot the knots on the frayed strings.

No need. Not because of coherence, but because of the gospel.

 

“For the sake of love or its essence – telling, informing, announcing, commenting, opining, distracting, listening and laughing, and vainly making plans – one betrays everyone else, friends, parents, brothers and sisters…In order to flatter the person you love you denigrate everything else in existence, you deny and abominate everything in order to content and reassure the one person who could leave you; so great is the power of the territory delineated by the pillow that it excludes from its bosom everything outside it, and it’s a territory which, by its very nature, doesn’t allow for anything else to be on it except the two partners, or lovers, who in a sense are alone and for that very reason talk and hide nothing, voluntarily.”

-  A Heart So White, Javier Marías

 

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