Once upon a time there was a poet, I know not when, I know not where, I remember not who.  He was before an audience reading one of his poems. When he had finished someone asked him what it meant.—and he read it again.  I just love that story I feel the same way about so many things.  The poem was the best way he could express what the poem meant.  The meaning was the poem.  Reading it again was the shortest, most accurate, most beautiful way of expressing what it meant.  Anything else would not due.  It would be to leave something behind.  To dissect it would be to vivisect your beloved family pet in an attempt to understand why he was beloved.  You would destroy him.  Part of the understanding is a thing inexplicable. 

A physiological demonstration with vivisection of a dog. Oil painting by Emile-Edouard Mouchy, 1832.

A woman told me she wanted to copy the colors of my house and I was instantly off contemplating the millions of factors that went into making it beautiful.  A list of colors just seemed vulgar, for that is not where the enchantment resided.  I couldn’t give her what she wanted.  At some level she would be disappointed.  So I suppose I chose to disappoint here now rather than later.  I gave her the first step in the journey, but who knows where she will end up.

I think this may be how Jesus responded to people.  He says that parables concealed meaning.  They can’t be broken down.  You have to have the right heart to inculcate the truth they are brimming with.  If you don’t have that, there is no help for you, there are no smaller bites, no introductory course.  The magic isn’t there. When we turn them into platitudes that apply to every situation, to our situation, they die.  This is especially true of our reading, it is modern mechanistic.  We want formulas and diagrams that work.  Which is why C. S. Lewis compared machines to magic.  Both get things done, they exude power over the world.  But the Logos, truth in word, should work the other way round.  We don’t manipulate it, we should allow it to remake us.  And this is a complex thing, we are body, soul and mind and sinful nature.  We don’t like changing much, we like our sin.  We could learn things by just being told, by using our minds.  But often it requires a sort of living parable or metaphor for us to learn.  God puts us in situations which go to all aspects of our being, and force us to learn or make a choice to learn.  Often we fail the test and go off to worse evil and he leaves us to ourselves.  But he made the world to do this, situations can teach us, minister to our soul, feed our bodies.  Good art can help us do this better, by taking us into another world we can reflect on our own world and become better men.  Nathan does this fofr David when he exercises David’s kingly wisdom, without revealing the bias David has for himself.  Jesus also did this as he put people in situations that forced them to rethink their world the rich young ruler, the woman he called a dog.  These were not theological debates, these were tests of all that they had built themselves to be, their whole person.  And they also make great stories to tell other. To put us in those situations too.

It’s an odd place we find ourselves in philosophically today, because this modern view of the world is going away, but only partly.  We want to each possess a unique, self in many senses of the word.   We want to remake our bodies with tattoos and piercings and crazy clothes and gender reassignment surgery and the bastardization of language.  But in many ways our thinking is more homogenous than ever.  We want to put people in two categories us and them, good and bad.  We love our systems.  We don’t follow professors or wise thinkers, we go and get degrees in programs.  We get jobs in companies, with titles.  They plug any old person into the system.  The particulars of the person matter little.  In fact when they do come out it is often a problem, “it’s not professional”.  What a hideous word, dehumanizing.  It is a modern word, and it’s strange that we keep it around in this sea of hyper individuality.  And we even apply it to churches, pastors are professionals?  How sick.  Absolutely sick. Churches are now seen as business and not living organisms.  We want to make every field of study and every profession into a science instead of an art.

And yet even the sciences are not that modern in the way they really work themselves out.  The average person has never read a scientific study, they just read the story told by the person in the lab or the journalist discussing the person and his lab.  There is an art to solving complex mathematical problems, or using math to solve engineering problems.  There is an art to programming, to say nothing of all the jokes,  because nothing is perfect, especially when dealing with humans.  People ask me how I fixed their computer or how I built a software solution.  And again I am back to staring off into space.  It doesn’t work that way.  We need to get back to the art in things.  As Chesterton said, when things go wrong you don’t need a practical man, you need an impractical man.  The practical man can not imagine things going wrong, only the way things ought to go.  It takes the impractical man, the poet to venture outside the system and dare to see the unseen, the ghost in the machine.  To reenchant what has been taken from us by the modern machine.  It just can’t seem to participate.  And so I will continue to offend people with vague answers.  I will continue to drive people nuts asking too many questions to get to all aspects of a thing to really understand and appreciate it.  That is to love and not vivisect.