Reversing Entropy

Luci Shaw

 

The following homily was given on Sunday, November 9, 2003, at the conclusion of Image's annual conference, “A Narratable Word: The Theological Implications of Story.” The event was sponsored by a grant from the Lilly Fellows Program. Except where otherwise noted, the poems that appear in text are Shaw's own.

I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love.

THIS Sunday school song that echoes from my earliest memories suggests a question: just how do we tell the story of the unseen? The song says it's about Jesus and his glory—but how and when have we witnessed heavenly glory? We can perhaps speak of Jesus's love with great personal authenticity, but without viewing Jesus in the flesh, we find that words fail us again. Without the visuals, how do we know enough to form a narrative? Is imagination useful here, or might it lead us into dangerous waters?

Narrative is a word originally derived from the Latin noscer—to know—and a related word, gnarus —knowing . Perhaps that is another way of saying that story is how we come to know the world.

As the theme of this conference suggests, we live in a world susceptible to narrative. We all find ourselves, without ever asking for it, part of a cosmic story that continually unfolds as future becomes present and present becomes past. I sometimes think of our lives as open-ended novels, with our calendars, journals, correspondence, photo albums, computer files, and our grown children and grandchildren marking the work-in-progress as the plot develops and the characters evolve. Who knows what change-points of circumstance or relationship will transform us in the next weeks or months or years?

We try, in the moment, to make sense out of what may often seem horrifying, incongruous, paradoxical, irrelevant, or absurd, while retaining a kind of eschatological hope that God's order, peace, design, or glory, will fill all the spaces in our widely scattered personal and cosmic jigsaw puzzles. We look forward to a time when, like Moses's did after his Sinai encounter with Yahweh, our faces will shine in a way that no earthly story could make them do. We watch and wait for the fulfillment of the prophecy that assures us, “The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea!”

Manna

They asked, and he brought quails,

And gave them food from heaven.

—Psalm 105:40

 

I'm not asking for quails for dinner

and if they flew in my window at mealtime,

in a torrent of wind, I would think

panic, not miracle.

 

Time is so multiple and fluid. I lose a day

flying west, and gain it back returning.

I am ravenous to know where I am today.

And who. And how am I to be fed? And if

the prayer I offered this morning at first light

was known and answered last week

am I in some horizontal pleat of time,

some rock crevice in the mountain's shoulder

with a great hand shielding me from

the tempest of too much knowledge?

 

You never know what a simple request

will get you. So, no expectation of birds

from heaven. Rather, I will commit myself

to this quotidian wilderness, watching for what

the wind may bring me next—

perhaps a small wafer tasting like honey

that I can pick up with my fingers

and lay on my tongue

to ease, for this day, my hunger to know.

 

Meanwhile, here we are, caught in time and rooted in space. Time, multiple and fluid as it is, is an essential part of story. And, as we might guess, the word story is linked with the word history (from the Greek word historia, the learning that comes by narrative telling) . Without a sense of time, the forward movement of living and growing, of purpose and events and progress and change, the shape of history and living would be without meaning. And as a Christian I do believe that life has meaning, that we are heading somewhere.

The story of the world is imprinted everywhere—the growth rings widening in the boles of trees, the wind-and water-carved art of coastal sandstone rocks, sharp, young mountains like the Tetons contrasted with the older Appalachians the up-ended strata of geological shift, inscribed parchments and tablets, the artifacts discovered in archeological digs, the fossil evidence, and the eroding edges of continents that cannot be reclaimed any more than lost innocence.

We may be trapped in time, but God is not. Charles Williams believed in the kind of retroactive prayer that was effective regardless of chronology, that the Almighty could change the outcome of, say, the Battle of Hastings, as a result of our prayers in the twenty-first century. Whether or not you believe in petitioning the Almighty for a more propitious outcome from past events, it is a dictum of physics that at the speed of light (and to the timeless God who is not, as we are, bound by time), the now of the on-going present includes all the pivotal moments in history of creation: the exodus, the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and the arrival of the Holy Spirit to be our pathfinder into truth.

Present

At light-speed, God-speed,

time collapses into now so that

we may see Christ's wounds as

still bleeding, his torso,

that ready sponge, still

absorbing our vice, our toxic shame.

 

He is still being pierced

by every hateful nail

we hammer home. In this

Golgotha moment his body—

chalice for the dark tears

of the whole world—brims,

 

spilling over as his life blood

drains. His dying into the earth

begins the great reversal—

as blood from a vein leaps

into the needle, so with his rising,

we surge into light.

 

Story has the power to grasp bits of the past and carry them into the imaginative present, rescuing us from the pitfalls of abstraction. It is not insignificant that much of the Bible, including the deuterocanonical books, is narrative in form, and that the characters and plots revealed on the sacred pages are not so different from those that surround and involve us today. As Eugene Peterson writes in Leap over a Wall:

Story is the primary way in which the revelation of God is given to us. The Holy Spirit's literary genre of choice is story.... The biblical story comprises other literary forms, sermons and genealogies, prayers and letters, poems and proverbs, but story carries them all in its capacious and organically intricate plot....

Somewhere along the way, most of us pick up bad habits of extracting from the Bible what we pretentiously call “spiritual principles” or “moral guidelines,” or “theological truths” and then corseting ourselves in them in order to force a godly shape on our lives.... Mighty uncomfortable, [but] it's not the gospel way. Story is the gospel way. Story isn't imposed on our lives; it invites us into its life. As we enter and imaginatively participate, we find ourselves in a more spacious, freer, and more coherent world. We didn't know all this was going on! We had never noticed all this significance! Story brings us into more reality, not less, expands horizons, sharpens both sight and insight. Story is the primary means we have for learning what the world is, and what it means to be a human being in it. No wonder that from the time we acquire the rudiments of language, we demand stories....

God isn't a doctrine David talks about but a person by whom he's led and cared for. God isn't a remote abstraction that distances him from the conditions of his actual life but an intimate presence who confirms his daily life as the very stuff of salvation.

There we have it: the God who is other but in whom we live and have being. The God who is both transcendent as well as immanent, both there and here. The Lion and the Lamb. Story continually attempts to fill the unsearchable spaces left by mystery and paradox. Mrs. Blake said of her husband, William, “I miss the company of my husband; he is so often in Paradise.” Unlike Blake, most of us are not mystics. We are earthbound, but with the longing for an occasional glimpse of a wider, more profound understanding of our existence.

Story is the most familiar and accessible way for human beings to understand the world. Despite the tenets of postmodernism—itself a meta-narrative, a horizonless landscape—again and again, through story, this world relaxes into coherence, in the process becoming less inchoate or disjunctive. Every time we tell a story or write a poem or compose an essay, we give chaos a way of reintegrating back into order; we reverse entropy; pattern and meaning begin to overcome randomness and decay. We find satisfaction in juxtaposition and linkage and succession and resolution as things split and differentiate and flow together again.

Not that it's all pre-packaged and programmed. I like to think that the uncertainty principle allows for surprises. Freshness and new insights happen in a continuous stream as we learn from our own stories, and beyond. How many of us novelists and poets are taught by the words and images that come to us as unexpected gifts, without our even trying, from quite literally God knows where? A poem fragment of mine, “Holy Ghost”:

My imagination has always been a window for you

to open. Sometimes it's like this: a drab day, and then

a little dance begins in the brain—bubbles rising like yeast,

a quickening spirit hovering over the waters. Dreams begin

to come in three or more dimensions, rhythms pulse in waves,

 

phrases nudge me like little fists, sounds begin to click

together, green turns real enough to be written as a word

on paper. Skeptic, and no scientist, I am being tuned

the narrative of heaven. My own poems persuade me the way

an available womb, and labor, persuade a baby to be born.

 

This element of the transcendent, what C.S. Lewis called “patches of God-light,” what many of us have experienced as epiphany, hints to us that this is not just our story (we realize, perhaps ruefully, that we are only a minuscule part of it). Just as a bicyclist riding along a country road through the woods may be dappled from time to time with the bright light of the sun, so we, in the course of everyday living, may be made aware of a brightness and a vision of what is above and beyond us, and so find ourselves, along with other travelers, linked into that larger universe. Described variously as “cosmic consciousness,” or by Aldous Huxley as “mystic experience,” examples are everywhere. A recent poem in the New Yorker, “Analogue,” by Maurice Manning, said it like this:

Oh, revelation only ever comes

at sudden crossings—the heart hopping like a happy frog.

The short-story writer Dorothy Canfield talked of “a generally intensified emotional sensibility.... Everybody knows such occasional hours or days of freshened emotional responses when events that usually pass almost unnoticed, suddenly move you deeply.... I have no idea whence this tide comes...but when it begins to rise in my heart I know that a story is hovering in the offing.”

Even Sylvia Plath, whose name is in the news again, in print and film, argued:

Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,

For that rare, random descent.

In an imaginative sense we are invaded by mystery and transported into a place of even greater and more persistent reality than the “real” world we know. Jesus welcomes us, in his parabolic stories, into a realm of truth that would be otherwise impenetrable to us. What Jesus had to say about transcendent truths may be literally unspeakable but metaphorically suggestive and rich with insight. Metaphor bridges the gap between unknown and known. The stories Jesus told are, to varying degrees, metaphorical. Annie Dillard comments, in Living by Fiction, that the parables are “a hermeneutic of the world.”

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 13, Jesus's friends ask him, “Why do you tell stories?” It's a good question. Often a gospel parable will start out with the words, “The kingdom of God is like...,” and then proceeds to sketch a story that may be hard for us to comprehend. Have you ever wondered why some of Jesus's stories seem to complicate or even obscure truth rather than clarify or simplify it? Perhaps it's that God, who knows us better than we know ourselves, is not content to speak simply to the rational intelligence, but informs us instead through imagination, intuition, wonder, and epiphany.

Though theologians draw principles out of these narratives that seem logical, those principles are abstract. The Bible wasn't written as systematic theology. We can talk in broad terms about soteriology or atonement, but until such ideas are fleshed out to us in story and imagery, say in the life of Christ who “purchased” our salvation (another metaphor), or the bloodletting of sacrifice to achieve atonement, such considerations do not touch us deeply. But images and stories print themselves on our minds (and even our senses) in such brilliant color and texture that time and distraction cannot obliterate them.

The parables were never meant to be dissected analytically; they were designed to be absorbed by the senses and the imagination and felt, the subtext of ideal, principle, and truth taken in almost unconsciously as the mental image and the quickening power of narrative suffuse the understanding over a period of time, a kind of divine soft-sell. And this, in our time, is the Spirit's work. Another fragment, from a poem titled “Ghostly”:

the third

person is a ghost. Sometimes

he silvers for a moment, a moon sliver

between moving leaves. We aren't sure.

 

What to make of this.... How

to see breath?...

This for sure—he finds

enough masks to keep us guessing:

Is it really you? Is this you also?

 

It's a cracked, crossover world, waiting

for bridges. He escapes our categories,

choosing his shapes—fire, dove,

wind, water, oil—closing the breach

in figures that flicker within

the closed eye, tongue the brain, sting

and tutor the soul. Once incarnate

in Judea , now he is present

(in us, in the present tense),

occupying our bodies—shells to be

reshaped—houses for this holy ghost.

In our special flesh he thrives into something

too frequent to deny, too real to see.

 

God does not always speak openly, plainly, directly, as he did to and through Noah and Moses and Jonah. While figurative language often leaves us with vivid impressions, or teaches by analogy, it may also cause puzzlement about what is being meant. Metaphor not only enlivens and suggests, but it furnishes a kind of screen between the object and what it is being compared with. Can we ask Why?

First, there is the difficulty of myopic, fragile human beings facing the reality of the God of glory. We all know Emily Dickinson's succinct dictum: “The truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind.” In C.S. Lewis's words: “God is the only comfort; he is also the supreme terror; the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only ally, and we have made ourselves his enemies.” And so a full frontal view of the Almighty, swift as light, sharper and more intense than a laser, with the energy of the universe flashing out of him, would paralyze, flatten, and annihilate us.

Perhaps that is why God gives us imagery, instilling his ideas and truths, his grace and love, into our minds through story and psalm and prophetic vision and dynamic illustration so that the truth dazzles us gradually.

Scripture is full of such imagery. All right, you may be thinking, we can all accept that story is implicit in metaphor, and analogy can bring truth closer and render it more memorable. But what are we to make of prophetic writings? Vivid and forceful, replete with brilliant visions, but also laden with enigmatic or oblique messages, one sometimes wonders why the divine directives were transmitted at all if they were so cryptic. The visions of Ezekiel and the revelations to Saint John in particular may seem like hallucinatory ravings. Why lamp-stands and burning swords? Why the tantalizing riddles about vials and scrolls and bowls and seals and pale horses and scarlet women and lightning and crystal seas in the Revelation? Why the bizarre “wheels within wheels full of eyes” of Ezekiel? Why all those unearthly beasts with their hybrid wings and horns and hooves and talons? Commentators interpret such symbolic language with widely divergent results.

Another question: God is Spirit. How, with our limited senses, may we see and hear this transcendent deity? And why, if our Creator wants us to trust him, to know him, to be his friends, does he seem deliberately to conceal or disguise himself? John Stott, the venerable and deeply orthodox Anglican priest and writer was quoted recently in Christianity Today as saying, “The invisibility of God is a great problem.” Why is truth so often presented as mystery? Isaiah cried out, in seeming frustration, “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.” The writer of the Proverbs proclaimed a paradox: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter.”

Even in the New Testament, which apart from the Revelation consists mainly of historical narrative and hortatory teaching, mystery abounds. It is defined as something secret, hidden, not known to all. There is the “mystery of iniquity,” but also the “mystery of godliness,” “the mystery of the gospel,” and “the mystery of the kingdom” There is “the mystery of marriage”—between man and woman, and between Christ and the Church—and “the mystery of Jew and Gentile united as one body in Christ.” There are others. All mystery feels like fog. It presents hidden-ness. It demands strong faith to walk into it believing that one day it will be de-mystified. We know from the Proverbs that people perish where the vision has been dimmed or extinguished. If we had been God, we tell ourselves smugly, we wouldn't have done it like that.

Jesus himself gives us a clue to why God does it like that. The Gospel of Mark records that “with many parables he spoke the word [to the people].... He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.” Matthew tells us that Jesus's followers asked “Why do you speak to the people in parables?” Jesus's answer:

To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.... This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. With them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: “You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive.” For this people's heart has grown dull and their ears heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed.... But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.

Jesus made a clear distinction between those who want to hear and understand, who yearn to see and believe, and those who deliberately clap their hands over their ears or shut out any illumination with tightly closed eyes. The inner sense organs, the eyes and ears of spiritual insight, created to receive impulses and signals from beyond, may become atrophied through disuse or disdain, and the result is indifference and dullness to the colorful inner landscape of creative insight and divine revelation.

“Puzzles are to be solved, but mysteries are to be experienced,” says Robert McAfee Brown. We, like those followers of Jesus, have glimpses of knowing, of seeing something transcendent that confirms our faith. But because it is faith —having to do with things not yet seen—we also must often live with the biblical experience of feeling baffled and puzzled and even skeptical.

And the greatest mystery of all was the incarnation—eternal Spirit, mighty God becoming flesh in Jesus Christ. Like Mary we ask, “How can this be?” And we are compelled to enter narrative mode as we try to penetrate the mystery. The disjunction brought about by the fall, the rupture in divine-human relations, compels us to ask the narrative queries: Who? What? When? Why? How?

The when is a complex matter of history and archeology. The why invites us into the arena of the Almighty's ongoing desire to bring humanity back into unity and harmony with himself, through what Peterson calls “passionate patience” as the Creator subjects himself to our human temporality. The what is an ongoing revelation of the divine. The how is quite beyond us—the visitation of the angel, the pregnancy of a virgin, the singing angels and the traveling star. But the who was God bringing within our human vision a form of himself that human beings like the Apostle John could see and hear and touch: “From the very first day we were there, taking it all in—we heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen!” (The translation is from Peterson's Message.) Another poem fragment, from “Slide Photopgraphy, Climbing the Mount of Olives ”:

how may we,

his distant pilgrims, know him real (whose

Garden presence still guards the gnarled,

secret olives)? Faith listens for his story

in the everyday neigh of a donkey,

an explosive obscenity, the threat of

armed soldiers, sweat on any dark skin,

the clink of coins, thorns pricking, metal

clanging on metal, a cloth tearing.

 

That's the kind of epiphany we need now. Sometimes it comes to us like a gift, out of the blue, and all we can say is Thank you. Thank you .

Recently, reading the narrative of Acts chapter 9, I felt a sudden jolt of insight as I reread the account of Saul's riveting experience on the road to Damascus . I felt I was Saul. I could feel the immense clarity that engulfed him as “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him,” and gave him a crystalline display of who he was from God's perspective, and the dramatic, life-changing reversal that was being asked of him. Entering that experience was like wine for me, or perfume, or the most warming sunshine. It was lucid, brilliant, vivid, unclouded. With Saul I had glimpsed God, and I understood with Saul that this energy from God was transformative. I could perfectly realize why he was transformed into Paul and was never the same again.

The impression lasted in my imagination for about a day, as I revisited and re-imagined it. In a crowded day I tried to find a quiet place where I could recapture it and live it again—that reality, that sense of Presence. Now all that I have is the memory of a memory. But even the memory remains transformative.

I am most aware of the action of the Holy Spirit in my life when a new image or phrase makes its way so insistently into my imagination that I have no option but to write it into a poem. I learn a lot from the poems themselves, those small presents freely given.

A story from the life of Denise Levertov is worth recounting here. I quote from her essay “Work that Enfaiths,” in her New and Selected Essays :

As I became, a few years ago, more and more occupied with questions of belief, I began to embark on what I'll call do-it-yourself theology. Sometimes I was merely trying to clarify my mind and note down my conclusions-in-process by means of the totally undistinguished prose of journal entries. Sometimes, however, it was in poems that the process took place, and most notably in the first such poem I wrote, a longish piece called Mass for the Day of Saint Thomas Didymus .... The poem began as an experiment in structure.

She thought to herself that it might be possible to adapt the framework of a choral piece that included parts of masses from many periods—medieval, renaissance, baroque, classical, and modern, not in chronological order, yet with a striking unity because of its liturgical framework. She writes:

I thought of my poem as an agnostic mass, basing each part on what seemed its primal character: the Kyrie a cry for mercy, the Gloria a praise-song, the Credo an individual assertion, and so on: each a personal, secular meditation. But a few months later, when I had arrived at the Agnus Dei, I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem—that long swim through waters of unknown depth—had been a conversion process.

In effect, Levertov had been transformed by her own writing as she experienced unintended changes in her understanding through the poem she herself was working on, and the efficacy of truth and its substance in her own unconscious.

We are all, whether we are conscious of it, swimming in waters of unknown depth. Saint Paul prayed for his friends that “the eyes of their hearts might be enlightened.” The story is there to be attended to, to be absorbed if we are willing to give it our attention, to follow the path of exploration and observation, eyes and ears alert, to follow the word, even giving over our conscious control of where it will lead. Madeleine L'Engle calls this way of life “becoming the servant of the word.”

Like Mary, with her available womb, like the ancient prophets, standing in the gap, a foot in two worlds, with souls attuned to both heaven and earth, like the psalmists listening for celestial tunes and translating them into the real poetry of both desolation and exaltation, like the Son of God himself become flesh, we fulfill our destinies by telling and re-telling the story that weaves together divine transcendence and earthy human experience.

Let us go forth together, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit! Alleluia, Alleluia!

 

Visit Luci Shaw as Image Artist of the Month for January '06

Issue #41• Winter '03-'04