fireplace: the truth behind the lies

I hate reading Gert Fram. Reading Gert Fram never fails to make me cry. I love reading Gert Fram. It never fails to uplift. Such powerful, evocative words, packed into a mere nine pages. And it is nothing more than fiction. Or maybe, nothing less than fiction.

I was intending to write about the truth behind stories, until I got caught up in googling the phrase “Jesus spoke in parables”. This led me to several interesting sites as well as several kooky sounding ones.

I caught myself thinking as I browsed one site, that this person has it so right… and so wrong.
The next question was: how do I know if she is really right or wrong?
And the question really is this: how do you know that what you believe is true?

Last week at cell, we were asked to share our salvation story.
Salvation stories are intensely personal and difficult to share. Or relatively easy, depending where you stand. How astounding and miraculous your story was, or how mundanely simple. I don’t know.

Maybe it’s this disconnect I have between my emotions and my head, where I can doubt the same things I say I believe in the same span of a thought. Maybe it’s the way that nothing really seems real anymore. And yet everything is. And to be intensely in the moment is of necessity to be intensely physical, to sing louder than anyone else, to dance to the rhythm and tune, because otherwise, I am caught in the web of my head which clinically and analytically asks “and why are you feeling what you are feeling? What are you planning to do next? Where do you intend to go with this thought?” or also, “why do you not feel anything anymore?” And sometimes I believe I understand the need to cut physically, the way I sometimes need to wound my soul in order to feel something, if only pain. Because sometimes pain feels good.

And yet faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

And maybe I’ll tell of the truth behind the lies after all, because a well-placed story at a well-timed moment tears your heart in ways the bare-faced facts could never do. Because by stepping out of yourself in that short span of time, you open yourself to be vulnerable to the Story that loops in endless sequences, in countless revisions, in trickles of narrative, or floods of words; the one that always says in the end that man needs a hero. And sometimes the hero echoes that of God, and sometimes, it echoes the works of man, but the immutable truth remains that one man cannot ever save himself.

And maybe Jesus spoke in parables because sometimes it’s the only way to get through.

p/s go read Gert Fram.