jayber crow

So I’ve decided it’s about time I got back on the blogging bike. It does me good if nothing else.

I’ve been inspired recently by the title of a book I haven’t read yet. It’s a book by that wise and joyful old man, Eugene Peterson, about the parables and prayers of Jesus, and it’s called Tell it Slant. Peterson borrowed the title from a line in a poem by Emily Dickinson:

Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.

I guess the idea is that sometimes we need to speak in a way that doesn’t attack the issue directly, but comes at things sideways. Sometimes we need to slip in the side rather than battering down the front door.

I’ve been thinking about how many of the writers who have most inspired me in the life of faith have been those who come at things from a poetic or artistic slant. Fiction writers like Wendell Berry and Marilynne Robinson. Imaginative spiritual writers like Frederick Buechner and G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. These writers move me and change me and do me good in ways that most of the books in the Christian bookshop don’t.

Most Christian books, like most sermons, come at things dead straight. They use the language of explanation and definition. They tell us what to believe and how to live. And they do it a clear, structured, systematic and logical way, with three points (each with their own subpoints) or seven steps or a 12-week programme.

The imaginative writers who most deeply feed my soul come at things slant. They don’t always define and explain everything, or reduce things to simple steps with diagrams. They hint and suggest and evoke. They paint a picture, tell a story, use a peculiar and poetic phrase. And something inside me shifts. It’s kind of hard to even write about because when you try to describe it directly it slips from your grasp. Lewsis said when he first read George MacDonald’s fantasies he fell in love with holiness or goodness, though he didn’t know that’s what it was, and his imagination was baptised. That sounds about right.

A lot of the biblical writers are masters at telling it slant. The puzzling parables of Jesus, the peculiar prophets, the delightfully strange Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, John’s bewildering Revelation. None of these deal in neatly packaged formulas or steps to holiness and happiness.That’s why they make us nervous. We prefer to stick with books that come at things in a more direct and linear fashion, like Paul’s letters. Or if we do pick up these books, our instinct is to tame them, to explain the ambiguities and strangeness away, to reduce them to a three-point form we are comfortable with. We don’t dare just let them be wild and strange, and see how they change us as we immerse ourselves in their imaginative world.

There’s something about coming at things slant that’s more true to the richness and complexity and ambiguity of life. Neat definitions and systems can’t do justice to the mystery of being human, never mind the mystery of God.

So all this has got me wondering about a few things. I’m wondering how those of us who talk about God in front of other people can learn to (at least sometimes) come at things slant. Are there ways of preaching that don’t just try to explain and define everything to death, but hint and suggest and evoke a world that is larger and more mysterious than we imagined? How can we use stories in a way that baptises the imagination and gets past the “watchful dragons” at the front door of people’s minds (and not just as a way of “illustrating” one of our explanatory points)? How can we rise to the challenge posed by Walter Brueggeman and become “poets speaking against a prose world”? I’m an explainer and definer by instinct. In my braver moments I even think that’s one of my “gifts.” Yet the writers who most inspire me are novelists and poets and artists. Is there a way to marry together clarity and ambiguity, logic and imagination? C.S. Lewis still provides the best proof that it might be possible.

I’ve also been wondering how we make space in our church communities for those who instinctively come at things slant – the artistic and poetic and intuitive. My guess is that they don’t often get asked to preach or lead small groups or chair committees. But we need their voices. When we do give space for artistic expression, we usually prefer that it should be direct and unsubtle – basically a three point sermon in the form of a song or painting or novel. How do we make space for artistic explorations of life and faith that are puzzling and provocative and strange and messy, like life itself?

And I’m wondering how we make space for people to come to faith, and grow in their faith, in a way that is uniquely suited to their own story. Our evangelistic courses seem to assume that most people come to faith through the front door, by systematically working through various questions in biblical apologetics. I’m quite sure that plays an important role. But people also become Christians because they fell in love and then got their heart broken and then read an article in a newspaper and heard a beautiful piece of music and watched their Christian friend go through a bereavement and a hundred other strange and slanted pathways. That’s the mystery of the way the Spirit moves in a human story.

I’ve always loved Frederick Buechner’s description of how he came to faith through an almost random phrase in a sermon:

Again and again he said that Jesus was crowned in the hearts of those who believed in him.I remember thinking that this was a nice enough image, as images in sermons go…And then he went on just a few sentences more and he said that this coronation of Jesus in the believer’s heart took place among confession – and I thought, yes, yes, confession – and tears, he said – and I thought tears, yes perfectly plausible that the coronation of Jesus in the believing heart should take place among confession and tears.

And then with his head bobbing up and down so that his glasses glittered, the preacher said in his odd, sandy voice, that the coronation of Jesus took place among confession and tears and then, as God was and is my witness, great laughter, he said. Jesus is crowned among confession and tears and great laughter, and at the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the Great Wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue at 73^rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.

My guess is that most of us grow in the life of faith through a similarly slanted and haphazard pathway. How do we allow for this and encourage this in the life of the church, when it’s so much easier to assume growth happens the same way for everyone, through the right kind of sermon or book or discipleship course?

As you can see, I have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. I’m just wondering about these things, and I’m wondering if any of you are wondering too…?