Truth Speaking

Dear Eugene,

A friend told me after reading Rowan Williams she could finally understand what she used to find incomprehensible about me.

I'll need to elaborate on that, and, in Rowan Williams fashion, I think there are twenty different angles I could open things up but let me choose a few.

Rowan Williams is a truth speaker.  He speaks in a way that honors the truth that he speaks about.  The fact that I suppose many will find my last statement having no true significance speaks about how untrue we often speak.  It happens on the pulpit as often as it does in a mall.  I tell it like it is and you should take it likewise.  Neither of us expect to be moved by my truth-speaking, not for even an inch, but please come again next Sunday.  Would that be debit or credit?

How we speak speaks about the Whats we speak about.  The medium is the message; the words are the deeds.  "The only preachers, the only lovers, with anything to say will be the ones who can make their own the frustration of the despised, because they have recognised with tears, with irony, with anger perhaps, but also with acceptance their poverty: that, whatever the outward securities (social, professional, religious), they too are mutilated."  So said Williams.  Would someone who has just spoken these words come down from his pedestal, shake your hand, and then send you off, send you back to your own frustrations, the same ones you carried with you when you first walked in as he began to speak?  The words are the deeds; the deeds are more than words.

Yes, I've found myself incomprehensible probably for--let me see--as long as I've lived.  The pastors, all three of them, from a church I used to attend a while back, gave me the same prescription: you'll just need to take the plunge for God, now that you know the truth.  My problem was I hesitate, lack commitment, too calculating maybe, doubt-stricken, so they diagnosed.  They were very eager to get things going for God and wondered why I wouldn't get things going for the church, why I would waste time articulating matters on the far margin of truth and human stories at the peripheral of holy ideals.  You know the truth, for God's sake!  Now do it!

Well, good luck having someone speak on your behalf when you were young but not so clueless to know the clues on your hands however little are from a place called heaven, somewhere that is not here but not too far away either, touches the corner of your eyes but now-you-see-it-now-you-don't.  The quick glimpses of heaven, little clues useless to a world of manufactured truths, as you know, Eugene, are, more often than not, given between the lines of truthful stories well told.

That's when I was in real trouble, suggesting church people to read "secular" stories, asking questions when the Bible is supposed to have given us all the answers and thus no further questioning is needed, imploring the know-it-all to acknowledge, in front of God, if God is really who we say God is, that we know not much about anything, least of it about God and our own deceitfulness in claiming our knowledge of Him, that having pieces of information about Him does not validate our pinning Him down, to know Him at all is to love Him and to love Him is not merely about getting facts straight and "doing His wills" as the church dictates what His wills are.

Now all these, how did I even start to speak about them, with the little clues on my hands that told me not all was well in my "Christian worldview" but I must continue to pay my dues with church attendance and doctrinal adherence?

And God spoke.

He spoke through you, my pastor, and you gently put things together for me, words that create new and beautiful, meaningful things out of formless void.  I never knew knowing the truth would actually create in a person the spirit to, before anything, speak gently and thoughtfully, hesitantly, even and not infrequently to the point of shutting up altogether, like how you spoke.  My background tells me when you have "the truth" in your hand you earn the right to speak like a winner, an enlightener, a wise teacher, a better-than-decent person who knows what is right and is doing it almost always.

I read about Rowan Williams in your masterpiece, a cornerstone of a read in my life, "Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places," and the rest is history, still unveiling, and let me unveil it on a different day as this letter is getting long.  For now I will just say: truth-speakers speak the same differently.

Thank you for your words.

Yours, always, Alex