“Are you a Christian?” my friend asked, not as confrontation, but as invitation from one who intimately knows my spiral inward journey. I heard the chambers of my mind clang like iron gates, opening backwards through centuries of buried theologies I have embraced, rejected, embraced. Two thousand years of overlays, past early church fathers, mystics, holy men and women who addressed this question, to a time long ago when a small circle of believers stooped to draw a fish in the dirt rather than dare the question verbally. These early believers faced persecution and death if non-believers guessed their secret preference. My heart paused to soak in this image.
This fish, drawn so simply in the dirt — a recognition beyond familiarity: Do you know him? Do you believe? Has your life changed because of him? I stood, silent, in my mind’s eye and strained to articulate my own journey with this image/question. Do I believe in Jesus’ principles, his searching, his steadfast heart, his final gamble and transition into something other? Has knowing Jesus changed my life? No words were shared by those early faithfuls as they drew this fish in the dirt, only recognition. Connection. Intimacy of the deepest kind.
There’s something mystical about an image. An image is more articulate than a verbal question. It connects with the heart. It unleashes the imagination and draws in the soul. I can join fully with you in an image without squabbling over details of the truth of it. Images open, whereas words can so often be, as Saint-Exupery suggested, “a source of misunderstanding.” My heart knows how to answer. My head knows better than to answer. My soul feels full in the silence of it.
How do you bridge the chasm of experience and inner journey between one person and another? How do you trace your inner knowings and articulate a mystery? How do you step into a spotlight whose blazing eye often sees only in black and white? Pontious Pilate washed his hands of it. People usually argue and take sides about it.
Only the image joins us in it. That’s why Jesus used images to speak a mystery — of shepherds and mustards seeds and wedding banquets. He knew the image could teach, could carry his listeners where they needed to go, would allow them to bathe in the mystery of it rather than be entrapped by the answer in it.The answer had to happen in the heart of the receiver. Jesus trusted the image to do that.
My own dance with the Jesus Question has been a lovely encounter. My attempt to articulate the mystery of who he is for me changes over time but the presence of him never wavers. When my friend asked in earnest, “Are you a Christian?”, I felt safe and treasured. It was not a trick question or face-off, but an opportunity to reflect, to share our depths of soul.
Articulation of a mystery should be approached only if the intention is a joining. It is not in the agreement of the answer that we join, but in the promise to keep struggling until our question becomes inclusive rather than exclusive. The question should wander as the soul wanders, enjoying the shift of metaphors and meanings, leaving the imagination free to play.
The early Christians teach us a lesson in dialogue: the image can lead us. If a representative of every faith expression on earth met in a room and worked together on an image of the transcendent until everyone in the room could agree on an image that was inclusive of their belief, there would be less territorialism. There would be a modernday Pentecost with every image offered seen in the native image of every seeker.
Different theologies, one image. We could sit with one another in this image and be one. Not a meeting of the minds — no dogma distinguished — but a connection of the heart. Divine intelligence does indeed enter us through the heart, not mind. We could then, perhaps, move beyond the image to the experience of that holy transcendence beyond our naming.
I am reminded of a poem my friend Bob wrote years ago that urges us to “praise the irrational, the sweet compulsion to unname the works of earth,” “to turn poets loose on dictionaries,” and “to keep one question always covered, to make tomorrow worth coming back for.”
May we struggle to unname the truth of what we believe and to share in the sheer experience it affords us until we find ourselves in a new place of spiritual growth. It may be that we reaffirm our faith as it expresses itself today. It may be we go full circle, as T.S. Elliot says, and return again to the place we began and see it, “as if for the first time.”
If someone stoops to draw a fish in the dirt and waits for your recognition, fall silent. Do not allow words to divide you. Struggle with the image in your soul until it is ready to speak.