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How do you talk about things that seem beyond words? This is how I felt about trying to blog the other day about my sad fighting friends and their rightful condemnation of the church as it had presented itself to them. A few writers'/speakers' musings on this topic have come before my eyes today. The first is by Stephen King in the short story, The Body.

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, the landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

Peter Marshall puts a spiritual spin on this idea when he sermonized:

"There are some things that can never be proven by argument, by logic, or by reason; things that are matters of perception--not of proof. There are things that can never be poured into the cold moulds of human speech."

So much of what we've experienced this last year is exactly like that...a thing of perception, a thing you can't share if you are trying to offer it with a side-order of proof. A thing you'd love to tell, if you thought you'd ever begin to find an understanding ear.

Dr. Marshall's wife described a representative incident, one of those things that is all about perception...it was at Dr. Marshall's funeral service. Several pastors were involved in the ceremony and were gathered in the pastor's study. As the time for the service approached, "...Mr. Bridge, the associate minister, asked the seven men to line up preparatory to their filing on to the rostrum...'Dr. Pruden, will you go to the head of the line, please?' As Dr. Pruden moved to the front of the line, he smiled broadly. As if at a signal, several of the other ministers began to laugh." This levity seemed disrespectful to the associate pastor, until Dr. Pruden explained it to him. "Once a week five or six of us ministers used to have lunch together at the cafeteria just down the street. The group would be so engrossed in conversation that the cafeteria line would move off and leave us. " Somehow, Pruden was always the one to notice and close the gap, but Peter would see this and say " 'There goes Ed to the head of the line, gang. Always afraid the food's going to run out.' " When these ministers heard the associate pastor call Pruden to first place, they said it was like Peter himself stood there, saying, "I see you made it again, Ed. Don't you dare go in there to my people and lead them in any service mourning over me. I'm still very much alive, still with you--still one of the gang--and don't forget it."

That kind of perception-reality that is hard to put into words...all the more palpable when it touches multiple people simultaneously: this is what we've been experiencing. Many people hear such stories and respond to the teller's wide-eyed childlike wonder with a half-irritated impatience. I don't blame them. I was like that, too, for many years. No-nonsense faith was the only acceptable faith for me. Where argument, logic and reason failed, time-honored tradition would step in to keep faith acceptable in its public, corporate domain. Such a dry faith is easy to maintain as long as you turn your nose up at the perceptive risky-faith types. It is easy, that is until you get drawn in to this kind of perceiving. At that point, you either redefine everything you knew about "relationship" with God and other people, or you start weaving baskets...