Telling the Truth

“It is a world of magic and mystery, of deep darkness and flickering starlight. It is a world where terrible things happen and wonderful things too. It is a world where goodness is pitted against evil, love against hate, order against chaos, in a great struggle where often it is hard to be sure who belongs to which side because appearances are endlessly deceptive. Yet for all its confusion and wildness, it is a world where the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after, and where in the long run everybody, good and evil alike, becomes known by his true name....

That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.”

― Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale

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Dear Kate,

Our world is very small; the one in our head.

Yet we speak about it like it is bigger than anything, push our use of language to its limits, as if our version of reality is definitive and final, Truth itself, and the world needs to reconcile to that.

What comes after "Generation Z"?  A new sort of beast with zero of the entire alphabet at its disposal.  What is greater than "iconic" (now that pretty much everything is)?  What to call to suffer an injury bigger than a "trauma" (now that any kind of discomfort is a sort of that)?

Exaggerating?  Let's just say we are--but why not?  Life is big, very big--and growing, bursting at the seams of our words, never enough new vocabulary for it.

How many weather apps do you have?  (And why do you need more than one?)  If you are to download one new weather app a day, you could probably go through a month with a new forecast everyday.  Now, don't you find this strange, so many weather apps out there, so many of us downloading so many of them?  At the end, shouldn't there be only one weather, one Truth, the One that we are going to greet in our tomorrows?  Why not allow the voicing of Truth be monopolized, for the sake of simplicity, for the best use of effort and energy, for us to stop asking and just get on with life?

The thing is, we can't stop asking.  We asked once, didn't like the answer, so we ask again and ask someone else.  Got ourselves a good answer?  Still we will ask, just in case we heard it wrong, just in case Truth is false.  Just in case Truth becomes false, grows false.  Being made false.

But we are talking about prediction, you say, and of course we want to enlist the help of the best in predicting, and hence the many apps and many asks.  Point taken.

Then why do we curse the weatherperson when the Truth turns out false?  Shouldn't we have expected a degree of and make allowance for that, especially considering his prediction before was almost always spot-on?  Why do we blame the weatherperson for her best but imperfect attempt to articulate Truth, which is often reduced to a single pictorial representation and a few simple numbers that we can understand easily and quickly to make sense of life?  The Truth-teller's job is rather thankless, mustn't we admit, to squeeze a big world, a boundless reality, an ongoing Story, into our small head and smaller heart?

I am not writing about weather today, in case you ask.  And you should ask.

Yours, Alex