Living in parallel

One of the advantages of being in the car for six hours as you travel to the Pocono mountains to see your friends is that you see a lot of colored leaves. That, and you catch up on your favorite podcasts. I cycle through TED radio hour, Dan Carlin or BBC’s history, Freakonomics, and the last Southridge and Woodland Heights sermons. That sometimes sparks conversation with the driver (to put it mildly; sometimes we have to agree to move back to the colors of the leaves). Our latest conundrum is why God told the Israelites to commit genocide. Oh. I know. This enormous problem has been contextualized in many, many ways. We find our way around it. One sermon I heard unsettled me by suggesting this solution: maybe God never said this in the first place. Ok... Never said this? I can handle contextualization through all four seasons, and as a teacher, I am quite comfortable with genres that aren’t meant to be taken literally (I’m still hoping with everyone else that in the end, there really will be dragons, but, sigh, I doubt the devil deserves the honor). But…never said this?  What does one do with such an untethering?

But I loved the reminder that we “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The Greek word “parable,” apparently, means to throw something down alongside something else so you can see them side by side and learn something about the one from the other. This is my life. This is novels and short stories and essays and poetry and art and dance and blogs. You lay two things down next to one another to learn more about both. You put two worlds side by side, like Mexico and Canada, or Oz and Kansas, or farmers and Palestinian audiences sitting, listening, on a mountainside, to find out what you can discover about one from the other. The Kingdom of God is like…

How rarely does our learning go in a straight line. I thought I knew what I was meant to be learning and then suddenly found myself here in a parallel life, where, after a view of corn and soy fields, I now see evergreens that look like my Group of Seven calendar, a bit straggly now in the cold wind and the rain. Here we are, living all these parallel lives, all these parable lives, and we look over at our sister’s life, and we learn from her some of the nuances of life we’ve missed because there is no way to learn it all straight. And the people who are the most different from us—little Ian chasing the ailing tabby around the sofa, yelling “Meow, meow,” the mother wearing a head scarf in the grocery line ahead of me, the bent-over scraggly woman dying of lung cancer and cursing for it, a husband who likes his omelets with everything included, even lettuce and radishes—these are the parallel lives that teach us the most.

Because God knows that we always miss the obvious. Like our kids, right? My son, in his last year at home when we exasperated one another demanded, “Why do I have to come to supper with you guys when I’m busy? What good is it if I don’t want to be here?” And the question takes your breath away because it’s so obvious. To you. You can’t think of a single word to offer as explanation. And you wait for the parables of life to offer the explanation for you, to show what you can’t say, to build a parallel road beside your table and bring him back to it. Which it has. There have been school cafeterias and suppers in other homes, and they have brought back the meaning of the common family meal to him now.  I have to admit I own a question like my son’s—a question about why I have to sit at this particular family table called Cancer and drink from this one particular common cup.

My guess is that all of our life, all of our lives, are parables, parallels to God’s life, and that he gives these lives to us to open our eyes to the meaning that is hidden for a time. And we will need all of our art to understand it, and all of our art to tell it.