![\"TheHobbit_Sdtk_Cover_1425px_300dpi1[1]\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2013\/07\/thehobbit_sdtk_cover_1425px_300dpi11.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe day after Christmas a few years ago I went with my son to see Peter Jackson\u2019s movie version of \u201cThe Hobbit,\u201d Part One.\u00a0I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I knew I would. I have been a Tolkienphile since my early teens, when The Hobbit<\/i> was assigned by Mrs. Lord (a great name for a teacher) in my high school honors freshman English class. I loved it, and innocently said to Mrs. Lord \u201cI like this\u2014has this guy written anything else?\u201d \u201cAs a matter of fact he has,\u201d she replied, and turned me on to the wonders of The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. It set off a love affair with J. R. R. Tolkien that has lasted for over forty years. Although I have strayed in the past few years, my first encounter with hobbits, dwarves, wizards, elves, orcs, and humans in Middle Earth caused me, going forward, to religiously read all four books once every three years. And I suspect that had Mrs. Lord not assigned The Hobbit<\/i>, I might not have discovered Tolkien for many years after, if ever. It was one of my first examples of the joys of unexpected literary discoveries. It probably also explains why I have never read a word of the \u201cHarry Potter\u201d series\u201d\u2013the next generations Tolkien, I suppose.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a short novel\u2014a novella, really\u2014that can easily be read in one day, especially if you have a cold and are resisting the siren call of work-related emails that you want to ignore until after New Year\u2019s Day. In the midst of the story about a world-famous food critic who has been told that he has no more than two days to live, I read a sentence that has stuck with me over the past several months, even as the details of Barbery\u2019s story drift away. \u201cLife exists only by virtue of the osmosis between words and facts, where the former encase the latter in ceremonial dress.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n As I get older and become more able to put years of teaching experience and continuing personal transition and process into some semblance of context and perspective, I find myself placed often at the intersection of words and facts. Facts, the one damn thing after another that provide the stuff of reality, are naked and uninteresting until shaped by a context, energized by a story, or illuminated by narrative light. Yet we live in a world which often insists on just the facts. As the insurance investigators tell Pi Patel in Life of Pi<\/i>, after listening to his story of survival involving a hyena, an orangutan, a tiger, and a carnivorous island, \u201cfor the purposes of our investigation we want to know what really<\/b> happened. If I have become convinced of anything in the twenty-five\u00a0years that I have been teaching, it is that true learning only happens in the company of the desire to see higher, further, or differently. Accordingly, in the narrative of teaching and learning the atomic facts of reality are dressed up in various styles. Sometimes the dress is formal, sometimes casual, sometimes liturgical, and sometimes humorous. Occasionally learning happens best when facts are dressed as for a masquerade, deliberately seeking to conceal what is underneath. Almost never are facts served up naked, except to illustrate how dull and lifeless facts in the raw are, compared with what we might find in the word wardrobe to dress them in.<\/p>\n The inadequacy of both naked facts and the words we dress them in is shockingly apparent when entering the realm of religious conviction. This is especially the case when the religion in question involves sacred texts, words that supposedly carry divine weight in some fashion or another. PS: My new book,\u00a0Freelance Christianity<\/em>, has just been published by Cascade Books! If you like my blog, you\u2019ll love my book! For a full description of the book, as well as reviews and endorsements (including one from NY Times bestselling author Kathleen Norris), click on the \u201cPublications\u201d tab at the top of my blog. Thanks!<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The depths of divine love cannot be exhausted by words, by speech, by texts, by facts dressed up in even the fanciest garb. These depths must be lived in and inhabited. And so the story goes\u2014we are the continuing incarnation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":10410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,14,21,35,40,61,62,66,73,80,91,94],"tags":[242,355,475,503],"class_list":["post-2492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism-2","category-bible","category-books","category-christianity","category-faith","category-god","category-literature","category-liturgy","category-movies","category-philosophy","category-religion-2","category-stories","category-teaching","tag-god","tag-muriel-barbery","tag-tolkien","tag-yann-martel"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>I still enjoy the unforeseen pleasures of a new literary find. I recently reread one of my favorite novels, Muriel Barbery\u2019s The Elegance of the Hedgehog <\/i>and asked myself, upon finishing, a Mrs. Lord question: \u201cI wonder if she\u2019s written anything else?\u201d Thanks to the wonders of Amazon, I found out in less than a minute that The Elegance of the Hedgehog<\/i> is <\/a>Barbery\u2019s second novel, that she studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale\u00a0Superieure, and worked for a number of years in France as a philosophy teacher. I immediately ordered her first novel, Gourmet Rhapsody<\/i>, to read during the break between semesters.<\/p>\n<\/a>\u00a0We want a simpler story for our report, one the company can understand and that we can all believe.\u201d But the notion that the truth is nothing more than facts properly assembled in appropriate order is itself the result of a particular narrative structure, a structure guaranteed to produce stagnation and mediocrity. \u201cI know what you want,\u201d Pi responds. \u201cYou want a story that won\u2019t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won\u2019t make you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>Alasdair MacIntyre tells us that humans are story-telling animals, and as such we package the facts of our lives for ourselves and for each other in word-woven stories. But just as facts are, of themselves, incapable of conveying truth, so also it is often impossible for even the most skilled storyteller and communicator to encompass the highest truths with words. Human beings know this intuitively. Anyone who has ever tried to express the depths of real love finds that the reality always exceeds what can be expressed in words. As Reverend Ames says in Marilynne Robinson\u2019s\u00a0Gilead<\/em>, \u201cyou must not judge what I know by what I find words for.\u201d \u201cActions speak louder than words\u201d is more than a truism or sound bite\u2014it is an acknowledgement that the truth often must be shown rather than spoken or written about.<\/p>\n<\/a>I am a product of a version of Christianity that treats the Bible as literal fact\u2014this leads to shallowness, agnosticism, atheism, or at worst, rigid self-righteousness. When the \u201cfacts\u201d are dressed up in ornamental dress, the product is stories, metaphors, doctrine, or dogma, depending on the style and the word-fashion designer. But embedded at the heart of the Christian narrative is a challenge both attractive and provocative. As with all of the greatest truths, the most dynamic aspects of the relationship between the human and the divine cannot be reduced to words.<\/p>\n<\/a>There is a reason why the writer of the Gospel of John begins by considering divine wordplay. \u201cIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.\u201d What sort of ceremonial dress is this? Alfred Korn puts it this way: \u201cGod is spirit, but at some point in history God became Word. This process of finding words for what cannot be expressed is incarnation.\u201d As the Gospel writer tells us, \u201cThe Word became flesh and dwelt among us.\u201d The depths of divine love cannot be exhausted by words, by speech, by texts, by facts dressed up in even the fanciest garb. <\/a>These depths must be lived in and inhabited. And so the story goes\u2014we are the continuing incarnation. As Saint Athanasius provocatively said, \u201cGod became human so that we might become God.\u201d The Word continues to become flesh and live with us, because the Word is<\/b> us. The life of faith is the life spent exploring what that amounts to and living it out.<\/p>\n