The Slow Work: On the Poetry of Faith
A while back in this space, I told a story about my first really significant encounter with a personal faith . It was an experience that came about via the medium of stories, more specifically the stories of this particular person named Jesus who lived a long time ago in a far off place. I wouldn't have had that vocabulary at the time, but it was a "poetic" experience and encounter. It wasn't like I read what was said in the Gospel passages and concluded that the "arguments" it was making or the facts that were laid out seemed correct. Instead, my reaction happened in a different key, on a more emotional and symbolic and abstract level. Indeed, the reaction occurred at a moment when I was very consciously and very explicitly struggling with the "prose" dimensions of the faith I was being taught. And nothing in that experience really changed that struggle, except in the sense that it pointed to some other dimension to this whole faith thing, s