I lack a single passage within scripture or literature with which to define my faith. I'll argue instead that's because the field of possibilities is too rich -- and one might add in the case of literature, ever-growing. I doubt I'm alone in saying my beliefs can be inspired, magnified, by what I read, often in unlikely places.
But shouldn't that make sense? Follow the Jewish and Christian claim that we humans are made in God's image, and we should, occasionally, have the power to reflect glory through our artistic abilities. My ongoing encounter with literature, as with the visual arts (including film) can leave me feeling I've shared vicariously with authors in their uniquely illuminating experiences of the divine.
The Roman Catholic novelist Flannery O'Connor, who lived and died in the segregationist South of the last century, wrote a darkly comic short story, "Revelation," in which a "respectable" but thoroughly racist farm wife, reeling from an insult dealt her by an unstable adolescent earlier in the day, receives a shocking and unwanted vision of the breadth of God's unfathomable grace.
Out watering her hogs late in the evening, the woman, Ruby Turpin, sees a "purple streak" emerge from the sky. "She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth in a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven." They include everybody with whom she has never wished to associate -- crowds of poor whites, African-Americans and many others. "And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those, who like herself and Claud [her husband], had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away."
If you have beliefs you call religious, you will find yourself party to something that ever exceeds the human imagination. But you may see it reflected in part. So saying, I close with another remarkable writer, Emily Dickinson:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant--
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind--
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