The First Aporia
After the disappointment of Fires and Clouds, you’d think I’d leave the idea of a religious paper alone right?
Nope.
The summer before I left for Waterloo, I convinced the church I was attending to apply for three grants for summer employment to start a multi-faith newspaper. They only got approved for one position so I started to try to put together another paper by myself.
After just a few weeks, I decided it was impossible, so instead, I proposed an e-zine. The church approved, and Aporia was born.
Unfortunately, after my hard drive crashed a couple of years ago, I lost most of the content. All I was able to recover was the first and last editorial (cleverly called “My Word!”). I’ll post the first today and the last tomorrow.
“Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads to dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend”
Those lines are from a Bruce Cockburn song called “Pacing the Cage” on his Charity of Night cd. They puzzled an early reviewer who interpreted them in light of Cockburn’s Christian faith. She couldn’t understand why the best map (which she assumed was the Bible) would not guide a person or how darkness could be friendly, since in the Bible darkness is almost always used as a metaphors for evil or a fatal lack of understanding.
But it made perfect sense to me. It ties into a theory I’ve had for a long time: Christianity is hard and doesn’t always make sense.
Of course I didn’t make this up all on my own. I had a lot of help from a woman named Flannery O’Connor who wrote a few novels and essays about that very theory.
In one of her novels, Wise Blood, she introduces the world to Hazel Motes, the son of a Southern Baptist minister who is trying to run away from God, but is having a little difficulty. He sees “Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted to stay was Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling a familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.”
O’Connor’s reference to walking on water might help put this all into perspective for some of you who are still a little sceptical. In Matthew 14, Peter steps out of a fishing boat and starts walking on water towards Jesus. Before Peter gets there, he realizes just how big of a storm he is walking into and he starts to get scared, and when he gets scared, he starts to sink.
Hazel has this in the back of his mind as he’s running away. For him, following Jesus means setting aside all the things he’s certain of and perusing something he doesn’t know down a path he’s unfamiliar with and can’t even see. He doesn’t have to see the storm to be scared. The unknown is frightening enough.
In the end he does give in and moves into the dark to persue Jesus. That’s where the novel ends, but somehow I don’t think it would be smooth sailing from there on in. Somehow I imagine Hazel Motes still afraid of the water, still not really sure where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, still cautious about taking another step deeper into the darkness, even though he is moving towards Jesus, “the pinpoint of light.”
This whole process can be summed up in one word: aporia. Aporia is one of those neat Greek words that means a whole bunch of different things at the same time. It’s when you don’t know where to go next; when you can’t see any path at all; when there are so many paths that you don’t know which one to choose; when you realize which path to choose but can’t or won’t take it...etc.
Somehow it describes my own faith as well. For me, being a Christian means not having all the answers, not understanding everything, not really knowing where I’m going and how I’m going to get there, but still perusing Jesus who I don’t really understand or know very well. Every once in a while I think I understand things, and I’ll try to put all the pieces together and make sense of everything. Then something usually happens that destroys all my theories and I’m left in the dark again, more confused than ever, more scared than ever. Sometimes, in those situations, I feel like giving up, or just staying where I am. Eventually, Jesus comes to me, swinging in the trees of my mind, calling me deeper into the darkness, towards Him. And I finally take another step.
That’s when I feel closest to God. When I’ve stopped trying to understand and explain everything, and I just give in.
And that’s why, sometimes the darkness is my friend.
(1998)
Nope.
The summer before I left for Waterloo, I convinced the church I was attending to apply for three grants for summer employment to start a multi-faith newspaper. They only got approved for one position so I started to try to put together another paper by myself.
After just a few weeks, I decided it was impossible, so instead, I proposed an e-zine. The church approved, and Aporia was born.
Unfortunately, after my hard drive crashed a couple of years ago, I lost most of the content. All I was able to recover was the first and last editorial (cleverly called “My Word!”). I’ll post the first today and the last tomorrow.
“Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads to dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend”
Those lines are from a Bruce Cockburn song called “Pacing the Cage” on his Charity of Night cd. They puzzled an early reviewer who interpreted them in light of Cockburn’s Christian faith. She couldn’t understand why the best map (which she assumed was the Bible) would not guide a person or how darkness could be friendly, since in the Bible darkness is almost always used as a metaphors for evil or a fatal lack of understanding.
But it made perfect sense to me. It ties into a theory I’ve had for a long time: Christianity is hard and doesn’t always make sense.
Of course I didn’t make this up all on my own. I had a lot of help from a woman named Flannery O’Connor who wrote a few novels and essays about that very theory.
In one of her novels, Wise Blood, she introduces the world to Hazel Motes, the son of a Southern Baptist minister who is trying to run away from God, but is having a little difficulty. He sees “Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted to stay was Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling a familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.”
O’Connor’s reference to walking on water might help put this all into perspective for some of you who are still a little sceptical. In Matthew 14, Peter steps out of a fishing boat and starts walking on water towards Jesus. Before Peter gets there, he realizes just how big of a storm he is walking into and he starts to get scared, and when he gets scared, he starts to sink.
Hazel has this in the back of his mind as he’s running away. For him, following Jesus means setting aside all the things he’s certain of and perusing something he doesn’t know down a path he’s unfamiliar with and can’t even see. He doesn’t have to see the storm to be scared. The unknown is frightening enough.
In the end he does give in and moves into the dark to persue Jesus. That’s where the novel ends, but somehow I don’t think it would be smooth sailing from there on in. Somehow I imagine Hazel Motes still afraid of the water, still not really sure where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, still cautious about taking another step deeper into the darkness, even though he is moving towards Jesus, “the pinpoint of light.”
This whole process can be summed up in one word: aporia. Aporia is one of those neat Greek words that means a whole bunch of different things at the same time. It’s when you don’t know where to go next; when you can’t see any path at all; when there are so many paths that you don’t know which one to choose; when you realize which path to choose but can’t or won’t take it...etc.
Somehow it describes my own faith as well. For me, being a Christian means not having all the answers, not understanding everything, not really knowing where I’m going and how I’m going to get there, but still perusing Jesus who I don’t really understand or know very well. Every once in a while I think I understand things, and I’ll try to put all the pieces together and make sense of everything. Then something usually happens that destroys all my theories and I’m left in the dark again, more confused than ever, more scared than ever. Sometimes, in those situations, I feel like giving up, or just staying where I am. Eventually, Jesus comes to me, swinging in the trees of my mind, calling me deeper into the darkness, towards Him. And I finally take another step.
That’s when I feel closest to God. When I’ve stopped trying to understand and explain everything, and I just give in.
And that’s why, sometimes the darkness is my friend.
(1998)
posted by deadwriter at 9:40 p.m.
1 Comments:
Holy crap. It's hard for me to believe that the summer of Aporia was 1998. Nearly seven years ago? We're getting old, Deadwriter. I feel like where you were seven years ago is where I am now. I can't really picture my beliefs becoming what yours are today, though.
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