My whole heart is bowed

(Words for the quoted text are attributed to Thomas Aquinas, taken from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982)

Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen,
who thy glory hiddest 'neath these shadows mean;
low, to thee surrendered, my whole heart is bowed,
tranced as it beholds thee, shrined within the cloud.

There are things that you have to feel to believe. I believe that. I have a hard time imagining myself as a purely intellectual Christian. Jesus makes sense to me on a level that's either above or below my rational mind depending on how you look at it. Don't worry---I'm not going to tell you I see God in the clouds. They are lovely though. I'm going to tell you something even crazier than that. I felt the gospels were True before I ever had a rationale for believing them.

I was in college and teaching Sunday school when I finally found a way to articulate what I meant by Truth vs truth. Truth, the Truth, is something that's more real than facts. Love is more than feeling a certain way about someone. Stealing isn't fair. Cheating on a test or forging a paper hurts you more than your instructor. Best friends stick around even when you're ugly or fat or in an awful mood. I had two little girls in my Sunday School class then and they were sisters. I didn't know how to talk to little kids back then; thank God their daddy was a history professor and they used to people using large words and forgetting they were both under the age of ten. One day they asked me if one of the stories in the gospel really happened and if they did, how did we know that? I thought about it for a minute and decided to tell them a story: (Most of ya'll will know it.)

"Once there was a daddy who had two sons who worked in the family business. The older son worked hard and did whatever his daddy told him to do. The younger son decided he was done working for his daddy and asked his father for his share of the money. This was a really mean thing to do since normally the younger son wouldn't get this money until his daddy had died so it was a little like saying his father was dead to him. The younger son went far away and spent all his money on things he probably shouldn't. He went out to fancy places and he ate and drank all his money way. He found work feeding pigs---which is really bad because he was Jewish and they aren't supposed to touch or eat pigs---but he was so hungry that he took the job and found himself tempted to eat the food he was supposed to feed the pigs. Then the boy realized that even the farm hands at his daddy's house had enough to eat and he decided to go home. He made up his mind he was going to beg his father to let him be a farm hand--since he'd been such a jerk and didn't deserve to be called his father's son anymore. He went home and he was coming up on the house--they had a long driveway--and rehearsing what he was going to say when his father saw him from a distance. He ran up to him and gave him a big hug! Then he told everybody to break out the good china and get ready because they were going to have a party."

I'm sure you know the rest of the story. I told the little girls that Jesus used to tell this story to show us what God was like. Then I asked them if it mattered if there was ever really a Daddy who had two boys like that and they both got it right--it doesn't matter. What matters is that the story is True in the sense that it tells us what God is like. It's True and some of it may have actually happened.

Scripture is like that. It's not all good literature. Some of it would be flat out horrible as literature and YES I'm talking about the gospels with the exception of John. The Gospel of John is the exception because it's pretty. The other three aren't. They read like what they are: first century histories. Please note the words first century. We all know Matthew, Mark and John probably didn't write the gospels named for them and if you have half a brain you won't have a problem with that. I may give Luke a pass but let's keep in mind that Leslie isn't a bible scholar.

So I felt these stories were True before I decided it was probably safe to believe that most of them actually happened. The gospels I mean. I felt that they held a powerful thing in them. I knew it was something I couldn't capture or quantify or control or God forbid--memorize to use as a weapon against my foes. My whole heart was bowed. It's still bowed. I won't spoil it by telling you why I believe it isn't fabricated because that too technical and a bit gross for this entry.

I may write more on this later: For now, here's a pretty cloud picture.