"If I Tell You..."

[Image: The Crucifixion with Virgin and Mary Magdalene …, center panel, Pietro Perugino, 1482/1485, National Gallery of Art, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, public domain]

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Every year I am struck all over again by the narrative beauty and authority of the text that rests at the heart of my faith. It’s astonishing to me that every human effort, whether deliberately malicious or keenly subtle or clumsily ignorant, to distort and ruin this text for us cannot distort or ruin it for me. I can’t account for this. The fact quietly bypasses reason without, however, outraging reason on the way.

I know that this means I’ve been lucky. I know it also means I’ve been sheltered. I know that many have had it ruined for them by others’ (mis)use of it as a lever or a shiv or a scourge. Or a spear. A way to pierce a heart that—hadn’t it already suffered enough?

Thought fails here. The only response I can bring to bear is that another heart was broken by it first. Another mouth spoke first out of its heart’s fullness: “If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer.” But also somehow: “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above.”

I don’t expect to make a rational synthesis of this. I am no theologian. I happen to have had some advantages—some of which also constitute, in themselves, real and hampering limitations.

One of those advantages is to know that I am not the point of life at all but just a locus of possible observation thereof. A line of vision. But this is also a limitation whenever it gets in the way of my understanding that the story at the heart of the universe is one that says, You are the point. And so is everyone around you. Because I AM and I will not leave you orphaned.

If someone says this sounds too good to be true I can only shrug and agree and admit that I think it is true anyway. We’re all skeptics now, by virtue of atmosphere if not by tendency of disposition. We swim in polluted water. We live amid constant betrayal of trust. We have to ask, again and again, “What is truth?” And “How do I know?”

And the only real answer we can ever offer is:

We hear a voice, and we know it.