A few weeks before my family vacationed at a camp ground on the shore of Lake Michigan, I picked out a new bicycle—sweet cherry red and slightly too big for me, but I would “grow into it,” my mother said.
So, after setting up our tents and stacking the wood by the pit, I mounted my 10-speed Schwinn and lit out like a struck match to catch up with my older brothers as they rode around the camp ground. The slant sun through the trees, the soft lake breeze cheered me as I peddled and peddled all the way to the front gate of the park. My brothers were a blaze in the wind beyond my reaching, so I turned back toward our campsite.
As I rode, I sat tall on my new bike like a king on his steed returned from routing his foe. So enthralled was I by the power of my 10 speeds that I failed to notice the camp ground was divided into two perfect ovals each accessible by a separate fork in the main road. Approaching our campsite, I discovered different people had taken up residence where I thought I had pitched my tent. Not deterred by my confusion, I circled the grounds again and again looking at every site but always coming back to the location where my family was supposed to be.
They were gone. Gone.
In the masthead of this website, I quote this line from a Thornton Wilder novel:
We know more than we know we know.
I’m not sure that’s true. Just walk into a library and you’ll realize how much you don’t know. Or, grow one day older and the effect will be much the same. I seemingly know less and less with every turn of the earth.
The author Frederick Buechner says that it’s through the stories of our lives, the very living of our lives, where we come to know ourselves and the One who created us. The poems and reflections shared on this website are tests of his theory. As I review my life here, shall I find in these bits and bytes some sense to a world that seems so nonsensical? And what of the God who made it?
Something I want to know is what my body is for. This imperfect, dying thing that desires physical intimacy with other men has been the cause of such dis-ease and distress. Why doesn’t it want to “know a woman” (a good biblical phrase)? Why can’t it catch up with my brothers and almost every other man in the world?
Lord knows, much of Christendom doesn’t have patience for my unknowing. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. God doesn’t make gay people. What else is there to know? I can’t exactly say, but I sense my life and my body bear mysteries that turn with rotations directed by the Spirit—that will get me to ends I cannot imagine today.
Take another look at Wilder’s quote.
We know more than we know we know.
As an American, I read this with a narrow, individualistic frame. But it’s not just I who know, we know.
Yes, I know a few things—some small somethings of our big God—but all of us together know a whole lot more. My story (and what can be learned through it) belongs not only to me. In fact, I can’t understand my story without the help of others to interpret it back to me. And, of course, our stories interweave like double-helixes—the building blocks of all life.
The world is not a vacuum. Nothing is isolated. Everything depends on everything else. God seemingly designed it that way. Every person bears the image of the living God, so too every tree, every flowering bush, every rabbit that darts left then right. None of these things are God, but together we show forth the goodness, the creativity, the beauty of the One who authors every story.
As I circled and circled that camp ground, I wept. I was frightened. I felt so alone and disconnected from those who love me. I thought I knew exactly where they were, where I belonged, but I couldn’t find the spot.
Eventually, I stopped in the middle of the road because I couldn’t sob and peddle at the same time. As the tears wet my handlebars, I let go into the loving care of a middle-aged couple who came out from their camper to help a lost boy.
They knew.
They took me to the other side of the camp ground, the other oval where my family didn’t realize I had gone missing. How many of us are missing, and we don’t even know it?
We know more than we know we know.
Everyone’s needed. Everything means something in God’s ecosystem. Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel of John that we would be one, like Jesus and the Father are one, is certainly a prayer for unity. But that unity is more than simply our witness of God’s perfect dance of oneness. It is a knowing across difference that reveals a larger image of the amazing and diverse God we worship.
Whatever we believe about gay marriage, about immigration, about baptism—wherever we find ourselves in our stories—we must bear patiently with one another, we must stick together not leaving anyone behind because of the speed of their bike (or if they have no bike). In so doing, we will all together grow into the likeness of Christ.
Of course, I don’t know this for certain, but we might.
Everything is one. No matter how fast we run, how much space we put between ourselves, we feel the pull. It knows the center holds more promise—though the sun’s core burns hottest, though the human heart beats, we must embrace its heat. ~ AJ Saur
Eighth Day Aches 