TELL IT SLANT
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 —
Emily Dickinson
Occasionally, I read what I wrote earlier in papers, blogs, or even email exchanges (sometimes forced to read as people respond to my writings), and I must admit, it often feels too cerebral, detached, and jumpy, lacking detailed fillers.
I am an impatient writer, not willing to take time and space to carefully explain things. I am a jumpy writer, leaping from one thing to another with little or no explanations in between. Some have asked how did you go from here to there? I must confess, I have a monkey-mind, not uncharacteristic of type 7 on Enneagram… Another confession. I am a terrible instruction reader or follower. In fact, I can’t. It drives me nuts. My wife and my children know. I messed up more than I care to remember when assembling IKEA furniture because I just would not follow the detailed and tedious (my language) but sometimes helpful instructions. In a related vein, as I write each blog post, I can almost hear my wife advising me to give examples from my life, which I have done from time to time. The credit goes to my wife if those examples made sense and enhanced the content…
It is true that my writing has helped me immensely (especially during the sabbatical) as it forced me to process retrospectively as well as prospectively. I am aware that what I process is not necessarily the objective truths (and will never be), but subjectively interpreted and couched truths. It is how I make sense out of who I am and how I perceive the past, present, and future. I suppose it is my way of telling myself truths and telling them slant. In many ways, I realize afresh that I can’t handle the direct truths, for I am prone to pollute the truths with my narrow and limited filtering efforts. “Coming to me slant” grants me uneasy and yet valuable time to reorient my life according to the truth. (As an Asian, I can appreciate this idea of telling it slant, as it is one of the virtues of indirect communication. I guess one minor distinction may be that telling it slant in the Asian context is about saving each other from shame more than the possibility of truth blinding us.) I would like to think this idea of coming to us slant is like experiencing God’s tangible grace in discovering our own life paths filled with questions and self-discovered answers. Thus, “the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.”
I tell myself that the only thing that really matters is Jesus and him crucified, as Paul succinctly summarized (1 Corinthians 2:2). Everything else is secondary and tertiary and so forth. Thus, we filter everything that happens in life through the lens of Jesus Christ and him crucified. Jesus Christ is his birth, his childhood, his occupation, his relationship with God and the Holy Spirit, his teachings, his questions, his healings, signs, and wonders he performed, his relationship with family, disciples, and sinners, his confrontations with religious and political leaders, his extraordinary and mundane actions, etc., mostly taking place in the obscure and backward country in Galilee interspersed with his presence in the Gentile regions and Jerusalem. It is what Kosuke Koyama aptly calls, “Three miles an hour God,” as the average person walks 3 miles an hour. While Jesus had a clear focus in life and why he came to the earth, he was in no hurry—he wasn’t zipping around performing incredible feats of multi-tasking. It is a miracle of divine restraint in the human form. The way Jesus lived his life makes it possible for us to follow and imitate him! Additionally, observing what Jesus did on this earth and how Jesus lived his life, Jesus was a master par excellence of telling it slant. And then there is his cross and resurrection which is his ultimate culminating work on this earth and his ascension.
I write not because I am an expert but as a seeker. it is my way of grabbling toward the Truth. I am exhorting myself that my writing is ultimately to reflect the reality of Jesus Christ in my life and provide meaning to myself and perhaps to others who resonate with my content and style. Then what I ought to be doing is to declutter and detach anything that stands in the way of Jesus… In the end, it needs to become a deep realization and actualization of Jesus Christ being the perpetual way, the eternal truth, and the never-ending life. Nothing more and nothing less.