Come, tip-toe up to the rim of mystery.

    When the Australian aborigine is asked the meanings of mysterious paintings on the wall of a sacred cave, he cannot explain them in words, so he dances his answer! We, too, know very well that many of life’s best valuables defy explanation:

• The explanation of love is not love.
• The explanation of a joke is not humor.
• The explanation of music is not music.
• The explanation of a poem is not poetry.
• And the rational explanation of religion is not the same as touching the Holy One!

    Who can completely diagram the meaning of my wedding ring? Or analyze the meaning of flowers brought to a hospital room, or explain the bread and the wine of Communion? Sure, you can say words about them that may well be true, but you can never say quite enough, never convey all the truth.

The rational explanation of religion is not the same as touching the Holy One!

    Henry Van Dyke said of one of his stories, “What does it mean? How can I tell? What does life mean? If the meaning could be put into a sentence there would be no need of telling the story.”*

    And when the great ballerina Anna Pavlova was asked, “What do you say when you dance?” she replied, “if I could tell you, I wouldn’t need to dance.”

    Yes, indeed! When we distance our deeper selves from the fine art of believing, we rob ourselves of most of what it means to believe. Real, dynamic faith takes up our dramatic mysteries and gets inside of them, no matter how undramatic, ordinary, or even misshapen we may think our own lives to be. Full faith gets down to the part of us that we cannot explain or quantify but that shapes the direction of our lives.

    Want depth and peace? Keep watching for the wonder. (More later)

*Henry Van Dyke, The Story of the Other Wise Man, preface to the 1923 edition (New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1923), p. xv.

Title: "How Do You Explain?"
Author: Lynn Anderson
Publication Date: March 28, 2001

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