My Substack’s title is taken from a phrase I’ll often use to articulate my inability to articulate. The earliest example of this I can recall goes back to my teenage years at summer camp. For whatever reason, I’d picked up a copy of C.S. Lewis’s “The Problem of Pain,” and on the one hand, the reading was a validating experience. Lewis affirmed lines of thought I had discovered independently and if I’m being honest, I was a little impressed with myself that my own ponderings had arrived at some of the same conclusions as such a venerable thinker.
On the other, said conclusions would take me hours to (poorly) explicate, while Lewis could sum them up via a mere paragraph in passing. This pattern continues for me today; the upside of having no formal education in philosophy or theology is that I’m free to claim deductions as my own, while the downside is many of the things I find to be revelatory and self-discovered, a philosophy major might recognize as rudimentary, and that which takes me an essay to lay out has probably been summarized quite concisely by many, many thinkers before.
“Grasping at echoes” refers both to this process and perhaps more to a particular feeling evoked by reading such thinkers. I frequently find myself able to comprehend their conclusions but unable to repeat them with any conciseness or precision, not unlike a man with an unrefined palate trying to convey how good a wine tastes without a sommelier’s vocabulary. In part, it's just because I find their work so stimulating; every time I try to put thoughts into words, I end up rabbit-trailing down fifty tangents and digressions before (hopefully) meandering back to the topic at hand. As Pete Enns so succinctly puts it: “It’s hard to talk about anything without talking about everything.”
But in another part, it's because the greatest theologians, poets, philosophers, etc, tap into something just beyond the effable. Lewis does this brilliantly (and accessibly) in his writing, whether it’s his descriptions of heaven in The Last Battle or The Great Divorce, his passing references to the true nature of the stars, or how he conveys the feeling of visceral hope that can only be glimpsed through the primal agony of immediate and incomprehensible grief. He evokes a distant picture of something so tangible yet just beyond the mind’s reach, and I think an echo is a good illustration of such a thing.
The other “echoes” my title refers to are historical ones. I am fascinated by the traditions behind traditions, lost documents, lost stories, any hints at myths lost to time. This curiosity frequently draws me down exploratory avenues related to authorship and source criticism, be it the redacted sources behind the Torah, the oral and written sources behind the Gospel accounts, or the scant and fleeting records behind so many church traditions that have endured down the centuries even though no one can exactly point to their origin.
An echo can resonate so suddenly and so clearly and just as quickly fade into nothing. An echo can be disorienting, sometimes ringing out from the opposite direction of its source, leaving you spinning about and grasping desperately for its ever-lessening ripples. Some of my favorite times to write are in the midst of these exercises, and I’d like to use this platform to share some of these writings.
I wanted to make this post first, however, to clarify that many of these pieces will be quite speculative in nature. Most begin with a thought of “ooo, that’s cool,” and proceed down an unfocused path of “this reminds me of that,” followed by a maddening cluster of half-connected dots and often concluding with a definitive “eh, maybe.” But every now and then, I will return to these (usually unfinished) pieces and think for a moment that I have glimpsed something insightful. I’m very curious to see how others respond to them.
The other clarification I wanted to make is that I am not an expert on these historical and theological subjects. I am confidently well-read and opinionated on a few particulars of Biblical studies, but as most of you are probably aware, my formal education is in art and media. As such, I never want to give the impression that I teach with authority when I speculate about the echoes of theology or the lost history behind the Biblical tradition. I will write about such things because I have an insatiable appetite for learning about them, but I write from a posture of “this is so COOL” more than I do from a posture of expertise. At my best, I will synthesize the thoughts of more educated persons than myself through the lens of my frantic understanding in a way that evokes the occasional “huh…neat” from the reader, and at my worst, I will frustrate any English majors in my audience with excessive run-on sentences and stylistic use of punctuation. If you learn something new from me, I’m delighted, but I take James 3:1 very seriously and thus want to state my credentials (and lack thereof) at the outset.
My next two posts will indulge each of these two types of echoes, the first one of something like speculative theology and the second of lost history. I would greatly value hearing your thoughts (positive, negative, critical, laudative, or otherwise) in response to either, so please feel free to leave lengthy comments.
This is so good. Please, please—don’t let your lack of formal training get in the way. You’ve received the “formal training” provided by the liturgical community—as long as your theology takes it as its source, rule and guide, you’re as good as a professional in my opinion.
I’m looking forward to reading your speculative stuff! 🙂