Cover photo: an artist’s rendering of Tui and La from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Tui (推) means “push” and is traditionally conceived as masculine, whereas La (拉), which means “pull,” is considered feminine. The two koi fish are an analogous representation of Yin and Yang and the concept of balance.
“What sense did the world make? Where was God, the Bloody Fool? Did He have no notion of fair and unfair? Couldn’t He read a simple balance sheet? He would have been sacked long ago if He were managing a corporation, the things He allowed to happen.”1
I’ve often wondered what the end will be like, what processes we’ll go through. And I know that it’s a small and futile thing even as I think these thoughts and write these words (assuming my instinct that God is somehow beyond the furthest reaches of our reality). But when you go traipsing through the thickets, you find yourself looking more and more for the individual thorns and leaves; the ones that could do you harm that you hold gingerly and gently to avoid snap-back, as well as the ones that seem innocuous enough to stumble through without much ill.
“So it’s fitting that he encourages his translators to do the same. He now refers other translators to me when they (inevitably!) ask him about the herbs. It’s been a lot of fun to meet so many of my Laurus counterparts by email because of those plants.”2
I have always wanted to believe in a generous God. But I am also afraid. At the end, will I be asked why I opted for such an open-handed, approximate theology that did not discriminate like it should have, and then will I be given a detailed report of all the misdeeds and misconceptions I’ve ever done and held? This thought takes me around and around; knowing it’s superfluous, in a way, but then knowing I’ll be made to see I shouldn’t have been so flippant and then wondering why I’m talking myself in circles.
My parents now live very close to one of my brothers, the Seminarian, which I suppose is only logical as the Seminarian is the only one to date who’s provided them with grandchildren. Not only have they become geographically close, but they also attend the same church and have many intersecting social circles. I wonder and worry, though. In my ripe twenty-three years of life, I’ve found my idea of faithfulness blooming like Winsor & Newmans across a wet page. Whereas the colours seem like they’re drying—receding, even—with my parents. They now look often to the Seminarian for teaching and guidance, and while I do not doubt their or his earnestness, I question how much narrowing there must be as they’ve shifted from the PCA towards the OPC. I don’t have hours and hours of Greek and Hebrew and afternoons filled with theological debates in hazy Westminster classrooms, but I still wonder where the line is between contentment and stagnation. Everyone’s got their own fallacies of belief and ideology, certainly, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got to accept them. I don’t want my parents to believe on principle that my friends or I are going to hell.
“Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind.”3
It’s a matter of living in oscillation with the constant whir and hum of never quite being still. The chicken runs back and forth across the road because she can’t make up her mind; one moment she catches the glimpse of something in the corner of her eye and rushes towards it, wondering if this is what she’s needed all along, but the next moment brings clarity to the absurdity of how she can’t quite catch her breath but staying still is even more unbearable. The chicken is me and I’m waffling back and forth about how I think I’m supposed to live and how I know I shouldn’t try thinking.
“I am largely worried about wingless chickens. I feel this is the time for me to fulfil myself by stepping in and saving the chicken but I don’t know how exactly since I am not bold. I only know I believe in the complete chicken.”4
1 A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
2 “The Care that Goes into Translation: An Interview with Lisa Hayden,” Graham Oliver for Ploughshares at Emerson College
3 “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche
4 Flannery O’Conner (purportedly)