T.S. Tuesday: Stacking up Truths

It's difficult to describe how I came back to God. To have it make sense to anyone outside of my life. There weren't too many concrete events that make tidy little blog posts. As Donald Miller said in his book Searching For God Knows What and in his blog post yesterday, there were a million steps that led me to where I am now, and even now, the steps are changing.

It was watching the Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it was dating a guy who was so much more cynical than I was that I actually started to believe something, it was stealing a Haitian woman’s parking spot, it was watching Planet Earth at the non profit organization I was interning at, it was reading ee cummings and T.S. Eliot, it was salty runs along the cliffs, it was new journals and an obsession with the Holocaust.

It was a stacking up of hundreds of little truths. In T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Dry Salvages, the third of Four Quartets, he writes:

"There is no end, but addition: the trailing
Consequence of further days and hours,
While emotion takes to itself the emotionless
Years of living among the breakage
Of what was believed in as the most reliable--
And therefore the fittest for renunciation."

I like the idea of the addition, the stacking, the summation of experiences and truths and ideas. That there is no end; only addition. Here Eliot is talking of suffering and pain, of death, but I’ve come to see this stacking up in every area of my life. My life is a compilation of truths and connections. Of a million steps that add up to where I am now.

Stacking hundreds of little truths up together is how I feel most connected with people--and with God.

I know it doesn’t sound much like basking, like soaking in God’s love. But my basking started with a few ideas, a few truths the size of mustard seeds, and built forward.

Love

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God is Love

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Love is God

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God

God is
God is here
God is here with
God is here with me.

In the last two years God has pursued me like crazy. In the ways that I like to be pursued (single men take note). I feel connected to God the same way I feel connected to people--through learning and growing, questioning, poetry, books.

God allowed me to stack up truths with him. I didn't need all the answers. I could still be cynical and skeptical and angry.

Amidst my questioning and cynicism and stacking up of truths I experienced Love. For myself. For this world. And for the God who created me.

And that was the start of the basking.