One of the more enduring tendencies of my life is to reduce the context, pretext, and subtext of life into text. This tendency, like any native tendency within human beings, is not uniformly good, but has its trade-offs. On the one hand, occasionally inattention or exhaustion bring out my inner captain obvious, as when I asked two twins, whom I knew to be twins, how old they were right after another. On the other hand, when the tendency to make obvious what is usually implicit, and to spell out what is usually merely only implied, does not go wrong, it can make for a very worthwhile life, since it leaves for posterity a record of my voice, my account, a life told in my own words. Being someone who has trouble with the slanders and libels that others have written and said about me, the fact that I am compelled to reduce my own complex life to text offers the knowledge that if I am to be condemned it will be for what is true out of my own mouth and not what is not true from the mouths of others. If that is not undivided pleasure, it at least presents an honest approach to life and it’s struggles.

When I was a child, and my brother and I were having problems, my native tendency was to write a covenant with him that would address his concerns with me and my concerns with him, with commitments and sanctions and so on. I imagine I must have been a very strange child, since making covenants is not something most people will do by nature. Although I made every effort to make the covenants balanced and even parity covenants by understanding what my brother was most concerned about, invariably I heard complaints that the covenants prevented him from doing all the things he wanted to do, which was the point, as what he wanted to do was not acceptable as far as I was concerned. A covenant makes explicit what is usually implicit, and is to be entered into in the context where it needs to be made plain that the relationship is more important than our own wishes. Jonathan, son of Saul, and David made a friendship covenant where David took on the responsibility of taking care of Jonathan’s family while Jonathan and David both promised loyalty to each other even though David had been promised the kingship.

When we share a context with people, not as much has to be spelled out, so even a vague reference is enough to clue others who are “in the know” that a given subject is being written about, where insiders have layers of knowledge that are denied to outsiders by their lack of context. The fact that people can share a great deal of context and often find it enjoyable to speak about things in a code that is unfamiliar to others and that facilitates gossip makes it appealing to talk to people one already knows and shares a code with and discourages people from taking the time to get to know others where explanations will have to be longer and more drawn out. Some people prefer to enjoy having a small group of friends where one can talk about a lot easily because of a shared context, and others like to know many people shallowly, but being open to relatively deep friendships with a fairly wide group of people requires that someone be patient in explaining oneself, so that others can understand the context and not rely on their own pretext, which can often be fatal to the building of any kind of relationship.

We live in an age that is hostile to reducing something to text. To write something down in prepositional form means that we have committed to some sort of view of truth that can be fact-checked. Perhaps the reason for our love of images in our contemporary world is the fact that images are ambiguous, and allow others to impute their own meanings without us having to commit ourselves to saying anything in particular. As might be imagined, this is precisely the opposite approach I take to texts. Rather than leaving texts open to whatever meaning others are willing to find in it, I tend to write texts that are layered with very specific meanings, often within particular limits. Often I write in such a way that those who want to know what I am trying to say can ask me, through the use of implicit parables and obviously mysterious comments. There may be plenty of people who are willing to speculate on such matters, but there are sadly few people who are willing to ask me about them.

Perhaps such a response is not too surprising. Over twenty-five hundred years ago the prophet Isaiah gave a prophecy that Jesus Christ used when explaining the purpose of His parables to His disciples. Isaiah 6:9-10 read: “And He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and return and be healed.”” As it was in the time of Isaiah, so it was in the time of Jesus, and so it is today. People hear and do not understand, and see and do not perceive, because their hearts are hardened, their ears are stopped up, and they willfully shut their eyes to what is around them, and because they do not ask, because they do not really want to know. They only want to preserve their ironic distance and justify their own ways. Ultimately, though, those who are broken do not need ironic distance and a feeling of justification in their brokenness, but they need to be made whole, and that requires a heart that is sensitive to its own wounds and the wounds of others, that longs for healing, and that seeks truth where it may be found.