What is the Answer?

I promised my answer, or at least the best one that I can give. How do we deal with that tilt, the perspective that is just wrong, just off? I have two answers. The first is the easiest one.

Jesus. No I do not mean religiously, if by religion you think of church buildings with stain glass windows, saints in robes of crimson and purple who paint as long ago cracked in their solitary murals, and ritually brilliant and complicated services. I mean simply with faith. Yes it is the my childhood faith, which I have starved and yet it is still there. The easiest answer to the question is simple. Jesus.

Now for the hard answer. This to leads me to Jesus. whether this is ironic or not I am not sure. Perhaps it is pure delusion to think that I might have the same answer by two different means. Is it my childish faith that leads me to gather myself like petals stripped from a flower, given to the wind? Even if you can gather each petal, the flower destroyed stays destroyed. Can one destroy something and somehow among those disorganized fragments find the truth that was lost? You see the hard answer brings even more questions to light.

There is a Salvador Dali picture, which always comes to my mind when I think of all of this (actually several of his paintings and drawings could be used as examples). I'm sure you have seen it, the interlocking stairs, which instead of leading one way, lead up and down and sideways. People walk in this tops-turvy world, gravity playing to the whims of whom ever and what ever. Everything is off. Even the people who seem up right, are upside down when you turn the picture to another angle, and those who seemed so wrong, so backwards, become right. It is easy to see when something is obviously wrong, even something that are only slightly wrong can be pointed out, found out. But is it possible to find something absolutely right? Absolutely good?

Even philosophers have tripped and stumbled upon this very problem. My religion tells me God is good. Even Rene Descartes, makes a full circle to the conclusion that there must first be a God and second that God must be good (even if at first he must stumble through the discussion of being at least a brain being played with by an evil genius, which the Matrix trilogy so wonderful explores). This however is no real help, for although philosophers can be helpful in answering part of this question, they can not add the complete answer.

This is where I must rely on my own field of study: Theatre. Some might find this as a paradox, but I will remind you that Jesus told stories. In fact the great story which finds its climax with Jesus, begins long before with the idea of a God who 'is'. 'I am' Says the Lord, 'Who I am'. This God, unlike so many in history knows of his own existence. And so this great story of a 'Good' God, which from my childhood as gathered me in its arms, like a mother comforting a child, can not lightly be put aside. I believe whole heartily in the truth of story. Theatre, my art, my creation, even my writing, is of stories. I do not believe a story any less real or true or important just because it was written by man. God's story to us (meaning humankind) is not just his story, but is story told through us, through humankind. Even if I thought God as weak and rather bad in form, I could not think less of the story.

The story is one of the greatest ever written, ever lived. It is a endless epic, which begins before time and the ending of which we have mere foreshadows and hints. And every page, every chapter and through the hand of every person who helped to write this great story, in the words of man, one reads Love. One reads of God's great love and great goodness. I can not believe that something, which written and witnessed by so many people, from age to age to age, could hold such a singular theme and not have that theme be true. We read fairy tales, and even though we know it is just a story, being just a story does not stop us from realizing what it is trying to tell us.

Of course I take all of this to a very different level. I believe that it is more than just a story. I believe that Jesus really is the solution, that extra 0.01% that we can't seem to grasp by ourselves. Jesus is the good, the right, the true, the absolute. And although the world will find fault in my logic and even call me deranged, it is more than just a belief for me, it is fact.