Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

by N.D. Wilson

I am a hypocrite. I grant it readily. I have read the philosophers (not all of them, thank God). I’ve been tested on the philosophers. I’ll talk about the philosophers, but watch my lip. It curls when I do. I hope I’m untainted. Every four years I’ll watch figure skating, but I’m no closer to buying myself tights. Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.

must come through something else. Welcome to the world of faith. Here is my lady, my picture, my philosophical account of an olive. I look around at the stuff of the world and I ask myself what it is made of. Words. Magic words. Words spoken by the Infinite, words so potent, spoken by One so potent that they have weight and mass and flavor. They are real. They have taken on flesh and dwelt among us. They are us. In the Christian story, the material world came into existence at the point of speech, and that speech was

If killing me makes an omnipotent God guilty of homicide, the best a partially potent God will get off with is negligent manslaughter.

The platypus is quite clearly the best currently living creature, but it is not the best of all possible creatures. In addition to its mammalian, egg-laying, duck-billed, web-footed, amphibious life, it also could have had bat wings, sonar, and the ability to fire explosions out of its rear like a bombardier beetle. To speak frankly, I feel that a creative opportunity was missed.

shadows in the photograph. How many souls were swallowed by the sea today? When will the next tsunami make war on Asia? How can

Tragedy isn’t an easy thing to kill. It takes more than a turtle. Tragedy must be destroyed by someone willing to be swallowed by it, willing to be broken, torn out of the flesh, but able to return to it. Someone must be able to shatter the tragic from within and exit into comedy, able to rip a hole so wide that a train of souls, a parade, could follow after, banging drums and throwing candy as they strolled into the sun.

The problem of evil is a genuine problem, an enemy with sharp pointy teeth. But it is not a logical problem. It is an emotional one, an argument from Hamlet’s heartache and from ours. It appeals to our pride and our nerve endings. We do not want to hear an answer that puts us so low. But the answer is this: we are very small. The apostle Paul: Who are you, O man?

Nothing in the existence of evil implies that God must not be in control. Nothing implies that He does not exist (exactly the opposite—without Him, the category evil does not exist; all is neutral flux and entropy). The struggle comes when we look at ourselves in the mirror, a carnival mirror, a mirror that stretches our worth into the skies. Given my immense personal value, how could a good God ever allow me to feel pain? Our emotions balk at omni-benevolence.

I have killed good people. I have orphaned children and have given villains a period of strength, a time for them to wax fat before they are struck down. I have done all this in novels for children. Am I a murderer? A predator? Of course not. Am I a puppeteer? I hope not. I imitate the world as best I can. I want my characters free, but my art fails. I a...

special capacity for pain. Rubbing isn’t helping. Laughing is. “Right,” I say. “I refuse to take responsibility for that one. The stair clearly moved. It’s not the tripping I mind; it’s the cheating.” Are you in shadow? Are you in pain? Next to you, is Hamlet a happy man? Has the rock been lifted, removing the sky, tearing your life in half? Do not cry to me. I can only cry with you. I will

Serve Boom, and you and I can still get along, but the way we see things changes everything. I see intentionality in the world, and so I imitate that in my art (and in the art I respect). You see a world that is no more than a large explosion, and the art that imitates that is a form of suicide.

We are bits of the flying flotsam, spinning away from the eye of the Great Disaster. Anything we do is attributable to Chaos, for we are its children, carbon-based shrapnel with sensitive nerve endings, a problem with self-importance, and a taste for pizza.

walk to the ladder, sucking on my finger. Two red-tailed hawks float high above me. They live here now, in this neighborhood, nested high in a blue spruce. I wonder what they find to eat. Kittens? Pet rabbits? I wonder how clearly their eyes can see the gathering storm and when they will take to their nest, a home stationed in the highest point on this block. How many hawks die from lightning strikes? How would I know? I climb my metal

Christianity is no longer about changing the world. Christianity is no longer about facing the darkness and walking into shadow with souls full of light. We don’t see evil as a thing to be conquered, we don’t see life as a story with any kind of arc.

Food is holy when you eat it, when it is used to strengthen a body used to strengthen the world. Leave the yeast. Be the yeast. Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side. The problem of evil brings its own strength. We do not need to strengthen it more by imagining perfection to be cross-stitch and cookies and uneaten, uneating kittens. The world is already more wonderful than we can imagine. Heaven will be better still. I do not doubt that whatever gates there may be, they will be pearly. But I know how pearls are made. Do you? In Heaven, the gates will be made of oyster spit.

far from pain. Paint me lush hedges and glowing windows and puddles that shine. Such scenes exist, like rabbits, like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Painter, Painter, find the other shoe. Drop it. Everything has its place in this frame. Everything has its position on the stage. The world is full of comfortable things. The world is full of soft beauty and gentle lapping waves. We would be fools to ignore the gentleness and get caught up in the grit, only able to tell dark stories. But a world of gentle touches is no truer than a world gone black. Put the colors in their places. Paint a true picture, with tension. After every rain, look at your feet. As the sun sets, admire the freshness of the world and how tasteful it looks with that golden tint. Look at the pale, bloated carnage. Every glowing puddle is filled with the earthworm dead. Why they come to such moist ends I do not know. Are they called by name when their earthly tour is over, or do they simply love the water without knowing how to swim? These are the puddle lemmings. In the summer rains, they die; they suicide by the thousands. Realism is not puffy-faced angels and realism is not grit standing alone.

The leaves are not falling. Not yet. They are changing, growing, accepting a new role. When they do fall, I shall rake them. I will scrape this sidewalk until the cast-off many-colored robes are mounded high. Then I will heave them into my yard. I will watch my sweatered children discover and rediscover the joy of playing in death, the joy of jumping, laughing, sneezing, and rolling in the remnants of another year, the joy of being buried and resurrected, of climbing in and out of a grave.

the autumn will blizzard. The trees will cast off the last of this year’s many skins, and in the morning I will look at their naked forms, bristled against a gray sky. In the morning I will look at winter, but the ground will not be white. It will be blanketed with the wet colors of fire. There

is the only true challenge for the Infinite. Anything else is as easy as speaking. This is the only struggle for the Infinite, the only resistance He will ever meet. The best of all possible tasks for the best of all possible Beings. I look at the world,