God's Words Upside Down

In one of my college art history classes, I remember seeing a lovely medieval painting in which God was speaking to someone. You could tell it was God speaking, because the text was upside down. The positioning, according to our professor, symbolized not only God’s place “up there,” but also the difficulty that we have understanding God.

Could this symbolism help us live more comfortably with our scriptures?

Right now, I’m in a phase where nothing about the Bible makes sense. I reread passages whose meaning I’ve “understood” for 20 years—and I see something different in them. (Some of these lessons have blessed me mightily, so it’s not all bad.) Turns of phrase that once seemed drop-dead clear are now maddeningly obscure. Don’t even get me started on the outright contradictions.

And my 21^st-century mind is sorely tempted to ask, “What’s wrong with you writers? Why can’t you be clear and consistent?”

To be sure, we’re reading texts written millennia ago by multiple writers with multiple viewpoints, and that’s part of the issue. But I think there’s more to it: namely, the impossibility of explaining ultimate reality directly. No wonder God’s words are upside down: in a sense, they cannot be any other way.

I see the same struggle to express reality outside the texts of faith traditions. In Ulysses, James Joyce takes 700-odd pages—some of them nearly incomprehensible—to present a three-dimensional portrait of one man on one day. Cubist portraits translate 3D onto a flat surface by displaying each feature of the subject on its own plane; the result is a more complete presentation of the elusive reality than a standard portrait could be.

In short, reality will not be nailed down.

What does this mean for us? Maybe it means the pressure is off. We don’t have to pinpoint exactly who Jesus was, or define God in a neat way, or be “right” about details. The pursuit of truth becomes less pursuit and more exploration. Humility gets the chance to flourish in our souls. We can hold what we’ve learned lightly, in case we learn something else to turn those lessons upside down.

And without the need to be “right,” we can turn more of our attention to God, where we will find far more truth anyway—and the love we desperately need to leaven it.