The world is full of words, more than ever. Never have there been more news headlines clambering for clicks, advertisements designed to arrest our attention, or friends filling us in on everything they had for dinner. Somehow, we have to muddle around this mess with our infobese heads filled to popping with more messages than they can process, too worn out to care much about what is really true and what is deceptively false.
Yet into this deluge I submit words of my own. I take a deep breath and yell into the roaring waterfall: “There are not enough words!”
Because there aren’t.
In all the daily torrent of verbiage, there are still far too many gaps. Most of the communication we hear is like a 1,000 piece puzzle from a charity shop that didn’t come with all the pieces. The pictures presented to us are incomplete, and the gaps can be hard to spot. And yet, quite often, the gaps are the most important part.
This is obvious enough in advertisements. We know that companies will tell us only the virtues of their products, shaping and bending the truth into the most desirable package they can produce. Yet even as we complain about this, we practice it ourselves on social media, where we work hard to cultivate an idealised image of ourselves, leaving out most of the actual reality of our lives. We fully expect the same from our political leaders. Fake news may be a new catch phrase, but it’s an ancient reality: the art of spin is a time-tested tradition that spans all cultures, continents, forms of government, and types of organisations. We may have more choice now over who we listen to, but often this choice comes down to which set of incomplete puzzle pieces we happen to prefer. Do we like the right side of the puzzle or the left? Are we drawn to the bits with a confusion of colours or to the parts that blend together in understandable sameness? Whatever our choice is, we can find news sources, friends, and tweets to support us.
The trouble is, with all our choosing and shaping and shouting others down, no one seems to be able to agree on what this puzzle is supposed to look like in the end. Have we lost the box top? Is there no unifying vision powerful enough to pull these pieces together?
There is a box top. I’ve had a glimpse of it. I can tell you that its picture has shapes and dynamics that are diverse enough for every person on the planet to have a place, and yet the lines and colours are so unexpected that they will leave absolutely everyone with something to be offended at. No surprise there: Did I really expect the picture of the universe to be a portrait of me? It turns out that the Artist behind this puzzling reality had a much bigger and more complicated design in mind than any of us could fathom, but he generously gave us the broad outlines of his plan in the Bible. It’s a complicated book (like the world); mixing shadows and light, greys and colours, sameness and confusion into one overarching drama expansive enough to catch up all our little pieces and finally make sense of them in the masterpiece of history.
As long as we insist on communicating without any reference to the box top, we’ll never be able to fit the pieces of our world into anything meaningful and whole. We’ll spin on in a vortex of half-truths and incomplete ideas, swinging our pendulums from one extreme to another in a never-ending series of attempts to find the purpose we long for. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If we listen to the Artist, we can begin to close the gaps and find our places together in his Magnum Opus.
sethlewis.ie 