Christmas 2008 - the Big Idea and the Specific Picture

I wrote my This I Believe Essay about the big idea and the little detail. As we approach Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, I thought I’d expand on that idea in a way I considered doing in the essay, but couldn’t quite find a way to do gracefully, because the format for This I Believe is so short, and these thoughts really deserve an essay all their own.
I do believe that all of life is a balance between the big idea and the specific detail, the abstract concept and the specific picture that illustrates it. And nowhere does that idea become more relevant to me than in my faith. Faith has become a dirty word in many circles these days, but everyone their lives by faith. Even the most committed atheist believes in the importance of truth, and though you can prove specific facts to be true, you cannot really prove that truth itself is of any importance, or of any more importance than anything else. Anything truly, deeply important cannot be proved. In the movie Contact, based on the novel by supposed atheist Carl Sagan, Joss, a preacher, asks Ellie Arroway, our heroine why she doesn’t believe in God. When she says that she can’t because there’s no proof, he asks her if she loved her father. She says yes. And he says, “Prove it.”
But that’s a subject for another whole essay.
This essay is about the big concept and the specific illustration. This is the story of the Incarnation. God is too big, too Other, for our brains to comprehend, though we try very hard sometimes to shoe-horn him into a comprehensible box. The concept is too much for us to “get.” And so he sent us a specific picture: Jesus. A certain person, living in a certain time period, under very particular circumstances. As Madeleine L’Engle quotes someone as saying, “Jesus was God’s ‘Show and Tell.’”
The Incarnation is the word made flesh, but it is also the Big Idea expressed as the specific illustration. To further deepen the point, within his own specific story, Jesus told stories (word illustrations) himself. Stories within stories. Some people would have us believe, like Macbeth, that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing (in which case why does it really matter if people think otherwise?), but I tend to see life in terms of Story, and in stories everything has meaning if we only take time to find it.
Jesus’ story is such a complex and multi-layered one, that there are, despite claims to the contrary, many ways to get meaning out of it. This doesn’t mean that every interpretation is right, but that the story is so rich that there are multiple layers of meaning to get out of any one part of it. It’s as if God tried to contain himself in one Man’s story, and that Man’s story bursts at the seams with meaning because of it. There The mythic archetypes of sacrifice, death, and resurrection are there, and are so rich in meaning that their significance can be played out and understood in many ways. “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” offers one take on its meaning. But so does “E.T.: the Extraterrestrial.” So does “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” So does, amazingly, Phillip Pullman’s “The Amber Spyglass,” the third book in a blatantly anti-religion (especially anti-Christian) fantasy book series about children on a mission to kill “the Authority” (God). But even as he tries to show his disdain and hatred for Christianity and Christians everywhere, he can’t help but make Christ figures out of his heroes. When even a writer who wants to undermine Christianity is drawn to the truth of it despite his best efforts to rip it down, this ultimately strengthens my faith.
The story of the incarnation resonates with my life on every level. As a teacher, I believe in the power of stories, just as Jesus did. As a writer I believe in the power of the specific and the abstract working together. As a husband and a father, I believe that I am only as good as the “life pictures” I create—the specific actions I take to play my role well.
And this birth, this limiting of the power that created, well, everything, tells us that being human is significant. That we matter. That there is a bigger picture, a big idea behind everything. Without that bigger picture, life is empty and bleak. Without the specific pictures, the details of our lives, we have no way to connect to the bigger pictures.
And so Christmas is, to me, the very place where the abstract and the specific meet, where the transcendent shines down to become a specific picture of the Holy. And all of this ties in with my writing, my teaching, and yes, even drawing cartoons. Those abstract words floating in bubbles don’t mean much until the pictures are there to en-flesh them. The pattern is everywhere, and always. It’s all part of the same fabric, and the Christmas story runs right through all of it for me, all year long.

This I Believe

This post is actually a draft of an essay I'm writing for NPR's This I Believe radio series. I am not sure if I am satisfied with it. I am going to try a couple of other ideas. This is my first try. I am asking my students to write This I Believe essays, so I figured I'd better give it a shot!

THIS I BELIEVE

As a middle school English teacher, I try to teach my students that it isn’t enough to tell us the main idea of your writing—you have to make us see the idea. I tell them it is all about the pictures.
For instance, if I ask a class to write about a best friend, I will get a slew of generic essays: my friend is funny, my friend is fun, my friend is nice. Sometimes I read portions of essays like that aloud and the students can’t tell who wrote them—they all sound alike. But when I ask them to list specific, concrete nouns and action verbs, these friends suddenly come to life. Pictures appeared. My friend and I go and try on crazy socks at J.C. Penny. My friend told a joke so funny, I laughed chocolate thick shake out my nose. My friend let me stay on his couch when my parents were fighting.
This is the oldest writing lesson in the world, but I think it is more than that. I tell my students, and try to show them, that this idea of general and specific isn’t just about writing. It’s about life. If we think about the kind of people we want to be, the ideals we aspire to become the main ideas we want to express with our lives. And the only way to live out those main ideas, is to do specific things—to create pictures with our lives. I can’t just say I want to be a good father. I need to make a Rubik’s Cube Halloween costume for my son or play a board game with my daughter. I can’t just say I want to be a good husband; I need to help with the dishes. I can’t just say I want to be a good teacher; I need to stand at the door each class period and call them by name.
I read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 with my eighth graders this year. Near the end, a character talks about his grandfather and all the things he did with his hands: built things, changed things, helped people. The book’s protagonist, Guy Montag, thinks about his wife Mildred. Her hands never really did anything. She watched TV. She smoked cigarettes.
I ask my students to think about what their hands accomplish. Do they change channels? Instant message? Play video games? Or do they actually do things that matter? What do your specific pictures say about the main idea of your life? Do you even have a main idea?
I draw a comic strip about teaching for my local newspaper, and every day I try to take my general thoughts about education, school, and teaching, and turn them into specific little framed pictures about pencils, gum, books, and middle school students. The general and the specific again. And the comic strip is something I create with my hands—a specific act that also shows what I believe.
I believe that all of life is found in the balance between the general and the specific, the big idea and the little detail, the ideals we aim for and the actions that help us live out our ideals. It’s all about the pictures we create with our lives, and what those pictures say.
This I believe.