The Light On Our Lips
The Light On Our Lips
Rachel Seo
Someday I’ll ask myself to remember what it feels like to be as young as I am right now—to be 21 and in college, when sometimes you wake up at 10 a.m. and wander through the rest of the day in a state of dazed, amorphous being; when the goodness of conversation launches itself gawkily over wine in plastic cups and wax pooling in cheap candles; when sometimes the world presses itself against your skin and tries to cling for too long.
I’m trying to hold what all of this means in my heart right now, because in just a few weeks College Student Me will age into College Grad Me, and all of my memories from undergrad will relegate themselves, officially, to retrospect. The hyperconscious part of my brain has been trying to pick through the threads of the past four years. More recently it’s latched onto a heady awareness of the different worlds to which I’ve belonged, parsing where these spheres intersect and where they don’t.
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I study literature and writing at a giant research university and have attended the same church for all four years, and sometimes doing those two things at the same time felt like code-switching, but also not.
In my classes we talked about embodiment, fragmentation, identity and trauma; at church we talked about glorifying God and the cross of Christ and redemption and inherent depravity. Sometimes I’d sit in a class discussion about the homoerotic symbolism in Romeo and Juliet, then go to church and listen to an earnest sermon on the book of Mark. Each situation required its own language, both that I could speak reasonably well and not suffer from internal conflict, working from the presumption that there will always be confrontation between ideologies.
At the same time, though, I secretly desired a space that existed outside of that continuum. Within my classes, I’ve participated in discussions about religious trauma and harm caused by organized religion that minimized the room to talk about faith. People at church sometimes ask me what it’s like to be a Christian literature student at a secular, public university, like I’m a singular shining light in a dark, dark world, and I never found a good way to explain that I didn’t necessarily think about it like that. It’s only been this last year in college that I’ve realized my occasional frustration with both— and, beyond that, lack the language to describe the relationship between faith and art outside that framework. It’s a language I’ve been trying to find for the past year.
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“Faith would be,” Annie Dillard writes in her book Holy the Firm, “that God is self-limited utterly by His creation— a contraction of the scope of His will; that He bound himself to time and its hazard and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love.”
I first read Holy the Firm last August. In every sentence we see the emphases in the subjects, winking irony in the verbs, the shifts in power purposely manipulated to obfuscate and then to reveal truer balances. Faith would be (the subject, measured by the breadth of the conditional) that God is self-limited (voice sliding into ironic passivity, for who is God to be passive?) utterly by His creation. That He bound himself (for only He could bind Himself) to time and its hazard and haps (if time is a constraint for us, how much more would it be for God) as a man would lash himself to a tree for love.
My imagination fell into the language, which caught it and held fast. It was one of the first books I read that seemed to allow different worlds to exist in simultaneity—and, furthermore, revealed a world past simultaneity, which indicates the presence of different spheres circling around each other. A world without simultaneity would exist fully itself, endless in its entirety. There is room for more, the book seemed to say, if you will help create the space.
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Derek Malou
Where that space extends, then, is the next question, and perhaps that’s for me to know in part and also something I’ll continue to discover. If, like G.C. Waldrep says in his interview with Image Journal, “one’s engagement with [any] work is, for the writer or reader of faith, an act of faith,” then “the engagement itself is a sanctuary, a temple, a field of encounter.” So whether we’re reading C.S. Lewis or Roxane Gay, watching Fleabag or Twilight, listening to Taylor Swift or Liz Vice, we’re perhaps searching and finding, trying to catch a glimpse of something clear, celebrating beauty that reaches for the other-worldly but still remains limited unto itself, tethered to earth.
After all, aren’t we—artists and non-artists, aware of our faith and not— grasping for a world comprised entirely of goodness? Aren’t all of our baselines—both in fundamentals and in purely subjective terms, like the colors we believe are beautiful— different? So, then, what does it mean to meet a work of art at eye’s level, to understand its place, the questions it intends to ask, and what small scrap of reality it seeks to rip away? When it does rip away, what does the author want us to find? To what extent is what they want us to find true?
I only ask myself that sometimes, because the right answer isn’t always the right answer, and sometimes giving the right answer isn’t the end goal. Sometimes bifurcation—that quintessential sacred-secular split, the ultimate incompatibility of world- views—exists, but with art it’s lazy analysis, a false bottom. Sometimes you have to punch the floor out from under that false bottom to reveal that beyond it lies something less quantifiable, but perhaps more true.
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Now, as I prepare to walk forward into graduation and past it, I’ve begun to think less in terms of good, bad, worse, and instead ask myself: where would I like to dwell? Every time I open a new book, listen to a new song, I ask: would I like to dwell here? Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I don’t know. The not-knowingness, I think, is new and good. I’m leaving college feeling younger than I did when I entered; I also feel dumber, more fragile and less impervious to life and its various ministrations. This might be the best thing I could have learned here—that inquiries are good, and that they are sometimes all that we have as of now.
“Art poses deeper questions, rather than giving easy answers,” the artist Makoto Fujimura says in a college graduation speech he delivered at Belhaven University in 2011. “I am convinced that art and music, while not the Thing itself, contain the aroma, the actual aroma, of the New... When you dance, when you play your violin, when you draw, what you see, and hear and smell and touch, it all invites you into the aroma of the New.”
It’s a sentiment that echoes C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory: “For [books and music] are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”
So much of the peace within Christianity emphasizes the knowingness of it all, the ability to know and to love God, the ability to know past the complexity of our present existence, the promises tangible and sure. We focus less on the unknowingness because, well, unknowing indicates a gap in knowledge that we ourselves can’t fill.
But some of my favorite art picks at the unknowingness, harps on it, because the sum of what we don’t know bears down on the world in what’s often seen as crushing defeat. So when Fujimura and Lewis point out that we ought to see art borne from unknowingness as a foreshadowing, I find that seeing art in this way is to feel hope’s pulse.
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I still, perhaps fittingly, lack the language to describe where I want to dwell, to which spaces I draw near. But I find myself most attracted to where sublime prose grows in profusion, where imagination feels most sanctified, where I can stand in front of a painting, breathless and rapt, for as long as I want.
Perhaps if I stand here long enough, I’ll find that in every discussion of religious trauma, after every question of how-do-you-be-a-Christian-in-a- secular-space, for every standard answer, I’ll have a better question than the ones presented on that spectrum.
Maybe faith would be that God is vast enough to be partially inexpressible in human terms—the words we lost at Babel yet to be resuscitated; but that speechlessness will one day render itself speechless and the light on our lips and tongues rise to full height, carrying themselves as they were and will be.
Rachel Seo
Writer & Student
Rachel has been published in Christianity Today & Christ and Pop Culture
Photography by Uri Segura