Less and More
by Angela Townsend
I believe more. I use fewer words.
Painters and quilters entrance me. They process the world in visions, prophets of color. Runners and ballerinas beckon me. They hit the flow beyond knowing, working out knots without syntax.
I know my place in the taxonomy of truth seekers. Where color and movement play mid-air with falcons, I am a mud-sparrow spattered in words. I don’t know what I believe until I feed it language. I speak and write and spring leaks of love.
I have believed in my own ability to patch hissing holes with paragraphs, talking like a dervish when fearful. I have summoned sentences to mend nets, exclamation points spearing the flopping fish as they escape back to the sea.
Yet the older I get, the more I want to follow them.
I met majestic, magnetic saints without pedigrees, clouds of unknowing sowing seeds of zest. The wrong people lived the right love. Undocumented grace wrote my life’s story.
The sea scowled with Leviathans when my faith was afraid. Salty psalmists stole my harpoons, dragging me whale-watching. God was too large for language, they cried above the waves. Our tidy truths were partial, our gilded words guesses. I watched in terror as they ran straight off the plank, halos soaked and salty. They rode the sea beasts and did not drown.
Shaky on deck, I gripped my plastic bags of carnival goldfish. I squeezed my certainties. I called the Coast Guard and rode back to write comforts in the sand.
I knew so much then, preaching to myself and all who would hear. There was a singular way to safety, a watershed of words. I knew more than I believed. I wrote in black marker and let it dry, smudge-proof and salvific.
But the dancers and dolphins read none of my rules, too busy playing with the prophets. I shuddered to hear my name in their songs. “You’ll be here soon!”
I knew so much, I couldn’t fathom a larger life. Who could believe more than I did then, so full of the Word, all watertight and maximum-security? You couldn’t have convinced me that I actually believed very little, a God within a clamshell. You couldn’t have coaxed me up to my ankles in the waters surer than certainty.
But when words won’t prevail, grace gets you out of your galoshes. Mercy’s fine art is life, and years did what theology could not.
My seminary studies led not to the pulpit but to the zoo. My job brought me bliss off the map. Every dissertation dissolved in the face of this chaotic calling, raising money for homeless animals instead of preaching the Gospel. I unlearned my words “us” and “them” in a community of disorderly kindness.
Meanwhile, love attacked and retreated, singleness bleaching my schedule white as a sand dollar. I fell for narcissists dressed as starfish. I fell into the arms of a God saltier than my storybooks. Invisible ink evaporated on my squid-sized concept of covenant.
I met majestic, magnetic saints without pedigrees, clouds of unknowing sowing seeds of zest. The wrong people lived the right love. Undocumented grace wrote my life’s story.
Life lived outside my understanding. I put down the pen.
I had no idea what God was doing and unfamiliar confidence that God was good.
I have seen the wake of the playful God, the goodness that owes no answers. I have felt the love beyond the limits, the mercy that asks no permission.
I rowed through walls of rainbows and found my home between the ocean and the moon.
Certainties soaked, my lungs filled with metaphor. The march of mystery left me unable to dry myself with the didactic. I became infatuated with the Bible’s depictions of angels, visceral psychedelia I had conveniently ignored in my parchment years.
If China cabinet angels once brought me comfort, today I cast my lot with the six-winged chaos covered in eyes. How had my dutiful reading never glimpsed these spectacles? They were the limits of language, the dominion of mystery, permission to fall on my knees and drop my words.
I began sketching them in my margins, only to find the main story melting into the Big Story.
I drew wings and eyes, only to find that mortal words kept silence.
I felt terrified and safe and uncannily not alone.
I have seen the wake of the playful God, the goodness that owes no answers. I have felt the love beyond the limits, the mercy that asks no permission. I have swallowed my sermons and certainties and fed on the “yes” that says more.
I believe too much to worry about words.
Next year I will believe even more.
Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: A Cat Sanctuary, where she has the privilege of bearing witness to mercy for all beings. Angie has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar, and her work appears in Amethyst Review, Dappled Things, Fathom Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, and The Razor, among others. Angie loves life dearly.
