Elephant in the Room

Is there a more indigestion-inducing imposition on teenaged siblings than for their parents to announce that no one can move from the dinner table until a poem has been read? When we did just that a week or so ago, I saw again how amazingly adept the teenage face is at the simultaneous display of a wide spectrum of human emotions: Disbelief. Repulsion. Horror. Volcanic commitment to some thing left undone for weeks that suddenly must be done, now. Frantic, silent conspiracy between siblings. An angry stare at Dad and a quick flick of the irises toward Mom to assess shared responsibility for this assault on the teenage psyche.

Grateful for their cooperation (at least they stayed in their chairs), I randomly opened my beloved copy of Best Loved Poems. (Well, it wasn't totally random; I figured that a poem from the “Poems of Love” section might cause the kids' heads to explode, so I went for “Poems that Tell a Story.”) I landed on John Godfrey Saxe's retelling of the ancient Indian fable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

You probably know the story, if not the poem. Six unsighted men each have a tactile encounter with a different part of the same elephant. The fellow who bumps into the side of the elephant proclaims an elephant to be like a wall. Touching the tusk moves number two to assert elephants to be spear-like. Four more make their confident declarations: An elephant is like a snake... a tree... a fan...a rope. Each, in turn, proclaims the reality of an elephant as a whole to be contained in their own particular and distinct experience of it.

The rhyming recitation concludes by stating the moral so clearly that we can't miss it:

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Quickly and with unusually efficient teamwork, the kids cleared the table and scurried out of the room. In that postpartum silence unique to a room just vacated by teenagers, my wife, Janet, and I were left to a few moments of reverie followed by brief conversation. We were both a bit stunned at how accurately this old story captures what transpires all too often in the “theologic wars” of the contemporary church.

Whether it's worship, sexuality, mission, or any of the many other hot topics among us, too often we shout at each other across chasms carved deep by indefatigable disagreement about what is true and good. We each claim that our reading of scripture, our experience, our understanding of tradition or current reality reflects the whole elephant. We “rail on” and seldom pause to really hear – with deep and profound hospitality – “what each other mean” or to prayerfully discern how it might enhance, enrich, or even challenge and change our own particular “ignorance.”

“For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part,” wrote the apostle Paul – no stranger to prating about elephants – to the debating community in Corinth. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” Someday, he offers, in the fullness of time, the partial will come to an end and we will know fully. But for now, we are left with elephants in the room and our own limited ability to perceive and proclaim what is true and good about them.

Thankfully, moving in our midst is also the Holy Spirit who, as Jesus promised, teaches us everything and reminds us of all that Jesus has said to us (John 14:26). But that old Reformation saw simul justus et peccator (at the same time sinner and saint) suggests that our own sin fogs even that glass so that not one of us can ever see the teaching or get what Jesus is saying quite right, no matter how much or deeply we pray or study scripture or research tradition or analyze the context. Our vision is riddled with blind spots. Perhaps humility, rather than being “exceeding stiff and strong,” ought to lead us into our discussions of the elephants in the room.

Since reading that poem with my family, I have found myself reading and rereading chapters 12 through 14 of 1 Corinthians. And I have come to think that it's time to rescue 1 Corinthians 13 from its matrimonial exile and return it to its intended dwelling place: smack-dab in the center of our life together as the body of Christ. Maybe this chapter and the surrounding two ought to be read every time we sit down at the table (and certainly before we get up from it) to talk about what it means to be the body of Christ and how we are to address the many issues and challenges we are called to face together.

I can just about see the look on some of your faces, the look like the multifaceted one on my kids' faces at the dinner table. But for the sake of God's mission of healing and hope in the world, the regular confession that “if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge...but do not have love, I am nothing,” empowered by God's Spirit, just might assist us in embodying some other words purported to be from the pen of Paul:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. [Ephesians 4:29 – 5:2; NRSV]