Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, May 15, 2007


I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

- Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter
on this day, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas
(author of “Ship of Fools” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”)


Many think that fiction is the opposite of truth. Wrong. I have often said that I read a lot more fiction than I do “theological” texts in my line of work, simply because in well-written fiction is where I hear the truth spoken most plainly and most eloquently. I read both of Porter’s novels mentioned above as a young person, and remember nodding my head and saying to myself, “This is Life as it really is”.

The truest Creation stories in “scripture” and in human cultures are fiction. They flow from the cultural consciousness and imagination, based upon experience and reflection and curiosity - and equally from prejudice and fear and other deep human realities. Therefore, we who come upon them later must grapple with them. The “fiction” is just a vehicle for the deep truths with which all human persons and cultures engage. It is not the details that matter. Talking snakes and forbidden apples offered by Eve are fictional tools that attempt to speak truth - that human beings make choices which either ennoble us or demean us. I accept that truth, and reject the anti-female prejudice and fear of woman that came with it.

Porter said, “It is such a relief to be told the truth”. And she said truthfully, “Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it”. She said it in many ways in her fiction.

After you and I have died, may people tell stories about us that may not be factually true ………. but which are true to the facts about who we were in truth. Just like we tell stories about “God” that are mostly fiction, but in deepest essence, true.

Brian+