Once upon a time…
There was a lady who loved to work jigsaw puzzles. She always did them with a big pair of toenail clippers nearby. Whenever a piece didn’t quite fit, she’d declare that it had swollen or shrunk from the humidity, and she’d grab the toenail clippers and happily snip away until the piece dropped into the slot without a fight. Sometimes she’d have to nibble away at a tab. Other times she’d ream out the holes.
She never worried about the gaps left in the puzzle—the unfilled slots, the edges that didn’t line up. It was like she didn’t even see them. As you might imagine, there were often pieces that seemed out of place—colors that didn’t match their surroundings, buildings that weren’t quite plumb. No one in her family ever pointed out the obvious discrepancies.
“It’s art,” she’d explain. “Neo-cubist. Very avant-garde. You wouldn’t understand.” Her family had heard this explanation repeated many times over the years. She was happy so they had long since ceased to bother about it. Of course, no one else ever got to enjoy a jigsaw puzzle because she would always insist that they were being picky when they would refuse to clip, waiting instead for a better location to present itself. “You’re not following the inspiration of the artist,” she insisted. “You need to let the inspiration breathe through you.”
Once, in a moment of irrational pranksterism, her husband (with the full conspiracy of their children) mixed several puzzles together and set them out in a plain box with no picture on the lid. There was an alpine mountain scene, a field of tulips in the Netherlands, a seascape from a Portuguese fishing village, even some baby bunnies hiding among the forest wildflowers. It didn’t matter. Soon, she was happily hunting and snipping away. Fitting what she thought would fit, snipping away at what she didn’t, always following “the inspiration.”
It took her quite a lot longer than usual to “finish” that puzzle. The resulting work appeared to her family to be a monstrosity of Frankensteinian proportions. There were still close to a thousand pieces left in the box when she declared it complete, yet she was so taken with the array that she mounted and framed it and hung it in the living room for all to see.
Her family was never sure if she was in on the joke. She seemed to be completely aware that the puzzle was indeed a mix of several different scenes. Yet, she always remarked how wonderful it was that all of the different artists wove a tapestry of unified inspiration.
So, how do you read the Bible?
When I look at what passes for Christianity, I think of this story—the woman fitting together pieces that were never meant to go together, trimming away parts that are inconvenient, ignoring the gaps that appear. When I point out that the bits don’t fit or that there are other bits remaining in the box, they tell me I’m not seeing it in context, or that I need to tap into the author’s inspirations in order to understand.
I see parts that aren’t supposed to fit together, but I’m always told that there is, woven through everything, a gloriously seamless, unified story. And, I think to myself, “Oh yeah, then why do you need the clippers? And why is there a fishing boat sticking out of the side of that mountain?”