Diving deep

There is a marvelous story about a lecture offered by Catalan surrealist painter and accused shameless self-promoter  Salvador Dali. The guests gathered in a hot loft to hear Dali expound on the surrealist movement. The guests waited long past the appointed time, growing more irritable and sweaty.  Finally they could hear the clump of heavy boots. To their amazement they saw two men leading a man  in an old-fashioned diving suit, complete with diving helmet. He entered the room carrying a billiard cue and leading a pair of Russian wolfhounds. If stories are correct, the heavy helmet was topped off with a radiator cap.

Though they could not see his bright animated eyes and his outrageous mustache, the audience knew this had to be Dali.  The host confirmed their assumption by making the introductions. Dali sat at microphone on the stage and he discovered his words could not be heard through the helmet.  His words ricocheted inside his helmet and were only perceived by his audience as incomprehensible sounds.  Finally, he motioned for help and his assistants unscrewed the helmet to give the gasping artist much needed air.

By way of explanation for appearing in a diving suit he claimed, "I just wanted to show that I was 'plunging deeply' into the human mind."

During my years of  intermittently writing Christian speculative fiction, which I style as a blend of fantasy and science fiction with a Christian worldview, I've often wondered if like Dali, I was somehow trapped in an artistic diving suit in which I plunged deeply into the Spirit of God. Try as I might to explain these experiences in  my fictional work, it was not received by secular publishers. Like Dali's external audience, they had no way of understanding what I was trying to communicate from within my experiences.  I wrote out of heavy-handed passion and not to the market, which is no way to sell a manuscript.

I knew that what I wrote moved me at times to tears from a deeply-felt love for Jesus, but it simply was incomprehensible to anyone who had not experienced that love.  And so, I came to realize that ultimately I was writing for an audience of One, who understood my heart stirrings and loved me unconditionally, not because of the excellence of my craft, but because I had loved and surrendered my entire being to His son Jesus.