I started this blog back in 2009, as I was finishing off my Master of Divinity studies at Briercrest Seminary and before I knew what my next steps were going to be for me in ministry. I was mostly looking for a way to keep me creative and thinking through sort of a lull in my life-trajectory. Seven years and 593 posts later, I have covered all sorts of ground in my efforts to reflect on God, life, faith, love, words and spirituality: from the theology of Halloween, to advice on pastoral burn-out, from the theology of video games to the meaning Gravity Falls.
As I look ahead to another year of blogging, I'm also realizing that there is a lot of rich material in the terra incognita archive that could bear revisiting, stuff I'd forgotten about, material that new visitors to my blog may never have seen before, ideas that, for all their being 7 years old, are still worth mulling over. With that in mind I've decided that this year, Thursdays at terra incognita will be dedicated to reviewing and re-posting old posts.
So whether you're a long-time reader of brand new to my blog, let me welcome you here today with an oldie but a goodie, the very first thing (after my obligatory introductory post) that I ever posted on the blog.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvOSOpsMQVzTF29e_gHL023nRy4T_xlh2A9Rf7dqYatRSP9A2_fdliWQ4EZOMe-ekB3UOd3I6O7pZEBmJoGYhRz6dRMLxXtQrC_tULzn-nPy9nBee-2jeqtXsObhkA6oyPPovrTgN5oF8K/s200/hand6.jpg)
Here’s the thing (I think): Most of us could probably get how we might possess “truth” "in the soul.” Most of us are Platonic dualists at heart—what’s truly true is not the touchable matter out there (in the body)—to find the “truly true” you have to journey inward (in the soul). I used to teach this with great enthusiasm when my English classes studied Heart of Darkness. I read the same thing in Wal-Mart yesterday when I happened to thumb through a popular-level book on eastern meditation in the discount bargain bin. But I think that way lies madness (of sorts)—and I think Rimbaud knew it. And so he denounces all such dualisms, and ends with a vision of truth “in one soul and one body” together.
And I’m left wondering, in what way can truth be possessed in the body. Can this actual flesh… these hands, these senses, this coursing blood… can it somehow be said to be somehow true? For Rimbaud, the journey away from spirit/matter dualism led him through a hell of futile debauches and empty sensuality.
But there is a different path.
It’s an inevitable path that leads down from a skull-shaped hill to a burst-open tomb, gaping wide and empty one Sunday morning. And the resurrected body that steps out of that tomb—the one who claimed before they murdered him that he was the truth incarnate—he reaches out his resurrected hand to us and says: “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe.” With a sweep of that nail-pierced hand, Jesus brushes aside Plato and Rimbaud together. And he points us outside of ourselves, to the Creator’s world broken and labouring, but now claimed by its maker and promised redemption.
And as we touch his glorified body—our hope and our promise—we can really say, in a way that Rimbaud never could: il me sera loisible de posseder la verite dans une ame et un corps.
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