For quite some time I’ve considered, questioned, and wrestled with what church should look like. I suspect I’m not alone: house church, emergent church, conversions to orthodoxy, etc. mark a religiously-charged time in our history.

I want to know everything from what a church service should look like minute-by-minute (three to five songs followed by announcements, offering, and a sermon or a more traditional liturgy) to what structure clergy and lay people fit into to how one should read the Bible (cover to cover in a year, one verse a day, with the aid of commentary, regularly, by oneself, in a group, as presented by someone else) to what living like Christ really means. But I have no answers.

Any time I attempt research, I end hours of tangential trails more confused and exhausted than when I began. During these times I fail to pray or consult the Bible because I’m crippled by the underlying question of how (how to pray, how prayer works, how to interpret the Bible).

But I’ve been reminded that sometimes answers aren’t the point. When I ask, “Yeah, but what does it mean?” I’m missing the experience.

Eugene Peterson’s Eat this Book has survived two moves, and I’m still not finished. I tend to rush through reading sometimes, so I’ve made it a point to slow down with this book.

Today I read: “We try our best to domesticate this revelation…to develop a problem-solving habit of approach to the Bible…But nothing in our Bibles is one-dimensional, systematized, or theologized…The place is charged with life, human and animal, good and bad, greedy and generous, indolent and determined. Such things, whether garden or country fair, can only be entered.” Certainly this is true, though it’s hard to understand right away what it means to “enter” the text.

Then I read: “We enter this text to meet God as he reveals himself, not to look for truth or history or morals that we can use for ourselves…we not only have to be willing to accept the strangeness of this world—that it doesn’t fit our preconceptions or tastes—but also the staggering largeness of it.”

As I read and reread the words I got the sense that sometimes one must continue on because there won’t be a time when every question is answered. And I got the sense that confusion can be normal. For one whose tendency might be to look for meaning, to systematize, then it’s a shock to accept what isn’t easily explained.

Then I had the feeling I’d read these words before. Though in the context of fiction, some 40-odd years ago, Flannery O’Connor spoke about reading as an experience (now collected in Mystery and Manners). She said, “People have a habit of saying, ‘What is the theme of your story?’… And when they’ve got a statement …, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story.” We may apply this to the Bible. If we know the events, the gospel, the neatly summarized statements of faith and theology, we don’t have to read it, we don’t have to “enter” the text and encounter the living God.

O’Connor goes on to say that “some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” While she speaks about fiction, the same is true the experience of reading the Bible. We can’t separate the reading of it from the meaning no more than we can separate the soul from the body while it’s alive.

Then O’Connor speaks about the type of mind that can read or write fiction. She refutes the claim raised at the time that the novelist has no hope and creates a hopeless world by saying that the people without hope don’t read or write novels and that “the type of mind that can understand good fiction is…willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

In my opinion, good fiction and the Bible have in common the ability to do just that—to deepen our sense of reality and mystery. A fictional world can point to truth in a way that the real world can’t. And the Bible can illuminate truth in the midst of “strangeness.” But we can’t read either one and extrapolate any sort of meaning; instead we must experience the details of the world presented to us, the God developing around us, and ruminate on the mystery of reality.

As one trained to think like a fiction writer, when Peterson puts the Bible into terms of plot and character, it resonates inside me. For the millionth time I have to let go of my need for perfect answers (though I still seek to learn and understand) and spend some time with the mystery.