Dear [The Name of the Kid Once Got Pulled Over By A Cop For Speeding By A Lot And Also Not Paying Attention With My Lifelong Best Friend In The Car And Then Swore Her To Secrecy With The Result That I Didn't Find Out About This Incident Until Several Weeks After the Fact],

The other day, we were talking over lunch. Everyone else had already left, and we didn't have much to say to one another, so as I always do, I mentioned the most interesting thing I've been thinking about recently. It was the version of the bible story that my mom had told me the night before. I wasn't entirely clear on what hat story was, and I'd like to let the world know, but it's a long story, so it'll have to wait.

What you said was this; "That's interesting, but I don't see what difference it makes, really."

It matters because metaphors do have power.

The reason the story catches my interest is that it's a better story. It shows a less arbitrary God, and a real enemy, and a God who isn't totally in love with making rules. Past all of that, though, it's a story. I mean a real, honest to god story, the kind worth telling generation to generation. My mom's story upgrades the thing from the kind of story that makes you feel like somebody, somewhere, is lying to you to the kind of story that you want to hear again. In the same way that rhythm is at the very core of music and line is at the very core of art, story is at the very core of literature.

I don't like a chaotic, arbitrary God, because I think in patterns, and that which you can't understand is scary. I don't like a God who pointlessly made a very nice garden that was also a death trap and was surprised when shit went wrong, but yet is all knowing and has preordained my future. I prefer a God who wrote all of the languages and speaks them all perfectly, and who wrote the strongest metaphors, the ones every culture clings to, and who made our minds to thrive on patterns and then made a patterned universe so we could understand it, but still made it complex enough that we could spend our entire collective existence figuring out. I like the God who invented calculus and quantum mechanics and is totally fluent in all of it. And also? I would really prefer a God who wrote a really, really beautiful book to help us understand him, and I'd love it if he were capable of writing a worthwhile story in the process. That is why it matters.

Sincerely,
Claire