In 2009, I wrote that our relationship to the Trinity is like a kite.
The wind of the Spirit lifts us;
Christ, the string, connects us
to our Father, the steady ground.
How high shall we glide
before we are gathered in?
Fifteen years later, while reading Bohumil Hrabal’s 1976 short story “Too Loud A Solitude”, I came across similar words. It was an eerie feeling, like finding my own words between the hard covers of a book written by someone else.
Here is how Hrabal’s words appear in the English-language version of his book, translated from the original Czech by Michael Henry Heim:
“…suddenly the kite was God and I [holding the cord] was the Son of God, and the cord was the Holy Spirit which puts man in contact, in dialogue with God.”*
Is it more than a coincidence that Hrabal and I both hit upon the idea that a kite is like the Holy Trinity? My guess is that, once you write for a few years, once you have used several hundred analogies, it does not matter how original they are, you are going to find others who have used them, others equally original.
This leads me to another quote from Hrabal’s book, from page 2. The narrator, who is compacting banned books, getting them ready to be burned, says:
“How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch an idea had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn’t have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself. … When my eye lands on a real book and looks past the printed word, what it sees is disembodied thought flying through air, gliding on air, living off air, returning to air…”**
Is the Trinity like a kite? That is a thought aloft in the wind, a thought Hrabal and I set down in words, trying to anchor it to page and screen, but the thought itself glides on.
If a thought is given to us, that makes it ours just as any gift to us is ours. But we cannot claim to be its origin, its creator. We did not make what is given to us. Where thoughts come from remains a mystery.
This is a thought I return to in wonder. I return again and again.
*page 59, Too Loud A Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal, copyright 1976, translated from the original Czech by Michael Henry Heim, English translation copyright 1990 by Harcourt Brace Javanovich, first United States edition. The original book was banned in Czechoslovakia.
**ibid., page 2.
COMMENTS
Jerry wrote:
I think Hrabel was inspired or took poetic license with Proverbs 30:4 — “Who has gone up to heaven and come down? Whose hands have gathered up the wind? Who has wrapped up the waters in a cloak? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is the name of his son? Surely you know!” (NIV)