It being a Monday morning, I am feeling either brave, or fool-hearty. I am not sure which. Either way, some folks will be offended-and I both dread and regret that; some will be affirmed-I am glad of that; and some will be indifferent-I deplore that, for the river of fire and debris I am about to jump into is the river whose waters are at flood-tide amongst us and, in places, already overriding their banks and levees.

Let us suppose then. Let us suppose that there is a huge, deadly wreck on busy Main Street, USA in the midst of mid-day traffic. There are, technically speaking, several hundred witnesses, albeit from very different perspectives. Some of the witnesses are immediate, so immediate in fact that two or three of them are wounded themselves by the flying glass and careening steel. Others are simply immediate enough to have been splattered by blood and dust and specks of oil. Not so immediate, but still close enough, are those who had to jump out of harm’s way and, in doing so, dropped possessions or skinned a knee or simply got an adrenalin rush of significant proportions.

Other of those who saw had a less dramatic experience, of course. Some of them really did see, in that they were standing at the curb waiting for the light to change and saw the whole thing as if in slow motion. Others were walking in the direction from which the wreck came and likewise saw the whole thing, also as if in slow motion, albeit from a safer distance. Some witnesses, of course, only “saw” the deadly accident in the loosest sense of saw. That is, the space between the sound of the crash in progress and their turning their heads to look was no more than a nano-second, or so it seemed. For some even, the screeching of tires laying down rubber was so dramatic that they turned and, in point of fact, really did “see” the wreck itself, although they hardly could be said to have “seen” the whole thing, since they witnessed only its final act of culmination.

And then, of course, there are all the window-gawkers…the office workers who leaned out from the windows of all the surrounding buildings that line Main Street. Or the store personnel who came running out of the street-level shops and commercial businesses. And there’s a couple of cops who were cruising in the opposite the direction away from the wreck and therefore did not really “see” it at all, except that their deep experience with wrecks let them respond almost instantaneously, just at it allowed them to re-construct what logically must have happened and include it in their report of the wreck itself.

Assume, then, that we have some several hundred good citizens-maybe even some not-so-good ones and a few out-right liars, thieves, and nair-do-wells on Main Street. Each of them, from the purest to the most nefarious, now has a wreck in his or her head. Each of them-it is one of the surest bets in this gossipy world-each of them is going to tell some other human being about this phenomenal wreck, at some point at some time over the coming hours, days, weeks, and years. Maybe even, he or she will tell several someones, And what they are all telling is true. A wreck happened at mid-day on Main Street, USA. Yet for every witness, that wreck is distinct, is different, is so nuanced that there are as many wrecks as there are witnesses. Oh, the tales will, in all probability, share a common thread; but they will also contain some inconsistencies and some contradictions amongst them.

Yet the truth in all of this–the one “fact” in it all-is that each witness, bearing home his or her story of disaster on Main Street, is reporting the actual wreck. All of them who seek to speak the truth of what they witnessed are indeed speaking the truth. The inconsistencies and contradictions amongst their various stories, were we to collect those tales into some kind of whole, would not be erroneous or deliberated distortions or violations of fact. They would be honest and true reports of what happened, because what happened did happen within the vitality and experience of each tale’s teller.

Now good and honest men and women are on the horns of a dilemma. We have the expertise of the police who have brought their training to bear on what will become the more or less official assessment of what happened. In addition, we have all the technology and brilliance of accident-reconstruction specialists who, by studying the lay-down of debris and tracks and the pressure required for such impact and the points of primary as opposed to secondary and terciary impact can be reasonably certain about what or who hit what or whom first. They can even re-construct enough to establish with some confidence which actions had to proceed which other actions in order to culminate in the impact in the first place.

All of this is absorbing. It can occupy the news media for weeks and conversation for a lifetime. It can cause consternation among those accused and angst among those deemed to have been not at fault. Reams and reams of paper, billions and billions of pixels, yards and yards of documentation, not to mention several hundred thousand dollars, will be spent in pursuit of the facts about this wreck on Main Street.

And when it is all over, when all is said and done by expert or ordinary citizen, the only absolutely certain thing…the only “fact” beyond conceivable question…is that there was a wreck one mid-day on Main Street, USA and that there was some take-away. We will never know the sum total of all the facts about the wreck nor will be ever know all of its specific details. What we have-and all we have-is the actuality of the wreck and the burgeoning largesse of lives changed in some greater or lesser way by their engagement with the wreck itself or with its story.

I tell you this dangerous tale on a sunny early-summer Monday morning for a reason. But you know that already. A parable always reveals itself early-on in its telling.

It was and still is the way of modernism to believe that there is some means by which to re-construct and define, with detail and specificity, the facts and truths about the wreck on Main Street. It is the way of post-modernity not just to doubt the possibility of that absolute position, but more importantly to ask why one would assume it in the first place, save for legal or fiscal reasons of guilt and/or innocence, although those are very valid, worthy, and sometimes energizing additions to the conversation. But what we really have here despite all our analyses and probing, the post-modernist might well argue, is access to only one truth: There was once an actual wreck and its actuality now lives in the actuality of hundreds and hundreds of people, being as distinct and different as are the hundreds and hundreds of individual universes in which the actuality now lives.

The post-modernist would argue, in other words, that as surely as it takes an observer for an action to occur, just so surely is the observed action the actual one. He or she would probably have us remember here as well that we should be leery of assuming that contradictions and inconsistencies are anything other than the evidence that things really are as they are when observed….that potentially light is a wave and light is a particle. It just depends on who is watching.

Let us go forth, then, and be Christian this lovely summer morning, but may the wreck and its story bother every one of us this whole day through. When all is said and done, every single one of us, alive in 2008 and claiming Christianity as our belief system, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks about the wreck. In other words, every single one of us, if we live another decade or so, is going to have to decide what he or she thinks not only about the crash, two thousand years ago, of Messiah into space/time but also about how we understand and engage the records of that event that have come to us over the centuries.

Phyllis Tickle