An older mentor once told the story of two friends from his church who decided to room together in college. One was an atheist, the other had faith. The atheist was a strong student who enjoyed debating and was quick with answers and facts. The other friend was an average student, was no good at arguing and was more laid back in personality. My mentor was nervous when he found out these boys would be rooming together. He knew their personalities and he feared the boys would converse about faith and the average student would lose all the arguments, which would lead to him losing his faith, too. Half of this happened. They did converse about faith and the stronger student did win all the debates. Strangely though, the opposite happened in regards to who came out on top.

By the time my mentor connected with them again (half a year? one year?) later, the strong student had reconsidered his perspective. Yes, he had won all the arguments. He pulled out all the facts, but the average student, although he had lost every argument, held to his faith. The facts didn’t change what his community had taught him about truth. This impressed his roommate. That someone would lose every argument and still retain faith made an impression on this young man and he was pulled to the other side.

There are probably many gaps in that narration that I don’t know, but the gist of the story is intriguing. In this situation, the facts didn’t matter. Don’t get me wrong. Facts are important. We don’t want people in power (or out of power) telling us that brushing our teeth is pointless or that gravity isn’t a thing. We don’t need to dispel Newton’s First Law of Motion (though I don’t actually know about that kind of stuff!). I’m not advocating blithe attention to rationality. But there’s something deeper than facts – something more important.

Let me touch on a concept taken from C.S. Lewis. In his Chronicles of Narnia books Lewis writes of a war between good and evil. The lion, Aslan, is a beloved character who holds all virtues of goodness. The White Witch is cold, relentless and evil. In the end, which is not the end, the witch kills Alsan, but Aslan returns to the storyline. Once this happens children ask how this can be. Aslan explains that there’s a deeper magic that the witch didn’t know about and so he was able to return to life.

This deeper magic reaches beyond facts. It’s not about an individual making up stories and convincing other people to follow them. The deeper magic isn’t about twisting the facts. It’s about embracing paradoxes and learning from stories. Marcus Borg (I’ve never actually read him, but he has a few concepts I appreciate) writes about it concisely. Borg writes, “We live in the only culture in human history that has equated truth with factuality. This has a pernicious effect on our ability to appreciate the Bible with its interweaving of history and metaphor and symbolic narrative.”

Our North American society seems obsessed with facts. I’m not excited about raising my child to consider only this aspect of life. Again, facts have their place, but the older I get the more I distrust facts. Politicians use them to sway voters. The religious right and the liberal left hoard their favorite facts to distort the story. Not everything in the Bible is fact. As Borg mentions, there’s history (which has many perspectives and interpretations), metaphor and symbolism. And this all points to the deeper magic, also known as deeper truth.

I sit here wondering, wondering how to pass on faith when it feels like so many people are releasing this truth that has been passed down. Is it because truth and fact are being conflated? Facts swim everywhere in our culture, but I want to pass on to our daughter a deeper magic. I want to pass on depth to her. I want to pass on faith and trust and truth. Sometimes I get hung up on the facts, but I’m trying my best here to be an average student.