Allegory

I have a confession to make.

A couple, actually. The first one is that I am strongly considering changing the name of this blog to "I have a confession to make." That seems to be what it's about, most of the time. Thank you, Confessors. Sorry about that.

The one I started being about to make is this:

I like allegories.

Shhh! I know! That is sooo not cool of me!

Allegories are stories-non-grata in the literary world (and most other worlds, too). They're usually not very good literature. The whole point-by-point symbolism tends to grate on most people, and nobody likes moralising. I totally get it. It's just that . . . sometimes it's kind of a relief or something not to have to do the work of figuring things out. Sometimes it's kind of nice to have a prepackaged spiritual truth, pretty much spelled out, but with different pictures, as it were. When I encounter one, if I like the "pictures," I feel kind of validated. Or, if the beliefs being spelled out aren't the same as mine, I feel like at least I know what they are so I can consider them without being force-fed philosophy (which, for some reason, I always have a harder time processing).

Since I secretly like it, I also (sometimes less secretly) look for it everywhere. In books I read. In every day life. In my defense, though, unless I'm feeling even lazier than usual, looking for allegories can kind of be heady work in itself. And it turns out that the allegories I prefer are more often the ones that aren't intentional, or that don't translate exactly point-by-point after all. Maybe kind of like . . . a parable. Hey! Jesus used parables . . . !

I bring this up because I've been allegorising and analogising lately, and some of that is probably going to spill over into the Confessional pretty soon.