Epanodos (e-pan’-o-dos): 1. Repeating the main terms of an argument in the course of presenting it. 2. Returning to the main theme after a digression. 3. Returning to and providing additional detail for items mentioned previously (often using parallelism).
Do you ever wonder why you’re here? Do you ever wonder what God intends for you? Do you aver wonder why stock cliched answers to these questions are good enough for you, mainly because they fit on a bumper sticker you can stick on the back of your car or truck, or on your college dorm door?
We walk in the shallow trench of the shadow aimlessness carrying cellphones and I-Pads to comfort us in our total isolation from the “others” who are tightly-wound mysteries reveling in their uniqueness. The core of their beings is incomprehensible. You can know their shoe size. You can know the color of their eyes and skin, but you can never know THEM—their being the in world is an ensemble of otherness, mystery, and difference. “Similarities” between you and them as persons are illusory. As things or objects, you can know them—six feet tall, 200 lbs, $80,000 per year.
These are things I learned in college. I learned to love what I couldn’t understand about a person, because that’s who they were and that’s what I wanted to love. The closer I got, the more mysterious they became. The less I “knew” them, the more I loved them. I couldn’t predict. I couldn’t control. What I could predict and control was not them—not their humanity. That’s why I turned to bumper stickered cliches. Yes, it’s true. Let m explain.
Every Cloud has a Silver Lining. Cat got your tongue? Time flies. Fit as a fiddle.
These, and thousands more, gloriously true and compact sayings, reach into my soul like the hand of God. They anchor me in the uncertainties of life washing over my relationships and everything else in a refreshing clear stream of hope, and faith, and happiness. Plastered on the rear of my Subaru, they tell the world we are connected by the blandness of common sense and the social chasm of our foundational alienation. Cliches ground us in the garden of advice, like tomatoes or basil, they grow in the soil of providence in need of very little tending, to yield their soul-nourishing fruits and healthful herbs. Cliches help show us how to live with unwelcome pontification and arguments, grounding our lives of love and loneliness in simplistic remedies—one-liners that can fit nicely on a 3×10” strip of paper with adhesive on the back.
The next time somebody says to you, “That’s a cliche,” pull out a bumper sticker from your backpack and read its cliche to them. Read it loudly with passion and resolve. Then, stick it on their face over their eyes, and spin them around a couple of times. Then, rip off the bumper sticker and yell “Opposites attract!” Then, give them the bumper sticker to keep, along with your business card and a small bottled water. If you get arrested, just pay your fine or serve your sentence and shut up.
Once you’re out on the street again, leave people alone. That’s right, ALONE. It will be the punishment you inflict for the great lot of humanity’s failure to understand that not understanding isn’t misunderstanding, it is rather, the acknowledgement of the centrality of bumper stickers and their cliched contents to the human condition, to the citadel of moaning and laughter.
Inspired by being stuck in traffic behind somebody, and reading the bumper stickers on the back of their car or truck, I am freed from the oppression of the other, the fear of contracting myself, the hernia- inducing heavy lifting of coherence. Right now I’m “making lemonade.”
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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