Jesus was once asked why he spoke in parables. His answer is more than a little curious: I speak in parables . . . lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn again, and I should heal them.

At first glance, it would seem that Jesus is being deliberately vague so that people would not understand the truth—and so could remain ignorant and obstinate.

The opposite is true. His studied imprecision is a gentleness, a deep compassion that recognizes that because people’s lives are complex, the truth should only be spoken in a certain way. How?

It is not enough just to have the truth. Truth can set us free, but it can also freeze hearts further if it is presented carelessly. Here’s a poignant example:

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates once published a book called Them. Although a novel, the book is based on the life of real person, a young woman whom Oates once taught in a college classroom and to whom she gave a failing grade.

Sometime after she had given this young woman a failing grade, Oates received a letter from her. The woman shared much of her own story, which was very checkered and painful. She had come from a bad home, been abused as a young girl, and had spent a number of years trying to deal with her wounded self through mindless and anonymous sex.

At the time she wrote this letter, she was trying to pull herself out of both her past and her destructive patterns of coping. In her letter she complained bitterly that she was not helped much by the class she took from Oates. Here, with a few slight redactions, is an extended quote from her letter:

“You once said in one of your classes: ‘Literature gives form to life.’ I remember you saying that very clearly. And now I want to ask you something: ‘What is form? And why is that better than the way life happens by itself?’

I hate all that, all those lies, so many words in all those books. What form is there to the way things happen? I wanted to run up to you after class and ask you that question, cry it out at you, shout it into your face because your words were wrong! You were wrong!

And yet I envy you. I have envied you since I first saw you. You and others like you. Your easy way with words and people. The way you can talk to others, like friends.

One day before class I saw you walking into the building with another teacher, the two of you, well-dressed, talking, smiling, like that was no accomplishment whatsoever. And another time I saw you driving away from school in a blue car.

And I hate you for that. For that and for your books and for your words, and for your knowing so much about what never happened in any perfect form.

I even see your picture in the newspapers sometimes. You, with all your knowledge, while I have lived my life already, turned myself inside out and got nothing out of it. I have lived my life and there is no form to it. No shape.

I could tell you about life. I and people like me. All of us people who lie alone at night and squirm with a hatred we cannot get straight, into a shape. All of us women who give themselves to men without knowing why, all of us who walk fast with hate, like pain, in our bowels, terrified. What do you know about that?

Like the woman I am sitting across from right now in the library as I write this letter. She is fat, heavy, thick cream-colored fat-marbled old legs, cracked with varicose veins. People like her and me know things you don’t know, you teachers and writers of books.

We are the ones who wait around libraries when it is time to leave and sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen. We are the ones who make crazy plans for marriage, but have no one to marry. We are the ones who look around slowly when we get off the bus; but don’t know what we are looking for.

We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long hours sunk in our own bodies; thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for someone to come and to give form to so much pain. And what do you know about that?”

Yes, what do we know about that, we teachers, preachers, and writers of books? Her letter tells us why Jesus spoke in parables.

The truth can set us free. Indeed, it can give form to life. But can also be spoken unthinkingly, without heart, and then it serves mostly to rub our own inadequacy and shame into our face.

We need to speak our truth in parables. Truth is not something we can play with, fast and easy.