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January 19, 2026 S6:E3 – Horse-sense and the Meaning of the World

Horse-sense and the Meaning of the World

by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpress/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/OTW_S6_E3_Horse-sense-and-the-meaning-of-the-world.mp3

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There’s an anecdote attributed to Beethoven, at least as I heard it somewhere, that I love. The story goes that after playing a certain piece of music, someone asked him, “Maestro, what does this piece of music mean?” “Ah!” he said, “good question,” and immediately he sat down at the piano and played the whole piece again from start to finish. You get the idea. The meaning of a piece of art can’t be separated from the art itself, as if, in the case of a story, for instance, a so-called moral could be extracted from it, such that the story could be discarded. The meaning of the music, or the story, or the poem is not separate from its medium, but bound up with it. Can you imagine a smile meaning something without a face? No, the meaning of the smile can’t be separated from the medium through which the smile is made available, the peculiarities of a loved one’s bodied expression.

Often it is the medium or mode of the communication that shapes us as much or more than the message itself. It was philosopher Marshall McLuhan who said, “The medium is the message.” What does that mean? Neil Postman, in his book “Amusing ourselves to death,” applies McLuhan’s phrase to television, specifically Sesame Street. Now, I grew up loving Sesame Street, but Postman argues that, for all its merits, even a wonderful show like Sesame Street, can’t help but teach us to love its medium, which is television. He explains that if we love a TV show, at least one thing that’s happening is we’re being trained to love television, which is the show’s medium.

Nowadays, even if this (hopefully beneficial) podcast is what you go to your smartphone for, you’re still being trained to love the medium, which, in part at least, is the device itself. It’s just a pattern of reality, not itself bad. For instance, like we mentioned above, if the message is love through a hug, smile, or loving words from a friend, the medium is that person, and you’re being trained to trust and attach to the medium. The medium and the message are inextricable. That’s why what is said and how it is said go together. Like music and its meaning, like language and the people who speak it, like a smile and a face.

I love to read outloud. One reason is because words don’t come from thin air, they come from people. People with bodies, body language, voices, gestures, and expressions. They have a way about them. The best writers make their characters real as you read—you can see how they move, you can just hear how they would say such and such.

I’ll give you an example from a song I wrote called “Looking for you.” Here’s the first line of the song, it goes, “what if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time?” It depends as much on how it is said, as much or more than what is said. You can imagine other ways of saying that line, can’t you? Let me try it out with two different ways of saying it:

What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a threatening tone)

What if you found out someone had been looking for you the whole time. (with a comforting tone)

That lyric could get creepy real fast, right? The non-verbal music or tone of the phrase matters to its meaning. I’ve heard it suggested that something like 85% of communication is non-verbal, implicit, and intuitive. That non-verbal 85% is one of art’s sweet spots, and it’s reflected in God’s artwork, the Creation.

So, let’s look at an example from nature… Like Beethoven’s music, you can dissect a frog and catalog all the parts, but what you’ll miss entirely is what a frog actually means. You might analyze what it is, but not why it is. George MacDonald, who wrote a whole essay about how the images in nature are meant to supply our imaginations with ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves and God, puts it this way:

In what belongs to the deeper meanings of nature and her mediation between us and God, the appearances of nature are the truths of nature, far deeper than any scientific discoveries concerning them. The show of things is that for which God cares most, for their show is the face of far deeper things; we see in them, as in a glass darkly, the face of the unseen. What they say to the childlike soul is the truest thing to be gathered of them. To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it—just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology. So Nature exists primarily for her look, her appeals to the heart and the imagination, her simple service to human need, and not for the secrets to be discovered in her and turned to man’s further use.

Isn’t that interesting? Nature doesn’t primarily exist to be analytically autopsied, as if the message could be extracted from the medium, without destroying both. Gandalf’s comment about Saruman fits well here, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.”

John Ciardi says the same of poetry, citing Charles Dickens

…the language of experience is not the language of classification. A boy burning with ambition to become a jockey does not study a text on zoology. He watches horses, he listens to what is said by those who have spent their lives around horses, he rides them, trains them, feeds them, curries them, pets them. He lives with intense feelings toward them. He may never learn how many incisors a horse has, nor how many yards of intestines. What does it matter? He is concerned with a feel, a response-to, a sense of the character and reaction of the living animal. And zoology cannot give him that. Not all the anatomizing of all the world’s horses could teach a man horse-sense… So for poetry.

So meaning is not about mere information. It’s not about extracting the message. That means art has something to say about the inseparability of orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct living), for instance, since art-making emphasizes that meaning (or truth) only arrives when what is said and how it is said—the verbal and the non-verbal communication—harmonize. Christ says to obey (orthopraxy) is to love, which may suggest that the non-verbal how of our lives—the part that art tends to specialize in—is actually primary. Which is another way of saying I’ll know what you believe by how you live, not by what you say you believe. I’ll know what a frog is by watching how it frogs, not by reading the autopsy report. Or, in the case of Ciardi’s jockey, I’ll gain some horse-sense by being around horses, not by listening to a lecture about their characteristics.

Am I saying that truth-claims are secondary and not important? No. I’m saying the natural order of things is that truth claims are literally second, in the sense that, in real life, they don’t happen first. First the stranger smiles at you, then you meet them and learn their name. The relational experience of the person precedes the propositional conclusions we arrive at. I smell the flower before I set down my doctrine stating how pleasant it smells.

Recently I heard someone describe the moment they began to take Christianity seriously. They said they were tasked at their job to interview an old man, a believer in his late 90s. As the old man began to tell stories of God’s work in his life from over fifty years before, tears ran down his wrinkled cheeks and praise tumbled from his quivering lips. The young man realized he was in the presence of someone not just conveying information, but bearing witness to a relational reality. This old man really had met and come to love a living Jesus.

It’s interesting that Jesus invites his disciples to follow him long before he asks them “who do you say that I am?” In some sense, the experience of discipleship precedes conversion. You get to know someone before you make truth-claims about them. And the truth-claims of the church are the result of the cumulative witness of many who’ve heard the deep, throbbing music of God’s lovingkindness, steeped themselves in the poetry of the holy heartbreak of covenant history, experienced the forgiveness, kindness, and beauty of God’s healing work, and they’ve come to know its meaning. They’ve come to put a name and a face to it all. “The meaning of the world?” they say, “It is Jesus.”

Having said that, can you detect the idea we began with—that the medium is the message? The main mediums God uses to communicate himself are the beauty and intelligibility of Creation, humans who embody his ways, and art that narrates his relationship with the world, by which I mean, firstly, the Bible, and secondly, the things that people make, whether books, music, poetry, etc. If television shows are really forming in us an attachment to television, for instance, and instagram is really training us to love our phones, then how might God choose to be deliberate in the mediums he uses to form and teach us to love and attach to himself. He needs to be deliberate, right? Since the medium needs to correspond rightly to the nature of the message, which is personal connection with himself.

The loving faces and touch of God’s people are the medium that teach us to love, not TVs and phone screens, but faces and hands. Jesus has a face and hands that heal. The medium is the message. The excellent artwork people make, can shape a “horse-sense” of reality in our very bodies that directs hearts toward what is ultimately real, and even how God relates to what he has lovingly made. That’s one of art’s sweet spots. The Scriptures involve us in the history of how God has gone about involving himself in history, how he has painstakingly crafted a beautiful story for God and humanity to inhabit together.

This principle is also the problem with idolatry, because if the medium conveys a message that doesn’t correspond to what is actually real, the sense of reality taking shape in us will be rooted in a lie. We’re all beginning to notice, aren’t we? That whatever our devices, as a particular medium, shape in us, it isn’t really true. Our devices aren’t making us more human, the medium of a screen can’t satisfy the deepest needs of our personhood for the presence of another living face and body with us. No machine ever could, because we’re not machines. Because the medium is wrong, so is the message.

Screens don’t prepare us for deeper relationships with people, but for deeper dependence on screens. On the other hand—and let this be an encouragement—protected time with actual humans in real life practicing God’s love, slow contact with the beauty of the Creation, and meditation in the presence of Scripture and good art—these all offer us points of contact with what God, and therefore life, is actually like.

May we, with all the saints across the millenia, when asked, “What is the meaning of the world?” answer, “It is Jesus.”