English Lessons

by Andrea Lucado

  The crackers provided enough relief that I could collect my things and steady myself at the front door. I put on my enormous, full-length, puffy winter coat that probably scared small children who saw me in it from a distance. I was going to this Christian artsy conference thing, hangover and all.

  The night before, on my solo drunken walk home, I had slipped on a patch of ice on the sidewalk. It was a very sad and pathetic sight. This morning, in order to avoid a repeat of the night before, I instructed myself to walk slowly and deliberately. There I was. This girl, alone, at seven in the morning on a Saturday, in a coat that could have hidden four other people beneath it, stomping her way along the sidewalk like some sort of clumsy soldier in a sloppy uniform.

  If the walk from my bedroom to the kitchen was long, the walk from my house to Jisu’s, about one and a half miles, felt like fourteen Mount Everests all lined up and laughing at me. On a better day, I could have run a few miles in that same weather. But on this morning, a mile-long, slow stomping trek made me want to cry and crawl back home.

  I dragged my pathetic self inside the nearest corner store. My grandmother taught me that Coca-Cola cures an upset stomach, so I purchased a bottle, feeling a little strange and guilty for using my grandmother’s remedy as a hangover cure.

  I think, no, I know that one bottle of Coke I happened to get my hands on that morning had been prepared by the gods. Some otherworldly, miracle-working creatures gathered the Coke ingredients and sprinkled magic dust on them, then cooked them and bottled them into this glowing thing. This bottle of life-giving, energy-supplying, hangover-curing, and all over feel-good liquid swirled around my organs and brought them back to fully functioning, thriving, blood-pumping, helpful body parts. Just moments before I had become convinced that everything in me was rebelling against everything else in me and my body was waging a war that would end in me collapsing in front of Jisu and his friends in a crying, shameful mess, anything but ready for our Christian conference trip.

  I continued walking, clutching my bottle of soda with both mittens, terrified to drop a single ounce of this fairy gold. I had not long to go before I would arrive at Jisu’s, and I was feeling more confident with each sip and step that I really would be okay. That I would be able to successfully hide my night-before gulps with a smile and freshness so uncommon for a Saturday morning at seven thirty. Maybe I wouldn’t be putting my best foot forward, but I wouldn’t be putting my worst foot forward either.

  Jisu and the others were standing outside his house on St. Clement’s Street when I got there. Everyone had sleepy eyes, and they were rubbing their hands together trying to keep warm. I said hi, and Jisu introduced me to our carpool for the day. A guy from England, his wife from Canada, and another American like me. The five of us squeezed into the English guy’s car and made our way to a church in a neighborhood in London I’d never heard of. I wasn’t sure where we were headed or what we were headed to. It was a conference. It was about art and its role in the Christian life. It was cheap. This is what I knew.

  Everyone was filling out name tags with name and occupation when we got there. “Andrea, Student,” I wrote and stuck my name tag on my coat. I looked around at everyone else’s. I saw many occupations. Photographer, journalist, artist, writer, painter. I should have made something up other than “student.” I felt out of place standing beside the photographers and writers, the people who did real art as their jobs.

  I considered peeling my name tag right off when I spotted Jisu waving at me from a row of seats he was saving. I sat beside him, and when he read my name tag, he started laughing. Jisu had written photographer on his. Though it wasn’t his day job, he was truly talented at it. He had taken me out a few times to try to teach me how to use the fancy camera I had begged my parents for as my twentieth birthday gift, but the lessons didn’t stick. Jisu was a wonderful teacher, and I was a hopelessly terrible photography student.

  The room was freezing, and I spotted only one tiny radiator in a far corner. I zipped my coat all the way up with a grand gesture. I wanted everyone around me to know that I was not happy with the temperature in the room.

  The keynote speaker of the conference was Dr. Gavin McGrath, a pastor and writer. As he began his talk, I tuned in with uncharacteristic attention. I am very good at not listening to sermons and other talks given from stages and podiums. This is a habit I developed as a teen, when the person most often behind the pulpit was my own parent.

  But Dr. McGrath was talking about something I had never considered before. Something about truth and art. He said that whatever we do, whatever our art is, as Christians we must be sure it portrays the truth. That is the job of the Christian artist: to tell the truth. This is a biblical concept, not his own. Scripture says it is the truth that sets us free (John 8:32), that we work for the truth (2 Corinthians 13:8), and that we walk in the truth (2 John 1:4). That is our job and our responsibility as Christians who create for a living or for a hobby—to convey truth.

  Dr. McGrath then turned to an unexpected passage in Scripture, one I had never paid much attention to before, Psalm 137:4–6:

  How shall we sing the LORD’s song

  in a foreign land?

  If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

  let my right hand forget its skill!

  Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth,

  if I do not remember you,

  if I do not set Jerusalem

  above my highest joy! (ESV)

  As he read the psalm, I scrambled for my Bible so I could read the passage for myself and underline it. If I forget you, O Jerusalem…If I forget you, O Jerusalem. I kept repeating the phrase. It felt meaningful, but I didn’t know why. It felt like I was receiving a message, but I didn’t know what, like someone had just pressed a note into my hand but I wasn’t allowed to read it yet.

  McGrath told us that these verses from Psalms were written when Judah was taken captive by Babylon. In the verses before, the psalmist explains that the captors were tormenting the Israelites and asking them to sing songs to Zion, to perform sacred worship the Israelites reserved for true worship, not entertainment. This was forbidden. Hence their question, “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” Their answer was, simply, to not. And they hung their harps on a tree and remained silent.

  Perhaps this is what the Christian artist feels like, McGrath continued. He is in a foreign land, yet he’s being asked to perform in the way that all artists are asked to perform. Something in them must create, and there’s no stopping it. In the same way, the Israelites knew they must worship God. It was what they were created to do. But how does the artist create when there are scoffers and enemies around, heathens and believers of other religions who may not understand Christians?

  Around the time of this conference, my thesis outline was due. I had recently decided to write about a genre called postcolonial literature. It’s called postcolonial because it is the literature that comes out of a place and people group once colonized by the West and then left to be independent. Though leaving the colonized nation alone sounds like a good thing, it can cause a time of upheaval. After years of being occupied by these other people, this other culture, the colonized are left floundering in their identity, an identity that has been so defined and wrapped up in their former foreign ruler. The ruler pulls out, and the result is chaotic and painful and confusing. Because of this, things that often happen in the postcolonial novels I’ve read are bad. Violence, suicide, rape, failure to rise above one’s class or escape one’s circumstances. The novels have dark themes, and the endings are pretty much never happy. These are sad books. Hard books to read. Tough. Yet, these stories were all I wanted to take off the library’s shelves that year. These were the stories I was most drawn to.

  This concerned me. I wanted to want to write on a more blatantly Christian subject, like C. S. Lewis. I was, after all, living in the hometown of our hero, Lewis. But instead, I kept thinking about these postcolonial stories and themes. They
were haunting me. One book in particular wouldn’t leave me alone. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I had been assigned to read it in college, and it was so good I packed it up and brought it with me to Oxford. (I like to be in close proximity to my favorite books.)

  In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy wrote one of the most beautifully sad stories I have ever read. It is about love, India and how India was in 1969, the caste system, and sacrifice. Death where death isn’t deserved, and life where it’s deserved even less.

  Velutha is my favorite character and probably the favorite character of everyone who has read the book. Velutha is a tenant worker on the Kochamma family property. He is a Paravan, an “untouchable.” He is secretly a part of the communist revolutionary movement, and he is “The God of Small Things. He left no footprints in sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.”*1

  And he is in love with the only daughter of the Kochamma family, Ammu. Ammu is a divorcee in danger of being shunned by her family when she returns home after the divorce, her young twins, Rahel and Estha, following behind her like little ducklings.

  Before this conference, I had not thought much about the role Christianity played in art or vice versa. Especially when it came to the type of art I was studying, the word type, the literature type. I had always thought it a bit risqué that my professors in undergrad allowed us—students at a conservative Christian college—to read books like The God of Small Things or others that spoke of truths we don’t normally speak of. I wondered if the entire English department had somehow slid under the radar of the administration’s eye. These books felt forbidden. I loved them, but as a Christian, I wondered if I was allowed to love them.

  Somewhere along the way I had drawn a line between “regular” art and “Christian” art. I had kept the two neat and separate. There were Christian movies (Kendrick Brothers Productions–type stuff, certain Hallmark productions maybe), and there were secular movies (everything else). There were Christian novels (by Frank Peretti and Karen Kingsbury, for example), and there were secular novels (everything else). Christian plays, secular plays. Christian paintings, secular paintings. You get the idea. Maybe this is a line you’ve drawn for yourself too, or maybe this sounds absurd to you. I see now that these labels of “Christian” and “secular” were very weak barriers I had built for myself, barriers based on nothing at all except overt use of the gospel or at least strong and clear metaphors for it. That day at the conference, I saw the weakness and the shallowness of these labels, and so my black-and-white categories, as they typically do with time and age and learning, began to blur.

  If we as Christian artists strive to be honest about who we are, like the Israelites in Psalm 137, rather than create something that is Christian, our mission becomes simple: Tell the truth. And if we are telling the truth, then it’s no longer a question of whether or not our art is Christian or secular. How can art, a nonliving thing, be Christian or secular anyway? It is not the art that is Christian. It is the artist who is a Christian. So instead of asking, Is this Christian or is this secular? maybe we should ask, Is this telling the truth, or is this covering up the truth?

  I think you can tell if art is telling the truth by the way it makes you feel. Honest novels, music, paintings, and other types of art invite you to be a part of them instead of holding you at arm’s length. When art portrays perfection, you are not a part of it, because you know you are not perfect. You don’t see a part of yourself in it. Think about a romance novel or a romantic comedy. The characters are beautiful, chiseled, thin, perfect. Even with their “imperfections,” they are endearing—the guy who is too prideful or the girl who is a klutz. Somehow, on screen, they still appear perfectly flawed. I think this type of art is a great escape. When I need to veg and not think about anything, a romantic comedy is my go-to. But in the end, I don’t feel like I’ve necessarily had a cathartic experience. I don’t see much of myself in it. The movie, as is the drill for comedies, ends happily. With a bow tied on top, nice and neat. Then I return to my life, my real life, where there are very few bows and, of the few there are, even fewer are nice and neat.

  When an artist works hard to portray the less aesthetically beautiful aspects of life, like sadness, loneliness, death, pain, even brutality, I have an opposite experience. I feel like I am a part of the story. Those are the pieces of art that stick with me, haunt me. Like the novel Crime and Punishment or the movie Shakespeare in Love. I felt the characters’ losses. I walked away thinking about the endings for a long time. Both of these works portray life as it is, rather than life as it should be. People end up in prison when they commit murder. A struggling playwright and a rich heiress will never end up together. These types of stories invite me in because I have felt that type of pain and loss too, in my own way and in the universally human kind of way.

  You don’t come to understand pain or the difficulties of life by painting over them and pretending they aren’t there. You come to understand them by admitting they are real and writing them on the page or into the script.

  Even though my name tag didn’t match anyone else’s in the room, I began to feel an inkling of kinship with those around me that day. I began to wonder if they had all already been let in on this little personal and exciting revelation I was having about art and faith. And I began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t the darkness of postcolonial literature that drew me to its stories. Maybe what drew me in was their truth and the way the darkness made the truth look so much brighter.

  In The God of Small Things, you find out soon enough that Ammu loves Velutha back, with a terrifying, absolutely forbidden but absolutely undeniable kind of love. Her twin children love him too.

  By the time Rahel and Estha are adults, they are a strange and sad pair. But as young children, they are lively and happy. They see Velutha as the one who helps them build a boat, who plays with them, who is strong. Ammu, the beautiful and practically shunned daughter, falls in love with Velutha for who he is to her and who he is to her children.

  Velutha and Ammu begin to meet without others knowing in a house just off the Kochamma family property. Being of different castes, it is against the law for them to love each other. It is something they could be killed for, even in the twentieth century. Velutha threatened “the Love Laws,” as Roy calls them, “that lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.”

  Each night before Ammu and Velutha leave each other, they make one promise: “Naaley,” they say. It means “tomorrow.”*2

  Velutha brought Ammu back to life. He gave her a sense of self, and it was a self that she liked. As a single woman and mother in India in the 1960s, she was not welcomed or understood by many, even if her husband had been a terrible man. She was lost. She had moved back home with Rahel and Estha to figure out what to do next, where to go. She didn’t even know what her children’s last name would be.

  Velutha saw the world in the way he could only dream others would someday. A place where caste didn’t determine destiny for generations and generations. A place where people were accepted and loved simply because of their humanity and nothing more.

  People were against him, though, as they always are with radical thinkers. As the plot builds, you get the feeling that this story will not end in Velutha’s favor. Instead, an innocent man will be killed one night while he waits for Ammu to meet him. Someone needed to be blamed for the death of a child, a white child, and it’s easy to blame the untouchable, the one who is not only breaking the Love Laws but is, in a way, trying to establish a new law altogether.

  A new way that threatened the old.

  The police, the ones charged with maintaining order, kill Velutha in the end, and Ammu is trapped in her house, her opposition ignored, her part in it dismissed. Roy describes the policemen’s motives: “Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”*
3

  I ended up reading The God of Small Things for my thesis four times. By the fourth read, Velutha and Jesus were basically identical to me. It’s not unusual to have a Christlike character in a novel, so I had considered this fact only academically, not personally. But thinking about it later in the context of the conference and art and truth, and the idea that if truth is in art then so is God, I realized something kind of amazing.

  Arundhati Roy was not a Christian. I knew this because I had been researching her. Yet she had managed to write one of the most riveting and real portrayals of the gospel I had ever seen. Which made me think, if the gospel can be portrayed by someone who isn’t even a Christian, it must be an inescapable story, a thread that runs through everything and everyone.

  Over the next few months, as I continued to study Christlike sacrifice in The God of Small Things and other novels, I began to see sacrifice everywhere: the changing of the seasons, parents giving things up for their children to have better lives, the crickets who shed their skin in order to grow, the people who do the same. Death is what makes way for life. Every time. We wouldn’t have life without it. And as I studied and typed away at my thesis, my concept of Jesus began to form into something very, very real. The faith I had grown wary of and confused about started to articulate itself right in front of me.

  I had been looking for God in my church and in my Bible studies. I had expected to encounter him there, but I had not expected to encounter him here, writing my thesis based on heathen-authored novels. As Christian Wiman says, “Art is so often better at theology than theology is.”*4

  I learned that I can’t limit God’s presence in the arts, or anywhere for that matter. Stories of sacrifice, death, and life can’t help but reflect Jesus in some way. It’s not up to us to decide where he is and where he is not.

  If the truth is there, so is he.