James Carroll, in The Communion of Saints, writes, “The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy….We tell stories because we can’t help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.”
My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember—re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality—that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could after the Resurrection.
Let me tell you a story. Early in January of 1990 I was on a small boat with my eldest daughter and her family. This was a wonderful and special treat for us, and we were having a glorious time. One night I went to bed, read for a while, turned out the light, and went to sleep. After a while I slid into wakefulness, and I was aware that Hugh, my husband, was in bed with me, and it seemed perfectly natural for him to be there. I was in that state of consciousness that is neither dream nor waking, and I was grateful for his presence, though I knew that I must move carefully and not touch him, because if I did, he would vanish.
At the time that I was having this sense of Hugh’s presence, around midnight or a little later, a radio call for us came through on the loudspeaker, and Josephine and Alan heard it and went to the radio room. There they learned that our beloved Tallis had died. They did not wake me. Early the next morning while I was drinking coffee, Alan came to my cabin and told me.
Later that day I told my daughter of my experience of the night before. She is brilliant and mathematical and eminently reasonable, and I asked her rather tentatively, “Do you think your father was there to tell me about Tallis?”
And she replied, “Well, Mother, that thought had crossed my mind.”
Certainly it is outside the realm of reason and provable fact, but for me it touches the hem of truth. And the important thing is that I don’t need to know anything more than what, for me, happened. That’s all. That’s enough.
I wish the church would be brave enough to acknowledge that there are questions to which, during our mortal lives, we have no answers. Too many answers lead to judgmentalism and to human beings (rather than God) deciding who can and who cannot go to heaven. I have a young friend whose father was unable to speak or move for weeks before his death, and his young son was devastated because, as far as he knew, his father had not accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour. “Please don’t underestimate the power of Christ’s love,” I implored. “You have no way of knowing what Christ was doing with your father during those weeks when he could not speak and tell you what was going on within him. If you believe that God is love…”
“I do.”
“Then trust that Love with your father.”
I trust that Love.
Does this mean that I do not believe in heaven—or hell, as punishment for our sins?
No. But I do not believe in the medieval versions of heaven and hell. Heaven, for one thing, sounds unutterably dull, and I do not believe that God is ever dull.
In Ellis Peter’s The Heretic’s Apprentice, the young heretic talks about his feelings over the eternal damnation of infants who have died before they were baptized. “A human father wouldn’t throw his baby into the flames,” he protests. “Why would God do such a thing?”
His heresy is a heresy of love as, indeed, are many heresies. Why do human beings seem to feel the need to have other human beings suffer the torments of hell fire in order to be happy in heaven? I share the young heretic’s heresy, though I do not believe it to be heresy. And I do not believe that God’s love will ever fail. I do not know what lessons of love my husband or my friend Tallis are learning right now, but I believe that they are learning, going from strength to strength in understanding the astounding love of God for Creation.
But again we are in the language of mystery, not finite fact.
And yet again, like jesting Pilate, we may continue to ask, “What is truth?” And unless we allow truth to be a widening light, we hamstring ourselves. Love, for instance, is beyond the realm of provable fact. Why did my heart open for this man, rather than another? Why does my instinct tell me to say yes, here, and no, there? Why does this piece of music move me to tears, and that leave me cold? Since Hugh’s death there are certain hymns I cannot sing without my eyes filling. We sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” at both my mother’s and my husband’s funerals, and yet I can sing that strong affirmation without heaving with emotion. But I cannot sing “I Am the Bread of Life” without tearing up.
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When I was in high school and college I looked at some of my mother’s friends (all good, Christian, churchgoing women) and thought, If this is what it means to be grown-up, I don’t want it.
Not my mother herself: she was a remarkable Southern woman, who, long before I was born, had ridden across the Sahara on a camel, and up the Andes on a donkey. In North Africa, in those days before planes, there were often long waits at desolate railroad stations, and my parents, with a couple of my father’s journalist colleagues, would spread a blanket out on the platform and would play Halma. Halma, which is to Chinese checkers more or less what chess is to checkers, was originally an Arab game, and they would often be ringed by Arabs, betting on them. Predictably, they bet on the men. It was a mistake. My mother, who had a mathematical sharpness I have not inherited, almost always won. No, it was not my mother who made me reluctant to be grown-up, but some of the women around her who had closed in, shut down, lost interest in new ideas, went to church to be safe, not challenged, who had forgotten how to play, forgotten story, forgotten how to laugh.
If we limit ourselves to the possible and provable, as I saw these people doing, we render ourselves incapable of change and growth, and that is something that should never end. If we limit ourselves to the age that we are, and forget all the ages that we have been, we diminish our truth.
Perhaps it is the child within us who is able to recognize the truth of story—the mysterious, the numinous, the unexplainable—and the grown-up within us who accepts these qualities with joy but understands that we also have responsibilities, that a promise is to be kept, homework is to be done, that we owe other people courtesy and consideration, and that we need to help care for our planet because it’s the only one we’ve got.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
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For centuries there have been stories that have been part of the vocabulary of even the moderately educated person. The great stories from Scripture, the Greek and Roman myths, the Arthurian legends, for instance. Pat, my physician friend, sent me the following quotation from the Journal of Occupational Medicine, taken, in turn, from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind:
When I first noticed the decline in reading during the late sixties, I began asking my large introductory classes and any other group of younger students to which I spoke what books really counted for them? Most were silent, puzzled by
the question. The notion of books as companions was foreign to them. Justice Black with his tattered copy of the Constitution in his pocket at all times is not an example that would mean much to them. There was no printed word to which they looked for counsel, inspiration, or for joy.
I hope that that is too radical a response to what has happened to our reading habits. While it is to some extent true, I hope that it is not wholly true, and I think that it is not, because of the large number of readers who write to me recommending and often sending me books they think I would enjoy, or who tell me that they turn to my stories for courage and comfort when they are in need. And I am encouraged, too, by my granddaughters and their college friends, and by their groans of anguish and ecstasy when they tell about the large sums of money they have just spent on books, not all of which are for their college courses.
But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation—nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of “limited vocabulary.” How on earth is a child going to learn words if the vocabulary is limited to what some “average” child is expected to know at the age of five or six or seven? When I was a child and came across a word I did not know in a story, I just went on reading, and by the time I had come across the word in two or three books, I had absorbed what it meant. It was easier for me to read Shakespeare in high school than it is for students today, not because my contemporaries and I were any brighter, but because far more vocabulary was familiar and available to us than to comparable students today.
We can, of course, dump the blame on television, but I don’t think it’s television alone that stops people from reading. It is, I suspect, fear of story, fear of imagination, fear of the unexplainable. The less vocabulary we have, the more limited our words, the more frightening the imagination becomes.
Allan Bloom continues,
Imagine such a young person walking through the Louvre or the Uffizi and you can immediately grasp the condition of his soul. In his ignorance of the stories of Biblical or Greek or Roman Antiquity, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and all the others, can say nothing to him.
It is ironic that my little grandsons are mad about Mutant Ninja Turtles, and their parents have had to explain to them that Leonardo and Raphael and Michelangelo were real artists who lived and painted and sculpted hundreds of years ago. My grandsons find it difficult to understand that they weren’t turtles. At least they are learning about great artists as well as turtles.
Bloom points out that these artists expected their viewers to recognize their subjects, to know the stories, and to have been influenced by them intellectually and spiritually. When such potent recognition no longer exists, Bloom says, “the voice of civilization has been stilled. It is meaning itself that vanishes beyond the dissolving horizon.”
Meaning that vanishes?
Truth that vanishes?
And can the two be separated?
And how do we come to meaning and truth except through story?
The story of Abraham and Sarah, of Gideon, of Miriam, of David and Abigail, and finally, the story of Jesus of Nazareth—these affirm and reaffirm meaning for us.
Story helps us with the questions that have no answers. I wish the Church (of all denominations) would be brave enough to acknowledge that there are questions which, during our mortal lives, are not going to be answered. There are no answers to the wonder of Creation, the marvel of the Incarnation, the glory of the Resurrection. Too many answers lead to smug self-righteousness and—even worse—to human beings, rather than God, deciding who is and who is not loved by the Maker. Can’t we trust God?
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The storyteller is a storyteller because the storyteller cares about truth, searching for truth, expressing truth, sharing truth. But that cannot be done unless we know our craft, any more than a violinist can play Sibelius’s Violin Concerto unless the techniques are there, learned, until they are deep in the fingertips as well as the mind.
When I teach a writers’ workshop, all I can teach are techniques. One cannot teach “creative writing.” Such writing is a gift, but the gift cannot be served unless the techniques have been learned thoroughly enough to become instinctive.
The best teachers of writing are the great writers themselves. If we read enough, certain truths become self-evident. There are certain things the great writers always do, and certain things they never do, and a proper study of their works will show us what these are.
Some of their words about their work are also helpful: Maritain says, “Fiction differs from every other art in one respect: it concerns the conduct of life itself.” That is, it looks at what human beings do and tries to find the truth of it.
Conrad says, “The novelist’s first task is to make us see.” To make us see not only the readily visible—the sunset over the Litchfield Hills, the snow falling, slanting in from the east, the tooth marks on the fresh-cut wood of a tree the beavers have felled. But also to see the less readily visible—the anger couched in exquisite courtesy, the self-sacrifice given in such a way as to be hardly noticeable, the carefully hidden anguish in the eyes of someone who has been betrayed. The novelist helps us to see things we might not notice otherwise. With a few strokes the biblical narrator shows the confusion of love and hate in Saul’s daughter Michal, the quiet wisdom in Abigail, David’s growth in honor and true royalty.
And Henry James: “Our task is to render, not report.” Show; do not tell. Thus, in fiction the verbs are active, not passive; “did,” not “was.” “She lost her balance,” not “Her balance was lost.” The great writer does not tell us what ought to be done, or what we think. The true writer shows us what is done, avoiding author’s comment. The storyteller doesn’t talk about the story, but shows it, immediately locating the characters in time and space. In Anna Karenina we learn at once that
Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys’ house. The wife had discovered that the husband was carrying on an intrigue with a French girl, who had been a governess in their family, and she had announced to her husband that she could not go on living in the same house with him….Three days after the quarrel, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky woke up at his usual hour, that is, at eight o’clock in the morning, not in his wife’s bedroom, but on the leather-covered sofa in his study.
How much we learn in a few sentences!
Aristotle: “A play is an imitation of an action of a certain magnitude.” This holds true for any work of fiction. The novelist writes about drama in people’s lives, infidelities, discoveries, unexpected love, tragedy, resolution. The characters, the action, are depicted larger than life in order that we may see them more clearly.
Chekhov: “The aim of fiction is absolute and honest truth.” Truth, mind you, not fact, that truth which we find in a man and woman eating an apple out of season; in the horror of brother killing brother; in an ark riding out a terrible flood. That truth which we find most ultimately in the story of the Maker of the Universe coming to us through the womb of a young girl.
It has often been said that the perfect form in art is a circle. That is why, when it was discovered that the planets move around the sun in ellipses, rather than perfect circles, the church establishment was horrified! In fiction, too, the perfect form is a circle—though it may be more of an ellipse. The plot of Oedipus has often been called the perfect plot, and it can be diagrammed, as can any other masterpiece, in the following way:
Draw a circle and put a line down the middle. The left half of the circle is marked C, for complication. The right side of the circle is marked R, for resolution. Now surround the circle with another circle. The left side of this outside circle is marked D, for discovery, and the right side P, for peripety.
C: In every great work there is a complication. The resolution is emb
edded in the complication, but in such a way that it registers only subconsciously. It is foreshadowed in the complication. For instance, in Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, the complication is the first rhinoceros crossing the square of a French town on a normal Sunday morning. The reaction of the people in the square foreshadows the resolution, the willingness of the inhabitants to accept the rhinoceros, and finally to become beasts themselves.
In Scripture the complication in the story of David starts before he himself comes on the scene, with the demand of the people to have a king. The resolution is foreshadowed in David’s honor in refusing to kill Saul when he has the perfect opportunity and is completed in the life of Jesus, who refuses to be an earthly king, but is, instead, the servant.
R: In the great storytelling there is usually an indication of the resolution in the first sentence. In Chekhov’s story Vanka, Chekhov states, “Nine-year-old Vanka Jukov, who has been apprenticed to the shoemaker Aliakhine for three months, did not go to bed the night before Christmas.” In the resolution he finally manages to doze off, dreaming of the freedom of other Christmases before he knew the brutality of the shoemaker.
The first sentence of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms is, “The leaves fell early that year.” In that first line we have a foreshadowing of love dying young, a hint that before the end of the plot the hero’s heart will be as bare and ruined as the trees and the roads.
When young David takes his harp and sings for the anguished old king, Saul, there is a hint that David, too, one day will be old.
D: The discovery is an event that does far more than foreshadow the resolution. It makes the resolution inevitable. In Medea, it is Medea’s discovery—that she cannot keep Creon from banishing her in order to free Jason to marry Creon’s daughter—that makes absolutely inevitable the tragedies that follow.
The Rock That Is Higher Page 9