When we have moved through the first response of anger, it is replaced by grief, healthy grief. Real grief accepts that there is no security. No one can promise us that in mortal, temporal terms nothing bad will happen. The implied promise of the insurance commercials is that no rape or murder or fire or accident can touch us—as long as we pay our insurance premiums.
Unhealthy grief usually has qualities of resentment. Or self-pity. Or sullenness.
I have a hunch that anyone with a strong and lively faith is not immune to the anger which is the first reaction to injustice, but the anger when worked through will not be destructive but will lead to healthy grieving and accepting.
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The way we handle our little griefs, the petty irritations of daily living, is an indication of the way we’re going to handle the larger griefs. Life in New York is full of petty irritations; for instance, it’s almost impossible to get across town without getting stuck in what seems like an interminable traffic jam. For the petty irritations I turn to a nursery rhyme which I find not only helpful but theologically sound:
For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy, or there is none.
If there be one, try to find it.
If there be none, never mind it.
If I’m stuck on a crosstown bus, or if I’ve taken a taxi to try to save time and it’s even slower than the bus, I repeat that rhyme to myself and sit back and relax. I realize there’s absolutely nothing I can do about the traffic; if I’m going to be late there’s nothing I can do about that, either. So why waste energy getting furious and frustrated?
The larger angers I try to turn to God. Like the psalmist, I bellow at life’s unfairness and God’s apparent refusal to do anything about it. And our Maker absorbs and heals all our angers, though the world gives us little legitimate outlet for them.
Many years ago when my husband and I left New York to raise our family in the country, and he was taking over the general store in the village, Hugh spent the day with an old country storekeeper in a neighboring town. The old man took him down to the cellar and showed him a large wooden lolly column in the middle of the cellar, holding up the sagging floor. Beside the lolly column was a baseball bat, and the old storekeeper told Hugh that when he’d had customers to the teeth, he’d go down to the cellar and have at the lolly column with the baseball bat, until he was fit to face human nature once more. That was a good lesson for us both.
Most of the scriptural protagonists had cause to learn a lot about unfairness, their own, and that of others. It was unfair of Saul to try to have David killed by sending him into battle against the Philistines. And yet David did the same thing when he had Uriah placed in the heat of battle, and David did not have Saul’s excuse of insanity. Later, when Bathsheba’s baby died to pay for David’s sin, surely that was unfair!
When my young children stamped and complained, “But it isn’t fair!” I would reply, “Who promised you fairness? Of course it’s not fair.” And when they wanted revenge, I’d ask, “That’s being just like the person who was unfair to you. Is that what you want to be like?”
And when I stamp my interior foot and say that the insurance companies aren’t fair, aren’t I being just like a small child? Yes, the insurance companies are in the business of making money, lots of money, and not in the business of helping the people they promise to help. If I need a reminder that we live in a fallen world, that’s a good one. People have been making money out of other people’s misfortunes, illness and death, for millennia. Why should I think that I should in any way be exempt from unfairness? And yet this irrational demand for fairness has been within me for a long time; it is hard to get beyond it.
So what’s the Good News?
It is that God loves me even when I am outraged! And God wants me to know all of my story, not just the pleasant parts. We do tend to want to rewrite our stories, turning ourselves into models of perfection which would probably bore our friends to pieces.
A number of years ago at a writers’ conference I got to talking with the leader of the nonfiction workshop. At least—he said that he did not write fiction, but then he told me about ghostwriting the “autobiography” of a famous European prima donna. They had long talks about her life, and he kept trying to find out what had happened to her between the ages of twelve and eighteen.
“But nothing happened. I was a good girl at St. Cecelia’s Convent.”
“But something must have happened.”
The prima donna shook her head. “I was a good girl at St. Cecelia’s Convent.”
This didn’t strike him as exciting enough, so he invented a count who adored her with an undeclared passion. The count and the young girl spoke of love only with their eyes. Theirs was a pure flame of undefiled love.
When he sent the prima donna the manuscript he expected an angry reaction. Nothing. Later, at a large autograph party he heard her say, “The count was really taller and he had black hair.”
The apocryphal count had become part of her memory. He was somebody who ought to have happened. As far as the opera singer was concerned, he had become real.
When my granddaughters were little they had the same uninhibited kind of memory. I used to make up stories for them, about Princess Charlotte and Princess Madeleine, and they would demand, “Tell us a story we’ve never heard before. Tell us a story we don’t remember.”
My six-year-old grandson, in his playtime, dons costumes. He enlarges his life by becoming a pirate, a turtle, a knight. And that is good. He is experimenting with his story. But far too often we diminish ourselves instead of expanding ourselves. We tidy ourselves up, removing the uglier characteristics, but that is, ultimately, dehumanizing. The good news is that God loves and wants all of us, at our best and at our worst, because it is out of this extraordinary mixture that God weaves the warp and woof of our souls.
Is there, then, no bad news? Oh, yes, there’s much bad news, and much of it is a result of our refusing to look at our whole selves, to read our whole story. If we edit and revise, then we are able to rationalize our anger, our vindictiveness, our vengefulness instead of accepting that these feelings are within us, but do not have to be acted on, and can, with God’s help, be overcome and forgiven. Maybe not immediately, maybe not entirely, but we can, as the psalmist affirms, be purged in the fire like silver.
I have a pleasant (though not playable) imaginary scenario of going to the small jail in Litchfield, on a pleasant street, and next door to the bank. There, with no normal day-to-day responsibilities, I can refuse to pay the ambulance bill and instead I can sit and write my books. That scenario is not going to happen. I’m going to have to pay whatever amount of my hard-earned money is legally necessary, and I’m not going to like it. But I’m not going to stay stuck in my annoyance. Already my first howl of outrage is past. This is the way of the world, and aren’t we taught that although we are in the world we don’t need to be of it?
The bad news is that I have had to face my anger. Or is that bad news, after all? The good news is that I know that God loves me anyhow. The literary protagonists who have meant the most to me have had all kinds of faults and flaws; they have been far from perfect; had they been perfect I would not have been able to recognize myself in them. I see myself in Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden because she is selfish and nasty and human and, in the end, love breaks through the selfishness, as it can with all of us. I sympathize with Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night because she gets herself into the terrible predicament of seemingly hopeless love with Count Orsino; most of us human beings have blundered in love at some time or other in our lives! I do not recognize myself in Victorian Elsie Dinsmore because she is too perfect and knows it. I agonize with King David’s daughter, Tamar, when her brother lusts after her, then abuses and abandons her. And I agonize with David’s inability to act to right the wrong, which
is not unlike Hamlet’s.
In story I recognize my own humanness, and the call to become more fully human—not perfect, but human—bearing within me the image of my Maker.
The Gospels are story, the Good Story, the story we are called to share with humility and joy.
10
STORY AS A CREATIVE ACT
The power of love that called forth the universe, calls on us to create, too—not out of nothing, for only God can do that—but with what the Creator has given us.
All art, good, bad, indifferent, reflects its culture. Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal. Two writers may write the same story about the same man and woman and their relationship with each other. One writer will come up with art and the other with pornography. There is no subject that is not appropriate for the artist, but the way in which it is handled can sometimes be totally inappropriate. True art has a mythic quality in that it speaks of that which was true, is true, and will be true.
Too much concern about Christian art can be destructive both to art and to Christianity. I cannot consciously try to write a Christian story. My own life and my own faith will determine whether or not my stories are Christian. Too much Christian art relies so heavily on being Christian that the artist forgets that it also must be good art.
When we write a story, we must write to the absolute best of our ability. That is the job, first and foremost. If we are truly Christian, that will be evident, no matter what the topic. If we are not truly Christian, that will also be evident, no matter how pious the tale. When I am working on a book I move into an area of faith that is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. I do not mean that I discard my intellect—that I am an anti-intellectual gung-ho for intuition. Like it or not, I am an intellectual. The struggle is to let my intellect work for what I am working on, not against it. And this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.
Scientists are now discovering that the cognitive part of the brain is not necessarily the most used part. Ideas, be they scientific or artistic, come when the cognitive mind is at rest, and suddenly it will awaken to an idea that has been given it by the interior, creative, often unrecognized area of the brain. When the storyteller insists on being in control of the story, then the story has no chance to take off and take the writer with it into strange and unexpected places.
I do not always choose what I am going to write. Sometimes I feel called to write on subjects I really don’t want to tackle. That’s when I most need to listen to the story with humility and virtue, virtue in the ancient sense of the word, which has little to do with moral rectitude. True virtue means strength. And in one etymological dictionary, virtue is defined as that which is necessary. So let us spell it vertue, to differentiate it from self-conscious virtue. In biblical language it means creative power—creative power vs. that dominant power that Lord Acton warns us will corrupt us. When the woman with the issue of blood touches the hem of Jesus’ garment, he knows someone has touched him, because he feels the vertue drain from him. So, indeed the act of creation is virtuous, as the Word shouting the galaxies into being was virtuous. Indeed, our vertue may involve a sudden acknowledgment of our wrongdoings. Indeed, our sin.
I was upset at the Bible college’s statement of faith that emphasized God’s wrath at my sin and depravity, not because I think I am sinless, or because I am never “crooked or wrong” (my etymological dictionary’s definition of depraved), but because I believe that God is calling me away from sin and depravity, both of which kill the creative element in us, and towards creativity, humility, and vertue.
If I dwell constantly on my sin and depravity, and am thereby constantly fearful of God’s wrath and indignation, I make it impossible for myself to move out of sin and depravity into joy and creativity. This does not mean that I forget what I have done that is wrong. Adam, in The Arm of the Starfish, must live the rest of his life knowing that he was at least partially responsible for Joshua’s death. But his calling is not to dwell on this terrible awareness, but to move on and to live the rest of his life as creatively as possible.
King David’s life was changed forever because he succumbed to temptation with Bathsheba, and then tried to get out of the mess by having her husband killed.
He confessed in an anguish of repentance, and Nathan the prophet told him:
The LORD has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. But because by doing this you have made the enemies of the LORD show utter contempt, the son born to you will die.
So it wasn’t just what David had done; it was the example he had set. People who have accepted positions of public trust are particularly responsible not to give occasion to the enemies of the Lord to say it’s okay to dump your wife, to sleep around, to evade income tax. Fulfill yourself, that’s what the world says is important.
But the people I know, in literature and in life, whose chief concern is fulfilling themselves, are always empty.
The rules are not the same for all of us; we’d like them to be, but they are not. I am free to have a glass of wine at a dinner party. My surgeon friend who is on call and may have to operate on someone that night is not. I have committed myself very publicly in my writing about marriage and marriage vows. Hugh and I used to laugh and agree that it was a good thing that we didn’t want to get divorced, because we couldn’t. I believe that those who are ordained to the ministry are also called to set an example in their daily living.
A man in a position of public trust said to me that he was unhappy with his marriage, that he could not stay in it and keep his integrity. This may sometimes be true. Too often it means, “I cannot stay in this marriage and have my own way.”
Someone else told me of a monk who, after ten years in a monastery, had recognized his homosexuality, and left the monastery because he felt he could not stay there and keep his integrity. I asked, “Why was it harder for him to be a celibate monk as a homosexual than as a heterosexual?” Didn’t keeping his integrity once again mean, “I cannot stay here and have my own way”?
If the public persona and the inner man (or woman) are not close together, there is trouble, and there is certainly loss of integrity. It is only as we recognize our sin and depravity and turn to God for healing (not wrath) that we are enabled to sin less frequently. If we set ourselves up as models of rectitude and make ourselves believe that we have perfect morality, we are apt to fall on our faces, as have some televangelists and many politicians. Moral rectitude may come naturally to angels, but not to us human beings.
King David’s public and private selves were close together, despite his adultery, and that is why his repentance was real. Ultimately he truly became a king, but not until after he knew himself a sinner, after he had suffered civil war with his son Absalom, and grieved for the death of those closest to his heart. Then, at last, he became “royal David,” a true king. We went through fire and water, David the psalmist sings. But you brought us out into a wide place.
“My God, my God!” David cried. “Why have you forsaken me?”
And Jesus, on the cross, echoed King David’s words.
Story is seldom true if we try to control it, manipulate it, make it go where we want it to go, rather than where the story itself wants to go. I do not control my stories, and most of the writers with whom I have talked agree with me. We listen to the story, and must be willing to grow with it. But how do we know that the story is right?
We’ve lost much of the richness of that word know. Nowadays “to know” means to know with the intellect. But it has much deeper meaning than that. Adam knew Eve. To know deeply is far more than to know consciously. My husband knew me. Sometimes he knew me far better than I know myself. In the realm of faith I know far more than I can believe with my finite mind. I know that a loving God will not abandon what has been created. I know that the human calling is co-creation with t
his power of love. I know that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all Creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The powers of darkness would like to keep us from this knowing, and it is possible that we can permit them to blind us, because we are mortal and flawed. But Love is always more powerful than hate, creativity than destruction. When I falter and fear I turn to story to return me to light. God’s story, God’s wonderful, impossible, glorious story of the mystery of the Word made flesh.
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After President Coolidge retired, he and Mrs. Coolidge lived a quiet life together, away from politics and political problems. One rainy Sunday Mrs. Coolidge had a cold, and decided to stay home from church. When President Coolidge returned, she asked him what the preacher’s sermon had been about.
“Sin.”
“What did he have to say about it?”
President Coolidge, ever laconic, replied, “He was agin it.”
We’re all “agin” sin, and yet we’re all deep in it, because it is an intrinsic part of human nature, and until we are aware that we’re sinners, it isn’t really possible for us to be “agin” it.
And what is sin?
As I read and reread the great stories in the Bible it seems more and more clear that sin is separation from God, and one way to separate ourselves from God is to over-define God. If Jesus was like us, but sinless, it wasn’t that he never did anything the moral majority of his day considered wrong. Indeed, he did many things that they considered sin, such as breaking the law by healing people on the Sabbath. But he was never separate from the Source, while we, of our essence, separate ourselves over and over.
The Rock That Is Higher Page 17