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For over thirty years, I have taught literature and writing in higher ed, but my early forays into literary criticism were not promising. In fact, I came to dread the book report, a constant that marked my elementary school years.
The book report: read a book, prepare a talk, and create a visual. I loved the reading part, and apparently the talking part, because I always went on too long, rambling about the book to a captive audience. However, when it came to the visual – I stunk. I had no ability. I disliked arts and crafts (I preferred to be reading), and I always scored low on the poster or diorama, the only two real options available in the pre-digital world. Oh, the frustration which led me to dread the project: it tainted the practice I very much loved – reading. Now, I understand the problem was partly with an assignment that did not help me find ways to share my enthusiasm and instead imposed somewhat rigid expectations: summary and visual. Student creativity would be allowed for in the visual, but if one had no talent in that area, well then, that was that. And while my adult-self recognizes that teachers assigned the book report as an opportunity to learn about new books, my child-self only focused on the assignment as an opportunity to earn a good grade doing something I loved (reading) and to show off my own brilliance (look what a big book I read). For in these early years, my reading was not generous – it was turned inward. I was jealous, competitive, and insecure – perhaps age-appropriate traits but not attractive ones. I was immature. I focused on whether my classmates listened to me, but during their presentations, I let my thoughts trail off, berating myself for my messy poster that could not compare to so-and-so’s, who, I happened to know, did not like to read. Then, in sixth grade, a momentous event happened: some random classmate presented on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, and I listened. Not at first. Initially, my reaction was true to form. From my seat in the back, I could see a drawing of the valiant mouse Reepicheep, which took up maybe one-third of the poster board. That was a good drawing. I began to wish desperately that I could draw. My mind wandered right out of the classroom, down a trail littered by my perceived failures, and then suddenly, I stopped. Why? I don’t know. Was the universe nudging me, a force calling from beyond?: “Pay attention; stop daydreaming; face your flaws and understand -- something is happening here that will form your life.” I listened, and over the course of that report, although I didn’t know it, my relationship with reading changed. After that, my reading no longer focused solely on me and the page. A door opened, and I entered a place where people talked about books, listened to each other, and then forged their own opinions. I joined a world of conversation and connection. That one fateful book report gave me a glimpse of what reading would do for me as an adult. Now I understand reading as an initially solitary activity which ultimately builds communities and connections. Reading inspires me to choose generosity and kindness, to make friends. When I share a book I love with a friend, when a friend does the same with me, we invite each other into our souls, and if it’s a book one of us needs to read at that moment (as it so often is), we have helped each other survive the barrage of life’s trials. Friends and books, friends with books remind us that we are more than the sum of our problems. Even now, over forty years later, I am surprised that before that report, I had never heard of Lewis and his wardrobe. As a child, I was an avid reader. The highlight of my summer vacations consisted of our weekly trips to the local library where we would stock up on books for the next six days. My choices varied wildly: I read domestic realism, historical fiction, fantasy, and yet I had never heard of Narnia. On the day of that report, I went home and told my mother about the novel and the series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Overwhelmed by the demands of small children and domestic duties, my shy, reclusive mother did not conduct many conversations, but she dove into this one as she did into almost any book-centered discussion. I knew, from a young age, I could engage her full attention if I brought up reading. She knew about Narnia; she also knew that many people chose to read the novel through a Christian lens, that Aslan the lion was a Christ figure and so on. This detail interested me, not for the religious implications but for the idea that a novel (not a parable, not a fable) could be about something more than the story and the plot, that fiction could contain allusions and abstractions that pointed to “deeper meanings.” In the middle-school years children begin to develop the capacity for abstract thinking. I was not a precocious sixth grader. I remember struggling in junior high to understand how a pie-making scene in Jack Schaefer’s Shane was about more than pie-making. (What was my classmate talking about?) However, my mother’s Narnia conversation showed me how to consider that stories were more than just stories (or entertainment); they could encourage us to reflect on how to live in the world. My mother, a prolific reader, certainly knew this about reading, but had she actually read Narnia by the time of the book-report? I can’t remember (and I can no longer ask her because she has moved out of this world). She must have known about C.S. Lewis, as she knew about J.R.R. Tolkien. (I watched her read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.) Furthermore, her father was an English professor, and he had Lewis’ Four Loves on his bookshelf as well as other works of Lewis’s literary criticism. (I now have these very books, my grandfather’s copies, on my shelves.) Lewis was part of the fabric of her childhood. And while her parents were secular humanists, my mother was not. She went off to college, rejected their agnosticism, immersed herself in the study of Slavic languages, and began searching for a Christian tradition to embrace. She met my immigrant father and chose his inherited Eastern Orthodoxy, encouraging him to participate with a convert’s enthusiasm. She would have been drawn to Lewis, his conversion story, and his Christian apologetics before I came home wondering about a talking lion and faun. And yes, she went out to buy the complete set. I read it. She read it. My father read it. H, my friend, read it. H, my best friend, lived forty-five minutes from us. We spoke regularly on the phone (when long-distance bills were a serious consideration), and we saw each other on Sundays at a Greek church on Boston’s outskirts. After service, while our parents dawdled in coffee hour, H and I would wander the neighborhood streets, talking about the books we read and the movies we saw. And eventually, we talked about Narnia. This point is perhaps the critical one. H and I read and reread those seven books over the course of the next four years. However, we did more than read. In the years before the internet and online fan fiction, we made ourselves characters in the stories: Princess Elena and Princess Aurora. We lived in Archenland and Narnia, and we wrote each other letters regularly, letters full of gossip and lengthy descriptions of new ball dresses: “This season’s gown is the color of sky at sunset, you know the pink/orange shade that the sun creates as it’s about to disappear . . .” Our characters sent these letters to each other, and we sent them too, with stamps, via the US Postal service. Daily I ran to the mailbox, hoping to find a letter addressed to Princess Aurora at my childhood address from Princess Elena at H’s childhood address. On the weekends when we managed to have sleepovers, we would entertain ourselves by continuing the stories. One would start and then break at some random point so the other could take over. Hours we spent sitting in our bedrooms, telling those stories. Why Narnia? Both of us were voracious readers, and we loved romantic tales, but we didn’t find or need romance in Narnia. Lewis’ Narnia tales were stories about friendship that led to redemption. One could be Edmund, mess up, and his friends, human and not, did not give up on him but helped him to find his way. Often those saviors were female. Lewis’s girls were powerful, strong: a girl like Lucy could help save the world. That was a powerful message for two girls entering adolescence and not liking it very much. We were happy to escape to Narnia, to leave behind crowded school hallways and the funk of teenage politics, family responsibilities, our social awkwardness. Narnia empowered children and allowed them to find and exhibit strength in very obvious ways (battling a witch, helping talking animals). Those seven books allowed us to live in that world for a long time. H tells me now that it felt like home, that she thinks we understood the books’ worldview: that all of us, no matter our age or physical, emotional, or material limitations, could fight for the good in the world; that despite our flaws, and we all had them, we were not completely broken. We could be strong, brave, and kind. We didn’t know all this at the time. We couldn’t have explained it this way. We just read, and talked, and wrote and grew our friendship while doing all that. I don’t remember when we stopped. Probably early in our high-school careers, when the academic pressure intensified. H is one year older and met the college demands earlier, but we both took Honors classes and had our eyes on the academic prize: acceptance to a competitive college. We won that prize; we went off to colleges a half an hour from each other, a mere shuttle bus away. Our friendship continued and still does today, but not the Narnia letters. And frankly, it’s been a long while since either one of us read the books. However, we maintain (and share readily) very strong opinions about new editions. When the books were renumbered, we were apoplectic. You cannot read The Magician’s Nephew first, we insisted. Why do we need chronological order? Did these revisionist publishers assume that children would not understand the concept of backstory? Did they have such a low opinion of their young readers’ intellectual capacity? In protest, we keep our childhood editions, with the older chronology on our shelves. And sometimes, when we are talking on the phone or in person, one of us will say something like, “I saw this sweater, the color blue, you know that blue when the ocean is so clear you can see your feet, and the sun is high”. . . and we both start to laugh. Something else I don’t remember. Did I introduce H to Narnia, or did she open the wardrobe before I did? I do remember that book report was a revelation, so I am sure H had not shared the title with me if she had read it. She doesn’t remember. She read one book, she thinks, The Horse and His Boy, without realizing that it was part of a series. Then she read the series. She thinks I might have gifted her the entire set one Christmas. On the one hand, this is strange to me. How can we not remember? How do we only discuss this detail now, roughly 40 years after the fact? Maybe that’s because who-read-it-first is not important. What is important: what we did with what we read once we shared that reading. In “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: “One must be an inventor to read well. . . There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion.” I share this passage with my students to emphasize that they are not just in the classroom to read and summarize but to create in response to what they read. I don’t want them to produce some version of my ten-year-old book report. Instead, I ask them what they want to do with what they’ve read? Can they connect the ideas with other texts, with their lives? Do they want to argue with a premise and create their own? Might they take their reading outside the classroom and respond in some non-academic way? The Narnia stories inspired H’s and my creativity. We were not content to summarize but instead were inspired to participate. Our letters, our stories formed our responses and ignited our imaginations in a medium that I could use: words. While the visual component of the book report was made to inspire response, my lack of skill in that area kept me from doing so. I didn’t understand that I was supposed to respond, and maybe that was because visual art was not my medium. Twyla Tharp, in The Creative Habit, writes of our “creative code,” our “artist’s DNA” (37). We all have our own “code,” and it “determine[s] the forms we work in” (37). I “work” exclusively in words (although I have been known to knit a hat). H, on the other hand, is gifted in many ways, but, in particular, she has an eye for images, which is reflected in the photos she takes, the ways she arranges a gift box, the pictures of ballgowns she drew in the Princess-Elena letters she sent. But there is another creative energy that reading those books inspires: the energy of connection. H and I strengthened our friendship because we read those books. Although I had been an avid reader from first grade (late by the standards of today’s helicopter parents), I had thought of it as a solitary activity. Certainly, that was the case with my book reports; I did not use those to connect with others. It never occurred to me that I should or could. But with H and Narnia, something changed, and certainly this energy, this “creative” response, has informed my life since then. My college roommate B and I continue to share book titles. We reach out to each other when our favorite authors publish a new book: writers like Elinor Lipman, Mameve Medwed, Terry McMillan, Anna Quindlen. I keep a book B gave me in college: John Jakes’ Heaven and Hell (we were avid fans of the North and South television miniseries, and Patrick Swayze was my celebrity crush). For one birthday, I gave B a copy of Anton Myrer’s Last Convertible, the 1978 novel that explores the collective friendship of five Harvard men from college to middle-age. What was it about that novel that attracted us? We both keep well-read copies on our respective shelves, now part of the landscape of our college memories. Then there is the group romance novel we began writing with dorm friends after reading the first novel of Lisa Kleypas (then, a young alum). Someone still has that draft. Now, another friend M and I share cookbooks and essays about food. We sometimes cook for one another. E and I met in a graduate literary program, and we still share a love for poetry and some novels (although we have strong dissenting opinions on others). A college romance has transformed into a lovely middle-age friendship enhanced by our reading of novels we then “discuss” in emails and text messages. Granted, we do not always approve of each other’s choices. I still cannot fathom his disdain for the oh so moving Howard’s End. C.S. Lewis famously wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .’” (78). That understanding permeates many of my friendships, but for the friendships forged in my early years, I don’t remember any one “moment” of recognition. Samuel Johnson (via Boswell) provides another framework: “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So, in a series of acts of kindness there is, at last, one which makes the heart run over.” Perhaps it is not necessary to know one “moment,” or “act.” Our friendships are not our romances. With romances, even when they ignite after a slow burn, we focus on “firsts,” and there are many: the first knowing look, the first date, the first kiss, and so on . . . Friendships, however, to quote E, operate differently. We don’t have or need these markers. Certainly, the case with H and me. With B, with E. We share histories with many memories, but there was not one pivotal moment. Andrew Sullivan, in Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival, makes a similar point: “If love is sudden, friendship is steady. At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate ‘click’ or a sudden mutual interest. But we don’t ‘fall in friendship’” (203). I don’t remember any “clicks” for my earlier friendships, but now, as an older person, plagued by time-sucking responsibilities, there are a few, particularly when there are obstacles. I meet a person and think “we could become good friends, if we can make the time.” Oh, the frustration: the lack of time to explore so many possible new relationships while nurturing my cherished older ones. However, my frustration gives me hope. I still “have it,” the desire, the ability to see possibilities for connection. Sometimes, in response, I give that person, my future friend, a book. Now I realize what I’ve been doing: marking my place in their lives, hoping we will grow more together one day. I am trying to create a space in our lives for each other. And sometimes this happens: I will have known someone for some time. Our interactions are friendly but nothing more. Then somehow, we discover that we are both readers, and “click.” Suddenly we are more than friendly acquaintances. So many of my strong relationships now are nurtured through reading – the sharing of titles, the gifting of books, the discussion of thoughts raised by something we read. I have forged friendships with seemingly unlikely candidates, but books cut through the external differences. We might seem incompatible due to personality, background, current life situation, but the love of reading, the love of books, the reading suggestions that fly back and forth, particularly when one of us is sad and needs a particular kind of book at a particular time – that is when we discover what we share: perhaps, in my life, these are the Lewis “moments” or the Johnson “drops.” My mother died very suddenly early one October Saturday, although we don’t know the exact moment she left this world. Instead, we were left with a series of drops. A pain in her chest woke her up. My father drove her to the crowded ER to have her pacemaker checked. In and out of the waiting room she went as they ran tests: in to test, out to sit with my father and me while we waited for some results, assuming this all was routine. We talked about books, the ones she had just finished. She scrolled through her digital reader. They called her in for another scan. “I’ll need a wheelchair if you’re going to take me back there,” she said as she went through the double doors, shortly before her heart gave out. These were the last words I heard from her, and at the time I was just happy that she had demanded something for herself. By coincidence, H arrived from across the country the next day. We had planned she would spend two weeks at my house, taking advantage of pandemic-created remote working conditions. However, instead of deplaning into a whirl of coffee-dates and autumn-walks, she came into a cloud of mourning. My mother was like her second mother, my father another father. That’s how it was: my sisters, her sister and brothers: hers, mine and ours; our families had messy boundaries. I told H that my four sisters and I would serve as my mother’s pall bearers; later that night, she texted me, from another room, a Moth podcast by Mary Kate O'Flanagan: a story of sisters who buried their father and carried his coffin to the grave. I shared this with my sisters, and I listened again and again. I was reminded of how artists of all types soothe us in the ways that science cannot, the ways hard "facts" delivered in the ER never will. H and I have been finding solace in artists’ work for most of our friendship. The books we share, the stories we tell, the photos she sends from London business trips at Christmas – we soothe each other’s spirits. Two days after my mother died, one day after H arrived, H and I made our way up to what was now just-my-father’s house. Sister K was there with him, and there was a package on the counter, newly arrived, from bookshop.org. “What’s this?” I asked. “Something mom ordered,” my broken father said. Inside the brown cardboard sleeve, one of the last books my relentlessly book-buying mother would buy: Once Upon a Wardrobe by Patti Callahan, a story inspired by Narnia, C.S Lewis, and his talent for friendship. We were astounded. There it was: a good-bye to us. In many ways, my relationship with my mother did not reflect the idealized mother/child bond, but we shared a love of books. My reserved, reclusive mother always knew the “right” book for me, and she showered me with many of those “right” books. Book-sharing was her love language. She avoided crowds and parties, but if she met someone who liked to read, she started to talk. She talked to me, to H, and all those years she nurtured our love of Narnia with gifts of new copies, supplementary materials, and conversations at the kitchen table. Now it seemed that she was waving at us from the wardrobe door. She was off to find the places and characters we read and talked about. She would defeat the White Witch; she would join Aslan, and she would finally find her peace and joy. -- Works Cited Boswell, James. The Life of Johnson. 1791. James Boswell.info https://www.jamesboswell.info/content/we-cannot-tell-precise-moment-when-friendship-formed Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” 1837. Digital Emerson: A Collective Archive. http://digitalemerson.wsulibs.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/text/the-american-scholar Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. Harcourt Inc., 1960, 1988. Sullivan, Andrew. Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival. Vintage Books, 1999. Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit. Simon and Schuster, 2006. -- Maria Jerinic is a faculty member and Associate Dean in the Honors College of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Also, she is a co-editor of and contributor to Finding Light in Unexpected Places (Palamedes Publishing 2019) and Finding Light in Unexpected Places Volume 2: Covid 19 Edition (Palamedes Publishing, 2022). Her academic and personal essays have appeared in a variety of print and digital publications, including, for the latter category, Cocktails with Miss Austen; 9 Lives: Life in Ten Minutes; Literary Mama, and Herstories Project.
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By Susan Yanos “Call me Ishmael.” So begins Herman Melville’s gargantuan epic of the great white whale, Moby Dick. Now don’t worry, I’m not recommending the novel for your summer reading list, but as I have been thinking about the personal story and the spiritual journey, Melville’s narrator has been haunting my dreams—until I realized that it was reading this novel that first got me interested in why we tell stories. I am a spiritual director, but I am also a writer and writing teacher. Over the years I have watched numerous students struggle to write the stories of their lives—in memoirs and non-fiction essays, or fictionalized in short stories and novels, in poetry, and in spiritual autobiographies. What I have seen over and over again is the power of story writing to reshape how people think about themselves and their world, about God and faith. Story theologians have said that stories serve three very important functions: world building, truth seeking, and self healing. In fact, some of my more astute students have noticed that writing is indeed spiritual work, and it was this that led me into spiritual direction. Now as a writing teacher, I have all kinds of suggestions which help writers go through this process, but it has taken some time and struggle to figure out how to be with spiritual directees when they bless me with the stories of their lives. It has taken even longer to figure out how to be with myself as I tell my own story, and often I am not a very good companion! Fortunately, Melville’s narrator whispers through my dreams. Call me Ishmael, he says, and we know immediately that this is not his given name but the name he chooses to give, perhaps just for this audience, just for this telling of the tale—and many readers of the novel get the impression that this is not the only time Ishmael has told his story, that indeed he has told it many times, may perhaps tell it many times more to any audience who will listen, whether willingly or not. He’s driven to repeat it, trying to understand why he alone survived while the rest of the crew died—many of whom he deems to be much better men than he. You’ll remember that in the Bible, the oceans are representative of the great forces of chaos which God did not destroy but bound within their basins. Deep within them dwells the monster of chaos, Leviathan, sometimes described as many-headed or as a crocodile or—pertinent to our Moby Dick tale—as a whale. Often storytelling is the ship we sail over the watery chaos of our lives. We tell our lives’ stories to protect us from the turbulence which threatens to pull us under, or when we do go under, to somehow find meaning in the struggle, in the confusion and fear, in the suffering and pain. Like Ishmael, we tell the same stories over and over again. Perhaps you have witnessed this in family members who have undergone some trial and cannot let it go, or in yourself. Henri Nouwen, in his book The Inner Voice of Love, writes, “There are two ways of telling your story. One is to tell it compulsively and urgently, to keep returning to it because you see your present suffering as the result of your past experiences.” Nouwen wrote this book during an intense emotional and spiritual crisis. By studying his own urges and compulsions, his own desire to tell his story, he came to see that there is another way, a way to tell your story “from the place where it no longer dominates you,” where the compulsion to tell it is gone. Such an approach requires distance, as well as the vision to see the telling as the way to freedom, and the wisdom to know that the past does not need to control the present. Nouwen wrote that then the past “has lost its weight and can be remembered as God’s way of making you more compassionate and understanding towards others.”  'Jonah and the Whale', Carlo Antonio Tavella (1668–1738), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons So this telling and retelling are important, are necessary, because although we cannot change the relentless reality of the plot, we can change the role we choose to play. We can move from the victim of the story of our lives’ events to its survivor, to its hero. (I’m not suggesting that this is the ideal trajectory for our personal stories, but it gives an idea of the change that is possible.) Some argue that this change is so mind-altering that it is, in fact, a re-writing of our personal histories. I prefer the term re-visioning to re-writing. We see order where before there had been nothing but chaos, meaning where there had been only perplexity, a glimmer of beauty in the ugliness oppressing us, light in the shrouding and suffocating darkness. This all takes time—much time—and much patience as we go through the many retellings. And it takes a sensitive ear to pick out the subtle shifts in the story and bring them to our notice, along with a gentle reminder that God did not destroy the waters of chaos. Therefore, God is in the darkness as well as the light, in the ugliness and perplexity as well as in the beauty and meaning. God is in our hunger as well as in the loaves and fish that feed us. Ultimately, this is not an intellectual task, but a heart task. All this has led me to two questions I struggle with personally. First, how best to help directees—and myself—see God’s presence in all aspects of our lives, especially in the watery depths where Moby Dick smashed Ishmael? All too often we don’t feel that Presence. I trust that God will reveal in God’s own time, because I know that too often we are not ready to receive a direct assurance from others. We have first to experience fully what appears as God’s absence. But having said that, is there nothing I can do to help? Second, what about those times when we get stuck in the telling, when we get lost in our own stories by becoming so absorbed with ourselves that we fail to see the larger themes of the story unfold? I want to know how we move from a compulsive storytelling—because locked in the past—to becoming open, aware, receptive, and trusting of the spiritual process, even to the “stuckness” itself, as well as to the grace within the telling, to any movement away from letting the past dominate the story, to God’s presence amidst God’s seeming absence. For me, one key is to remember that just as Moses feared that he would be destroyed if he looked upon God’s face, begging God to show him just the behind, we too can often be destroyed by a too direct look at truth, especially the unpleasant truths about ourselves—or at least be so overwhelmed by them as to be unable to take them in. Such is the case for Melville’s narrator. Unable to take in the truth, he walks all around it by cataloguing every inch and pound of a whale in tedious chapters that most readers skip because, they complain, those chapters cause as much misery for them as the ship’s crew endured in its battle with the whale. The narrator thinks that he can eventually comprehend the mystery that is Moby Dick, as well as Captain Ahab’s need to conquer it, by studying mere facts. I think that’s what happens in a lot of storytelling I hear from folks—this almost compulsive need to record every detail. But that’s approaching it with the intellect. Remember that getting beyond story compulsions is heart work. To engage the heart, we can tap into the imagination. Stories are so powerful because they combine the language of reason (declarative sentences, facts and explanation) with the language of the imagination (dreams, fantasies, the subconscious). Psychology has revealed that the imagination carries truth, but perhaps more important, the imagination allows us to hold contradictory elements in tension. Consequently, the language of the imagination can lead us more deeply into ourselves, becoming ways to face indirectly truths we are unwilling or unable to face directly. Such language carries deep insights which we cannot verbalize. Many years ago, I discovered that students writing memoir instinctively chose images that resonated with them, but they didn’t know why and frequently didn’t even realize they’d done so. My job was to pay attention and then call their attention to the images. For instance, a young woman brought to workshop several short vignettes, including a story about her childhood cancer and another about how she thought a ghost lived in her childhood home. She believed nothing connected the pieces and wanted to throw most of them out and start over. I encouraged her not to, and eventually she began to see that her life was haunted by more than one specter. The largest specter was fear—the fear to dream of the future because her cancer might not remain in remission. Bringing that ghost into the light not only made for a good memoir, but it seemed to destroy the past’s power over her present. The ghost still inhabits the house—an appropriate metaphor for the self—but she found it is a pretty large house. Or there was the student who wrote about a tornado that swept through her town, which she later saw as part of a pattern of imagery centered around destruction, revealing the dysfunction in a family marred by abuse. Or the student who came to understand her bungee jumping as a metaphor for the uncertainty of her life because she was born with a hole in her heart. These stories stunned the students’ classmates with their profound beauty, a beauty which resulted because the storytellers were willing to sit with the chaotic jumble of fragments they had generated until they could see links between them. The stories became a way for them to tell their truths indirectly, to let the images and the structure reveal deep insights which they could not, and probably still cannot, verbalize directly. By the way, these students were not extraordinarily gifted writers, nor did they have years of training as writers. Therefore, one strategy we can adopt is to note the images which appear in our storytelling, explore them further, and be willing to sit with the resulting chaos. Researchers have noticed that the distinguishing characteristic between a good and a poor writer is the ability to tolerate chaos. Neither writer likes it, but while the good writer endures the tension, the poor writer will grasp at the first idea that comes along simply to be rid of the unease. The same, I think, is true of the spiritual journey. Any time we can engage the imagination, there’s the potential for mess and chaos, but also the potential to bump the story out of the rut it’s stuck in. Another strategy I’ve stumbled upon is to re-write the ending. If I don’t like how I responded to someone, I re-write it. I challenge myself not to stop with merely changing what I said, but to go further and see the experience as a scene with consequences: what will happen next and next and then after that? What if you hadn’t received that wound, been scarred in just that way? Re-write the story so that everything leading up to the injury stays the same, but the injury doesn’t happen. Don’t stop there, because I suspect you’ve already done this step. Go on with the story. Imagine the consequences. When Melville’s narrator demands that we call him Ishmael, we suddenly realize that he is telling his truth, although indirectly, by linking with another Ishmael, the first-born son of Abraham, first born but not the true heir, not the favored son, not the better son. A slave yet more than a slave, he and his mother, Hagar, are driven into the desert alone, exiled, abandoned, condemned to wander far from home—a fate the novel’s narrator feels he shares. So a third strategy I’ve learned is to connect my personal story with one of the great stories of literature, because when I am able to do so, interesting connections are forged through the imagination. Biblical stories and ancient myths are particularly powerful vehicles for this, one reason being they rarely provide the psychological insights or emotional filler that we’ve come to expect from more contemporary storytellers, thus leaving important gaps which we must fill. I’ve been reading the story of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark’s gospel lately, and noticed that even though he begged Jesus to allow him to come along on the journey with the disciples, Jesus told him to go back home, back to the very people who chained him in that graveyard as if he were already dead. What was that like, I wonder. Did his family and neighbors marvel at the miracle and praise God, or did they watch him warily, unwilling to get close emotionally, never trusting him because it would surely be just a matter of time before he snapped and once again hurt them. People don’t really change, you know, I can hear them say behind closed doors. Such gaps in the plot and in the characters’ emotions force us to imagine what is missing, and it is this opening that allows us to examine our own situations within theirs. Think of the implications of this for the self-awareness that is necessary to understand our lives. After Nouwen wrote The Inner Voice of Love while undergoing six months of spiritual and emotional care, he wrote what I consider his most beautiful book, Return of the Prodigal Son, where he explores his own past by immersing in the parable, in Rembrandt’s painting of the parable, and in Rembrandt’s life. Counting his own biography, he imaginatively mined, compared, and wove together four stories. Let me give you a personal example. Unfortunately, I had a falling out with some family members. It was a difficult time, very difficult. Now this is going to sound really geeky, but then I am a literature geek: one morning I woke up with Odysseus’ black ship in my head. I began to see my situation as a scene from the Odyssey. The scene I had in mind was when Odysseus had to sail between a rock and a hard place. Rather than take a much longer but safer route, he chose rather arrogantly to navigate between the deadly whirlpool named Charybdis and the rocky lair of the many-headed monster, Scylla. As you’ll recall, he doesn’t make it. Scylla’s heads lunge down and eat some of his crew, his ship gets sucked into Charybdis’ mighty maw and is destroyed, the crew drowned. So I imagined Scylla’s heads bearing the faces of my family members and began to draw in my sketch book a very bleak scene. My ship was going down, caught in the whirlpool of my anger. I wasn’t going to make it either. Then I remembered the rest of the story. Odysseus nearly drowns, but he does not die. Instead, his clothes are ripped from his body by the currents and he’s swept upon the shores of a beautiful island, naked as a newborn or as a newly baptized neophyte, younger looking and more handsome than before. I know, I want to get ahold of some of those sea salts for my beauty regimen, too. On the island, he is offered a new life with a new and younger wife, a new kingdom to rule, and years of peace without conflict and the suffering conflict engenders. But that is not who he is. He says thanks but no thanks, and returns to his true wife, Penelope, and much conflict and suffering as he reclaims his own kingdom from those who tried to replace him while he was gone. In the far corner of my drawing, I drew myself washed up on a beach. Identifying my story with Odysseus’ story helped me get unstuck from the details of my experience and express what I had not been able to before. Yet knowing the whole story challenged me to see that I had choices before me. I was not a victim assaulted by invincible monsters or trapped in the watery depths. And because I understood why Odysseus chose to go home, even though he risked life to do it, I became more aware of the options before me and what I needed, what I wanted to do in this situation. Call me Ishmael. Call me Odysseus. Call me Ophelia or Jack the Giant Killer, Ruth or Naomi. Some have defined humans as creatures who think in stories. Others have said the basis of ministry is not to serve others but to enter into their stories. We could explain the Incarnation as God entering the story of humanity. Once we enter a story, nothing is ever the same. Susan Yanos is the author of The Tongue Has No Bone, a book of poems, and Woman, You Are Free: A Spirituality for Women in Luke; and is co-editor and co-author of Emerging from the Vineyard: Essays by Lay Ecclesial Ministers. Her poems, essays and articles have appeared in several journals. A former professor of writing, literature and ministry of writing, she now serves as a spiritual director, retreat leader and freelance editor. She lives with her husband on their farm in east-central Indiana (US), where she creates art quilts and tends to her hens, fruit trees and gardens.
Susan's other work on Foreshadow: God Who Sent the Dove Sends the Hawk (Poetry, January 2021) Love Song of the Anawim (Poetry, April 2021) |
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