Tell Me a Story

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. – Hannah Arendt

I’ve come to love the often long, arduous narrative portions of the Bible, particularly those in the Old Testament. I love indulging in the imagination necessary to create that “movie in my head.” I blame this squarely on Tolkien. For some reason The Lord of the Rings trilogy fostered a respect and enjoyment of a lived in, deeply historical, acutely human, epic narrative. The first time I finished The Return of the King I found myself wanting to experience that disquieting epic urgency present in his story; that feeling of kairos, and inter-connectedness; the experience of the veil of divine meaning momentarily lifted so one might get a passing glimpse or scent or breezy touch of the divine mystery; the hint of holistic reality, the trace of divine condescension. For some reason, I found this experience often repeated when reading the epic tales recorded in the Old Testament.

This wasn’t always the case for me. I grew up with a strong preference for the enlightening pedagogy found in the Apostle’s letters. Meaning was much easier to find there. The writers came right out and told you what they meant. They explained those epic tales. They told you what was going on behind the scenes in heavenly places while folks slogged about trying to make sense of their lives down here. They gave you the moral of the story. They clarified the ambiguities of history... to a point, but as it turns out, not always to a particularly sharp point. This stood out to me as a Bible study I am involved in was trying to make sense of Romans 9 through 11.

Paul here is trying to reconcile God’s actions in the history of the life of Israel with God’s actions in the young history of the life of the Church. It may seem at first blush that God has abandoned Israel to engage the Church. Paul makes the historical case that this isn’t so. This is Paul doing his best to clear the muddy waters of history. Of course this clearing is necessary because history doesn’t interpret itself. Even when God acts to intervene in history, or perhaps especially when God acts to intervene in history, God’s motivations and intentions are often not entirely clear. Take as an example any narrative representation in scripture. When God extended daylight in the book of Joshua, what did God intend to communicate to humanity? When God allowed Job to suffer, what was really going on there? When God allows Jonah’s shade to be eaten by worms, what are we to take from that? Granted, we’re often given partial answers to these questions, but we are typically left with more questions than answers. Some might be uncomfortable with this predicament, which is why we may tend to embrace only the explanations in the New Testament, however I would suggest this ambiguity is one of the strengths of Biblical historical narratives. In the words of philosopher Hanna Arendt these narrative reveal meaning, I might add “experientially,” without defining it.

One of the most amazing outcomes of a good story, at least to me, is the wordless glimpse it provides into transcendence, into places where denotations and definitions are powerless to go. A good story allows one to experience something beyond the walls of the visible, and allows the unseen to be perceived, imagined and experienced. These experiences though are, again at least for me, often difficult to impossible to articulate. Words as human creations are often not capable of containing the descriptions or meaning of these kinds of experiences. The meaning simply overflows the words. This is part of the challenge I think Paul faces in Romans 9 through 11. He’s trying to condense a story God had been telling over thousands of years into a few paragraphs. He brings to light the key points he wants to highlight to boil the story down for his readers, but there is far more that God was and is doing in those relationships than can be contained in those few chapters, which I believe Paul himself would acknowledge.

This then I believe is part of the value of reading the narratives of the Old Testament on their own; that the reader gets to experience these glimpses first hand. They get to experience the wildness of a God who is good but not safe, to cite Lewis. They get to experience the meaning the Holy Spirit is intending to reveal to humanity, even while that meaning isn’t entirely defined, and in this case, I believe that lack of definition is a good thing.

The Perils of Grace and Beauty

This may seem an obvious statement for all who know me, but I’m a big Flannery O’Connor fan. When I first read her work, I was struck by her insight into and representations of pride and hubris. In fact much of my understanding of human nature and theological anthropology can be traced back to her short stories. I believe it would be safe to say that my interest in the “darkness” mentioned in the title of this blog can be blamed to a large extent on her, if one would care to lay that blame.

Only more recently however have I begun to digest her understanding of God and grace, and the manner in which God interacts with the hubris in her characters. This interaction is of interest to me because it seems God is wholly silent in her stories, yet grace abounds, seeming to act as the voice of God speaking into the terrible darkness of her vision of the South. However, because her characters are emotionally, spiritually, and even sometimes physically grotesque and twisted, the grace must come in a form grotesque and twisted as well.

Inherent to this understanding of twisted grace seems to be an understanding of revelation as a shocking event in which God breaks through our impotence or indifference and grabs us at the core of our being and shakes, sometimes less gently than others. As overwhelming as this experience may be it is to O’Connor a moment of grace, though it may not seem at the time like “an undeserved kindness”. It’s in this vein I want to quote a lecture Rowan Williams gave on O’Connor in 2005. In it he refers to Tarwater, a character in her 1960 novel The Violent Bear it Away. The details of the story are unimportant for Williams’ point. But this portion of his sermon I think sums up nicely the parts of O’Connor’s depictions of grace and revelation that really resonate with me:


A God who fails to generate desperate hunger and confused and uncompromising passion is no God at all. It is not that Tarwater’s life and faith are held up as a model of or for anything; they are what they are. And they are what they are because God is as God is, not an agent within the universe, not a source of specialized religious consolation. If God is real, the person in touch with God is in danger, at any number of levels. And to awaken the hunger that Tarwater at last recognizes is to risk creating in people a longing too painful to bear or a longing that will lead them to take such risks that it seems indeed nakedly cruel to expose them to that hunger in the first place.

Taken from:
http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2005/050210.htm


On a side note, I wonder if we consider this when we evangelize, that is the sheer terror involved in being in relation with an all powerful, devastatingly beautiful, entirely free and loving God who was willing to sacrifice a Son to be reconciled to humanity, and to individuals. We love what that means for us, it makes us feel safe that God loves us so much that “God gave his only begotten Son”, however I’m not sure we look at the flip side of that coin that often. It seems to me the flip side is that we who have trusted Christ are now also “sons and daughters of God”. If this is the manner in which God’s love is shown through the suffering and death of a Son, and we now share a son or daughtership with Christ, then what rightful expectation can we have to temporal security and safety?

A friend once told me that risk reveals love, that our love for someone is evidenced by what we are willing to risk for them. If the Father is willing to risk the Son in order to evidence that love, then should we not as fellow sons and daughters expect to walk the same path in order to communicate and embody that love? This picture of God reminds me of the manner in which Lewis writes Aslan in his Narnia books, as terrible and terrifying, yet loving, wise and good. I’m with most people who tend to love the wisdom, goodness and faithfulness of the Lion, and ignore its freedom, power and beauty.

At any rate, Williams gives wonderful voice to the dark beauty of grace, revelation, and incarnation in O’Connor’s works. It seems in her stories that God’s grace is always unexpected in its existence, timing and form. I find this resonating with my experience of God, with God’s grace often coming as a shock, perhaps because of to whom that grace is given, either myself or some person I sadly estimate is not worthy of that grace, or perhaps the manner in which it’s given. As for myself I find my passions, longings, and joy being kindled by this grace, and I sense the danger in that.

I sense in these longings a hunger that can’t be sated. It’s a hunger that seeks to encounter unmediated the beauty of God, but must experience that beauty mediated through broken, unreliable, hurting people in a world that appears unhinged. So I find myself, like Gimli after his encounter with Galadriel in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, desiring to experience the beauty of God again, and pursuing the paths God has blazed in which that beauty must be experienced.

That hunger to be in contact with the beauty of God however leads I think down the path in which Christ expressed that beauty in love and that’s through risking my own well being, esteem, emotions, and security in service of the least of these. I agree with Williams that on the surface it seems cruel to expose people to this, to relation with this God who calls us to follow through such danger, except that I think that perhaps there is something of the beauty of God that we will never experience until we travel these paths. Now this may seem entirely self evident to some, and of them I am truly envious, because this path is such a struggle for me to find, let alone walk. If it weren’t for the joy mediated through the beauty of God I experience when on this path in some fashion I don’t know that I’d be inclined to walk it at all…