Life as Story

I am working my way through a book now that is quite challenging and very rewarding.  Fortunately, I am reading it along with a group that I lead.  The folks in the group are great troupers.  They are plugging along with me.  They are not complaining---no whining!  I fear if I were using it in a normal college class, there would be some grumpiness about how “hard” it is.  The book is by Christian Wiman and is entitled, My Bright Abyss.  The subtitle is revealing: Meditation of a Modern Believer.

           

I don’t know Wiman and have to confess that I had not even heard of him.  He is a poet.  He also is a lecturer in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.  He has been editor of Poetry magazine, which one publication calls “the oldest and most esteemed poetry monthly in the world.”  Wiman was born in 1966 and as a relatively young man of thirty-nine was diagnosed with incurable cancer.  That obviously added a powerful, new twist to his life story.

He talks about growing up in West Texas with a Southern Baptist background.  He describes growing up “in a culture and family so saturated with religion that it never occurred to me there was any alternative until I left.”  He left to attend college and soon found that West Texas faith was a thing of the past.  He did not lose faith.  I enjoyed the way Wiman put it in an interview with the magazine, Christianity Today.  He said “the religious feeling went underground for a couple decades, to be released occasionally in ways I never really understood or completely credited---in poems, mostly.”

Wiman talks about falling into despair, which precipitated a long dry period when he could not write his poetry.  Almost in a funny follow-up, Wiman describes serendipitously falling in love with a woman who became his wife.  In a powerful, incisive comment he says, “the despair was blasted like a husk away from my spirit.”  He was able to begin writing again.  I find his words to be poignant.  “I was just finally able to assent the faith that had long been latent in me.”  And his book, My Bright Abyss, is the result of that newfound ability to write.

I share all this because it helps me to appreciate, if not understand, the challenge of reading the book.  One piece with which I connected has to do with life as story.  I begin with one of his challenging sentences.  “A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive.”  When I grasp this, I agree with Wiman.  God is found within our world more than beyond our world.

Then he moves to the theme of this inspirational piece.  Wiman says “Christ speaks in stories as a way of preparing his followers to stake their lives on a story, because existence is not a puzzle to be solved, but a narrative to be inherited and undergone and transformed person by person.”  That resonated deeply within my soul.  I know that Jesus often uses a story to convey his message, but I appreciate that even more now.

I am sure that Wiman is arguing for story more than doctrine or dogma.  The question emerges for me: what is the story I am willing to stake my life on?  One way to get at this is to look at the story my life (or your life) has already told.  Every person’s life tells a story---even if it is pointless story!  My story includes having a family, kids and now grandkids.  It is a story of much education, teaching and ministry.  I hope it is a good story---certainly not a great story.  But I have not yet reached the end.

Wiman says existence is not a puzzle to be solved.  That makes sense to me.  What he adds, then, is not easy to understand.  Existence is a narrative that is inherited, undergone and transformed.  If I try to apply this to my life, the form takes some shape.  The narrative of my existence begins on an Indiana farm within a Quaker context.  Inheriting the narrative is the easy part.

Undergoing the Quaker narrative is where it gets more difficult.  This means for me actually giving shape to and life to the Quaker message.  It means I seek the Center, which is the Living Christ.  I seek to live out of that Living Christ.  It calls me to live a life of love.  I sense this is where the transforming begins to happen.  If I can live a life of love, then I can also begin to be a peacemaker in the world.  I am likely in no position to make peace other than person to person, as Wiman says.

Like you, I can only do the loving and peacemaking in the context in which I find myself.  Personally, that means in the classroom with students, in the locker room with athletes and in the hotels with the groups I am working with around the world.  Because of my education, I could share a great deal doctrine, but I am sure Wiman is correct to say that my story is more important than doctrine.  As I see it, that is the work yet to be done---until my story inevitably ends.