He who knows the story
All my life, I’ve been fascinated by stories. Whether it was told in the form of a book, a movie, a play, or through some old relatives sitting on the front porch on a hot day sipping cold bottles of beer, I’ve always been captivated by the almost magical power a story has to make you feel more human, more alive.
As a kid, I used to write my own tales incessantly. When I was eleven I finished up a 100-page novel about an awkward loner girl who was ostracized by the popular kids, only to have them falling at her feet and begging for her approval and forgiveness after she solved a great mystery (no idea where I got that plotline). By the time I graduated from high school, I had five or six more unfinished books tucked away in dresser drawers. But a funny thing happened as I got older: I lost my passion for stories.
At the time I was a strict atheist materialist, and the more I thought through this worldview, the less room I found for the human story. Every time I had ever felt moved by some epic tale of heroism or glory, I had been moved by a sense of the transcendent, that something had transpired here that was more than the sum of its parts. I was touched by the idea that even if every single character on the staged died, with nobody knowing of anything that they had done in their final glorious moments, they would still have had an impact on the universe in some lasting way. Yet my atheist materialist belief system did not account for that. In a worldview that said that all of mankind’s experiences ultimately go no further than the chemical reactions in the human brain, concepts like heroism and glory and honor, as they had classically been defined, did not exist.
In college I briefly explored Buddhism, and found it to be wisest among the godless philosophies. I was drawn to Buddha’s ideas about the cessation of suffering being possible through letting go of passion. And it was another blow to my love of the story: whether it was a thriller or a mystery, a historical epic or a nonfiction how-to instructional, what made reading or moviegoing electrifying was the thrill ride of death-defying victories and breathtaking losses, and the transformation of the individual that took place along the way. Yet if Buddha could have heard me, he surely would have cautioned me against all these passions, and perhaps even counseled me not to think of “me” as doing anything at all. There is nothing permanent in this world, he would say. Even my concept of “self” was merely an illusion — a dangerous illusion that I needed to let go of, because it would keep me clinging to all those passions. In a sermon to his first followers, the Buddha said that the best path is to get wearied of feeling and perception and consciousness, until you’re finally wearied enough that you let go of passion. Then you’ll be free.
“Well, that’s unbelievably depressing,” I thought when I first read it. I wanted to jump on a tabletop in defiance, shouting that not all passion is bad and that the instinct to seek triumph and joy and love and the wild ride that comes with it is something to be toasted, not something to intentionally grow weary of and discard. But then my rational brain would kick in, pat me on the hand and remind me to get real. Everything in this world is destined to decay, including yourself, and there is no individual life beyond death, so you might as well let go of it all.
And then I discovered Christianity, and everything changed.
First of all, Christianity preached the soul. It said that, wrapped up in all those chemical reactions that fuel our emotions and our experiences, there is a non-material aspect of our being, one that unites us to a realm beyond the fleeting material world. In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton fabulously connected this concept to the concept of the story when he took aim at atheist materialists who see history in purely economic terms, who assume that we humans make our decisions based on cost/benefit analyses rooted in instinct alone. He wrote:
Cows may be purely economic, in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and seeking better grazing-grounds; and that is why a history of cows in twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of detailed narration.
I was still researching Christianity when I read this, and I actually got chills when he went on to say that a true story only begins “where the motive of the cows and sheep leaves off.”
Yes.
Yes.
That is what I had been looking for all those years as I wandered through the wasteland of dead materialist thought. Immediately, I recognized that the eternal soul is the necessary component to the story. It clicked into place that stories — as well as all art — are secret handshakes of beings with souls, the very calling card of the only members of the animal kingdom who are made in the likeness of God. “It will be hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same material motive that made the swallows go south,” Chesterton wrote. And if you do try to remove the mysterious movements of the human soul from the human story, he warned, “it will not only cease to be human at all, but cease to be a story at all.”
I still had a million questions about this odd belief system. I’d only read a couple pages from the Bible at this point, and still could not imagine setting foot inside a church. But I began to see something here, something that sent a shiver down my spine, something that left me with an exciting and terrifying premonition that told me that I would end up giving up everything I had for this belief system because everything it said was true: It was that here I saw no sins against the story.
“All the other philosophies avowedly end where they begin; and it is the definition of a story that it ends differently,” Chesterton wrote. “From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story.”
Only Christianity understood it. What it said of who we are, why we’re here, what we really want, and what is truly good in life all resonated with everything I’d ever known about what makes a story. To read the Catechism was like watching the stage get set up for a great epic. It said that the material world is good, but will not bring us lasting happiness. It taught that life is to be cherished, and that we should live each moment to the fullest. It said that resentment leads to slavery and forgiveness brings freedom. It warned that indulging your carnal pleasures to excess will lead to death, spiritually if not physically. And it loudly, boldly proclaimed that in order to achieve anything worthwhile, you first must be willing to sacrifice everything.
There were a lot of reasons I ended up converting to Christianity. It was a years-long process in which I searched and asked questions and read a couple of shelves full of books. But one of the key turning points in my journey was that moment when I realized that this belief system understood the human story better than any other. When I realized that I was looking at an uncannily thorough knowledge of what it means to be a player in the grand drama that we call the human experience, I had to consider that it may have all come from the One who wrote the script.
It’s done. I’m back. Happy Mardi Gras!
IT’S DONE!!!!! Three weeks ago I had resigned myself to the fact that it was impossible. There was too much left to write, and too little time left in which to write it. I asked a bunch of people to pray that I could get this thing completed, and then a crazy thing happened: the words just started flowing. I started churning out word-per-hour ratios that should not be humanly possible. And in the end, not only did I have time to finish it, but I even had extra time to go back and finish a few problems with the beginning. Typing the period on the last sentence at the end, a day ahead of deadline, was one of the more surreal experiences I’ve ever had. (If you’re new and have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read about the book I’ve been working on here.)
For the last few weeks I had this prayer card taped to my computer monitor so that I couldn’t see the word count, since the number kept stressing me out. I’d grabbed the first one found in my desk drawer, and laughed when I realized I’d chosen the Hail Mary. Obviously it was an appropriate prayer for the occasion, but I loved the reference to a “Hail Mary” in the sense of an insane, long-shot attempt that only has a slim chance of success.
The draft turned out well. Better than I could have hoped for, actually. (I guess that’s the advantage of having written it twice before). All along, my goal has been to write something that will leave the reader saying, “That was good. That was fun. I feel a little bit more alive for having read that.” I’m pretty sure this draft accomplishes that.
So what’s next? Allow me to use some bad clipart to elucidate the process for you:
That’s how it’s supposed to go. However, that is not my impression of how it actually works. I’ve come to see it not as a linear process that ends in a finished product, but rather as a Sisyphean wheel, a mystical circle of endless work designed to teach me about humility, detachment, and the ultimate futility of the labors of man.
I’m going to revise it and then will send it off to my agent in a few weeks. We’ll see which flowchart turns out to be accurate this time.
Anyway, tonight’s Mardi Gras promises to be one for the ages, considering that we’ll be celebrating both the last day of Ordinary Time and the end of my toil on this book. I have one day to let loose in between book writing and Lent, and I plan to make it count.
What’s been going on with you? What are your plans for tonight, and what do you plan to do for Lent?
Please hum the theme to the Rocky training montage as you read this
It’s crunch time. I’ve asked Hallie Lord to guest host 7 Quick Takes Friday for February 3, February 10, and February 17 so that I can make a huge final push on the book.
Some folks have asked if there is an email list they can get on to receive an update when I’m back to regular blogging, which is a polite way of saying “It’s really not worth the mental energy it would take to keep up with the intricacies of your writing schedule.” The answer is yes! Sort of! You can sign up to receive my blog’s content by email whenever I write a new post. It’s free, there’s no spam, and you can promptly unsubscribe in disgust if I ever turn this into a Justin Bieber fan blog:
Meanwhile, I have realized that the possibility of hitting this deadline is only barely within the realm of what is humanly possible. So if you want to know what the next three weeks will be like for me, just imagine the training montage from Rocky. It is going to be EXACTLY like that, only without physical activity, interacting with other people, or leaving the house. (Although I may punch some slabs of meat at some point.)
I feel weird asking for prayers, as if no one has anything better to pray for than my word count goals. But if you find yourself scraping the bottom of the barrel of your prayer intentions, getting to the point that you’re requesting God’s intervention with Facebook load times and the plot of Downton Abbey, it would be great if you could throw in a good word for my little project.
I’ll be back on February 21. See you then!
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 162)
For the #1 spot in each week’s Quick Takes, I usually think back and pick out an interesting / funny / bizarre story that occurred within the past seven days. As I sit down to review this particular week, I realize just how nonexistent my life has been. One hundred percent of my energy has been divided between the following three things:
- Feverishly working on the book.
- Thinking about how infuriated I am going to be if I don’t hit this deadline and thus have to wait eight months until my schedule clears up so I can get back to it. (Notice I am beyond the point of even pretending that I might be able to prayerfully turn the timeline over to God. My “patiently accepting endless delays” capabilities ran out sometime between the second time I scrapped a completed draft and the 12 months I had to wait to work on it again.)
- Hanging out with the kids, unsuccessfully pitching a new pretend game called Tortured Artist, where one of us (mommy) sits and types furiously while everyone else stands around and makes comments like “That’s genius!” and “What a brilliant paragraph.”
Have I mentioned that I’m speaking at the Living the Faith conference in Denver? I can’t wait. You can read Julie Filby’s article about it here. I see that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will be giving one of the keynotes. I guess that means that, since I am also a speaker, we’ll pretty much be hanging out the whole time. Justice Scalia (who will probably insist that I call him “Tony”) might have some questions about my blog, and will want to get my take on some of the cases he’s hearing right now. Another keynote speaker, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, will be excited to hear that my husband is coming. My husband established himself as a luminary in the worlds of both philosophy and astronomy after calling out every celestial body in the cosmos and issuing a standing challenge for any of them to go up against him on Jeopardy (as of yet unanswered, I note), so I’m sure that Brother Consolmagno will be anxious to meet him.
As I flail around with my own book project, the good news is that there are other bloggers out who have fancy things like completed books, and I can live vicariously through them. Steady Mom has a new eBook out that promises to be great, and The Bloggess’ first memoir is coming out in April. Prediction: The Bloggess’ book will be in the top 10 of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list within one week of its release. She has what publishers refer to as a “FREAKING HUGE PLATFORM,” meaning that she has tens of thousands of loyal readers who lie awake at night waiting to buy her book, so it’ll be very interesting to see how it does. (As a writing nerd who is also a web stats nerd who used to work in marketing, these sorts of things are fascinating to me.)
You may notice that I didn’t link to The Bloggess’ blog in that last take. I know. Bad etiquette. But I simply don’t have the vocabulary to craft a content warning that would be strong enough to give readers unfamiliar with her writing a proper idea of what they might find there. Ten f-bombs, to be sure. But also discussion of insane taxidermy experiments. Pictures of insane taxidermy experiments. Sexual references that would make Hugh Hefner blush. And that’s just in the first paragraph.
I was going to go ahead and link to it with an all caps warning that clicking through will fling you far, far outside of the Inspirational Christian Mommy blog world, but then I had the realization (that chills me every time I think about it) that some of my dear friends who are Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist occasionally check in on my blog. I had this vision of Sister Elizabeth Ann accidentally clicking on the link, unsure what just happened, and at that moment some of her sisters walk in behind her. Sister Maria Rosario faints, Sister Thomas Aquinas is crossing herself and saying Hail Mary’s. Someone is on the phone to Mother Assumpta. And Sister Elizabeth Ann is frantically closing browsers, crying, “JENNIFER FULWILER MADE ME DO IT!”
Now I feel the need to post something worthy of having deeply devout people read this blog. I have the perfect thing! Check out this super cute four-minute talk by Kimberly Hahn. It’s a really unique presentation that has stuck with me ever since I watched it.
Tucker Max announced that he’s retiring from his hard-partying ways last week (some profanity at that link). I was quite touched by what he had to say about it:
The turning point came when one day I realized, I was a number-one bestselling author, I was rich and famous and I’d done all these things in my writing career that I couldn’t even dream of accomplishing when I’d started. All the things I thought I needed to do to make myself happy, I had done…I thought that would be more than enough to make me happy, and it wasn’t.
Want to hear something eerie? When I found this article I had just finished mentioning him in my memoir, which explores those exact themes. My husband and I used to get together with some friends occasionally to go bar hopping in a yellow school bus while dressed as clowns, and I talked about it because something significant to the main plot happened on one of those nights. Tucker happened to be with us, so I mentioned it. Anyway, it was odd to hear someone who was there that night publicly express the same opinion. I was like, What?? Clown Night didn’t bring you deep inner peace either?! So weird!
Tucker Max (holding up the megaphone) at Clown Night, 2003
Good for you, Tucker, for searching for something more. I pray that your journey may also take you from the clown bus to God.
As I wrap up this edition of Quick Takes to get back to work on the book, I leave you with this fabulous quote that nancyo recently left in a comment:
“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
- Thomas Mann
This makes me think I might be a real Writer after all.
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