Month: September 2018

We tell stories

Jesus told stories. That’s how He taught. Because He knew people wouldn’t remember just facts. He told stories that stuck. Parables that people had to think about; that planted seeds, took hold, and grew in hearts, minds, and souls. And when it came time to remember Jesus, it was His stories that got written down so that we might know them (and Him through them) as well.

I love thinking about people gathering around as Jesus got rolling. You can kind of see the 12 looking at each other as He got going and thinking, “Ah, yep, the sower story again, I dig this one,” even though they’d heard it and probably still hadn’t gotten it. Jesus knew people would keep telling His stories, and His story; He counted on it. It’s why he walked the 12 through them; it’s why the Gospel writers went to so much trouble to write them down; and it’s why there are four separate Gospels, not just one condensed version. Telling the stories matters.

Stories last. None of us know Homer or Mark Twain, but we may know something about The Odyssey or Huck Finn. And likely they would rather us remember their stories than themselves. We may have never met Martin Luther King Jr., but we know his story and some of his stories. Neil Gaiman, a favorite modern day storyteller of mine,  gets it:

“Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas–abstract, invisible, gone once they’ve been spoken–and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created.”

Our lives and thoughts are shaped all around by stories–our own stories, our families’ stories, and the stories we identify with. I loved being around our cousin Doug Hanks Jr. when he held court at Schooner’s Llanding, or at the Tred Avon Yacht Club, or at family parties. Even after his mother’s funeral, back at his house, telling stories of her life that had a crowd both laughing hysterically and realizing what a unique character was “Mary Hanks of Oxford.” I miss Doug’s stories and his storytelling and the way he made us all feel when he told them.

Jim Harrison is a favorite storyteller of mine. I never got to meet him, but I will be forever moved and shaped by some of his stories and poetry. He wrote that, “Death steals everything except our stories.”

I dig this story of a writer getting to know and remember him after an article:

“…we sat on your porch in Patagonia, watching you watch birds. There were hundreds of them, and you knew their names, rattling one off every now and then between long, choking drags of your American Spirits… you were gracious in the retelling of your wildest stories… you wrote from your bones, your marrow into poetry, novellas. And you made me believe that there was something to writing. That storytelling really was something romantic, magic even.”

If there is magic in stories, it is in how we remember them and how we connect to them. When we hear the stories that move us the most, it is not just because we connect with who wrote it, but because what is said speaks to us, becomes part of us. In our stories, we learn who we are; we are able to speak it and understand ourselves better. Our stories connect us, teach us, inspire us, and help define us.

What we hear in the stories that matter the most to us, is who we are.

“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen… a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – John Steinbeck, “East of Eden.”

What will we remember?

Remember. Never forget. And we shouldn’t. How could we? But what do we remember? What will we remember?

Those who lost their lives. Yes. Always. Those who responded, went straight into harm’s way to help others? Yes. Always. The fact that we were attacked on our own soil in a way that my generation and younger had never known, or maybe didn’t even think was possible? Absolutely. September 11, 2001, is for us what Pearl Harbor was for my grandparents.

But what else? A friend, Ted Daly, wrote this on September 11, 2013:

“Never forget, and here is what I would like everyone to remember:
Remember the two weeks following the attacks, when we were suddenly so nice to one another? We met and greeted our neighbors, we let drivers in front of us, we offered help to those in need, no matter how large or small the effort required…then, once the third week began, we were right back to the same old same old. Was it so hard, or the effort so unbearable? We could inspire each other to these same acts every day. What kind of world would that be?”

I hope we can remember that. Remember that in the face of tragedy and horror, we helped each other. That we cared about each other. That we didn’t call each other stupid because we didn’t hold the same political beliefs; that we could disagree and be kind; we could disagree and still support one another. I hope we can remember that, because even in the middle of heartfelt and right as rain remembering the lost and the responders, and the horror of that day, it certainly seems like we have forgotten how to help those people, our neighbors and our friends, who don’t agree with us.

NASA posted this picture of the smoke plumes in New York City, visible from space that day.

Station Commander Frank Culbertson, looking down from space, wrote this:

“It’s horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are.”

We may never get to see the earth from that perspective, but we can all hear and feel his words.

Never forget, from our own lives since 9/11. After. On September 11, 2011, I was working in DC, for the Coast Guard. I walked onto Ft. McNair and had lunch on the river bank. And I wrote this:

Sandburg and I sit on the river bank, eating lunch, talking about Chicago and how people are. On the other shore, two helicopters take off, bank over the river and fly directly overhead. These are the same helicopters that carried a different President to St. Michaels when I worked there and got to see him speak.

Then, like now, was after. After we looked at machines flying over cities differently. After flying machines were flown into buildings and the President we saw in St. Michaels got interrupted talking to school children; children that could have been my daughters, but weren’t. Children who wished they were in that school because it would have meant they were far away from New York and didn’t lose their parents.

That day, before, I was in Easton. I didn’t work in Washington, like now, after.

Now, I sit with Sandburg on the river bank of the Anacostia, watching planes landing and taking off at Reagan National. Watching Presidential Helicopters flying overhead.

Sandburg’s Chicago didn’t have planes flying into buildings. It wasn’t something he thought about. But our girls, and their children, will learn it as part of their history classes. It’s part of their story, part of our story, now, after. 

Now it’s 17 years after. We say we will never forget. We say we will remember. And we will. There is no doubt. But what will we remember? What will we do about it? And how will it change our lives?

To Call Each Thing By its Right Name

No one wants to be a grown up on Charlie Brown. No one wants what they have to say to amount to WA-WAH-WA, sounding off in the background, unintelligible. And yet, that’s what happens to the majority of words, of communication that comes our way and a good bit of what we put out into the world. We talk too much and say too little.

…only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways, “which demand from us no real effort of expression and… demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension”–at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished. – David Abram, summarizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “The Spell of the Sensuous”

When meaning has become impoverished, what we get, and what we become, are grown ups from Charlie Brown.

But this isn’t what language is for or what it is meant to do. Language, words, gestures, expression, body language, is supposed to be us trying to convey, to express our wants, needs, fears, questions; trying to get someone to understand something of vital importance–otherwise, why bother?

If we go back to the feeling of being alone, unheard, not understood, language works miracles, it attempts to do the impossible: to communicate with another being something that is inside us. But only if we find the right words or the right way to get something across.

Abram talks about language also being physical and touching our senses as well. Maybe we can all reach back to a time, place, way we have felt someone’s words wash over us, where a gap has been bridged. But Abrams doesn’t just limit it to people.

If language is always in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitely separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our conversations and soliliquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated.

There have been times where I have physically felt God was communicating me without a word spoken, simply with the sounds and language of the landscape alive around me. In the mornings, I sit with coffee and listen to birds, cicadas, neighborhood dogs, the buzz of hummingbird’s wings as it goes to the feeder. Sometimes that language means more and says more than what we hear from people.

If our own language, our own words, are going to mean more, it’s up to us to use them wisely, and maybe less frequently; to look for, and listen for, the right words to speak our hearts and minds. And to listen to others who are making the effort to do the same.

I’ve had this notion in my crawl about reclaiming language, trying to come to meaning, to get back to the primacy of saying something worth saying. And then was moved all over again by words I’d heard before.

In the movie version of “Into the Wild,” towards the end, there is a scene on the magic bus in Alaska, where Chris McCandless is reading Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and comes across this notion:

For a moment she discovered the purpose of her life. She was here on the earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.

Maybe that’s the challenge we need to give ourselves. To strip away the static, the clutter, the convention, the emptiness of the words so often around us. And to call each thing by its right name.

Let things sink in. Let them wash over us, trying to come to our own truth about them. And when we talk, when we pray, when we write, when we see, when we hear, to call each thing, and each other, by our right names.