storytelling | Michael Valliant

Spiritual Friendships

We build community by coming together to share meaningful experiences. It’s the same with friendships–it’s by spending time together, doing things we love, or helping each other, creating memories and shared stories together is how we grow closer.

Having church be a part of all those things is still fairly new to me, just a few years old. Over the years, I’ve formed friendships and stories through running and trail running, writing and reading, skateboarding, paddleboarding; through kids and mutual friends; through hiking, and sometimes through coffee houses, book stores, or bars. And of course through work, which is where we spend most of our time.

I’m fortunate and grateful that work and church get to be the same thing for me right now. And that has led to building some wonderful friendships through small groups, Bible studies, and worshiping together. Our stories overlap and intertwine in trying to deepen our connection to God and to each other; in trying to get a better understanding of Scripture; in trying to continue our spiritual journeys collectively and in community (we recently read N.T. Wright telling us, “there is no such thing a solitary Christian”). I especially dig that groups that meet at a church don’t look or act like you might have in your head. There is deep laughter and relevance in Bible studies, groups that have gone kayaking and paddleboarding, and hiking and bonfires at retreats. And there is frequently food.

An afternoon hike and high wire act during an Alpha Retreat in Buckeystown, Md.

Gathering intentionally each week is a great first step. For church, that time is for worship, which is a time to recharge our spiritual batteries; to get inspired; to pray with and for each other; to be lifted up by incredible music; to be united in body and spirit by sharing communion. And then we are sent out “to do the work (God) has given us to do.” Though for so many of us, that is wrapped up in running errands, getting or keeping things straight at home or with our families, doing our jobs.

It’s hard to make time to be intentional about our spiritual lives or formation. What would it look like if we did? And how would we do it. I am biased, but I’ve found small groups–whether at church, a running or hiking group, a workout group, a writing group, a book club, a group of friends–to be such a key way to make things happen. And Lent is a perfect time to start. Make Lent a time for renewal; a time for clearing out habits that aren’t serving us. And a time to begin some practices to enhance our sense of community, our spiritual friendships, and our relationship with God.

Christ Church Easton has a few ways to help get started.

A small group from an Alpha Retreat at Camp Arrowhead in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

The Alpha Course has been a community-changing and relationship-building program at the church. It is a program designed for people who aren’t sure what they think of church or Christianity, but it can also enliven those who are farther along in their faith walk. Alpha asks questions, including, “Is there more to life than this?” and provides groups to have discussion without judgment or preaching to get a sense of what people think. And Alpha is known for feeding people, so dinner is included as well. We will be starting Alpha on Saturday, February 29 (that’s not a typo, it’s leap year!) after our Alive @ 5 service. Alpha is a free program. There will be a weekend retreat in the spring, which has a cost, which the church can help with if need be. There are a number of people at Christ Church and around the world who will tell you to “Try Alpha” if you can. You can sign up here.

For anyone who is curious about Bible study, or who would like a daily devotional practice during Lent, Christ Church will be offering “Lent for Everyone, Matthew Year A,” where scholar and former bishop N.T. Wright leads us through Matthew’s Gospel from Ash Wednesday to the week after Easter. The group will meet once a week on Wednesday evenings at 6:30 pm (beginning March 4) to discuss the week’s readings. This is a great way to get a feel for the Gospel of Matthew. It is uncanny how relevant it is to our daily lives. Two years ago, we offered the Mark year version of this study, and almost everyone in those classes has gone on to further and deeper Bible study and become a part of groups that meet almost year-long.

“Walk in Love” is a series of talks that focus on listening, compassion and empathy, and walking with someone who is grieving.

The “Walk in Love” Series has been in the works for some time now at the church and folks are excited for how it might help us each to walk in love with each other, through listening, empathy, and being with those who are grieving. It’s a three evening event that will take place on Thursdays of March 19th, 26th, and April 2nd at 6:00pm in the church’s Parish Hall. All three presentations speak to our call to give humbly of ourselves to those we love and those who need our loving compassion, by bringing greater awareness to how we listen, love, and walk with courage with our family, friends, and neighbors. You can come to all three sessions, or whichever ones you can make. The series is free.

Life is tough to do alone. Faith might be even harder, with how easy it is to get distracted or knocked off our paths. Thankfully, there are ways for us to connect, to each other, and to God. Spiritual friendships, small groups, and community, created by time together, by shared meaningful experiences and practices can help us form bonds, memories, and stories to keep us going.

“I knew every raindrop by its name”

The unexpected voices stay in our heads. They speak lines, phrases, words, pictures that we didn’t see coming, but that we can’t forget. Denis Johnson planted a stop sign in my soul with, “I knew every raindrop by its name,” as I tried to get to know his heroin-addicted narrator in “Jesus’ Son,” a book of short stories, which has been called one of the best written in the last 50 years.

Johnson’s voice, his writing, was born from his experience with addiction. He was worried at first that sobriety would affect his creativity. But the distance, clear-headedness, and productivity of being clean let him more fully access his past and own his voice in a way only he could. My copy of “Jesus’ Son” (named from Lou Reed’s “Velvet Underground” lyric in the song “Heroin,”) is full of underlinings where Johnson knocked me off-guard, off-balance.

He died of liver cancer in 2017. The New York Times obituary gave Johnson his own take on his faith:

Mr. Johnson thought of himself as a Christian writer who wonders about the existence of God in a troubled world.
“I have a feeling God finds us pretty funny,” he told New York magazine. “But that’s all the speaking I should do for God–he doesn’t go around talking about me.”
Richard Sandomir, New York Times

I’ve been thinking about and trying to read distinctive, original voices lately, gravitating toward short stories. Johnson is one of the first people I thought of. Another is Barry Hannah. Hannah begins his landmark book “Airships” like this:

“When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another.”
Barry Hannah, “Water Liars”

In an appreciation of his writing, author Richard Ford says that Hannah, “recasts the world in the way obviously great writing does… Barry’s voice was the one many of us hear when we speak candidly to ourselves–subversive, inventive, unpredictable, funnier than we can be in public.”

Recasting the world. That’s what great writing should do for us. Help us see differently or think differently about something, or maybe see something we haven’t seen. Fantastic stories, well told.

I’ve had Tom Robbins lines and phrases typed into my subconscious for 20-plus years now. He can take something as mundane as mockingbirds and cast a slanted light on them:

“Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they are born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all the ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world.”
Tom Robbins, “Skinny Legs and All”

But for all our disparate voices, it is not enough to recreate the world from the world, but to try to add some meaning, some connection, something universal within the personal.

Stories connect us in ways that nothing else does. Jesus told stories so he could be sure we would remember them, re-tell them, and talk about them. Hemingway and Twain are household names because we connect with Huck Finn and the Old Man and the Sea. And when Johnson’s narrator says he knew every raindrop by its name, I am transported back to being a kid, looking up into summer rain with my arms stretched out to the sides, trying to count raindrops and see if one looks different from another.

It started with Stan Lee

“Stan Lee and Dr. Seuss and Ray Bradbury. That’s where it begins and ends with me.” That’s how Josh Brolin, who plays both Thanos and Cable in the current Marvel movies, began his remembrance of Marvel legend, founder, and storyteller extraordinaire, Stan Lee. Lee died yesterday at the age of 95.

I heard the news from my cousin, who works at the Miami Herald newspaper, which is fitting, because he is the same cousin that introduced me to comic books; the same cousin who I would spend hours with at Alternate Worlds Comic Book Store in Cockeysville, pouring over Stan Lee’s creations. The comics I collected and couldn’t stop reading were Daredevil, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther–all first created by Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and all current Marvel movie blockbusters.

My teenage daughters don’t read. And I’m not overly worried because I didn’t read growing up. Except for Marvel comic books, something that started when I was 10 and went obsessively on through middle school and into high school (though it wasn’t something you wanted people to know back then). And then graphic novels found their way back onto my reading list in my 40s, again the same Marvel titles being the mainstay.

Stan Lee lived every writer’s dream: to see his characters become household names, loved across generations, spur imaginations, and touch people’s lives. And the coolest thing is that it wasn’t about him, it was and is about the stories and the characters–he passed them on to subsequent writers who try to build on and expand his vision. Here is what those who continue Lee’s stories (three of Marvel’s top writers and an actor) had to say on Lee’s passing:

Stan Lee made the word, “Excelsior!” his sign off and tagline. It’s generally translated to mean, “ever upward,” “higher,” or striving. Chances are, if you hear it in today’s culture, it’s because of him.

Marvel does a nice job of giving the skeleton/chronology of Stan Lee’s career as a storyteller. It’s heartening to realize that Lee almost quit writing comics after 20 years and didn’t really breakthrough until he was 39.

When someone dies at 95 years old, having lived a life people dream about, it’s not tragic; it gives us a moment to remember and appreciate what they brought to our lives. For me, my love of stories, and my desire to read them, to consume them, look for them, think about the shape of them, the imagery of them, to get to know characters–started with Stan Lee. I remember paying $5 for Black Panther #4 in its clear, plastic bag and feeling like I had a small piece of a legacy in my hands. I would walk out of the store with hours of stoke and fuel for my imagination. And I smile now, when I pass on something to my nephew, who sits transfixed, shuts out the world around him, and dives into the Marvel universe.

And these same stories, Stan Lee’s creations, having hit the big screen in ways we didn’t know could happen back then–cinematic storytelling has caught up to what was being done on the page–I now share with my daughters, who have seen all the movies, and suggested Marvel marathons without prompting–always looking for Lee’s comedic cameo in each film.

When I picked 13-year-old Ava up from school yesterday, I told her that an older famous person who she knows died. The first guess out of her mouth was, “Stan Lee??”

And last night we watched “The Avengers.” Tonight we’ll pick another. The stories keep going. But it started with Stan Lee. “Excelsior!” is how he lived.

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.”