Troubling Stories

-12/13/2013-

I remember wrestling to articulate to myself somewhere between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college (which is where all the real decisions are made, right?) the reasons that I, a tentatively aspiring scribbler and reader, was going to study nursing instead of English or literature. 

I want to learn stories from people, not just pages. 

Good reading is seventy-five percent of good writing. I can read while I practice nursing. 

I want my page-turning and people-winning to feed and not starve each other. 

I want real life and real people to tell me why paper-life and paper-people matter. 

I want to actually hurt and struggle through things with someone, 

beyond emotional self-flagellation over hypothetical and historical situations. 

So I arrive at the end of my twenty-second year. I never pulled a Paolini when I was fifteen or even twenty, nor do I have thirteen or so large novels sitting on my computer hard-drive waiting to be unleashed into the world of publication like so many barrels out of bond. I have not perfected the art of mass-scribbling; I have not even mastered minor-scribbling. The only art I have clung to with half a feeble hand is that of waiting. 

And waiting. 

Four months ago, I traded my adventures running around a cardiac unit brandishing toxic, life-saving substances for a silver band on my left-hand ring-finger. 

And waiting.  

Three-some months ago, I traded general physical wellbeing and the ability to wear chic faux-vintage clothing for morning sickness, a swelling belly, and the Doppler's swish-swish promise of life yet unborn. 

And waiting. 

Last weekend, we buried my oldest brother and I traded the sense of a big happy family here on earth for the achingly awful beauty of the utter necessity of resurrection and glory. 

And waiting. 

Those were the credentials I received. No towering stories. No overseas experiences. Life, new life, and grief - in that order. 

A couple months ago, I bothered to pay attention to my Twitter feed, and caught a little monologue from Jeffery Overstreet on the inherently problematic nature of Christian fiction. It ended with this final critique: that in modern literature, "the stamp 'Christian' draws readers who want stories they'll agree with, rather than stories that (like parables) trouble them." 

The last week and a half have taught me more about troubling stories than the previous twenty-two years of my life. I have stood next to my parents and siblings and heard their mouths and my own telling virtual strangers again and again how God is good in the death of a seventeen year old boy - telling friends how Jesus was kind and good to take the life of a man on the cusp of the rest of his life, a man full of talent and love in the prime of health, vitality, ambition, and uprightness. I have tasted how bereavement is chock full of glory and beauty, how glory and beauty are chock full of pain, how pain is chock full of sweetness, and how none of it makes sense because it all should make sense in the sovereignty of God and yet I still find myself crying. 

One life - one loss - I cannot claim has left me qualified as a writer, but it has left me immensely unsatisfied as a reader. 

Take Dorothy Sayers: a good "Christian writer." The Mind of the Maker will easily shape the identity of any writer who holds to orthodox truth, and I am greatly indebted to her for her sound thoughts on the Christian identity and literature. Yet she lived Harriet Vane before she wrote her story - in sin, in heartache, in messiness and turmoil, and that is a troubling story. 

It is also an undeniably good story. 

I used to like writing a good crying plot into my stories. I used to think it was something to make characters suffer, and take lives and torment readers. I treasured drama and sudden plot turns. 

But now I do not understand how it is godly to revel in suffering any more than it is to write it off. 

I do not understand how writing off little things is any less than writing off the foolishness of God for the wisdom of the world. 

I do not understand how an author who factors in the death of a character as "part of the plot" rather than a gaping chasm in the fabric of the story can understand anything of the essence of story-telling as a reflection of God's nature. 

I do not understand how a degree or even a creed in the Christian faith qualifies anyone half as much as Sayers to try and sketch the chasm of death and loss of life. (Sometimes I wonder if the degree is more useful than the creed; to paraphrase Christ, even the heathen toil after earthly dwellings and complicated falsehoods, while we the faithful are put to shame by our lack of ability to labour over our simple truths). 'Sooth, I find as much comfort in the platitudes of the majority of "Christian" fiction as Job found in his friends', who sought to justify God into their own tiny understandings rather than ache and sorrow under the glory and mystery of his ways. 

Where, O Christian teller-of-tales, is the glory? Where is the mystery? 

Jesus said, "Let not your hearts be troubled." I do not mean in my grief to say that we should build houses for our hearts in the realm of trouble. But Jesus also said, "In this world, you will have trouble," and though the sentence that follows is immensely comforting I wonder how capable we can be of conveying the truth of such comfort if we ignore the trouble itself. 

Take heart: I have overcome the world. 

Jesus did not give platitudes. He gave parables and riddles, called Mary and Martha to see the glory of God when they asked to see their brother healed, and in his own death overcame death. His life and death and life were not given merely as a plot point to allow some people to see nice things in bad things, nor to keep a select number safe from the hurt of this world. 

For the Christian writer, Christ overcoming the world ought to mean greater freedom: freedom to range the minefields and lose limbs, not freedom to sit safely on the fence of platitudes and "Christian" sentimentality. God give us courage to take heart and pen and hold onto that truth with all the tangible, brutal force that this troubled world necessitates. God give us peace enough to tell his troubling stories.