Progress report

When I started seminary back in August, I dove right into Biblical Hebrew and Spiritual Formation without knowing what either of those meant. I jumped into the community not knowing their opinions about things. I tiptoed into relationships with people there not knowing if they were conservative or liberal or in-between (I mean, it can be a decent, if messy, data point). I wondered what they thought about women in church leadership. I wondered what they thought about the president. I wondered what they thought about parenting, aging, poverty, mythology, prophesy, snakes. You know: stuff.

A semester and a half in, I’ve learned where a lot of people, including faculty, stand on some things. It’s been enlightening and helpful to be in a community where a lot of people think in complex and thoughtful ways about all of those topics and more. Everybody has a voice. Everybody has things to learn, things to contribute, and fresh perspectives. We’re talking about current issues. And we’re given the time to grow and figure things out. It’s kind of like church. Heck, I think it probably *is* a form of church.

This morning, driving through the now melted snow to Walmart to get groceries, I was listening to Tim Mackie (from Bible Project) talk about the creation story in Genesis. It was like sitting in class. In fact, Tim Mackie and the Bible Project are the biggest reasons I’m in seminary. So I was listening to him talk about the various points of view of the creation story—about how ancient literary styles come into play—and I got to thinking about my story. I don’t mean my personal story. I mean the novel I wrote. I started it before grad school and eventually turned it into my thesis project. That was right about the time I left most of my old religious ways and entered into the possibilities of academia. It was exciting. I was traveling. I was writing. I was crossing my fingers that I’d somehow win the literary lottery (it sort of *is* a lottery) and be the next Judy Blume.

In the years that followed, I didn’t become the next Judy Blume. I became a teacher. But I still worked on my novel here and there. As I taught writing, literature, and English classes: I wrote. I edited. I revised. I tried to sell the story. I rewrote. I edited some more. I revised some more. I printed the whole thing out and spread it across the floor and dissected every part of it. I got highlighters out and traced every character, every plot line, every conflict. Then I bought writing books, and I stuck sticky notes to every important page, went back to my novel, applied what I’d learned, revised again, rewrote again, more editing, more dissecting. More teaching all the while. I joined critique groups, paid for face time with editors at big conferences, had beta readers, and took classes on the side.

The process went on like that all the way up until last summer when a dear friend read the book and said he liked it, and that was sort of enough for me. It meant it was likable. And it is. It may not win any lotteries. But it is finished. 15 years after I wrote the first scene.

So I was thinking about all that while listening to the Genesis talk, and do you wanna hear something funny? I mean, I thought it was funny. I laughed driving home from Walmart by then with a trunk full of groceries. I laughed because it was all so obvious all of a sudden. As Tim Mackie carried on about creation, I thought, “It’s so interesting that God would use literature to reach us," and then I thought, "Wait a minute...”

That’s when it hit me like a big stupid pile of big stupid bricks. “You ass,” I thought.

Then I laughed and laughed at my silly self for all these years calling my exit from religion a desert. You’ve probably heard me call it that: the time when God was silent—the time when I didn’t connect with God—the time when I didn’t believe. I laughed out loud going around that big curve in the road on the back side of The Reserve on King Mill Pike as the 15 years changed from a desert into a garden—a garden full of books, piles and piles of books like mountains and hills, trees where the leaves were pages, streams of words and ideas passing through the land, the seasons like genres, the work not toiling with rakes and shovels but pen and ink, a woman feverishly writing and editing and revising, creation and de-creation, highlighters and red pens and trips to the antique stores where she collected old copies of anything she could get her hands on, and the walls of her house became lined with stories, and her days were spent writing fictions and nonfictions, and her dreams were filled with characters, and her own life was becoming a story, and then she read to her children whose lives became vines that flowed over and in and out of everything and whose memories became big bright flowers and whose words scratched clouds across the sky, and then one day, on a path deep in the middle of the garden, she stumbled upon a book that she remembered from the old days, and it would challenge her sense of literature more than any ever had before.

In the background, Tim Mackie was talking, asking the audience, “If you’ve read through the Gospel of John, how often is Jesus talking through clear, explicit means of communication? Almost never. He answers with riddles, he answers with questions…This is native to how Jewish literature worked in ancient Israel and in the period of Israel’s second temple. This was a culture that valued slowness, that valued learning things slowly over a long period of time through repetition…”

It had been a garden all along. And the silence had only been in my ears. The voice had been on every page, at every turn of a plot, in how stories are made, in how twisted words make metaphors, in how deep the poetry of a line can go, in how stories are the way we see our lives, see the world, see reality. In how Jesus’s entire life was the middle of a story that started long before he was conceived of by Mary, and he spent his ministry pointing to the things that were foreshadowed in the literature of his people. It’s so wildly beyond Shakespeare. And that’s saying something.

So today, after 15 years of calling a garden a desert, I heard: “Are you ready for a collection of books that’ll twist your brain and heart around even more than Hamlet?”

I think maybe I finally am.

***

“Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.” - A great speech to ponder and a special moment of heroism by Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Silver Chair