Home
He preached that morning on the sufficiency of Christ's suffering and sacrifice. He'd reassured us--and himself--that we can hold hope high through the deepest valley of the shadows because we know Christ himself had already suffered the appalling worst our human minds can ever imagine once and for all, all of that and more--for our sakes.
He approached with communion table, fortified, I think, by his own exposition of the text. Rather than read through the liturgical form, he took his place behind the bread and wine and returned us once more to the promise offered in the sacrament--that in taking this body and blood we would not only be sharing in Christ's suffering, but glorying in that once-for-all-time sacrifice. His suffering--so many times worse than ours--makes us totally free. But all of that came haltingly, the bread broken with more care than usual, his face down, the wine poured soberly from the chalice.
I sat on metal chair far in the back of the church. This was not worship-as-usual--for him or for us. The morning's sadness hovered over the congregation like dank fog, but created rapt attention more characteristic of a funeral service than a worship celebration. The startling absence of a young girl dried up the thirsty souls of an entire congregation.
Maybe that's why I couldn't help thinking what I did. As the preacher walked to the table of our Lord, I kept repeating a single line: "Read the story. Read the story--I wish you'd read the story."
With an urgency that was as arrogant as it was distasteful and impossible to stanch, I kept wishing the suffering preacher would read a story I wrote long ago, a story I thought--no, I knew--would make this celebration of the sacrament as fully real as it could be. Through the long distribution of the elements, the promptings wouldn't stop. "If you'd only read the story. . ."
When it comes to guilt, I am accomplished. Despite having partaken of the sacrament, as I left the church that morning I couldn't help but berate myself for such an insufferable ego. "My story, my story--read my story," the voice in me had urged. What was more dispelling than the sheer volume was the fact that the voice had pleaded so continuously for something of my own creation--my piece of fiction. A young girl had died at six that morning, the celebration of the Lord's Supper was being offered, and I couldn't stop thinking about the efficacy of a story I had written long ago.
There is enough arrogance in that reaction to verify my need for cleansing in Christ's blood; I'm not at all proud of my pride. But the more I thought about my inappropriate reaction, the more I began to think that while the posture may have seemed arrogant, what my conscious mind was begging for was nothing less than the very truth of the sacrament--that all our sadness and sin is once and forever shouldered in a death and resurrection which occurred thousands of years ago. What I wanted to do was tell the old, old story my way, the way in which I learned the truth of the gospel most profoundly, myself--in a story which I wrote.
That realization prompted me to think again about another question frequently asked--what is it we do exactly when we write? What some voice in me wanted to accomplish that morning in church was offer my own firmly struck apprehension of the gospel truth, not something I'd learned by simply by having the gospel read or a lifetime of Sunday School lessons or thoughtful homilies--although all of those experiences are certainly mine. I began to wonder whether it was possible for me to say that I'd learned the bona fide, incarnate truth about the efficacy of God's sacrifice--not only intellectually, but as viscerally as it was possible for me to learn that truth--by writing a story. That morning, I wanted everyone to experience what I believed and knew via the medium by which I'd come to know and believe what I do--via a story whose infrastructure--its characters, plot, setting, theme--had come together, picture-puzzle like way in the process of writing, and had, thereby become, to me at least, the whole truth. I knew what I believed because I'd written it--that's what I'm saying.
The process of writing--specifically fiction (I'll let poets and essayists speak for themselves) is very much the process of discovery we all talk about when we define the task. Writing is discovery--and I'm certainly not the first to say it is. What I'd like to try to illustrate here is that writing fiction is a means by which we come to know what it is we actually believe.
Somewhere far back in my undergraduate education, I remember someone saying, "Believe the tale and not the teller." I've no idea how deconstructionists would toy with that old saw, but the notion still seems to me to hold the truth. When there is a discrepancy between the writer's talk and work--what she says she believes and what the work appears to suggest--I really believe the verification is the work because the work is, in fact, the incarnation of belief--idea made flesh. The work is what the writer truly believes--testimonials or denials to the contrary.
If children order the chaos of their lives, as Bettleheim says by the fairy tales they hear, then why shouldn't that same structuring occur as the story is created in the mind of the writer? Obviously, a story does not argue principles, but it does offer a kind of understanding inasmuch as it admits us to the internal life of the characters the story offers. We learn by becoming--both as readers and writers.
What sets me to thinking these things again--for this is old ground we're going over here--is a letter in a recent Poets and Writers, a letter which appeared in response to an article I had written about Christian writers. There is nothing new or startling in the response, but its contents forced me to consider once again the complaint perenially leveled against all of those who, like me, try to both believe seriously and write seriously. Here is the substance of the letter: "A working/writing life grounded (literally) in myths about gods and souls and spirits and such may be Schaap's idea of an anti-vacuum, but to lots of us it has the look of just the opposite: a life circumscribed by authoritarian non-ideas."
Perhaps I could end
the speech right now and quote from O'Connor, who knew well the very same
criticism. Here's what she says in "The Fiction Writer and His Country":
I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the story-teller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.
That's O'Connor's answer. G. K. Chesterton is helpful here, as well. In his Othodoxy, he slips the noose over the head of the modernist, when speaking of the same species of criticism.
"In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted," Chesterton says. "He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist."
Theoretically, I've now answered the criticism, lining up a pair of superpowers like O'Conner and Chesterton to take out the enemy's position. Let's just throw in Eugene Peterson, who claims that writing isn't not just a literary act, but a spiritual act as well. But defining, as exactly as we can, what it is we do is something composed of a whole lot more than a battle of ideas. Defining writing, like writing itself, begins in full retreat from abstraction and theory. Writing begins in substance and sense, not ideas.
So I still face a certain existential problem here. Just as it is possible to hear the gospel and not know its truth internally, it's just as easy to listen to O'Connor or Chesterton and not know the truth of their rejoinders. I'm talking here about knowing, about conviction, about the surety of my own faith. And the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that what prompted my emphatic, but fortunately silent appeals to the preacher as he stood at the table of our Lord. What I was begging for was not, simply, an intellectual acceptance of the truth of Christ's sacrifice, but a holistic and tenacious avowal of what I have come to know deeply and sincerely. My testimony, internally given, my full-fledged belief in the efficacy of Christ's sacrifice, while undoubtedly shaped by a lifetime spent within the body of believers, was made most real by my writing the story. That's what I want to explore here--how writing itself teaches us what we believe.
Listen to O'Connor: "I have to write to discover what I'm doing. Like the old lady," she said, "I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again." Thus the action of writing clarified her thinking. In creating stories, she investigated what she believed. That's what I'm saying happens in writing, and obviously I'm not the first.
I know this forum is advertised as a speech, but I'd like to read you that story today because I believe that in hearing it you'll better understand what I'm saying. It's not a long story, and it hasn't been read by thousands of people, nor is it included in any Best American Short Stories. I'll leave it to others to judge its literary merit. But the story is important to me for two reasons: first, it is, like few stories I've written, especially autobiographical; and second, because of what I have discovered I believe in the process of writing the story.
Years ago, I was an employee of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, working at a Terry Andrea-John Michael Kohler State Park, in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. My duties were largely custodial, but occasionally I would man the registration booth at the park entrance, where it was my job to sell park stickers and register campers.
One day in early summer, a truck pulled in lugging a rack of canoes. I don't remember whether the wind was as uproarious as I say it was in the story, but I know very well that I understood that canoeing on Lake Michigan was, at best, a dangerous undertaking. I also know that I wouldn't have dared to say that to the young social worker driving the truck, nor his passengers, African-American kids, all of whom had come up the lake shore from Milwaukee. And while I don't trust my memory perfectly, I remember thinking, as I handed them the daily sticker they paid for, that taking those Alumicrafts out into the Lake Michigan surf was risky, at best.
They did, some capsized, and some of those kids drowned. I saw nothing of the event itself because I continued to work in the registration booth that day. But what I remember best was the tongue-lashing I took from the boss, who marched down to the registration booth from the park office hours later and told me in no uncertain terms that by failing to warn the park's visitors not to go canoeing, I'd been myself responsible for what had happened. I was eighteen years old. I don't remember his exact words, but I know that he told me I should have known better, having been born and reared on Lake Michigan. He was right, of course.
That night I remember telling my parents about what had happened that day at the park. It was a headline news story, of course, so they would likely have heard anyway. But I remember not telling them about my part in the story. I suppose I was a rather typical late adolescent, chafing--as many kids do--under parental rule. I didn't tell my parents the whole story because, in part, I didn't tell my parents much at all about my life, about what I was thinking and doing. I didn't tell them the whole story because, well, they were my parents. Some of you will understand.
It's important to understand that this incident did not somehow haunt me throughout the years--nor does it today. I remember Lawrence Dorr once saying, years ago, that some of nightmarish horrors of his own holocaust experience in Hungary during World War II were somehow put to rest by his "use" of them in stories. As many of us know, writing out one's memories and ideas carries a certain therapeutic quality; that's why therapists frequently suggest their patients keep notebooks and diaries.
I understand, too, that telling one's story audibly offers relief to some people; several times in my life I've listened to people tell their stories of suffering--especially World War II stories--and been told that their experience of telling me the story brought a certain kind of peace to their souls. I mention that only because I think that phenomenon may be relevant to this whole discussion. There is something to the notion that objectifying a story, holding it arm's length, can create satisfaction and peace. But I also want to make clear that my selling those kids a sticker and thereby granting them admission to the park and the lake was not something that haunted me.
Nonetheless, years later, I decided
to try to write that story as fiction, largely because, I suppose, I knew
both its physical and emotional reality very, very well. It is almost
impossible to know exactly why I chose any specific feature of the story-telling
itself--why, for instance, I chose the fictional elements of the story--why
I chose to tell the story from a father's perspective, rather than from
the point of view of kid who sold the sticker.
Whatever the reason, this story,
"The Voice of the Body," is what resulted.
The Voice of the Body
Once our Brad hit high school, he took one look at his older sister, a senior honor student, and opted for a whole different course of study. Mary is bookish, tall and thin, and given to wearing plaid skirts of perfectly medium length. Every day of her high school career, she walked by herself to the bus stop or drove alone to school, and loved the quiet company of solitary mornings. Not once did we yell her out of bed or shoo her out the door. But from the first day of ninth grade, our Brad decided he'd have none of his sister's world. He set out on his own course, and if Ann and I would count the hours we spent wringing our hands about the boy we once wanted so badly, we'd tally enough time for a two year leave-of-absence. But you don't take leaves from your kids.
He sat beside me this morning in church in much the same pose he always takes, slouching with his leg up against a hymnal, face down while he pushes back his cuticles with the edge of a dime. But I knew it was a pose designed to hide--maybe from me, or from himself, maybe even from God. This morning he was in church--I mean really there--even though we'd tugged him along for all the Sundays of his life.
Maybe it's a wonder it's taken this long. At eighteen, he's already a man.
Most anywhere south of here people would say most of the weather we've had this week is still winter. Early June isn't summer at all on the lake shore. People wear jackets and keep their sweatshirt hoods up around their ears at the state park where Brad works. Damp gray haze lies so heavy along the shore that in the morning water beads on picnic tables all over the park, even though there may have been no rain. Sometimes a whole week of workdays can pass and you can't paint a thing with that kind of moisture. By calendar and climate, early June around here is really late spring. When the sun comes, it's a joy.
Brad was working in the booth at the park entrance Friday morning, maybe the first sunny day in two weeks of gloom. I know the job. Lots of things have changed around that park in the last twenty years--there's nature tours now, a new visitor center with wildlife displays, and the beach is finally coming back after too many years of high water. But some things haven't changed from when I worked my way through college down at the park twenty years ago. Somebody has to sell entrance stickers and register the campers. It was Brad's turn in the booth.
He told me he was outside when that Chevy van came through, an old wreck tugging a rack of Alumicraft canoes. He'd just grabbed a handful of camper receipts from the little box at the exit. There hadn't been much traffic into the park that morning, even though the blessed sun burned through the haze and likely pulled the soft blue-green from the long row of cedars I helped plant years ago down the road to the campground.
Brad let that conversion van into the park and the beach, sold them a daily sticker--two bucks. That was his part. All of it.
Ten kids from that van went out with two social workers, and four of them, delinquent kids from the city, went down, drowned in heavy surf not more than fifty feet off the beach. They made it out quite a ways, I guess, but two of them swamped and dumped, and four kids died. Two of those bodies were recovered that afternoon, and two stayed out, like ghosts floating in the swells.
I didn't know exactly what it was that Cecil told Brad until Brad himself told me last night on the beach. We live on the lake. Friday night I heard the front door slap shut, and when his cycle never popped, I assumed he went out to the water by himself.
Last night he took off again in silence, so I gave him fifteen minutes, and then went out myself and walked north towards the park because I realized he was probably looking for that last body. The moon raised a sparkling triangle over whatever little waves hadn't yet bedded down for the night, and lights from the cottages down the beach stood in perfect order like a line of troops.
I found him about a quarter-mile down on the Sprigsby's dock, staring out toward the moon, his arm wound around a guy wire holding the runabout up above the water. The thin chill in the breeze off the lake kept your face cool and wet. "It's cold as April," I said, coming up from behind him.
"You out here?" he said, as if he hoped it might be someone else.
I walked past him over the planks and stood at the end looking out toward a necklace of lights from some ship. "I used to dream of someday standing here and seeing Michigan," I told him. "Just once in my life, I'd like to see land way beyond the blue." I turned towards him because I wanted to hear him say something, anything at all. "I think maybe if we'd get up on the roof of our place some night when things are really clear--maybe in a tree or something. Take some binocs along. Maybe we could pick something out."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Ninety
miles. Too much curve in the earth," he said. "You couldn't
see over there even if it was crystal clear."
"Top of the power plant maybe?"
I said.
He pulled the zipper of his jacket
all the way up beneath his chin. "You could figure it out--how high
you'd have to be."
"When I was a kid I used to think
you could see it when you'd see these long lines on the horizon, like sand
dunes--"
"Probably fog banks," he said.
I turned back to the horizon.
The barge lights hadn't moved. "It's only a dream," I told him.
Somewhere down the beach a heavy
bass from a party beat through the stillness of Saturday night.
"One of them's out there yet," I
said. "It could turn up miles from here."
We hadn't really talked much about
what happened. Brad doesn't really talk much at all to us anymore.
Ann says since he's turned sixteen his only mode is silence, interrupted
by an occasional grunt.
"Guess so," he said.
"Where'd the one come up today?"
"Fifteen miles down," he said, pointing
down the shoreline towards the lights from Port Jefferson. "It gets
battered up, I guess. You wouldn't think it would, not rolling in
the water. Besides, it's so cold this time of year. You'd think
a body wouldn't look that bad at all."
I didn't know then what exactly what was
going on. I didn't know what Cecil had told him. He's young.
Eighteen is too young for all of that, but I guess you think that way when
it's your own you're worried about. "You blaming yourself somehow,
Brad?" I said.
"Somebody's got to take it," he
said. "Four of them dead. It's somebody's fault. I sold them
a sticker. I let them in."
I tried to laugh just to lighten
things. "You're taking the whole weight of the world on your shoulders,"
I told him. "You'll strain something if you try to do that."
"Cecil told me it was my fault."
I couldn't believe it. "What do you mean?"
"He said I should have known better.
I was born here, he told me. I should have known you can't take a
canoe out into those waves--that's what he said."
I know Cecil's a fine man, an old
war horse from Korea who worked himself up to Park Director by sweat and
loyalty and a powerful love for the lake shore. He gave me a job
years ago, and when I asked him about Brad last summer, he never hesitated.
"Cecil said that?" I said.
He twanged the guy wires as if they
were the strings of a bass viola. "He's full of crap," Brad said.
"It's not my job to be a lifeguard. I only sold them a sticker.
He can't blame me."
Sprigsbys have a canopy on that
deck, so they don't keep a tarp over the boat. We know them well.
For some reason, Brad swung himself inside and sat down behind the driver's
seat.
"We all need to blame somebody,"
I told him.
"It wasn't my fault."
"He doesn't blame you either."
"You should have seen his eyes,"
Brad said. "You ever see Cecil mad?"
"I used to work for him myself."
"He was mad. He read me out
down at the booth, comes limping down from the office like he does, and
just about tears my throat out."
"He didn't mean it," I said.
"The heck he didn't."
I know why Cecil did it. I
know Cecil. He comes into the bank two or three times a week, deposits
the take from the stickers and registrations. He's a fine man, but
a dozen TV cameras all over the beach and all those reporters poking mikes
at him, asking him how on earth four kids could drown in a well-maintained
state park, and I can see him standing there speechless, a man who works
with his hands but never was a talker. Besides that, right there
at his feet are the bodies of two boys drowned in his park.
"It wasn't my fault at all, and
he had no right to chew my butt the way he did," Brad said.
I turned around and walked to the
side of the boat. "Then why do you think it is?" I said.
"I don't," he said. "I ain't
a lifeguard."
"You said that already," I told
him.
"That jerk social worker shouldn't
have let them put those canoes in. You can't canoe in waves that
high, not in Lake Michigan. What kind of stupidity is that anyway?--geez."
"He didn't know."
"He should've."
"You talk to him at all?"
"I sold him the sticker is all.
Don't even remember him. Long hair, I think. A beard.
He said the guys kept their rooms clean. 'Which way is the beach?'
he says. 'These
guys got a day off for keeping their rooms
clean.' He says it for them, looking around toward the back seat,
you know--not for me."
"That's all you remember?"
"Shoot, and I'm going, 'I don't
even keep my room clean.’"
"So he didn't know anything?" I
said.
"Guy with half a brain could see
you can't canoe when the water's up. That don't take any smarts."
"So it's his fault?" I said.
"Guy like that doesn't know the lake.
They shouldn't send anybody down here who doesn't
know the lake."
"Who's they?" I said.
"The guy's boss. I don't know.
Whoever sent him down to the park. How am I supposed to know?
It's just not my fault."
He sat with his elbows on his legs,
toying with a ski rope, his broad shoulders--like his mother's family--squared,
his thick arms packed into the jacket. At fourteen he stopped wearing
my shirts because his chest didn't get into them anymore, but big as he
is, he's not strong enough to carry those dead boys.
"You been looking for that body,
haven't you?" I told him. "You were out last night and you're out
again tonight because you want to find it."
"Can't a guy take a walk on the
lake?" he said.
"No law against it," I told him.
It was early. It couldn't have been much past eight. I figured
I could help him somehow, maybe I had to. "Do the lights work on
the Farmall?" I said. "You used it when you were seining smelt, didn't
you?"
"They work," he said.
"Maybe we ought to take a ride,"
I told him.
He turned around on his seat, looked
right at me.
"You never know," I said.
He shook his head.
"I looked half the morning. Cecil put me on the tractor and sent
me up and down the beach, one end of the park to the other. He says
we just as soon not have people bumping into that thing by surprise."
"You had enough?" I asked.
He looked down at his watch.
"It's Saturday night," I told him. "You haven't been home this early
in years."
*
I let him drive. I sat up on the fender, and the lights gave us enough illumination for us to spot a body up on shore or still rolling in shallow water. The air was cool and damp, of course, so I grabbed a couple stocking caps while Brad was getting the tractor out of the shed. I pulled on another sweater and told Ann what we were up to. She'd been reading.
"What are you going to do if you find it?"
she said, taking off her glasses.
"I don't think we will," I told
her, grabbing Brad's heavy jacket.
"Then why are you looking?"
"I'm going along for the ride,"
I told her. "He's the one that's looking."
We rode on the slant of the beach edge, six miles down to the mouth of the river, as far as we could go. Some places where the beach is gone, he'd slow down and take the water, the lights bouncing off the surface in a way that made me afraid we'd feel some clunk, then turn and watch a face or an arm or a leg emerge from the track of the big wheel beneath me.
When we got to the Sauk, he stood at the edge of the river, the lights disappearing into the water and the wispy fog. He pushed the gas back to an idle, and stared for a moment, and I knew he was thinking about the river currents out into the lake, about what they might do to that last body, how they might fan its drift miles down the beach, far beyond us, south even to Chicago. I know he was thinking that. I know it.
"That's it," I told him, over the engine noise.
He reached for the gear shift between his legs and swiveled around to back up over the dry sand, and he never said a thing. We went faster back up the beach towards home, our tracks, where they were visible, like a reminder that we'd covered all this ground already and no real goal could be found anyway. I didn't think the Lord would wash him up like that--just for us.
He pulled off the hat I'd given him and stuck it in his pocket, then stood up, keeping both hands on the wheel, his eyes moving back and forth over the beach--going too fast, I thought.
When I used to fish out there with Brad, Ann said she could hear us talk no matter how far out we went, our voices carrying through the open stillness as if there could be no secrets on the lake. That night I wondered what the people thought up and down the beach when they heard us go by, not once but twice, and saw a huddled figure in a stocking cap leaning on the fender of a tractor driven by a boy standing up and staring at the water as if he might find some monumental treasure tossed up by the wash of an evening's gentle waves.
We never spoke during that long ride. But I knew that if I tried to yell over the engine's heavy popping, I'd be heard by the whole world. Every word. So I kept quiet because it seemed to me then that I had something to say that wasn't meant for a crowd.
Brad needed that body, needed to pull it himself from the maw of the killer lake, as if he were in fact the lifeguard he swore he never was, as if he still could rescue someone already dead for two days. But it wasn't that boy he needed to rescue. I think it was himself.
*
Sunday morning came as perfect as
a storybook Easter. Ann stayed in bed and I brought her coffee, along
with the front page of the Journal. I read all of the sports before
Jeremy got up to grab the funnies and Sarah came down asking about Brad.
"He isn't in his room?" I said.
Ann must have heard Sarah's announcement.
"Maybe he stayed overnight someplace,"
Sarah said. Ann came up behind her and shrugged her shoulders.
When I went out back to the boat shed, I saw the Farmall was gone and I wondered how on earth he could start that thing without either of us hearing it. I saw the tracks through the pine needles out back, and watched the gouges run west down the lake road instead of east past the side of the house. He didn't want me along.
I walked out to the water and looked both
ways along the shore. A single track ran north up the beach towards
the park. A man in a brown hunting coat walked his collie my way,
maybe fifty yards up, just past Vandiver's, so I waited.
"You didn't see a tractor, did you,"
I said, "Farmall, an old orange one?"
"Nobody out here but me and Pepper,"
he said.
A blue-green choppy mask broke into
rippling waves just off shore, little waves, as if the hand of God were
somewhere just beneath the whole lake rocking it gently.
"He's still looking?" Ann said when
I got back to the house.
"Where is he?" Sarah said.
"Is he fishing or what?"
In a way, I guess, he was.
*
Church starts at ten, and he goes with us every Sunday whether or not he wants to. It's a rule we have. As long as he lives with us, he lives by our rules--and our rules include church. I'm a believer, always have been. Not that I don't have doubts, but so did King David sometimes.
We were all dressed up and ready by the
time I heard the Farmall roll up the beach. I didn't say a thing
when he came in the front door and left the tractor stand out front.
His face--his eyes--seemed vacant,
and there was a hollowness in his voice. "I found it," he said.
"It was only about a mile up from the park. Can you believe that?"
Ann looked at me from across the
table as if he'd just said something really profane.
"You leave it there?" I said.
It was a stupid question, but I didn't know what to say.
"I called from a cottage.
It's already picked up--"
"What'd you find?" Sarah said out
of nowhere.
I waited for him to answer that
question because I wanted to know what he'd say. But he looked at
me as if I were the only one with the voice.
"He found the body of the boy who
drowned Friday," I told her, gently pushing the company tag down into the
back of the neck of her summer dress.
"Wow," she said, and she pulled
a hand up to her face.
It was Jeremy who said it, even
though I wondered myself at that very moment, and I'm sure Ann did too.
"What'd it look like?" he said.
I've seen Brad speechless for the
last four years, but I never saw him so robbed of words. He ripped
open the clasps of his jacket and stripped it off his shoulders, all the
while looking down at the want ads on the table.
"Was it all blue or what?" Jeremy
said.
He's ten, and he's seen his share
of TV death.
"Sometimes sand rubs off all the
hair," Jeremy said to all of us, as if we really wanted to know.
I kept waiting for Brad.
He threw the coat over the love
seat and looked right into his little brother's eyes. "He was dead,"
he said. "Nothing spectacular or nothing. He was just plain dead."
And then he looked at me, as if
I had a sermon.
*
We've never had a day's worry with our Mary. This summer she's working in a student ministry in Sequoia National Park. During the week, she scoops ice cream in a fancy concession in a tourist trap, and on Sundays she helps out in a little park ministry that meets in the forest, logs for pews.
But Brad has always been another story.
Mary professed her faith and took communion when she was fourteen, stood
up in front of the church all alone and answered the questions. I
remember how the preacher gave her this little hug up front once it was
over, and neither Ann nor I will ever forget her smile.
Brad is already four years older
than Mary was when she told the whole church that she loved Jesus.
Some Sunday mornings we almost have to dress him to get him there.
I'd rather not know, sometimes, how he spends his Saturday nights.
When he goes to college next year, I'm sure Ann and I will spend more time
praying for that boy than we have for Mary in all of her years.
Brad's never said a thing about faith to me, not one thing. We haven't forced him. He's never professed his faith. I don't think he's any kind of agnostic; he just lets it go somehow because it's part of the baggage of his parents' values---it's what he's rebelling from, I suppose, part of the world he thinks he has to leave in order to become who he will be.
I've asked the Lord to make this sullenness of his, this rebellion, this dark kind of brooding, strengthen him someday, so that in some future time his sneering, like Paul's, would make him a saint. But I haven't seen a thing yet to assure me I've been heard.
We had communion this morning. Sometimes I wish I were a Catholic so that I could say that this bread and wine is more than just a symbol, more than just grape juice and a dry cube of bread that points at a higher reality. In our church, that's all it is--a token remembrance of Christ's shed blood and broken body. You eat it and drink it to prompt a memory some don't have. At times, I wish it were the real flesh and blood.
So I'm sitting there this morning waiting for the bread and the wine, Brad right there beside me, chewing his fingernails, his knee up against the pew in front of us. But I knew it was different for him this time, because I knew that the blue face of a boy drowned for almost three days hung in his mind, a face he claimed he really hadn't seen that Friday morning in the back of the van, a face he'd seen for the first startling time that very Sunday dawn.
When the sun rises over the lake, it gilds everything with a sheen that's heavenly gold. But I knew that morning that nothing the sun could do could wipe away death from the face of a boy who could have known that taking out a canoe in surf swept up by a rough east wind was dangerous--if only he'd known, if someone who knew had told him as much. No gold lay over that face in the lake shore dawn.
So I grabbed Brad's hand once the bread had been passed. I grabbed it and I opened those fingers stained with state park green paint. I opened it to callouses and a width that long ago surpassed my pink banker's hands, and I shoved that bread there in his palm, even though he's not supposed to partake, not having professed. I force-fed my son the body of Christ.
"Take eat, remember and believe," the preacher said, and an entire church--all except me--raised the body to lips waiting for the relief of our own guilt, sin washed forever out to sea in the blood of Christ's death.
And Brad looked at me as a child might have, as he might have himself before he'd become the problem we'd prayed about for so long. With my thumb I pointed at my mouth.
His eyes glazed almost, not in tears but
in fear.
"Take it," I said. "Go on--you
know what it is."
And I grabbed his hand again and raised it, held it up to his face until he took the bread into his mouth, held it there until it turned, as the Catholic in me prayed it would--just today--into the body I know he needed so badly to find.
"Remember and believe that the body
of our Lord was broken for all our sins," the preacher said.
And I pulled his hand back down
from his lips and held it the way I used to, the way, years ago, he once
wanted me to.
And I'm the one who cried.
*
That story is close to ten years old, and when I read it again I remember some of the impulses I felt to write it the way I did. For instance, I remember a Sunday morning when someone called and told my daughter that a friend of hers was in the hospital, being treated for burns. Her house had burned down. This happened just before church, and I remember sitting beside her that morning in the pew--she was 10 or 11 years old--and knowing--on the basis of her deep attention--that that Sunday may well have been the first Sunday of her life that she was really "in church." When I wrote the story, I remember thinking that that Sunday would have been the first Sunday that Brad was really in church, too.
But what I remember best about the whole process of writing is the sheer joy which I felt at the moment when it came to me--notice the word choice, deliberate passive sense--"came to me"--or when I "discovered"--or when I stumbled on--or when I finally knew after hours of writing, how the story would end. I remember the jubilation I felt when suddenly it came to me that the father, sitting there beside his son in church, would force-feed his boy the bread--the body, he needed to find. I remember standing up from my chair and just knowing that there was something exceptionally fine in that single gesture--the odd juxtaposition of masculine power and loving intimacy, a gesture, to me at least, so believable and breathtaking that it stunned me when--and let me once again use the passive language, "when it came to me."
I do believe that all of us who write know the exhilaration which comes with that kind of discovery, when the confluence of character, plot, and setting yields something that seems, to us, to be the perfectly concluding gesture to the story, perfect because meticulously engineered by the givens of the story, yet surprising, even--and perhaps most importantly--to the writer. Once more, O'Conner: "The writer," she says, "penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality."
What is fiction here? My father worked in a bank, but my family never lived on the lake. My father and I never had a long discussion about the event. I didn't take the tractor up and down the shoreline, looking for bodies--but others did. The Lords Supper never brought me any particular solace for what I very certainly did assume to be my own culpability. What happens in the writing here is what always happens in the fictional process--certain elements of real truth mysterious mix with imagined scenes and characters--Brad is not me, my own father is not the narrator. The process of writing this story blanched and distilled what the memory offers to the fictional process, shapes and identifies anew both characters and the settings, then weaves everything together into something which is both old and new, both unreal and yet very real, both false to history and true to our experience of life. Everything that goes before leads to this final, single gesture, this new artifact--that's the process undertaken in the creative fictional mode, methinks. "The fictional process," says John Gardner, "is the writer's way of thinking, a special case of the symbolic process by means of which we do all our thinking (Art 51)." As Calvin Miller says, "We who tells stories find out who we are and why we are born."
It is undeniable that the emotional truth which attracted me to the story was the guilt of the sticker-seller, a guilt I knew fully. What I'm saying is, what pulled me into the story was an exploration of a conscience heavy-laden with the deaths of kids, deaths which could--but not within a court of law--be placed at the feet of a teenage boy who sold the stickers. I remember that guilt, and I remember carrying it alone. One of the memories I carry of the incident is, once my parents were off to bed that night, my taking out a piece of paper and writing down my thoughts, denying my guilt. I wish I had that paper, but I don't. At that point in my life, when I was still light years away from ever thinking of myself as a writer, I must have somehow understood that talking to someone--even a piece of paper--might be helpful. So I did.
That personal dialogue--me and the paper--is certainly the basis of what drew me back to the story. For the nature of the conflict here is clear: there is very clear guilt for a crime--a sin--for which I couldn't be charged, but was there nonetheless. I believe that as I began to write that story I did not have that emotional truth in my mind. What really brought me into the story was the event of a father and son moving up and down the shoreline of Lake Michigan, at night, with a tractor, looking for a dead body who was there for reasons that had very much to do with the kid. That event--writing a story that would include that event--was what I was after when I started composing. That scene drew me into putting the pencil to paper. But took the writing of the story itself for me to identify the real nature of the emotional conflict which had drawn me to it. The process of writing identified that problem and defined it as sin and guilt. By the laborious process of creating a world of realizable truth, of "felt life," by the process of creating a father, a boat dock, a sparkling necklace of lights off shore, two children with understandably kids'-ish questions, I came to discover what had brought me to the story as well as exactly what action or gesture would get me out or get me home.
This process yields, or so it seems to me, what Gardner calls "concrete philosophy," which is not to say that it is philosophy at all because it isn't. What it is, is idea made flesh. One of the toughest jobs of teaching introductory literature classes is explaining what we mean by theme; and the reason it is such an exacting job has less to do with poor students than the difficulty we all have of distilling major idea from story. Story doesn't mean anything, really. Story is story. What MacLeish said of poetry is equally true of story: "a poem should not mean/But be." Story is concrete philosophy--it is not the same as, but it is akin to"the word made flesh."
What I am saying is that for me at least, writing the story is a process whereby I discovered what it was--and is--I believe. I believed in the efficacy of the sacrament before I read the story--I'd taken communion in varied states of attention hundreds of times. But the process of composition, the art of fiction, the marriage of experience and imagination which is so much a part of the fictional process affirmed viscerally, fundamentally, and definitively what I believed. That's why, in the difficult worship some weeks ago my imagination kept insisting that the reality of Christ's glorious substitution for our sin would be more vividly manifest in the minds and hearts and souls of all the parishioners if someone would ready my story.
It is time to return to the unsettling letter. Once more, here's the line I'm toying with: : "A working/writing life grounded (literally) in myths about gods and souls and spirits and such may be Schaap's idea of an anti-vacuum, but to lots of us it has the look of just the opposite: a life circumscribed by authoritarian non-ideas." What I would offer in response is that the process of composing that story led me to a discovery of what I do believe. There can be no question about the fact that it enhanced my faith. But I really do believe that writing the story was itself a faith journey, a tour of discovery.
But I'm not blind to the fact that the letter-writer would undoubtedly respond by saying that the closure of the story was not someone I learned, but instead something generously supplied by a system of belief which remained aloof from whatever discovery I considered myself up to. If I were the letter-writer, I'd consider this entire speech indicative of the very delusion Christian writers must maintain in order to ply their craft. We have to believe we're free to discover, but as anyone outside the circle of faith can readily see, we're not and I'm not. After all, my own joy at the discovery of the appropriateness of the story's climactic gesture is undoubtedly constructed upon my own already existing "belief" in the efficacy of sacrament.
The issue which lays beneath all of this is free will or determinism: to what extent am I really free to discover anything, through the process of writing or the scientific method any other process for that matter; and, an equally valid question I might ask of the letter-writer: does his rejection of God really free his mind to discover anything not already deeply planted in the value system which his criticism affirms he has? To what extent is he really free, am I really free, are any of us really free? That's the question which lies unanswerably at the deep reaches of his criticism.
In this month's Atlantic, Edward O. Wilson argues for "the biological basis of morality" in an essay taken from his new book Consilience. He says he believes that what we commonly call the religious experience will "eventually be explained as functions of brain circuitry and deep genetic history," in other words, our mythologies, our faith systems, and the sources for what we consider to be our moral imagination will all be discovered to be hidden somewhere in the labyrinth functions of human biology.
That such discoveries will occur is, of course, Wilson's faith, as it is the faith of the person who won't believe in my own autonomy as a Christian. But my faith is elsewhere. Mine exists in the reality of an omniscient God whose divine authority is very real, but whose nature both defines and demonstrates the perfect manifestation of what we humanly consider to be divine love. That's exactly what it was I learned by writing the story.