Word-Bound Creatures
A day or two after walking a group of teachers through a magnificent old fairytale, an old myth: The Handless Maiden, one veteran educator came up to talk to me about the story. But in reality it wasn't a discussion about the story simpliciter, it was about the role of stories—stories told, stories heard, stories written.
The teacher said to me, “I heal by writing.” Preaching to the tone deaf choir of one, I thought to myself. I heal by writing too. I dabble in creative writing, reflections, some poetry, although not as much as i’d like. But most of my writing these days consists of putting together sermons and that is an utterly unique type of writing.
As the muses would have it, I find myself writing this on a lazy summer afternoon, hiding under the shade of a Japanese maple in an old Adirondack chair. It is one of those days where the heat becomes visible, dancing off the asphalt and almost serves as an ethereal speed bump —slowing the cars that normally race breakneck through the neighborhood. Lethargic, sun- soaked days have a way of bringing my mind bak to the fields of Gilead Iowa, the fictitious but ever-real title town of Marilynne Robinson’s magnificent novel Gilead. At one point, a pastor in the story says, “For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone.”
Those words have resonated with me since I first read them—writing so often can feel like praying because both depend on or presuppose a posture of gratitude. So much is gift. In writing and in praying far more is received than what is expelled as a process of our own output. Both writing and praying require that we be still that we might know that we are not God.
Writing is often like those moments when you fall in love with your wife again or just become more acutely aware of the love you are in that is so often hidden beneath housework and hobbies, fiscal responsibilities and fights, deadlines and disciplining children. It is akin to those times when you see your child just sitting on the couch or lying in their pajamas about to go to bed and you think, “That is my kid.” And your heart is heavy with the weight of love. And your eyes are so full and focussed you finally see the new colors that your inner artist has quietly been asking you to see.
Those moments don't have preambles. They are not accompanied by an introduction. They just burst through the often too thick veil that shields this fleeting, thin, reality from that thick land devoid of clocks. You can’t force these moments—the moments when something to write, something that must be written, encroaches upon your workaday world. Like a dear friend unexpectedly knocking at the door, you are just happy that they came. You invite them in, crack a beer and start talking.
And that talking with a friend, that praying, that writing, it is indeed healing. This shouldn't surprise us that telling, hearing, and writing stories would be restorative because we are made in the image of a storytelling God. I love philosophy, logic, and systematic theology as much as the next guy (provided that that next guy really loves those things) but God did not undergo the process of self-disclosure to his creatures by laying out a series of logical postulates. He did not hand us a book of axioms and mathematical equations by which we would come to know him in the way he chooses to be known. But rather, he gave his Church a library of stories—stories that are more true than truth—stories that are the functional and epistemological groundwork for truth itself.
God has always been a storyteller and in the most remarkable plot twist, He wrote himself into the story in the person of Jesus. And what do we find that Jesus doing so often in the gospels? We find him telling stories. He is the Word of God who speaks many words. It is no wonder then that words have a remarkably ameliorative power to them.
We are word-bound creatures and we are made to read stories, to listen to them, to tell them, to write them. We need to fill ourselves with stories daily just like we fill ourselves with food. You won’t always remember the meals you ate or the books you read, sermons you heard, stories you listened to, but if they are nutrient dense, if they are good, they will keep you healthy —physically and mentally.
So many people are hurting and we all are to some degree. We want quick fixes. Its easier to pop a few pills than to do the hard work of fixing your nutrition. But deep healing comes from submitting yourself to the slow process of ingesting the best things again and again and again. So start chewing on good stories, start chewing on THE story. Listen to it. Read it. Tell it. Write about it. Look it over from every angle and find yourself at peace.
Justin Chiarot serves as a humanities teacher at Chapel Field and Pastor of Christ’s Church of the Hudson Valley in Ulster County, NY.
