The Horror
It’s Stewardship season in our congregation and I was asked to get up and give a talk about why our church is worth supporting. Nothing too elaborate. Not a sermon, a talk. Five minutes max. No biggie.
I gave a similar talk last year and for once, I wore full makeup, because I knew my face was going to turn bright red. Public speaking terrifies me. High school speech classes used to send me racing to the bathroom to be sick. I turn tomato faced, sweaty, trembling, nauseous, you know, all those great speaking qualities you look for in a future pastor.
I was feeling similarly ill about it this year, but I’d survived last time, and I do believe our church is worth supporting, so I agreed to suck it up and get up there again. As the moment got closer I sent off a bunch of those goofy, fear-inspired prayers.
“Hey God, I’m feelin’ a little sweaty and panicked over here. You calmed the raging seas, maybe you could, uhhh, calm me?”
Service starts at 9:30am. I wear a smart watch. From 9:20am until the moment I finished talking, I clocked 20 minutes of “intense activity.” That was my heart pounding.
“Why do we have to be so vulnerable?” a colleague lamented this week. Indeed, answering calls like this, if we do it earnestly, asks us to expose our soft spots. It’s hard to open up. I don’t regret starting this blog, but each time I post, I do get a jolt. I quit writing publicly for years, in part, because it feels so naked. Harsh criticism is a pastime these days. I don’t know how I’ll be perceived.
This week Dr. Schnell told us courage is something we can increase with practice. Thank God. The heroes of popular culture would have us believe courage is a finite resource, or a trait in our DNA: some people just have more than others. But that’s not the case. The Bible is full of perfectly ordinary people who grew into courage.
It’s risky to be earnest, but this has always been the case. We’ve been reading about the saints and witnesses and martyrs and all the super fun things they had to deal with: arguments, misunderstandings, humiliation, rejection, exile, torture, death. When it comes to witnessing publicly, a little stage-fright is on the very lowest end of potential horrors. So, I probably shouldn’t be asking God to calm my pounding heart. I should be saying thanks for these very easy opportunities to practice the things that scare me.
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Entirely unrelated to my seminary journey, this semester I have been teaching an after school Creative Writing class for youth. Each week me and a handful of young writers pull up our chairs and talk craft. I will put a quote on the board to steer our focus. One week I wrote a quote attributed to Ocean Vuong:
“Plot is the woodchipper into which we throw characters.”
These sweet, adorable young ladies cackled with delight.
This was hardly a lesson they needed. Each of these girls was already plotting out their woodchipper without my encouragement. There were plane crashes and zombie apocalypses galore, house fires and bullying and spirals into frightening parallel dimensions. In my grad school writing program we were reminded over and over again to make sure we brought tension to our stories. The kids need no such instruction. Youth know something that adults tend to forget or deny: when it comes to our stories, we want peril.
I gave the girls an example of a bad story.
“Once upon a time, there was a really nice girl. She was nice to everyone and everyone was nice to her. She was polite and never caused any fuss for anyone, so everyone liked her and was nice to her. Her life was really pleasant. The end.”
The review was unanimous: Booooo!
“How can we improve this story?”
Give her a bad haircut!
Her best friend is mad at her!
Make her get lost in the woods and it’s dark and she can hear wolves coming.
Now we’re talking.
I’m not a parent, nor did I study education or child psychology, but I remember being the same age as my young writers and the paradoxical delight of reading about and identifying with characters wrestling with unpleasant realities. Here is my hot take on children’s storytelling: if the youth aren’t reading and writing about trouble, something’s off. I worry about a kid who has no appetite for trouble in their story.
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For me, it started with Stephen King. I read Cujo, then Misery, and I just kept going. Shirley Jackson, Agustina Bazterrica, José Saramago, Brian Evenson, Junji Ito, P. Djèlí Clark, Octavia Butler, Eric LaRocca. The bleaker the better. I love horror.
Not slashers, mind you. Not jumpscares. Not gore. But I do adore a story that strips away hope, a plot that goes, as Vonnegut dubbed, “From Bad to Worse.” Maybe that’s surprising. I’m told I can come off pretty cheerful and light. I think the inordinate amount of horror contributes to that. It’s the same reason I find Halloween so appealing. It’s the practice of being horrified, of creating a thoughtful space to acknowledge the darkness and then put it in its place.
In his work on Soviet repression, Aleksandr Solzhenitysm wrote, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts. This line shifts.”
We are, each of us, capable of terrible things. We would do well to acknowledge that horrible fact. Storytelling is the arena where we can approach the monsters and practice ways to hold the line.
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Studies have shown that there is a correlation between fiction and empathy, and that when we read stories, we take on the emotions of the characters on a very real, neurological level. Mirror neurons light up both when we act and when we see someone else take that same action. They’re often dubbed the empathy neurons and they also light up when we read stories. This means that a character’s peril becomes our peril.
In The Storytelling Animal, Jonathan Gottschall notes, “There is a paradox in fiction that was first noticed by Aristotle in the Poetics. We are drawn to fiction because fiction gives us pleasure. But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety, Sturm und Drang.”
So, it’s not necessarily escapism, though well-told stories will immerse us. Good fiction can take us to bleak and terrible places we’d never want to arrive at ourselves.
“Like a flight simulator, fiction projects us into intense simulations of problems that run parallel to those we face in reality,” Gottschall writes. “And like a flight simulator, the main virtue of fiction is that we have a rich experience and don’t die at the end.”
One of the reasons books get censored or banned is because people mistake content for message. I’ve read all kinds of stories about apocalyptic horrors and dystopian oppression and the torment humans can inflict on one another and the message is never, “now you try it!” The message is almost always to be aware of the darkness that can be sewn in every human heart, our capacity for evil, and find these threads of resilience. Know the role you will play in the story of your life.
Stories tell us what kind of people we do and do not want to be. They orient us, form us, and, when shared, they unite us. “[Story] defines the people,” says Gottshall. “It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one.”
Story is a bridge; across time and space, across cultures, ages, classes, geography. It’s a door to empathy and the more we read, the wider our circle becomes, the more united we are.
I am proud of these young writers, and of everyone still doing the work of real, true storytelling. Stories make us human, and, I really, truly, firmly believe this: good stories make us better humans.
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During Greek this week, Professor Giere told us that the root of the word radical is the same Latin root as radish: radix, which itself means root. So when you do something radical, you’re affecting the very root, the very core. I picture a radish, yanked and shaken violently to free the dirt. It can’t feel comfortable.
A phrase I’ve encountered many times over the last few weeks is that “theology should be disturbing.” I was resistant to these words, because it sounds like the same breed of oppressive “Christian” values I take issue with. It sounds like a stomping, angry God is coming to tell us we’re in big trouble. But that’s not what the phrase means.
Our theology should disturb us from our worldview. It should yank our heads from the sand, shake us awake and threaten what we assume to be true. We’ve been reading about Acts, about the revelation that the Gentiles, too, were God’s people, and what a shock that was, what a paradigm shift. The wider church didn’t deliberate or come to this decision after a long, contentious council meeting: the Holy Spirit moved and the people caught on.
God is free. That’s a disturbing idea because it means we aren’t driving this bus and we don’t know exactly how we’re going to get where we’re going. The Spirit is on the loose and not the least bit worried about accommodating our itty bitty ideas, our priorities, calendars, strategic plans, institutions, leaders, and especially not our cultural norms.
We have blind spots. We are far, far from Christ’s perfection. This is a country that tried to annihilate the indigenous population, enslaved generations of African Americans, treated women like property, tortured and killed queer people, neglected and disposed of the vulnerable, and frankly, none of these issues deserve to be told in the past tense. We are, today, still harming one another because we have small ideas about who should be cherished.
The lie of history is that we are evolving towards improvement, that better conditions for humanity were inevitable. But people fought for bigger hearts and better practices. People saw the distance between the way things are and the way they ought to be and they were deeply disturbed.
I don’t think God is an angry parent come to discipline us. But I do think the distance between our lives and the way Christ lived should horrify us. From indifference and neglect to hatred and atrocities, we are capable of terrible things. That doesn’t change if we ignore it. We can’t bring light to our darkness if we pretend it doesn’t exist. In The Places that Scare You, Pema Chödrön writes, “The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.” When we make space to approach the horrifying, we are left with truth.
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I recently interviewed my young writer friends about their characters. I wanted them to think about their characters in more real, complex terms.
What’s their favorite outfit? What’s in their pocket? What’s the view outside their bedroom window? Who is someone they admire? If someone fell down in front of them and spilled all their stuff, what would they do?
Towards the end, I started to ask about the morality of their character, because writers discover that stories are where hard lessons are learned and values are tested.
“What value is most important to your character?”
They were all in agreement. Despite the horrors of their circumstances, or maybe because of them, the two things all of their characters valued most were clear: kindness and courage.