L.I.D.S.: The Best of the World and God Beside

During last week’s homily, Father John mentioned his counsel to persons first entering the ministry, whether as clergy, pastors and teachers of the youth, caregivers to the infirm, or other formal and informal positions carried out under the auspices of the parish. Typically, those newly commissioned or ordained feel a bit nervous and apprehensive, afraid that they might mess something up in some way. Very few feel truly worthy. Regarding worthiness, Father John’s advice is simple, timeless, and in keeping with what many of us have heard before: God ministers through whom he ministers; if he chose only those who were worthy, very likely there would not be enough people to go around. Perhaps you are not worthy, but do not think that upon that basis God will not or cannot minister through you. Just show up. That is the first part: just show up, and God will minister through your presence. But new initiates are often still nervous. “Okay, I showed up, here I am, see me? But now what should I do?” The second bit of counsel Father John proposes to this anxiety is simply “Listen. That is what you can do. You can listen.” The L.I.D.S. acronym that forms the title of our newsletter is his mnemonic for this idea: “listening is doing something.” His deepest point, and our point here, is not only that listening is doing something, but that you will never do anything more important than listening. Its importance, in fact, is vastly underrepresented, overlooked in the search for everything else we ought to be “doing.” From listening will follow all other types of important action.

There is, of course, an art to listening. And those who listen well have learned the secret to a deeper spirituality. What separates the true religion from the false is a matter of listening. There is infinite wisdom in the maxim: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Just recently I received a letter from a young man undergoing a crisis of faith, deeply disturbed by the biblical account and what appears to be a discrepancy between a God of love and the evil in the world. Not surprisingly, the question of contemporary theories of evolution and the goings-on of Genesis also formed the fodder for his consternation. His letter was a flurry of arguments, an intellectual blizzard tantamount to the thorns and thistles Jesus spoke about to his followers that grow up and choke out the fallow seed, the worries and concerns that prohibit us from being able to know and experience the kingdom of heaven here on earth. To search for God in the book of Genesis is probably not the place to search for God. To search for God in writings both ancient and modern—while such writings have their time and place—is not where we are going to encounter God, except by accident. And if we do encounter God in some text by accident, the encounter is merely facilitated by the text: the encounter certainly is not located in the text. To look for the encounter again in the same text is likely only to produce a memory of encounter, for all encounters ever and always take place in the heart, and an encounter either encounters or it is not truly an encounter no matter what name we might bestow upon it: an encounter always involves the interaction and exchange of parties, a giving and a receiving.

Only encounter with God puts to rest the troublesome questions. And the only way to encounter God is to listen: to be still and listen in our hearts, and, in time and with enough listening, we will come to know that he is God—and we will come to know what it means to say that he is God. What God does as portrayed in writings both ancient and modern will then be seen through an entirely different perspective: from the inside out, as it were.

The wise one seems foolish to the man who does not listen. The man who does not listen is filled with many things, most namely an inflated sense of his own importance. But as the Eastern sages well know, water only flows into the empty spaces. Listening, then, “creates a space” for encounter, for it is in the emptiness that God may be found by us. That is the lesson I take from Job. An apparently capricious deity turns an indifferent ear on his suffering servant, offering only non-answers to Job’s questions: “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Perhaps the picture we have is of a taciturn God, an outmoded immortal in need of a New Testament upgrade. Or perhaps instead we have a piece of wisdom literature reflecting on the merits of emptiness: only the one emptied can be filled, and part of being empty is being able to let go of everything else, including the need for answers. In this life you will suffer. And suppose that I answer all of your questions? Will you then be filled?

I would argue that answers never fill, they only create more questions: we can see the wisdom in L.I.D.S., certainly. The same that holds true of encounter with God, also holds true of encounter with others. If we rarely listen, we will rarely encounter. And by “listen,” I mean listen, and by “encounter,” I mean encounter, I do not mean merely hearing and interacting, for we hear and interact with many people a day without ever being touched. Let’s shift gears for a moment, hopefully without grating any of them in the process as beginning drivers tend to do.

This semester, I am teaching two sections of “creative nonfiction,” a term that often sounds like an oxymoron to students, though they soon learn to see the genre as factual accounts written creatively, a broad style of writing that borrows techniques typically associated with fiction—without fictionalizing. The beauty of teaching this course is that we read both fiction and nonfiction, and we have lots of opportunity to talk about how the two realms may in fact be a lot more closely intertwined than many realize (creative nonfiction notwithstanding). The assigned reading for this Friday was Lynn Z. Bloom’s “Living to Tell the Tale: The Complicated Ethics of Creative Nonfiction.” As the subtitle suggests, it is concerned to show that trying to tell the truth creatively can be complicated, not only because there is a fine line between fact and fabrication, but because in a large portion of creative nonfiction, we are writing about our own life which necessarily includes—and by extension implicates—other people. The tension she presents in these sixteen pages is the tension between what, if anything, a writer owes to those who appear in her pages and what she owes to herself as a writer and researcher. She intersperses part of her own life story throughout, drawing on a number of other writers to present a pastiche of opinions ranging anywhere from those who say that the writer is entirely selfish and the other persons’ right to privacy should always prevail, to those who say that the writer should say “to the devil” with any concerns about others and simply write what she writes and be done with it. By not explicitly taking a side herself, Bloom forces her readers to comprehend and confront for themselves the ethical complexity involved in writing true life accounts.

When I opened the floor for discussion in my second class, almost immediately a rather impassioned exchange took place between three girls in the class. Two of them spoke of the great courage a writer displays in saying “to the devil” with others, but the other expressed reticence, believing that we did need to take into consideration how other people might be affected by our words. She said she was not advocating censorship—Bloom cautions against both censorship and consensus—she was merely stating that others did not ask to appear in our writing, and we owe them a certain amount of responsibility. This student’s argument closely approximated Bill Roorbach’s advice, which Bloom cites extensively on pages 278 and 279:

At this point in the class debate, I interjected. The point of Bloom’s article is not that one side or the other of the ethical debate is correct (as the third girl, the most thoughtful and reflective of the three, understood)—it is not that we should either simply not write about others at all or else we should write about others without the slightest concern for how our words are going to affect their lives and careers. Rather the point of Bloom’s article is that there are two sides. That’s the point. There is an ethical dilemma between telling the truth as accurately as we know how and in protecting those it is told about, and it is one that Bloom suggests solving on “a case-by-case basis” (279): as I reminded the class, no two situations are ever exactly the same, no two people are ever the same, and we do well to ask ourselves as writers, “How will telling this account affect this person?” How we answer that question will depend on our own value system—not only how scrupulous we are or are not, but also what we believe it even means to be scrupulous—as well as the particulars in each case: truly “the complicated ethics of creative nonfiction.”

One of the extremes Bloom cites that tips the balance in favor of the author comes from Lee Gutkind, founding editor of the periodical Creative Nonfiction, who claims that if he even so much as changes the names of the persons in his life, the reader has a right to suspect him on other points as well. I strongly disagree and stated so in class: a lot of being truthful in interpersonal relationships is to be up front and clear about intentionality and not hide our motives from others: we say what we mean and mean what we say. Likewise, I see absolutely no reason why if I explicitly state that I have changed the names to protect the people involved someone should on that point doubt my credibility. There is a bit of difference between saying “names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved,” versus “based on a true story”: the latter signals a work of fiction, the former good etiquette. No doubt Gutkind has in mind silently changing names, however, which is probably not good practice for a work claiming factual integrity.

Of her own writing Bloom says, “I write for the usual reasons writers write about anything important: to get at the truth; to make sense of things that don’t make sense; to set the record straight; to tell a good story” (277). We talked about this statement, breaking down the four items she describes, recognizing that there are plenty of things in life that do not seem to make sense or have answers, but that in writing about them, we paradoxically validate the struggle to understand, both for ourselves and for our reader. Bloom continues, “In these stories from real life I aim to write what Philip Gerard, in Creative Nonfiction, defines as the essence of the genre, ‘stories that carry both literal truthfulness and a larger Truth, told in a clear voice, with grace, and out of a passionate curiosity about the world’” (278). A bit later, she talks again about “the literal and the larger Truth” (278).

When people think about Truth with a capital T, they often think about “absolute truth,” and not just absolute truth, but truth that also happens to be factual, that is, “fact-based.” However, what I argue in my classes is that fiction writing very often tells the Truth with a capital T. That really should not be so surprising, for where does the inspiration for fiction come from? If I make up characters out of my head and put them in situations stitched of my imagination, where did the initial inspiration come from? Almost always, from real life. And suppose, to use one example of hundreds, that I write a story about a little match girl in a flimsy frock selling matchsticks one frigid New Year’s Eve, her father at home enslaved to his bottle, and how the next morning that little matchmaker girl is found dead on the doorstep, a bundle of her matches burned up in a pathetic attempt to keep herself warm. Didn’t I tell the Truth with a capital T? I would argue that this is precisely what Hans Christian Anderson did when he recounted The Little Match-Seller, a short, tragic tale that forces us to pause and reflect on our lives and the things that matter most.

The larger Truth is what makes creative nonfiction creative. If it did not have this larger Truth, it would only be another article in the newspaper or the latest newsfeed from CNN or BBC: ephemeral writing, read once, then discarded. It would be factual, as far as facts go, but it would not be timeless and large. Thus, in creative nonfiction, there is the literal truth—that’s what makes it nonfiction. But there also must be the larger Truth, and that is what makes it creative. It tells the Truth about what it means to be a human being with all the struggles and trials and issues that we face. That is a paradox, really. Our culture very often values fact at the expense of Truth, but being “fact-based” is only part of what it means for something to be true, and, depending on what we hope to teach, often the lesser part.

A beauty of teaching creative nonfiction is that we read both fiction and nonfiction in the same class. One of our assignments is what is sometimes called a definition essay. What the definition essay attempts to do is take a concept like love, or joy, or peace, or longing, or whatever else the imagination might furnish, and “define” it by showing the reader what this concept “looks like.” Like our talk about modeling in the previous issue, the essay attempts to model what, say, love means, not unlike the story of the little girl who was looking for God “with skin on.” The idea of this essay is to use our words to show, not simply tell, what this particular concept means to us. If I were to assign just one topic—we will again use the example of “love”—I would most likely have a class full of very different papers even though they all followed the same guidelines and sought to define the same concept. The definition essay is a prime example of the literal and the larger Truth working in concert, because students are selecting events from their lives that really happened in order to define what a universal concept means to them—welcome to the world of creative nonfiction.

Last semester in one of my graduate classes on the American short story, we read Harold Brodkey’s “Verona: A Young Woman Speaks.” It is purely a work of fiction, for Brodkey is not a young girl, and what is more, he never was. Now I happen to think that this piece tells the Truth very well, but then again, I am not a young girl either, and what is more, I never was. However, the narrator, who is a young girl, describes happiness by recounting a joyous summer spent with her parents as they toured Italy, and in the process, she ends up defining—showing—what happiness means to her. As the syllabus I drafted indicates, the definition essay term paper “just happens” (read, “is strategically placed”) to align with a section of the course devoted explicitly to fiction, and in particular to “mining fiction for technique and inspiration.” For the obvious reason that “Verona: A Young Woman Speaks” makes an excellent fictional example of what the nonfiction definition essay seeks to accomplish, I desired to find a copy to use for my classes that would allow for precisely this kind of orchestrated reading/writing schedule. I was in luck. Google Books features Alma Halbert Bond’s Tales of Psychology: Short Stories to Make You Wise, where this entire short story may be read (click here, though be aware that other stories in this Google edition have only limited previews and thus have “missing pages”). I did not excerpt Bond’s comments when I converted the text via OCR, but she writes something about this story I find very interesting for the purposes of our newsletter today.

After suggesting that stories about happy childhoods are hard to come by, Bond says she thinks she knows why. After selecting Brodkey’s piece, she notes: “The child had young, attractive, charming parents. She had them all to herself, and she had their full attention. ... With such parents on a trip like that, who wouldn’t be happy?” (116). Her point is that life being life, such a combination of factors is quite rare: most people’s childhoods are not like the girl’s in the story. Bond then adds this concluding postscript:

Before our venture into the land of creative nonfiction, we were talking about listening. And Bond has just reminded us that “To him that hath shall be given,” and “Life is not fair.”

Very often, annoying chatterboxes who simply will not shut up are secretly looking to be loved and affirmed. Chatterboxes long for something that is not being given to them, but often find their efforts rebuffed, which often makes them try all the harder to be liked. By contrast, people who have no need to constantly chatter because they have come to an end of themselves find no difficulty in being loved and affirmed by others, or at least not on that account. The person who listens tends to attract others like magnets, because what we are all dying for inside is to be affirmed, loved, appreciated, validated, accepted: in a phrase, listened to, truly listened to. Father John’s advice to new ministers, lay or otherwise, to (1) just show up, and to remember that (2) listening is doing something is a great deal wiser than it might initially seem on its surface. There is no greater form of ministry that we can offer another person than to truly listen to him or her, resisting the urge to offer unasked-for, band-aid solutions. Simply listening, really listening, even though it seems like we are doing very, very little, is in fact offering the other person the one thing he or she most longs for: simply to be listened to and understood. Most of us are not looking for advice, but we sure could use a friend. The art and value of listening was the topic of a post on the discussion forum recently, in fact.

For the minister of God—whether bedecked in a clerical collar or otherwise—listening is not only doing something, it is the beginning and end of all effective ministry. It is the beginning of effective ministry because what separates the true believer from the nominal is his or her encounter with God, silence the empty space in which the listening ear may grow and develop. And from this beginning it branches outward toward the end: by listening in our heart, a great deal of the true and the false of our lives is sifted and sorted which means that we already have more to give others because we are ourselves less dependent. More secure and less needy, we are less inclined to hide behind words, whether to cover our nervousness or to prove our intellectual superiority or for any other reason that seeks to fill with language what can only be filled with the encounter that takes place in the empty spaces. Less inclined to hide behind words, we are more apt to listen to others. And the more apt we are to listen, the less fair life becomes, because to the one who already has, more is given in abundance: the true listener will have no shortage of human companionship.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

Indeed, listening is doing something. Listening is doing the one thing that will inform all other actions: the one who listens well also knows when to speak and how to speak and what words are most fitting. The one who listens well finds that in renouncing the right to answers, he or she becomes increasingly their possessor: the person with mouth shut and ears open finds little birdies everywhere he goes that tell him all sorts of interesting things, some useful, some not. Occasionally, even, he may find there are so many birdies he even has to shut his ears sometimes. The listener makes of himself an empty place, and, as nature abhors a vacuum, the best of the world and God beside come rushing in. Let us, then, pray that we may learn how better to listen.

“If your lips would keep from slips,
Five things observe with care;
To whom you speak, of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.”

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