My talk at the university, titled “The Story of a Mennonite” went well.
I had never spoken at a university before and was very nervous. Actually I was more nervous because my former creative writing professor would be there, and I wrote about him in my book and never mentioned to him that I was going to.
“Be sure your sin will find you out,” they told us when we were young. They never mentioned that not only sin, but every little action in life has its completion. Every persistent thought someday is fleshed into reality. Every beginning has a segue.
My mind is full of many fragments right now. Someone I love is making a new start in life, drug-free.
Another person I love is sorting through old hurts.
I can’t write their stories, of course, but their stories are full and large in my mind.
I was accepted to Sattler College. I am not sure what to think about that, honestly. I want to go—at least for a year—and yet I don’t. I hate to leave Rusk County. My stories are here, my people. I am afraid if I leave, they will need me, and I won’t be here.
I am ready—again—to work on Turtle Heart. But I am reluctant to start. Every story, unwritten, terrifies me.
I am taking my car to Markquart Toyota in Eau Claire today. When my brother-in-law took it in several weeks ago to get a new key made, the Markquart man found several recalls on it and ordered the parts. I had always ignored recalls before, simply because my life was busy and I didn’t know how to proceed.
This is not a story, only an incident in my life.
My life is made up of thousands of incidents, but only a relatively few of them make my story.
I wonder, sometimes, these stories that have so much meaning to me, if they are really stories or if they are only large, unmanageable strings of gibberish from which I try to make sense.
My former professor gave me a book by Tony Earley called Somehow Form a Family. In his introduction, Earley relates a vivid childhood memory involving a full moon and his shock to learn in later years that the moon on the particular night of his memory was not full, but only a crescent.
“Memory and imagination seem to me the same human property,” he writes. …”While it is necessary for our sanity to keep the line between fiction and nonfiction clearly drawn, that particular boundary, as with the boundaries between nations, is more arbitrary than we might care to think.”
Earley knows what I know and what every writer of creative nonfiction knows: experiences are almost completely subjective. While two people might go through a very similar set of events, the spirit with which they meet those events, the conclusions they draw from those events, and the outcome of those events in their lives may be vastly different.
The difference, and what causes that difference, is one of the most profound mysteries of the human race.
Some people may say genes are a complete explanation, but I don’t say that.
I don’t say that because “genes only” removes choice. If we are merely the sum of our genes, there is no reason to write stories, only reason to move automatically through days and reach their end without purpose. There is nothing to fight for, if we are only genes, no hope or reason to rise above circumstance.
And I know, the deep inside of me knows, that there is everything to fight for.
I believe in an Author, and because I do, every story has meaning: a beginning, a purpose, and an end.
If I did not believe in an Author, I do not think I would believe that. I would wonder why and would not know. As it is, I do not always know, but because I believe in Him and his vast creative mind, I believe that there is a plot line, a purpose, a denouement, a meaningful tying together of events.
I believe that story completes me, not because I am a string of random genes, but because I am part of a larger story of the universe.
Why else should story make so much sense, if I was not born to live it?
Author Donald Miller says this. He writes that it is the reason he came to believe in God and in the story of the gospel.
Earley also talks about story in relation to God and the universe.
“The narrative form—a story with a beginning, middle, and end—is not only a way for us to relate information about the universe to each other, but a reflection of the universe itself. …Nothing in the physical world—time nor distance, and certainly not the personal essay—is inseparable from the narrative mind of God.”
This gives me courage. This gives me hope.
***
All photos in this post were taken by Chadwick Miller of Nervous Light Photography at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
I love your thoughts on story and narrative and an Author.
And you’re accepted at Sattler College! I want to hear all about it.
Alright! You will. I am going for an open house in April, and then things will be more definite.
I’m so glad I know the Author too–the One who says He’s the beginning and end.
I love the pictures and I’m so excited that you can go to Sattler. Can I be excited for you since you’re not sure? And how about telling more about your talk at the university?
I love that you’re excited for me! And since you asked, I’ll blog about the university talk next time.
Lucinda — Congratulations on your acceptance to Sattler College. I’m so excited for you.
I, too, believe in an Author. I don’t know if the Author is male, female, fully neither, or fully both—but that we have an Author, I’m fully confident.
When you said, “experiences are almost completely subjective” it made me think that my sister and I (only 13 months apart) grew up in the same home with the same parents, but we have completely different remembrances of many of the same events. Subjective? Absolutely!
Thank you, Laurie. I know, isn’t it crazy how we all remember things differently. I believe we shape our experiences as much as they shape us.
And I know you didn’t ask, but since you brought up the “gender” of the Author, I will share that I believe the author is neither male nor female, but Spirit. That’s what Jesus said in John 4:24. And I also believe that the Author encompasses all that is male and all that is female, since Genesis tells us that both were made “in the image of God.”
So both and neither at the same time?
Lucinda — Amen siSTAR ⭐
You are a trailblazer and have tried “the new” before. Going to college is another frontier to embrace. Brava!
Thank you, Marian!
I believe in an Author, and because I do, every story has meaning: a beginning, a purpose, and an end. I love it!
Your progression of thought– strangely connected, yet truncated and incomplete nuggets of consciousness which brings a fuller realization of God and a primal need for Him– is so true to our human existence. We struggle to get answers to our questions instead of finding in the Author of the Universe release from the need to ask questions. The story of our life is but a window through which He shows us Life; and in Life, reason and purpose.
Congratulations on your enrollment at Sattler. I hope you find time to describe your experience there!
Thank you!
I like your concept of life being a mirror of Life.
I am so happy to hear you are accepted to Sattler College. I so wish my daughter who is in college could go there but they don’t offer the things she needs for her degree there yet. My husband said he could have visited with the founder, Finney, for hours when we visited there last fall. We were intrigued with their group there in MA. (And I want to take a little of the credit for you going…wasn’t it you I asked on a blog comment awhile ago, if you had ever heard of Sattler, and you hadn’t but said you would look into it further? Or was it someone else? Anyhow, congratulations and I would love to hear of your experiences there!) Also, if you haven’t made this connection, I am Luci’s sister (three green doors) and I think we are something like third cousins. :) I remember your aunts and mom visiting us up in Bay Tree and we visiting them in Wisconsin. Or maybe they didn’t visit us…my, my memory is failing…
Twila, yes! You deserve all the credit for letting me know about Sattler in the first place. I was wanting to thank you for that. And no, I hadn’t realized you were Luci’s sister, and I didn’t even know I was third cousins with Luci, to be honest. :) I lose track of those connections. Sorry your comment didn’t show up right away. I rescued it from spam filter…for reasons known only to its inscrutable mind. Anyway, thank you for the Sattler tip and I will certainly write about my experiences there.