The Passion of Literature

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, March 12, 2006

Passion belongs in church. Passion about life and ideas belongs in church. Passion about experience belongs in church.

Passion enters every kind of sanctuary and worship hall through stained glass windows, through simple wooden pews or a high beamed ceiling. Passion enters with music, with swaying rhythms and raised hands, passion enters with children, with words of affirmation or creed; passion is brought into our Sundays through stories.

Here we speak of what we love, of what we long for, of what comforts us. Here we speak of our fears, our losses, our despair…and often we use stories to speak of these things.

I love books for they contain a multitude of stories, a rich and diverse assembling of lives. I desire words that paint the human experience, words that are crisp and clear, words that offer paradox and beauty. Words about human dilemma, human struggle, human complexity, human connection…words about live death love and loss.

I desire words that guide my thinking , raise intriguing questions, put contrasting ideas together and take everyday experiences apart.

When I read a passage, I sometimes shout, “wow!” and sometimes I love the image or idea so much that I rush to call a friend and read it aloud over the phone. I am passionate about my reading.

Literature, like all the arts is a vehicle, a tool, a pathway, a gift…that brings me alive in profound ways.

When I come to die I want to have lived with passion.

Listen to these words written by novelist Michael Onjaatje in the English Patient. He writes about how our bodies accumulate the marks of our living, how we, how our bodies, might be read as maps are read.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead, I believe in such cartography-to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buidlngs. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste of experiences. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

Our lives can be read as text. Literature teaches our lives as text. We offer to one another our lives as text.

I’ve recently come across a new writer, Adam Haslett, whose fiction debut made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist. From this collection of amazing short stories, I’d like to read from “The Volunteer”.

Like most of the stories that touch me, it is about a connection made after a deep loss. A connection that is unpredictable, unusual, beyond the ordinary. Good story always sees a connection wrought by grace.

The story begins; “The boy has given her hope, a hope Elizabeth never imagined she’d have again. Seven weeks in a row, he has come to visit her. An awkward teenager, lonely she suspects, curious in ways that will not help him defeat others in the competition for success.

He comes with a pad and pencils and asks her what she would like him to draw. Her walls are decorated with his work; sketches of the woods behind his house, the view from his window, but mostly self-portraits, conventional at the outset- by the mirror, growing more expressive as they progress along the wall, his eyes growing small, his forehead larger, the pencil’s lead smudged to blur the lines. His visits have given her weeks a purpose. She spends hours imaging their conversation, thinking of questions she wants to ask, and then like a nervous mother, forgets them when he arrives.”

This collection by Haslett is full of suicides, mental illness, abandonment, excruciating pain and also full of devotion, forgiveness, reunion. As the title “You Are Not a Stranger Here” implies this is the stuff of life of which we are all familiar. This place of loss and pain and grief and suffering, this place where transformation begins.

By story such as this we are awakened and led back to ourselves.

Reading: A Poem

By L. Strauss

I find myself in stories that others write,
Real life being too vague or throbbing.
Real life having torn pieces of my body (even though
There’s no apparent wound).
Parts of me lost through the years linger
In various schools, in different cities,
Among mountains or newly dug suburbs,
Hidden in the shadow of the city projects
Or left in the climbing tree by the lagoon.

Lost parts of me are left
Still parked in my boyfriend’s car (even though
He died recently from cancer),
Parts of me still running after my brother’s shadow calling silently for him to stop
(even though he never turned around)

And so I read voraciously.
Layering word upon word over the emptiness,
Grafting blood and bones from strangers on the page,
Hoping they’ll breathe life into me.
Searching for my lost parts
I read on and on-
Driven by the need for healing, for wholeness, for holiness.

I know I’m here somewhere
In the stories, in the life on the page.
The characters, my intimates, meet me, leave a space for me, include me in the
Conversation, offer me a part of themselves.
I hear their voices.
I cry with them.
They hold me and whisper encouragement.
The lead me on.

Literary critic, Roland Barthes, who died in 1980 studied French literature And classics at the University of Paris. I was attracted to his work titled; “The Pleasure of the Text” and “A Lovers Discourse”. Barthes compares reading to eros, writing to seduction. His primary message is that reading is for pleasure.

We all know this, when we read a good book, we hate for it to end. Sometimes we stay up all night or postpone our reading until we have time to savor.

Words, like music, create desire. Here’s a sentence to enjoy. “Cloths, sheets, napkins, were hanging vertically, attached by wooden clothespins to taut lines.” .

I can fall in love with a phrase, or the single sentence that carries vivid immediacy- “The rain ferocious.”

All the words and images that bring depth of feeling about life and death, love and laundry…all this is religion, all this is my religion.

There are many theologians who agree that “The word” the imagination, the metaphor, the story is critical to the religious enterprise.

This week I read, “The Prophetic Imagination” by Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary.

Bruggemann writes of the prophetic imagination, of the poetic prophets who tell truth in a way and at an angle that assures it will not be readily co-opted or domesticated by hegemonic interpretive power. Prophetic works must be imaginative, angled out beyond the ordinary and reasonable. That’s the only way it is possible to speak truth to power.

This morning in the Washington Post, I read words written by Tom Fox, the Quaker who worked for peace in Iraq, was kidnapped in November and whose body was discovered this week.

In a letter writte before he left for Iraq, Fox wrote; “Many people are willing to die for war, but few are willing to die for peace”.

Prophetic words, beyond the ordinary, beyond the reasonable.

So, how does my passion for literature connect to my search for religious and spiritual truth? I read constantly because I am searching for wisdom, wisdom about life, wisdom about my own life.

In this collection by Adam Haslett, I found such wisdom, I woke this morning thinking about Hasslett’s story, “The Volunteer” and I had an insight…(sometimes they don’t come until Sunday morning).

I realized the story is about substitution. About suffering and substitution. Suffering and substitution is something we all know something about. It is a religious theme.

Christ died for our sins, may be the most obvious connection to Biblical literature, but there are many. Abraham’s sacrifice of the lamb rather than his son Issac. Jacob wresting his father Issac’s blessing away from his brother Esau, Mary listening at Jesus’ feet while Martha does all the work.

Here’s some of Haslett’s story…
Elizabeth has lived almost 20 years in a mental health facility. She has taken her medication without resistance. But as she looks forward to the teenage boy’s visits, she begins to hide her pills. She begins to enjoy the vitality of life with a young person, the vibrancy of life without medication.

“Elizabeth wakes to colors more vivid; the Oriental carpet swirls of burgundy and gold; dawn kindling the sky an immaculate blue. She puts on her bathrobe and moves to her spot by the window.”

And she begins to remember.

As more pills are pushed to the back of the bedside drawer, Elizabeth starts to hear Hester’s voice again; the voice she first heard the day her only child was born, which was the same day her only child, a son, died.

The boy, Ted, is a volunteer from the high school. He is seventeen years old and his own mother suffers from a depression which keeps her in her darkened bedroom most days. A depression which the family never talks about.

Slowly Elizabeth and the boy become friends. And one day they gain permission to go for a drive. They go shopping at a mall, but the stimulation causes Elizabeth trouble, and the voices gain control and she makes a scene and they must leave. Ted is patient and unafraid of Elizabeth’s hallucinations.

“At first Ted didn’t want to volunteer with the elderly, enough already with the mentally ill, but something made him come and then Mrs. Maynard, when she asked him to draw and she began to ask him questions about what he was reading and what oil he used, and how much he’d weighed when he was born, just to sit there and be asked a hundred stupid questions while he drew pictures; it was all somehow worth it.”

Many more important things happen in the story, mostly to Ted as he comes of age, and it turns out that the home hears of the mall incident and says that Ted can’t come to visit Elizabeth anymore.

So on New Years Eve, Elizabeth leaves the home and walks to town, keeps walking until she finds Ted.

“In the midst of it all, there is so much she wants to ask Ted that she’s started making a list so she won’t forget.”

“Ted watches Mrs. Maynard lean forward and pull a dining room chair up beside her. She’s had some kind of break, he thinks. The woman of the voice in her head, must be with her. He crosses to the chair and sits.

From her coat pocket, Elizabeth takes the folded piece of notepaper on which she’s kept her list of questions. She pauses, then reading from the page, asks in a quiet voice, “Did you ever think you meant more to your mother than her own life?”

“Ted would like her to be quiet now. There is so much to think about.

Elizabeth looks up and sees tears running from Ted’s impassive eyes. She puts aside her list and lifts her hands to his cheeks. At her touch, he starts to sob.

Elizabeth is exhausted. The lights in the room stream into her eyes like refulgent dawn. At last, she feels the warmth of her son’s tears in the palms of her hands”

As I read to the end it dawned on me, although I didn’t see it coming. In Elizabeth, Ted had found a mother’s compassion and in Ted, Elizabeth had found her son, the one who died in childbirth.

This idea of a substitutive sacrifice has contemporary power as well. In declaring war in Iraq, our government decided to send our enlisted men and women to fight and die in the streets and on the desert roads in our stead.

Those who died on 9/11 also gave their lives so we didn’t have to, not intentionally, not by choice, but the result is the same, their families suffer and we can almost put the tragedy behind us.

It’s a complex thing to think about.

Those on the bottom of the system suffer as substitutes for those at the top.

I have person experience of this. I’ve spoken of my brother before. His addiction to heroine began when he was a teenager and ended when he died in his early 50s. I loved him desperately and learned to love him even as he chose drugs over love again and again throughout his life.

When we were children my brother was the one always in trouble. I was the good kid. I was so good, I even became a minister. He became an ex-convict. After he died I allowed myself to know the truth of our closeness. In some weird way, he was protecting me, not by choice, not wisely, but yes, I believe he deflected and absorbed pain and suffering so that I wouldn’t have to.

Too sentimental, too romantic a view of addiction? Yes, I know, and yet, I never doubted my place in his thoughts, I never doubted his love for me, I always knew he would do anything for me.

Literature stirs desire for wisdom. Literature gives me insight and hope. In a good story, I find parts of my lost self.

This too, is my intention in my religious life. That in religious community, I will be stirred, I will find wisdom, I will find hope, I will find lost parts of myself.

May It Be So for You As Well,
Amen