The power of story

From Walking on Water: reflections on faith and art by Madeleine L'Engle

"I was still at the age of unselfconscious spontaneity when I started to write. At the age of five I wrote a story, which my mother saved for a long time, about a little "grul," my five year old spelling for girl.
   "I wrote stories because I was a solitary, only child in New York City, with no easily available library where I could get books. So when I had read all the stories in my book case, he only way for me to get more stories to read was to write them.
   "And I knew, as a child, that it was through story that I was able to make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life. The sound of coughing from my father's gas-burned lungs was a constant reminder of war and its terror. At school I read a book about the Belgian babies impaled on bayonets like small, slaughtered animals. I saw pictures of villages ravaged by the Boches. The thought that there could ever be another war was a source of deep fear. I would implore my parents, "There won't be another war, will there?" My parents never lied to me. They tried to prepare me for this century of war, not to frighten me.
   "But I was frightened, and I tried to heal my fear with stories, stories which gave me courage, stores which affirmed that ultimately love is stronger than hate. If love is stronger than hate, then war is not all there is. I wrote, and I illustrated my stories. At bedtime, my mother told me more stories. And so story helped me to learn to live. Story was in no way an evasion of life, but a way of living life creatively instead of fearfully.
   "It was a schock when one day in school of the teachers accused me of "telling a story." She was not complimenting me on my fertile imagination. She was making the deadly accusation that I was telling a lie.
   "If I learned anything from that teacher, it was that lie and story are incompatible. If it holds no truth, then it cannot truly be a story. And so I knew that it was in story that I found flashes of that truth which makes us free."

Amen!

a prayer for a writing day

Today is a writing day...sermon preparation...finding prayers and readings and opening words and a blessing for the congregation on Sunday.

It's not a straight shot, writing. There is a lot of poking around in files, assembling pages of ideas - words scribbled on note pads while at the grocery store, words from a post it note in the car driving to the office, and more words from an email I wrote to myself last week when something important emerged - there is visiting old books where I know there is a good story...there is a lot of musing...a lot of wondering and wandering around until eventually, by deadline, it all comes together as it is, this time.

Today is a writing day...and while looking for a prayer I wrote years ago that will be perfect for this Sunday, I found this one that I shared in 2006 when I was ministerial intern at the First Universalist Society in Franklin. The beginning words are mine. The prayer itself is the creation of Andrea Ayvavian.

May it be so.

Prayer for May 14, 2006

Let us now take some of our time together to find that place within or around us

Where in silence Deep calls to Deep

Where Imagination speaks her wishes

Where we say our most precious prayers

Where we are one with all of existence

Where we come, at last, to be still, while Creation takes care of the rest.

When you hear my voice again, the words you will hear are those of Andrea Ayvavian:

if we dug a huge grave miles wide, miles deep

and buried every rifle, pistol, knife, bullet, bomb, bayonet

if we jumped upon fleets of tanks and fighter jets

with tool boxes, torches

unwelded them dismantled them turned them into scrap metal

if every light-skinned man in a silk tie said

to every dark-skinned man in a turban

I vow not to kill your children

and heard the same vow in return

if every elected leader agreed to stop lying

if every child was fed as well as racehorses bred to win derbies

if very person with a second home gave it to a person with no home

if every mother buried her parents not her sons and daughters

if every person who has enough said out loud I have enough

if every person violent in the name of God were to find God

we would grow silent, still for a moment, a lifetime

we would hear infants nursing at the breast

hummingbirds hovering in flight

we would touch a canyon wall and feel the earth vibrate

we would hear two lovers sigh across the ocean

we would watch old wounds grow new flesh and jagged scars disappear

as time was layered upon time we would slowly be ready to begin.

Amen. So may it be. Namaste.

Do you know where you need to go?

I read recently that sometimes you go down a path toward a goal that turns out to not be the goal at all; that the reason you thought you had to do something or wanted to do something is not, in the end, the real reason...it is just a mechanism to get you to an end that you really do need to get to...the real purpose of your journey.

Today this poem showed up in my inbox from The Writer's Almanac:

Wrong Turn  by Luci Shaw

I took a wrong turn the other day.
A mistake, but it led me to the shop where I found
the very thing I'd been searching for.

With my brother I opened a packet
of old letters from my mother and saw a side of her
that sweetened what had been deeply sour.

Later that day the radio sang a song from
a time when I was discovering love,
and folded me into itself again.


"Wrong Turn" by Luci Shaw, from What the Light Was Like.

Reminds me of something I read in the book Blink too. We don't often know consciously what we need/want. But somewhere inside there is a knowing. Or is there?

there is a change in the air

Russ has covered the pool
I am wearing a sweater and making hot tea with milk
This morning I grabbed the robe with the fury collar instead of the cotton wrap
There is a change in the air.

First, a poet

When I was in fifth grade I wrote a poem called Fog. This poem by Thom Gunn reminds me of it. Mine is the first I remember writing though I imagine there were more. It was just the first that I showed to someone else. It got the attention of my teacher. It was put in a little book. I first began to identify as writer...a poet. Thanks Thom Gunn for the reminder. Thanks to my teachers.

The Night Piece

The fog drifts slowly down the hill
And as I mount gets thicker still,
Closes me in, makes me its own
Like bedclothes on the paving stone.

Here are the last few streets to climb,
Galleries, run through veins of time,
Almost familiar, where I creep
Toward sleep like fog, through fog like sleep.

"The Night Piece" by Thom Gunn, from Collected Poems.