Giving Space

"When we engage in the narrative of drama and fiction, [we ask the searching question]: How are we to exercise most creatively our creating power to tell story about ourselves?

Do we exercise power creating the safe, the impressive, the successful version of ourselves, or do we (...) go on reinventing ourselves, not as the giants and heroes and saints we like to be, but as those who are willing to give more and more space for the life of others to come alive, in us or around us?"

Rowan Williams, "A Curious Novel: Postmodernism and Holy Madness," TEDxOxBridge

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Dear Kate,

I admit most days I have to fight off the cynicism of being implicated in the story happening around me, a story that makes no sense, having not enough answering power to life for asking not nearly enough questions about life.

The story of self-creation, finding our destiny, or "vocation," or knowing our strengths and further knowing how to best capitalize on them, so that there is no regret to life, no fulfillment amiss, no potential unexploited... "Living the best version of ourselves."

So what?  So that I can finally lay claim to me being me and die happy with the thought?

One time I was talking to someone about reading good novels--quite recently, but I don't remember to whom or the occasion.  He told me about this book that everybody says everybody should read, called The Alchemist; Bill Clinton likes it, Madonna loves it, and Will Smith calls it the best ever.  On Amazon it is getting universal praise (among the most and best reviewed books).  It's not the kind of book I'd usually read but I gave it a try, took it from the library this past weekend.

I tried a few pages.  I'd throw it out of the window if it's not a library book.

It makes me angry, you see, and it is ridiculous of me.  It's just a novella, what The New York Times called "more self-help than literature."  It's not good writing, but that's not the point.  Garbage sells, nothing new.

I am angry because influential people are propagating this as the Good News, turning what is otherwise a trite story with little bearing into true poison of mass conning.  The same sort of anger I have for lying politicians and lazy preachers.

So what is the book about?

Everything can be neatly summarized by this one line from it: "To realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation and when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."  Will Smith echoed this great news, "I believe that I can create whatever I want to create. […] I feel very strongly that we are who we choose to be."

Sure I am too cynical, am I not?

This is positive stuff, isn't it: believe in ourselves, turn water into wine, sky's the limit, never give up, never give in, never let go, love life, love ourselves, love others, perpetual growth in shareholder value, continual reinvention, self re-creation for better for more for ever?

Maybe a giant politician or a super singer or an A-list movie star can believe in and say all these, but I can't.

I can't look at broken people and say to their face, "You are broken because you choose to be broken.  There are ugly things in life because of people making ugly choices.  If only everybody would make brilliant choices like I do there would be no ugliness in this world.  Beauty is within reach; it is your fault to not want it bad enough.  If you want it bad enough, all the universe will conspire in helping you to achieve it.  I feel very strongly that we are who we choose to be.  So--don't choose brokenness.  Don't decide on being ugly.  Get yourself together and be better."

Yes, there are ugly people, ugly things, ugly places in this often ugly world.  It's not a very politically correct thing to say, but yes, there are.  And yes, I do agree if there is hope to be found it has to do with how we choose and, yes, the re-creation of our dying selves.

But we cannot begin to articulate the sort of self re-creation that would bring about hope and peace and joy if we don't even ask honest questions about life, the good the bad and the ugly of it.

Yet who can afford questions?  Who can afford doubt, to go backward, to stop and look into a mirror?  The world is moving forward and if we don't get on the bus we are bound to be thrown under it.  How are we to "give more and more space for the life of others to come alive, in us or around us" when we are busy securing space of our own, on a bus that is getting more crowded with growing ambitions individual and collective - the way our Story says they should?  How can everyone strive to continually re-create oneself without creating the collateral damage, "unintended incidental harm" of tossing someone off the bus?

The Alchemist doesn't say much to answer any of these questions; that is not the main point of his story.

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Rock star. Pastor. Where do their roads intersect?

When Bono, U2’s lead singer, invited a special guest for a visit, he was turned down. The decline came from Eugene Peterson, who at the time was working against tight deadlines on "The Message: the Bible in Contemporary Language.” Years later in 2016, Peterson welcomed Bono to his cabin home in Flathead Lake, Montana, their first encounter captured in a short documentary. Their separate worlds - one of rock 'n roll and the other in words of the Rock - collided as two curiously divergent novels into a seismic storyboard of evolving dialogue.

Beneath a canopy of conifers, the two celebrities of creating power creatively different from one another in form and influence stripped down to their bare selves and shared an intimately common space, opening a berth in conversation about the violence, beauty and nakedness of the Psalms, their source of strength through springs and storms. They shrank in world-class stature to connect as neighborhood, simple friends, reinventing their dramas to enlarge the lives of others through melody and mourning in creation.

A lover of the Psalms translated to vernacular language in The Message, Bono reflected: "I hadn’t really thought of Jeremiah as a performance artist. Why do we need art? Why do we need the lyrical poetry of Psalms? Because the only way we can approach God is if we are honest through metaphor, through symbol, so art becomes essential, declarative.”

Imageries, songs. Art is air to sustain intentional existence. The “narrative of drama and fiction”, poetry and play, seem to clash with modern paradigms spawned from the rigors of empirical evidence and binary coding. In science and success we trust. How can fiction fit into facts to present a robust manuscript? A proposition for daydreamers, fools.

Historically the reign of fools have reinvented the archetypal portrait for success. In the late 19th century, the young and aloof Nikola Tesla was perceived as an underdog in rejecting the successful tale of generating electricity by the superhero and his former boss, Thomas Edison. Tesla’s perceived folly led to the first global showcase of electrical lights in the 1893 Chicago World Fair. His story was epic in triumph and tragedy, his closing chapters of life meager. The reinvention of self is melodramatic, often remote from the limelight of recognition as the best-selling album.

Another seemingly foolish figure was depicted in Peterson's book, "The Pastor”: John Henry Newman, one of Peterson’s three deceased mentors and England's heavy-weight theologian. In his midlife conversion from Anglican to Roman Catholic priest, Newman yielded his ivory tower seat in Oxford University to stoop and serve for his remaining half life in the filthy, humdrum communities of Birmingham. Newman’s decision was so creatively insane that Peterson compared it as "Einstein leaving Princeton to start a school for street kids in the Bronx.”

The contradictions of fiction vs. reality, drama vs. facts, loom loopier as we consider the daily loops, zigzags and brakes in our personal journeys. Everything necessary starts in the here-and-now, God’s future breaking into the present. All are unpredictably dull. None is duly predictable. We leap in shock and crash in fortune. To lose is to gain. In deep sorrow, we grasp joy. Facts and fantasy are blurred, ledgers tossed, to grant space for reinventing you and us.

My bleeding narrative oozes in stench and sacrament, a drink offering mixed with yours and theirs. Give space for the curious, the crazy, the crushed at Calvary. Let me drink in your bittersweet story and retell mine and ours spun in the great space and Story of giants and fools, saints and stains, wreckage and gold.

Yours, Kate