Stories Without Words

The miracle - that I was not currently being consumed in a fiery inferno - was lost on me. The lampshade smelled of nearly-burning plastic. Walter Payton, ball held wide to his right as he dove into the end zone, appeared on the largest decal, which had been carefully centered on the front of the shade. Around it were stickers in other themes, inspirational to a kid just beginning junior high: Darth Vader walking ominously along the main corridor of the Death Star. An unknown rider spraying a rooster tail of mud behind a Honda dirt bike.

All were curled at the edges, brown from countless nights of intense heat. Too preoccupied to find an appropriately-sized bulb for the desk lamp, I had, months before, taken an inappropriately-sized one from the main light fixture on the ceiling of my room. A flick of the switch, and then a bulb unscrewed in the blackness, one finger-blistering second at a time. The weight of the extension cord threatened to pull the lamp from where it now balanced, precariously, next to me on the top bunk.

When the time came to let the room go dark, separating cord from wall would be the only solution, because the switch on the back was much too hot to turn. But that time was still in the future.

Charles Ingalls had a fire on the farm, and the lives of his family and horses were in the balance. Aslan the Lion, children on his back, was breathing life back into the statues as he furiously stormed the witch's fortress. Jubal Sackett was pinned down, hiding in the mountain boulders, between two warring Indian tribes. Frank and Joe Hardy were barely hanging on, as their motorcycles swerved to avoid oncoming traffic, the documents needed to solve the case once-and-for-all tucked into Frank's jacket.  

The feeling of escape I found among the pages of those books was intoxicating. Tales of danger and survival atop the lonely landscapes of the old west. Of wonder and redemption on the far side of the wardrobe door. Of heroism and sacrifice and adventure.  

But most of all, they were an endless reminder that there was virtue and hope and good in the world. That there were people who valued those things. Some of the characters were real, some imagined. But all were brought to life by a person with a pen, who understood at least a version of a greater story behind the stories. And understood what they might mean to someone, someday, who took the time to read them. Someone they would never even meet. Someone like me. 

And thinking about that, made me feel like I was part of something much bigger. Like I belonged somewhere, even if I was yet to gather any specific idea where that was. Like I wasn't alone, even when I was by myself.

Nearly fifty years of water has moved downstream since those days, but the feeling stays with me. I still sense it in great stories, no matter the medium. Matchless performances, tales of selfless sacrifice. Quiet landscapes, sweeping plots and the emotional stirrings within the pantheon of great music. In seeing, through their creativity, the lives of people who have crawled through great sorrow and walked, more than once, an exhausting path, littered with wrong turns, but who have come back changed. Their scars now revealing only credibility: They have something to say, and I should listen.

In my younger years, I never considered that feeling to be anything beyond a bit of yearning. I thought perhaps the respite those stories provided from my average existence was so great, that it was simple relief I was experiencing. That it was mere escapism, and I was mistaking it for something more powerful.

Later, I saw the movie Shadowlands, about author C.S. Lewis, and the happiness and wrenching heartache he experienced in his relationship with his wife, Joy. In it appears a quote, which has since been widely attributed to Lewis, but was in truth the work of screenwriter William Nicholson:  "We read to know we're not alone."[1]  

Yes. It was a phrase that put an eloquent and profound caption on what I had experienced for so many years. I knew it was true, in some sense, the moment I heard it. That what I felt when I read those stories was hinting at something more, after all. Something grand and powerful and too-often overlooked.

Those seven words have since been co-opted by the book industry, mainly to sell trinkets. They appear on bookstore posters, on the front pages of websites, on bookmarks and coffee mugs and paperweights. And as is so often the case, the commercialization and overuse has faded the meaning and obscured the relevance. Perhaps the author didn't intend it, but to me, that quote speaks of something far beyond the pages of a novel, or a man pecking away at his Smith-Corona, pipe clenched between his teeth. Beyond, even, the act of reading itself.

It speaks of the fact that we need to hear how others experience life. How they've overcome, how they've created, how they've helped. Whether by writing it down, or by painting, or in simple acts of kindness, or, in a great irony, by simply being a person who remains quiet and listens, we are all telling a story. We tell it through our failures, by being honest about them. We tell it through doing what makes us come alive, by inspiring others to come alive. By being who we are - who we really are - and by providing occasion for our friends to do the same.

The question, of course, is: What are our stories saying? If they merely join the cacophony of voices shouting half-truths and consisting of problems, profanity and provocation merely for their own sake, then they are but “tale(s) told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[2]

A window into the hopeless, Existentialist thought, present but unrecognized in the lives of many today; the sort that provides amplification of shared misery, but does not offer a solution as benefit, is encapsulated succinctly in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. [3] A book popular among the youth of more than one generation, it resonated with my own because it spoke with understanding to the universal angst of youth. While a copy remains on my shelf to this day, mainly as a salve to my ever-open wound of nostalgia, it contains precisely half of the truth. And it is the lesser half, to be sure. It examines only the part of humanity that is hopeless. That has no reason for being. That can, at best, attain only to broadcasting its own disquiet loudly enough that perhaps it will find some reception among others feeling the same. And it certainly does that.

With adolescent synapses not yet quick to form meaning – or even to realize we should be looking for it – the youth of my era connected with the fictitious life of Holden Caulfield in droves. Though in his story we found no solution…and truly (Caulfield was moody, devious and profane), we didn’t even find a friend we could like, we did find in our shared (and imagined) commiseration a sort of temporary shelter from feeling so lonely.

But The Catcher in the Rye leaves off after acknowledging (without ever realizing it) the truth of the brokenness of humanity after the fall of man. It wallows in the common feelings of people who are lost. The book was widely received as Nietzchean. A great irony, because indeed, it was very much written along the thoughtline of Friedrich Nietzche, but not for the reasons ascribed. The book caused a rise in interest among young people in Nietzche’s writings, and a corresponding rise in youth who adhered, at least in name, to Nihilism. Proving, likely, that all the new philosophy books purchased were never read, as Nietzche wasn’t a Nihilist. And neither was The Catcher in the Rye.  

The author’s attempt to achieve something poetic out of the very idea that life without purpose is anything but poetic, is decidedly not a Christian view, but it is a subtle attempt to achieve, at least indirectly, two things which Nihilism rejects offhand: The idea that the world lacks morality (which supposes there is a morality to be lacked), and the very possibility of communication with purpose. But Salinger’s novel certainly wasn’t alone. While true the endemic philosophies between any two unbelieving writers aren’t necessarily the same, the results of their attempts to find answers within the collective power of mankind most certainly are. In fact, every novel, every song, every play written, every picture painted and every sculpture scratched from granite has always, and will always, reveal only partial truth, if put forth under the guises of merely-human solution.

The power of the great creativity of man should never point down a road leading nowhere. And if we’re creating without an intention based in the Gospel, that is altogether what we’re doing. If what we produce isn’t fostered atop the underpinnings of the saving work of Jesus Christ and under the sovereignty of the Triune God of the Bible, if the creator doesn’t hold fast to an intention of laying bare the truth that he knows, and that only the true God can provide, then his work has not only failed in its attempt at transcendence, it has already and by-itself  pointed us to idolatry.

Absent this creative foundation of Jesus as Lord, the song or the play or the book – or the talents of their authors - on their own merit, are lauded as the object. The throne and the scepter become the king. The beauty or poetry or lessons contained within the stories ultimately rattle harmlessly against the walls of a box in which they must necessarily lie, confined to only ever be what they appear on the surface: A collection of words, of colors, of notes. And in lieu of the solution, (that in an atheistic creativity never presents itself), they simply add to the mountain of other works which, while most certainly beautiful and noteworthy for a season, are transitory. They are lovely as the mist over a field, through the window of a passing car, is lovely: Striking, and then gone…replaced, before it was ever really enjoyed, by traffic lights and honking horns and the frenetic demands of life.

Even as believers, we can learn from the creativity of the atheist – and do – but what truly makes art powerful, is the subtle ability of the author, not to reveal the revolutionary, but instead to illuminate in an irresistible radiance that which men already know to be true. As Christians, we know that what needs to be known can be suppressed in total, a victim of arrogant pride, or at best, dulled to a barely-visible coal, because of other voices in society, or personal pain, or simple exhaustion from the profitless pursuit of meaning where meaning can’t be found.

As Christians and creators – and we are all creators - we need to be consistently aware that our one goal is to turn the faces of others toward the light we know is shining, but to which we were all once blind. We all at some time failed to see it, until that day we realized we were surrounded by the dark, damp confines of an impossibly-deep well into which we’d fallen.

But we should take care to center our efforts in the realization that we are saved, but still sinners. Our course will lead us from the well, but today we have only a lamp with which to see. As Christian apologists of the Reformed tradition, we might correctly see the unsaved as suppressing the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But it seems we so often miss the fact that we are still suppressing it ourselves in places. It is one thing to believe the truth. It is decidedly another to profess it – and to know that we are professing it, in every single act of creative communication to which we endeavor. 

Recognizing this in full scope reveals our point of contact with the unbeliever: Our common ground is in the wonder and the fear and the suffering that we all endure, even as Christians. Where we differ as believers is not in merit nor in capacity, but simply that we have a profound hope which the world desperately needs and searches for, and it should be our goal sui generi among our varied collections of lesser hopes and dreams, that it be communicated as such.

But why, then, do we find this so difficult?  Perhaps one reason is that art is borne from our unique experience as believers, and our own stories usually seem to us to be tedious, silly, small. As plentiful with bad decisions, as they are lacking in excitement. But to another person, one who is stumbling over the same stones on which we once bloodied our knees; for whom the horizon has been dark for ages, your story as a Christian is anything but dull. The fact you are standing, offering a hand to those behind, even though you haven't quite recovered from your own climb: That is the heroism, and it is found only in Christ. That is the glory, and all of it belongs to God. It's in the filth and the regret and the pain...and in the love and hope and forgiveness on the other side. In the truth others see in your story, that they are not alone. And we can communicate confidently, knowing without question that we hold, for them, the key to hope.

And revealing our stories creatively allows us to tell of the abiding love of Jesus, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, without confrontation or overt directness, so often misunderstood as accusatory or condescending. Art, collectively, to include all mediums, is universal, and finds common ground without conscious deliberation. And in its pure form, wielded by the people of Christ for the glory of God, it becomes an envelope for the letter of the gospel, which can pass unhindered through the slot in the door, or into the box by the road, where it can be received and examined at leisure. And at its most powerful, art has no need to reveal even the solution overtly. It merely speaks redeemed truth about the commonplace, and allows the solution to be found by viewers who already have the knowledge buried within them.

Two of the United Kingdom’s most eloquent (and at times, reluctant), apologists, addressed this very point, albeit from different angles. G.K. Chesterton, in his inimitable way, hints of his own suppressed knowledge being subtly brought to the surface, when met with winsome storytelling:

 “These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, “Robinson Crusoe,” which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory.  Every kitchen tool becomes idea because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genious: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been”.[4]

 And C.S. Lewis, in many ways the reclusive opposite to Chesterton’s gregariousness, observed both the need for - and the limitations of - the poetic allusions available to a fallen world, in order to more clearly illustrate the characteristics of the Triune God, in one of his letters to his fictional friend, Malcolm:

 “I do not think that the life of Heaven bears any analogy to play or dance in respect of frivolity. I do think that while we are in this “valley of tears,” cursed with labour, hemmed round with necessities, tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings, and anxieties, certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous.”[5]

I’ve found myself at times overlooking the apologetic potential of my own creations. Often it seems the world is crawling with information and opinion, forming a smothering cloud, impenetrable to all but the loudest or most outrageous forms of communication. Isn’t the world in need of clarity and resolute direction, rather than yet more hints and suggestions, as art might seem to be? Resoundingly, yes, the world is achingly in need of clarity. But the answer to the question as to what constitutes clarity and direction, or just where in the chain of communication they lie, isn’t so simple.

Apologetics, as a discipline, is not meant to further the education of the believer once they are saved. Instead, it is meant to point one toward the worldview which we know as Christians to be singular of truth. Art, when exercised as an apologetic method, does precisely that. While the point of contact for art is shared experience, the ability to gently establish the insufficiency of the worldly position on grounds of its own futility (known by author/professor K. Scott Oliphint as the Quicksand Quotient)[6] remains the same – and thus apologetics in art lies wide-open to the regenerated creativity of people.  

"We read to know we're not alone". Without changing the beauty of that original quote, it would be equally meaningful to see the word "read" as:  'Receive'. Or 'learn'.  Or 'listen'. But there is nothing to learn from each other, nothing of which to quell the loneliness through shared experience - nothing to 'read' - unless we create. Unless we build or counsel or speak or teach and in so doing tell of the road we've traveled under the sovereign power of the magnificent God, and of where that road will soon lead. We read for ourselves. But we write, so that others know they are not alone.

[1] (Attenborough, Shadowlands, 1993)

[2] (Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1623)

[3] (Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951)

[4] (Chesterton, Orthodoxy, pp. 113-114)

[5] (Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 1963)

[6] (Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics, 2013, p. 76)