It was a wretchedly extraordinary night. I wonder if I wounded Quotidian when I said I couldn’t see her in her name. Did she slink off like an animal? Did Extraordinary smell blood? She seems to be circling.
In the early morning moment when I was jolted awake by my screeching security alarm, it was no ordinary thing. Even in my son’s voice, which I have known from newborn cry to maturing man. His absent-minded distraction is not unusual these day – a girl is in the picture – but that sacred ray escaped my notice under the circumstances. The screeching was picking up speed, even as my fingers froze.
Then the phone. The calm voice wanted my Password. I’ve never used this password. My brain is packed with passwords.
Before long an urgent rapping on my front door brought me face-to-face with a badge on a blue uniform. Extraordinary is unabashedly mocking me.
But then Quotidian appeared. At my feet. A tender tan-ish blade-shaped leaf unswept from my porch. She is a fragile and dusty wind-blown traveler. Her ancient heirs are innumerable, but the maiden voyage which landed her beneath my distraught gaze, ended with no fanfare. She lay there. I spied her.
When the badge was gone, I swept her up with the friends who followed her, and with that simple rite, I obtained my bearings. My faith was restored. We are friends again.
I ate it before breakfast – one square square, intense and dark. The cherry did tango with the chocolate. Then they disappeared from the darkened dance floor, gliding under the palatine uvula disco ball. No glimmers or sparkles or flashy flashes traced their exit. Only the crinkly, castrated foily sheath lies beside me on the sheet.
An empty brown bottle stands under the lamp on my bedside table, sentry of the solitude. In the dark that was not chocolate, it offered me hard cider from an angry orchard. Personification. Just a stupid knocked-up word, but I am filled with its pregnancy. Angry orchards and castrated sheaths, puffed up pillows and barren blankets. The fertile fog of futility fills the frigid room. Life spirals down the tubes, but only the proverbial ones.
I eat and drink alone in bed and find amusing ways to uncover this naked truth. That is all I am revealing. There is not more.
A basket of unfolded laundry is perched slanted between the arms of the chair in my bedroom. Not an ordinary way for a laundry basket to sit – even in its disregarded state. It should be in the corner by the armoire – or in the closet under the empty plastic hangers. But there it sits. There. All caddy-wampus and obvious – begging me to remember the solace I once took in its existence. I inhale, imagining. Fresh and faintly lavender. Soft, worn cotton – smoothing, folding, creasing, patting. Smoothing, folding, creasing, patting. Smoothing, folding, creasing, patting. Bottle to drunk, needle to junkie, word to writer.
My taste for the ordinary and this oxymoronic word which describes it has fled. You, Quotidian, are no ordinary word. How dare you presume to climb into my jumbled, intoxicating basket?
Some friends and I have been having a discussion on the importance of fiction, specifically the importance of fiction in the life of a follower of Jesus. Some of us are more convinced than others. I tend to agree with the thought that there is usually more truth in fiction than non-fiction. A woman can write her autobiography and leave out the part where she stole from her employer. A man can write about the life of another man and leave out the part where the man cheated on his wife. A journalist can write an objective piece about a political candidate and leave out the part where the candidate lied about his military service. A story – perhaps a very good one – has been told, but truth has not been completely served. Opportunities to relate the realities and consequences of difficult situations have been missed.
Jesus, the Word and Truth himself, never missed an opportunity to relate truth in ways that impacted people – even cut them to their very core. Jesus was a storyteller. We know this generally from all the parables he told, but largely in almost every word he uttered. How can it be that Truth Incarnate, can be so intimately linked with Fiction? It can be because Jesus was also a master of metaphor, and that makes him a master of fiction. What is a metaphor, but something that is not real, being used to describe something that is real? In the gospel of John alone, Jesus uses a lot of fiction. (I found 29 examples in a rather quick perusal this morning.) Jesus was not literally a light; he was not a lamb; his body was not a temple; he was not water; he was not bread; his flesh was not bread, and his blood was not wine. Jesus made his living as a carpenter, but never as a shepherd; he was never a grain of wheat or a vine. People are not fields for harvesting; they are not sheep; they are not branches, and their bodies don’t bear grapes and apples. John the Baptist was not a burning and shining lamp. All of these ideas, taken literally, are completely fictitious. So, why did Jesus say them? Is he possibly modeling a way of conveying truth to us? I think so.
Jesus used quotidian objects to convey vital truths to which people could relate and respond to accordingly. People in an agrarian community know the beauty and the importance of a field ready for harvest. I remember being a child and standing in my father’s and my grandfather’s wheat fields, smelling the warm, yeasty grains, watching the golden stalks wave in the breeze, rubbing the rough tassels in my hands. Even then, I knew that time was of the essence; those fields had to be cut within a certain time to do my family any good. So when Jesus says that people are fields ready for harvest and other people are reapers, I can understand both the urgency and the potential bounty and blessing of the situation. But people aren’t really fields, and that leads us back to the question of fiction.
Fiction writers, in my opinion, take their cue directly from Jesus. They take things, situations, even worlds that aren’t real and show us truths that are real. And I’m not just talking about classic examples like what C.S. Lewis does in The Chronicles of Narnia or what Dickens does in A Christmas Carol. I’m talking about books like the one I picked up at random from the library a while back. I’d never heard of Big Wheat or its author, Richard A. Thompson, but what a fictional find. The story is set in the first part of the 20th century when the American farmer is grappling with mechanization and expansion possibilities. The main character, Charlie Krueger, is tricked by his “love” into getting her pregnant, so that she can further trick a land-owning, second lover into marrying her. (Already sounds pretty grim, huh?) Dismayed over the deception, Charlie gets up the courage to leave his abusive father and start out on his own to find a new life. The same night he leaves, a serial killer kills his ex-girlfriend, and Charlie’s absence immediately makes him the prime suspect. Charlie doesn’t even know what’s happened until he’s settled in with a threshing crew made up of determined down-and-outers like himself. As the story unfolds the heartening transformation of Charlie, it keeps you guessing whether good or evil will win out. It keeps giving you glimpses into the heart of man. I am not being dramatic or insincere when I say it caused me to reflect on the story of redemption as well as reflect on people I encounter in real life.
And doesn’t it all eventually come back to the people we encounter in real life? I love what my friend, Gail, had to say about this. She said, ” The people I encounter on the written page drive me to people-different people than I would normally be drawn too. When I meet someone I feel like I’ve met a mystery, God’s mystery and I want to unwrap them…”
Let’s get to unwrapping, and…take time to read more of the fiction that might help us do that.
WomanNeverSleeps 