What is Catholic storytelling? What do Catholic storytellers have to teach me, a Catholic and a writer? And how might this teaching help me forge these identities that often feel disparate?
These were only a few of the questions I brought to last year’s Catholic Storytelling Workshop led by author, editor and teacher Nick Ripatrazone. Over eight weeks, we studied fiction, nonfiction, poetry and film from Catholic storytellers; we workshopped each other’s writing and created community. The answers to my questions came in the form of meditations, reflections, narratives and poetry I set down in response to our readings, week after week.
Before I wrote a word, I read closely and contemplatively in the Ignatian tradition. I read not just as a fiction writer taking note of style but as a Catholic taking note of the spirit. From one of the first authors we read in the workshop, Ron Hansen: “Writing with faith is a form of praying.” I underlined and starred that sentence I jotted in my notebook. Reading, too, I thought. Reading the selections for workshop became a meditative ritual and my nightly prayer.
When the time came to write, I worried my responses wouldn’t be Catholic enough, too short on Scripture, too much of this world. But Alice McDermott’s essay, “Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic,” spoke to my searching and sometimes skeptical nature, and Terry Tempest Williams’ “Why I Write” gave me permission to write my truth.
The answer to why I write came through reflection: I write to make peace with the unmaking and remaking of my life, with life’s losses and gains, big and small. Writing my truth is how I hold my life in balance, day to day. Sometimes it’s a balance struck between my identities of wife, mother, daughter, friend, parishioner and writer. Other times, it’s a balance struck as a Catholic in a secular world.
Before I wrote a word, I read closely and contemplatively in the Ignatian tradition. I read not just as a fiction writer taking note of style but as a Catholic taking note of the spirit.
To write fiction is to have an escape hatch, to travel to a different plane, if only in my mind. To imagine a character from thin air, to make a world from nothing? There is a touch of the divine in that creation. This workshop reminded me to thank God for that.
But what is required of the Catholic fiction writer? I strive to write fiction worthy of contemplation, even argumentation. I don’t write solely for me. In his essay, “The Reason for Stories,” Robert Stone says, “A reader holds the characters in judgement, investing sympathy or withholding it … How then can fiction ever be independent of morality?”
Moral (rather than moralizing) fiction requires the teller and the receiver both to be engaged in the creation. Through our reading of Andre Dubus’ “A Father’s Story,” a harrowing exploration of morality in fiction, I came to think of story as inviting us into a kind of communion, if not sacred, then certainly spiritual.
With a good footing in fiction, I approached the workshop’s poetry readings with some trepidation. I am a fledgling poet, frightened of foreign forms (but not alliteration). Could it be that, as with faith, the mystery is the point of the process?
“One has only to surrender / you preached,” reads a line from Mary Karr’s “Christ Human,” a poem in which Karr presents the image of Christ as human and divine. The workshop’s exercise: Linger on a line and reflect on how it anchors the full poem. I selected a word: surrender. Surrender that we might “receive a pouring of sunlight,” might breathe, might die, might “bloom and almost be you,” as Karr writes.
To write fiction is to have an escape hatch, to travel to a different plane, if only in my mind. To imagine a character from thin air, to make a world from nothing? There is a touch of the divine in that creation.
Extrapolating the poem’s meaning to my own life, I understood my need to surrender my humanness, selfishness, greed and pride that weigh on my human frame. So that freed, I might find acceptance, a place where I can experience God’s grace, a place where I might be able to let go, stop all the questioning and truly “bloom.” I am trying.
From one monumental poem, I turned to another, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” A poet fairly new to me, the 19th-century English Jesuit wrote his sonnet in 1877. In it, he laments the destruction humans have caused God’s natural creation: “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod” — what glorious repetition! But the line on which I lingered was: “And for all this, nature is never spent.”
Nearly 150 years after Hopkins wrote his poem, nature still blooms in cities, suburbs and small towns like mine, where we have a yard, a vegetable garden and wild creatures, our dog Rufus among them. Despite we humans doing our best to pave over God’s creation, the natural world persists. (Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si” calls Catholics to better steward creation, and I try.) Still, I thought, might God be mad at us, for our base humanness, just a little bit?
I took my turn, the Catholic writer, crafting my own poem (only a little tongue-in-cheek) in response:
To Hopkins on the Event of Our Fallen World
Note: After Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur,” in which the poet writes: “And for all this, nature is never spent”
Nature’s spent.
And God is pissed.
I take match to tick
on hip. A tiny black speck
I mistook for a mole. I’m growing old.
No visible appendages but, boy,
that guy was stuck. And there was blood.
Likely hopped off the dog, this creature of God.
Licked clean the wound with an alcohol swab,
and aren’t we all trying to anesthetize the natural
while communing with it? What a mess we’ve made
of God’s creation. Our suffering’s on us, still He won’t
let us go. We’re dug into each other, thank God.
I love a good germ, the bacteria in my gut, a fat spider,
a bat making its drunken courses through the night sky,
eating its fill. But blood-sucking ticks? Come on, God.
It’s a terrible way to die, by the tiniest of gashes that remind us
of lashes, only we are so very small, specks in Your great shadow.