In case you missed it, last week The Seattle School posted this piece I wrote on story and theology. Head over there to read it in honor of Theological Libraries Month!
http://theseattleschool.edu/theology-of-stories/
A Theology of Stories
Integrative Project Presentation
This Spring, I handed in my final master’s work, called an Integrative Project, titled “To Play with a Child Named Sorrow: Engaging Sin, Grief, and the Self-in-Relation through Myth and Fairy Tale.” I spent 15 months to write and then whittle down to 70 pages, and then whittled further until I had a 10minute presentation. The abstract is below; click through here to see the presentation.
Western theology’s understanding of sin on pride has focused on pride, which has furthered the oppression of women. In the last 50 years, feminist theology has made great strides in explaining how pride (“masculine sin” developed by male theologians) oppresses and has named “feminine sin” (which I term echoism) as diffuseness, a lack of a sense of self, a defining of one’s self by relationship. However, theology has failed to discuss the ways in which these sins interact with one another and how we interpersonally move from sin to grace. In “The Myth of Echo & Narcissus,” we see the ways in which pride harmfully emphasizes the self and how echoism harmfully emphasizes relationship. In “The Tale of the Handless Maiden,” we come to see the transforming process of grief, which frees us to love. This is not simply a balance between pride and echoism; this process is a transformation of human character that comes through an active process of receiving God in the midst of grief. The burden is not on humanity to find a way to manage or balance our sins. Rather, as the tale shows us, characterological change frees us from the constraints of sin (with emphasis on either self or relation) and frees us to love as selves-in-relation.
See the 10-minute presentation here: https://vimeo.com/138362284
Imago
A young girl rolls in the cool fountain water some distance from where our feet dabble. She calls over to us: “What does God look like?”
Her mom smiles and whispers to me, “She likes the light and easy questions lately.”
“Mom! What does God look like?” the daughter insists.
“I don’t know, honey.”
“Do you know?” her sincere eyes turn to me.
Well… God looks a little bit like your mom. And God looks a little bit like those ballerinas practicing in the grass. And a little bit like that man playing the saxophone. And a little bit like each person walking by and driving by. God looks a little bit like me. God looks a little bit like you.
I want to say that, but I hesitate, attempting to gauge what the mother’s reaction might be, and before I can resolve to risk it, the mother answers her again: “No one knows. God can’t be seen.”
The mother and I look to the girl, the girl looks down into the rippling water, and the moment is gone — but for the whisper in my head: Everyone who has eyes to see knows just what God looks like.
The Slow Regard of Silent Things
First, I wanted to send Patrick Rothfuss’s slim novel The Slow Regard of Silent Things to anyone who has a loved one struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder. I didn’t really realize, until about halfway through, that this would be a primary and accurate way to characterize the main (and only human) figure in the novel.
Auri lives under a city, finding perfect homes for found items. She listens to the silent things. She discerns their character and longing. She intuits the personality of a room to hear if it lacks a bottle or a button. She stops, regularly, to wash her face and hand and feet. Her life is devoted to making everything “just as it should be,” while keeping her own impact and desires as small as possible, save a few luxuries such as soap (of course it would be soap, in one who epitomizes OCD).
What’s shocking about this slim novel is how compelling all this listening and discerning and soap-making is for the reader. Although written in third person, we are pressed so closely against her back that we feel her heart beat against our breast; we lovingly regard the inanimate items as she encounters them. It becomes important to us whether or not there’s a button under a rug or whether a brass gear is content on the mantle. This novel helped me feel what a burden and a gift it is to feel the world so tenderly.
Which made me wonder if there was more going on here than a character study of a psychological disorder, made me wonder if somehow this willfully small girl carries within her the image of God.
I’ve heard, my whole life, of the MMA Champion version of God who takes up space with all His muscles and forcibly bends the cosmos to His will. In Auri, the image-bearer, we glimpse the god who wouldn’t claim a capital “g” for herself, the god who attends to the character of lost and helpless things, the god who sees that some items are more beautiful when broken. The god who, in smallness, is able to mend what is cracked and tend what is askew.
Auri carries the image of the god who works as hidden and quiet as a spirit, the god whose love whispers in slow breathes. She searches in the manner of the god who behaves like a woman searching for a lost coin or a shepherd seeking a lost sheep, restoring all things to their proper places. She lives like the god who is willing to become small, to empty herself and become humble.
Rothfuss’s novel is more than a psychological study. It is a parable, a portrait of a god who intimately and quietly loves a broken world.
Reach: Reading Eve’s Story
I was recently invited by OneLife Community Church to preach in their series on women in the bible, and chose to preach on the first woman, Eve. The sermon was a product of years of struggling and engagement with the story of “The Fall,” and I feel like this sermon gave me an opportunity to articulate the story in a way that generates new life for me — and I hope it does for you, too.
A video of the sermon can be found here.
If you have any questions or concerns, the comments section is open.