Everything I know about writing I learned in Sunday school

Christian Century, Oct 21, 1998 by Doris Betts

I am a storyteller whose themes are informed by faith, but I do not preach it. In fact, one reader mailed back one of my novels complaining that it was filthy; with a magic marker she had blacked out everything she found offensive. When I saw that the first casualty was the mere mention of Jack Daniels bourbon, I knew there was no need to look any further. I mailed her a refund check.

Such readers want literature to set a good example. They want writers to pretend that people do not drink, shack up or commit incest and blasphemy. They want us either to take sin out of our fictional world entirely or to punish it more thoroughly than real life does: to stop that tower of Siloam from falling on the innocent and to make sure that every Job gets new wealth and a just-as-good replacement family.

Flannery O'Connor wrote that a writer who believes that human beings have been "found by God to be worth dying for" must use shock to make her Christian faith visible to a reading audience that does not share it. "To the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." Like mothers and kindergarten teachers, I find that whispering is also sometimes effective, and even with the volume turned down I hope my theology can be heard in my stories. Most church libraries contain more "shout" than "whisper" authors. The volume is turned up high in a Christian bestseller like Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness.

Annie Dillard once warned that in serious American literature today, to be called "religious" would be a "death knell," and one reviewer said Frederick Buechner wrote from an "unfashionable center." When Publishers Weekly, in its religion section, talked about one of my novels and one of John Updike's as crossover books by mainstream writers, I doubt that our editors at Knopf were pleased. On the other hand, some religious book publishers actively require their authors to produce what I consider bad prose: obvious, sentimental, contrived, cute and preachy.

Yet despite the cutesy guardian angels and New Age metaphysics that seem to dominate popular culture, I do hear in current serious fiction a whisper of that still, small voice for which our faith has taught us to listen. A recent novel I admire is Ron Hansen's Atticus. Though reviewers have treated it as a literary detective story, all biblically literate people will recognize the parable of the prodigal son in this story of a contemporary father who searches for a son who once was thought to have died in Mexico but then is alive again. I also like a collection of essays by Thomas Lynch, a poet who is also a funeral director, called The Undertaking. One reviewer said irritably, "This book has little to offer the secular humanist."

When a British magazine recently listed what its editors considered the best young American novelists, it noted that writers were turning back to childhood, growing up and family relationships as subject matter--what some grumbling critics called "the Norman Rockwellization of the novel." Yet such life stories are the most apt to raise questions of ultimate meaning. I hear a "whispering hope" when the erudite Reynolds Price writes openly about his vision of Jesus during his cancer ordeal, or when thousands buy his translation of three of the Gospels; when books of interviews with writers--like Susan Ketchin's The Christ-Haunted Landscape or Dale Brown's Of Fiction and Faith--seep into the academy. Mary Gordon's disclaimers finally give way to her admission about priests and nuns: "Nevertheless I can't quite give up what they stand for." Cormac McCarthy writes about a blind amputee who is arguing with a street preacher. The beggar says, "Look at me, legless and everything, I reckon you think I ought to love God." The preacher answers, "Yeah, I reckon you ought. An old blind mess and a legless fool is a flower in the garden of God."

Many writers, wherever they may be located on their own pilgrimages, also admit how much the Good Book and the Good News still whisper to them. They are still haunted by the statement Goethe's Faust struggles with: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." We children destined to be writers took that word literally before we knew a logos from a hole in the ground. In Genesis, the whole universe is called into existence by God's imperative sentence, "Let there be light!" That moment when humans are created in his image must be the very evolutionary moment when vocal chords and brain were linked to produce language. The other million species on earth speak not a word.

The Bible, from the creation story onwards, is a cornucopia of language. Were the Ten Commandments not inscribed into a stone by God's hot finger itself?. Did not the burning bush speak, the moving finger write on a despot's wall, the Tower of Babel confound language and, thus, communication, the Pentecost bring tongues of fire that translated love into each listener's native language? Didn't Philip climb into a chariot to teach the Ethiopian the meaning of what he was reading? And though the church, like its members, has sinned, did it not keep words alive through the Dark Ages and illuminate and make beautiful even the alphabet?