Presentations
Chapel Talks & Convocations
Chapel Talk
October 1, 2002
Jim Heynen
Is my discipline, creative writing--poetry and fiction--a friend of faith?
Wherever you are on the faith spectrum, I think creative writing is always a friend. Creative writing is friendly first of all--and from the outset--because it is not utilitarian. It does not come into the world with a practical purpose. It may move the heart or delight the senses. It may make our lives richer, it may deepen our understanding of the world and ourselves--but, as Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book, The Gift, says: it is not part of the consumerism formula. It is not a commodity.
For writers who take this enterprise seriously, the act of writing becomes a spiritual journey. One reason this is so is because creative/inventive/imaginative writing slows things down. Even if you are a witty writer, even if you try such outrageous practices as automatic writing, even if you are an irreverent, in-your-face writer, tapping into the artesian well of your imagination leads you into a kind of meditation. You are slowing things down, and in this slowing down process, in this receptive manner, the imagination starts breathing.
We speak of inspiration, which really means a breathing in of the spirit.
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It is no wonder the country turned to poetry after 9-11. We needed a language that only reflection can produce. We needed non-consumerism language that could speak to the unspeakable. A language that would connect us to each other. On 9-11, we were driven back to the source of poetry, to that deep urge to express the needs of our inner lives.
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I think the whole process of creative writing is a healthy one. I think it is healthy psychologically. I think it is healthy spiritually. And part of that health comes through hard work. Getting that gift onto the page can be like wrestling with an angel (sometimes a fallen angel!). If nothing else, the struggle to get it right can be humbling.
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In my mind, creative writing in a faith community is most legitimate when, with integrity, it honestly looks at the whole of human experience and presents it in what discerning readers perceive to be aesthetically accomplished form. This can mean poems of despair. This can mean dark stories as well as uplifting ones. This can mean cantankerous moods, irreverent moods, status-quo-challenging moods, as well as reverent, affirming moods of contentment and celebration. Creative writing has the hard work of saying what needs saying--about one's own life, about life we see around us, about the broken world. Often putting one's negative moods into artistic form is as much a gift as a poem of celebration.
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There are among believers those who want to whitewash creative writing into a literature that has no irreverence in it, no skepticism, no bad words. Too often such mandates of conformity lead to oversimplified and dishonest representations of the world. Sinless characters are not real people and can in no way challenge the reader toward spiritual growth. Spiritual growth, I believe, is rooted in the truth. Flannery O'Connor (perhaps echoing Chekhov, but I think no one would doubt her faith) suggested that a writer's primary objective should be to be "hotly in pursuit of the truth." If writers pursue the truth, whether of their own misery, whether of their own anger, whether of their convictions or their uncertainties, whether of their wry perceptions of the follies of human kind, whether through wit or through wisdom, if writers apply the tools of artistic creation (and that's what our writing workshops are about; that's what revision is about; that's what emulating great literature is about; that's what learning the strategies of the trade is all about--understatement, overstatement, condensation, surprise twists, a leap of association that sends a little current up the reader's spine--that's why we learn to make language sound like music, why we sculpt it, massage it, give it color: all so that we can wrap it like the gift it is going to be!--if the verbal artist does this hard work of creating from the raw materials of imagination and experience and tries with integrity in the pursuit of truth to manifest something that is artistically beautiful, then I think we all have reason to sing, Hallelujah, it is good. And a gift to us all.
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Opening Convocation: "Community and Compassionate Imagination"
September 5, 2001
Mary Titus
Some excerpts:
Wonderful new communities are birthing right here on the Hill. But I want to push community creating further. How do we connect with people different from ourselves, develop compassionate imagination for the unfamiliar? How do we create community in the midst of diversity? How do we create it all over the world?
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The skills we learn as we create and transform community in our classrooms are the skills we need to create and transform larger communities. I believe that if we can learn how to make each person in a classroom a full and contributing citizen, we will then have the tools to do the same thing in our nation. I'm bringing in the word citizen for a purpose here, for I am invoking one of the great hopes for Higher Education in general, and for this college, the community to which you now belong.
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Higher education leader Carol Schneider envisions the college classroom as a place where we practice the skills of democracy, talking and thinking together, sharing and making new stories, new meanings, a place where we learn to recognize different kinds of people as fellow contributors to, citizens of our community.
Unless we exercise compassionate imagination we remain isolated, silent passengers, each in his or her small cramped seat, riding the bus of life--to where? As Paul Loeb wrote in Soul of a Citizen: "We can blank out the voices of our fellow human beings...but if we do, we risk the decay of our humanity. When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink too."
Not attending to the stories of others, we lose the power of compassionate imagination and become ever more separate: separation leading to lack of relationship, leading to callousness and fear. I can think of many moments in our history when separation did this work. Consider Germany divided after the War, Northern Ireland today; Serbians and Croatians; South Africa under Apartheid--the Jim Crow laws here in the United States: separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate restaurants, separate people--black and white. Or consider the Jewish ghettos in Poland. When human relation is broken, apathy and fear fill the gap. Those people are not like us. For them we have no compassion.
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As I told you, I'm an English professor and I believe in stories, in fact I believe stories can help us develop compassionate imagination by creating rich relationships with all kinds of unfamiliarity, stories connect us in our minds and hearts with each other--in a classroom, a campus, a community and beyond.
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In her book Poetic Justice philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that stories--literature--can do just this work. Through reading novels, she believes, we can strengthen our ability to imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be oneself or one of ones loved ones (5).
As an English professor I want to agree with Martha Nussbaum, yet I am always admonished by the words of that intrepid heroine, Janie, from Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Do you know of Zora Neale Hurston: the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in anthropology and one of the great black dialect writers of American literature? Those of you who have read Their Eyes Were Watching God--and I hope there are a lot of you out there!--will recall that when Janie returns to her hometown (after three husbands and a hurricane) she tells her adventures to her friend Pheoby.
Janie's story changes her friend, immediately enlarging her world. As Pheoby breathlessly announces, "Lawd! A done growed ten feet higher from jus listen tuh you Janie." Janie knows the power of story--she is a great porch sitter, yarn weaver herself. But she believes you need more than just words. So she tells Pheoby: "Its uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo papa and yo mama and nobody else cant tell yuh and show uh. Two things everybodys got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin fuh theyselves."
You've got to go there to know there. That's the hope of study abroad in higher education--and again here at St. Olaf College. Not only will students sit in classrooms and share stories, not only will they read books and encounter more stories, talking about them together, but they will also leave their homes and communities for places far away. Can we really become citizens of the world? Is the world a community? How far does your compassionate imagination extend?
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Let me read a story from a traveling Ole. She writes of her experiences in Australia where she lived for a week with an Aboriginal family, helping prepare for a dance, a corroborree, making grass skirts, clapsticks and didgeridoos. She writes of an evenings end, after she has danced and sung, carrying her own clapsticks:
I linger in the circle for a while longer. I am alone. At first all I hear is silence. All I see is the light of the fires near me and the darkness beyond the circle. I look up to the stars. They twinkle brighter than I've ever seen before. Slowly, I begin to hear: the beating of the clapsticks, the rattling of the boomerangs, the singing of the didgeridoo, the chanting of Country's voice, and the movement of our feet as we dance. I hear it in the air, feel it in the soles of my feet, and see it in the light of the fires. The darkness of the forest is replaced with light. There are figures dancing, children singing, voices laughing. I close my eyes gently, feel the night surround me, sense the moonlight upon my face, and hear the crackling of the fires. For a moment, all is peace within me. I feel connected to something greater than I have ever known. I leave the corroborree circle somehow different than when I entered, and I look forward to tomorrow night, when, once more, we dance.
With her whole self this student entered into the story of another culture: living with a family, trying her own hand at making clapsticks, eating, singing, dancing--becoming connected. Her story grows larger, her imagination embraces a bigger world. As she tells us: I leave the circle somehow different than when I entered.
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Its a new year and you are a new generation of St. Olaf students. On behalf of the staff, the faculty, the students--this whole small city on a hill--I bid you welcome. We look forward to hearing your story and creating community with you.
