“No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great Burden of guilt men have!”
I don’t reread many books. There are some characters and stories that stick with you and for one reason or another and we want them to remain precisely as they were when we first met them twenty some-odd years ago. Fitzgerald’s Gatsby — haunted by regrets, reliving the irredeemable past, always just out of reach; exhausted by the varieties of life. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre — with her clarity and passion, enough to speak “spirit to spirit” to Mr. Rochester. Or, Salinger’s Franny and Zooey — fed up with “making a splash.” Why can’t we have the courage to be a nobody? Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through it — for his tenderness towards history and time and complex loyalties to people and place. Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow — for giving us a beautiful picture of what it looks like to belong.
This is what great literature does. It gets inside us and blows open parts of us that perhaps we never knew before. Something true but told through story. Which is to say, who of us could ever hear the whole truth about ourselves directly? That would be cruel. Who could bear it? Great literature is a mercy.
In John Steinbeck’s monumental novel East of Eden, a truth is told to us as old as the world. A truth about someone else we are descendants of — Cain. Upon first reading a story, sometimes it “only gets through our skin and not much of it sticks,” as Adam says to Lee and Samuel in regards to the biblical Cain and Abel story. That’s what it was like for me the first time meeting the Trasks and the Hamiltons. And Lee and Cathy. They pricked my skin and left a tingling that now, twenty years later, I was curious to revisit. What would happen to those beloved characters if I met them again? I feel them in a haze, feeling only what I let them teach me when I was so young, so new to life. I met them again this summer, the haze evaporating while I was face to face with this old story. And I was reminded, it was within me too.
“Isn’t it strange that three grown men, here in a century so many thousands of years away, discuss this crime as though it happened in King City yesterday and hadn’t come up for trial? …
Lee said, ‘I found some of the old things as fresh and clear as this morning. And I wondered why. And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule–a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting–only the deeply personal and familiar.’”
Finding Ourselves in Cain — A Secret Pond
Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers. Liza wears a Bible down evenly. Here we are — this oldest story. If it troubles us it must be that we find the trouble in ourselves.”
I would like to say that I remember the first time I found the trouble in myself. As if I were completely pure and whole before a certain time, and if I could just pinpoint that first transaction of darkness, maybe I could put the pieces back together. But that’s an awful lot of guilt and shame for one person to be in charge of. It was a slow, horrible, and merciful awakening to that “secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.” The same secret pond that grew in Cathy grows also in me. But even for monstrous characters such as her whom we shake our heads at and wonder, how did she get so bad? We are never given a reason why she was the way she was. Just that, she was. The pieces are undone and some of our secret ponds are better kept than others, but we all have one. At the same time, we all carry within us the desire for that pond to be made into the most beautiful, lush and biodiverse pond in the world. I think of Marie Howe’s poem, Part of Eve’s Discussion.
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.
Mercy is found in Samuel, who just can’t seem to mind his own business. But his persistence becomes endearing. I wish I could have some of Samuel’s courage and conviction when he visits Adam two years after being shot. He was shot by his wife Cathy, and left alone to provide for his twin sons who were not yet named. It’s been a year and three months since Cathy left and Samuel is stunned.
“They don’t have any names.”
“You’re making a joke, Lee.”
“I am not making jokes.”
“What does he call them?”
“He calls them ‘they.’”
“I mean when he speaks to them.”
“When he speaks to them he calls them ‘you,’ one or both.”
“This is nonsense,” Samuel said angrily. “What kind of a fool is the man?”
“I’ve meant to come and tell you. He’s a dead man unless you can wake him up.”
Mercy is found in someone who would risk the anger of their friend who’s been asleep for a long time. No one likes to be woken up. But is there grace in disturbance? Yes. “Death hates resurrection,” as Garret Keizer writes in his book The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin. Samuel calls Adam out.
“Do you take pride in your hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know” is Sloth’s favorite answer. And it gets angry when it’s disturbed. It longs to remain siphoned to it’s own misery. But mercy shows up with courage to cut the tube and be the recipient of the other’s hurt.
“Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
A slight anger came into Adam’s voice. “Why do you come to lecture me? I’m glad you’ve come, but why do you dig into me?”
“To see whether I can raise a little anger in you. I’m a nosy man. But there’s all that fallow land, and here beside me is all that fallow man. It seems a waste. And I have a bad feeling about waste because I could never afford it. Is it a good feeling to let your life lie fallow?”
‘’What else could I do?”
“You could try again.”
Adam faced him. “I’m afraid to, Samuel,” he said. “I’d rather just go about it this way. Maybe I haven’t the energy or the courage.”
“How about your boys — do you love them?”
Here is where we come to the agency of all change — love. It’s not knowledge, or it’s favorite cousins, logic and reason. Those were all fruits from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil after all. (As Simeon Zahl so wonderfully wrote in How Do People Actually Change?)
“Speak the language of the heart truly and sincerely and watch as God sends forth his Spirit to ‘renew the face of the ground.’” (Ps. 104:30).
What Chance Did We Have?
Adam broke in, “It (the story of Cain and Abel) makes me feel better, not worse.”
“How do you mean?” Samuel asked.
“Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
“Yes, I see. But how does this story make it better?”
“Because,” Adam said excitedly, “we are descended from this. This is our father. Some of our guilt is absorbed in our ancestry. What chance did we have? We are the children of our father. It means we aren’t the first. It’s an excuse, and there aren’t enough excuses in the world.”
“Not convincing ones anyway,” said Lee. “Else we would long ago have wiped out guilt, and the world would not be filled with sad, punished people.”
We don’t have to go far to know that mercy can feel terrible at times. We know that sometimes we’d rather take the lashes with our fists holding on. And what about the stories we’ve inherited through our family line? Ghosts from our past, coming to life. Some we balk at in horror, wondering where did YOU come from, and some we know exactly where they came from.
We feel the layers of sin and grief all the way back to Cain’s mother.
Samuel went on, “There’s a thing I don’t understand. There’s a blackness on this valley. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it … It’s as though some old ghost haunted it out of the dead ocean below and troubled the air with unhappiness. It’s as secret as hidden sorrow. I don’t know what it is, but I see it and feel it in the people here.”
That’s the thing. To borrow from Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, “Underneath all the politics, the ambition, the harsh talk, the power, the violence, the will to destroy and waste and maim and burn, was this tenderness.” Deep down, we hold a tender sorrow that more often than not, is born into madness. To remember our tenderness is to dip our toes into our secret pond, and to sink to the bottom only to find a door way. We are caught by surprise. The best thing in the hands of a God who’s Son knocks on the other side.
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