“Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose.” This sentence is from Andrew Solomon’s advice to young writers published last year in The New Yorker. I was so struck by his characterization of writing that I copied down his words and tucked them into my Bible with other scraps of paper I want to reread.
Is it nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story we know? That fragment of Solomon’s wisdom is the one that kept rolling around my brain. I want to believe that Solomon is right, that knowing another’s story will inoculate us from hate. Experience tells me that if knowing the particulars of another’s story doesn’t prevent hate, listening to the details of someone’s life at least makes hating him harder. Hearing, reading, learning a person’s story curtails our faulty assumptions and invites us to reconsider our quick judgments. Writing those stories down deems them worthy of preserving and makes them real.
Reading Elie Wiesel’s “Night” made the Holocaust more than history; the millions murdered became fathers, sons and grandparents. Reading “The Color of Water” by James McBride gave me a glimpse into the complexity of racial categories. Timothy Tyson’s “Blood Done Sign My Name” invited me to wonder what I would have done had I been a white, Southern pastor in the 1950s and 60s, challenging me to consider what my call is now in the face of ongoing racism. Anne Lamott’s “Traveling Mercies” helped keep me tethered to the church during a time when the weight of my sin felt insurmountable. “Nickle and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich revealed a world that surrounded me but that I had previously scarcely noticed.
Countless people, places, ideas, possibilities, problems and circumstances have become real for me because someone wrote them down. I know Moses, Jeremiah, Amos, Esther, Ruth, Peter, Mary, Lydia, Paul and, yes, even Jesus because someone wrote down their stories. These stories, through the power of the Holy Spirit, have helped me not to hate and shown me who and how to love. The Bible stories of sinful women and prodigal sons and sibling rivalry and friendships betrayed and road-to-Damascus conversions make real forgiveness and reconciliation and grace and mercy and perseverance and transformation. So real that I am able to recognize forgiveness and reconciliation and transformation when they happen in my own life.
A remembrance of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney written by Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books described Heaney as “a public figure who managed, over thirty years of bitter conflict, never to speak bitterly.” Heaney, O’Toole writes, “transformed conflict itself into the richness of diversity — not directly in the political sphere but in the field he himself plowed, the open terrain of language.”
It is hard to hate someone once you know her story. Writing has a moral purpose. Words help make our worlds. The biblical narrative shapes our own narratives. The sacred texts of Scripture tell our family history. The Word dictates our language (or at least it should).
O’Toole continues his remembrance of Heaney, “The porousness of language, the refusal of words to know their places, eludes the control of narrow identities.” When Wiesel writes of Juliek playing the violin for his life, as if his soul was the bow, my Gentile identity rubs elbows with Juliek’s Jewish one. When McBride surmises that the politeness of the South thinly covers a bomb waiting to go off, I think, “I know that place and those people.” When Ehrenreich quotes a co-worker who wishes she could take a day off and still be able to buy groceries, I wish that for her, too. When the father runs out to meet his wayward son, I know it is possible for anyone to be welcomed home. When Jesus says to the frightened, cowering woman, “Go and sin no more,” I feel her relief and yearn for others to know that kind of mercy.
Our narrow identities are expanded through language, making it much harder for us to hate. We learn people’s stories, stories made real in words, and those words move us to live with moral purpose.
Grace and peace,
Jill
