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Honesty that Dismantles Your Own Sense of Self

Do you remember the first class?

HEMPEL

Vividly. The assignment was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.” And everybody knew instantly what that thing, for them, was. We found out immediately that the stakes were very high, that we were expected to say something no one else had said, and to divulge much harder truths than we had ever told or ever thought to tell. No half-measures. He thought any of us could do it if we wanted it badly enough. And that, when I was starting out, was a great thing to hear from someone who would know.

-Amy Hempel, from The Art of Fiction No. 176, The Paris Review (Read it online HERE)

This is Amy Hempel describing her first class with her teacher, and a famous author and editor, Gordon Lish.

As I’ve devoted much of the last year to reading (so-called) minimalist authors, Amy Hempel has not only risen near the top of that list, but near the top of my list in general. The fact that she now teaches at an SEC school doesn’t hurt either.

Her short stories are worth the purchase price for the first lines alone. The first line of Tom-Rock through the Eels is one of my favorite sentences: “Are you here for all the things that I don’t have?” The Harvest beings with, “The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.” The story she’s referencing in the interview above,  In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried, has an equally good first line: “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.” I recommend her collected stories as highly as I recommend anything.

I want that to be the line in my comments section instead of ‘Your Thoughts:’ Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting.

The disciples of Gordon Lish, and his literary descendants, use the trauma of their lives to fuel their stories. They do not necessarily tell you about their own lives explicitly, but they will hide their lives within stories. Tom Spanbauer refers to this as “dangerous writing.”

Let me get back to the quote from her Paris Review interview (there are a ton of great interviews at that site by the way). Imagine walking into a classroom/workshop with a teacher you greatly respect. Now imagine that that teacher required that you divulge your deepest darkest secret. You can read about Amy Hempel’s in In the Cemetery where Al Jolson is Buried.

Here’s the deal as a Christian. What we do is this: we try not to tell lies. As long as we’re not fibbing we convince ourselves that we’re honest. But honesty may well involve much more than how we speak. It has to involve how we deal with ourselves.

Personally, I am so prone to bury all of my hurts, fears, and anxieties and pretend that they don’t exist. If they start creeping up I tell them to go away.

One of my good friends is going on this journey through minimalist literature with me. We each read things. We share what we read. We share how the things we read help. And so we help each other. He preached a sermon recently on 2 Cor. 1:3-5: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”

He actually referenced the above Amy Hempel quote in the sermon as evidence of the fact that some writers solicit more honesty of students than the church does of its disciples. The point of the sermon was that if we’re not honest about our hurts, then God cannot bring comfort. And it is through the comfort that God brings, which we often miss, that we are actually able to minister to others. You can listen to the sermon HERE.

In their own ways, the ‘minimalists’ use their hurts in their writing both for catharsis and to help others.

Here’s the thing for Christians, or at least for me: Are writers at writing workshops more honest than Christians? I tend to bury my pain and anxiety. I stick my fingers in my ears and say la la la really loud and hope that they’ll go away.

We are scared of digging up things that will ‘dismantle our sense of self,’ that will expose us, make us vulnerable. We think that ‘thou shalt not lie’ simply means that we don’t tell fibs. We never consider that we ought to be honest with ourselves.

We bury old hurts, they become scars, if you scratch them they start to bleed. We don’t want that. We want them to stay buried. Who would risk the danger of dismantling our sense of self?

The thing is, since we’re so content to bury it all as if it never happened, we never leave opportunity for God to truly heal the wound. Like a man with a gash that needs stitches, and he bandages it and refuses to see the doctor. We won’t dismantle our sense of self, and so we never really figure out who we can be. We never open up the possibility of the God of all comfort ministering to us so that we can minister to others.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Study Notes: 1 Corinthians 13:4a

I offer you a peak into my studies this week. While digging in the commentaries on 1 Corinthians 13:4, I found quite an array of suggested meanings to the Greek words commonly translated ‘patient’ and ‘kind.’

1 Corinthians 13:4a ‘Love is patient; love is kind…’

The word generally translated ‘patient’ is a compound word that cannot really be translated into English in any literal sense; the closest we can get is probably something like ‘long-passioned.’ But the issue of translation is compounded by the fact that the word is a verb, which doesn’t come out so well in the word ‘patient.’ The KJV uses the word ‘long-suffering,’ which is probably closer to the actual meaning (and it brings out the compound nature of the word). F.F. Bruce suggests the word ‘long-tempered’ (as opposed to short-tempered). Matthew Henry suggests something like ‘big-hearted.’ The main idea is that love patiently bears being wronged.

As for the word translated ‘kind,’ it is even harder to translate in some ways. It only appears in this particular form in this text (nowhere else in the NT). It is also a verb and it appears (surprisingly, at least to me) in the middle voice, which denotes interest in the subject, such as ‘Love is kind in, or of, itself’ or ‘Love shows itself kind.’ The actual word denotes more than ‘kindness.’ It is a mixture, as some commentators have noted, of kindness and goodness. In other words, it denotes benevolence, or a good disposition (but in an active, demonstrable form). Phillips translates it ‘love looks for a way of being constructive.’ Gill uses the words ‘liberal’ and ‘bountiful.’

Between Gill, Henry, Clarke, Calvin, Coffman, Bruce and others, I came up with this list of paraphrases:

  • Love is big-hearted and open-handed.
  • Love receives wrong and gives good.
  • Love is slow to get angry, quick to do good.
  • Love is long-suffering and liberal.
  • Love accepts rudeness and offers kindness.
  • Love suffers long and wishes well.
  • Love patiently endures and actively does good.

All of these are accurate descriptions of the disposition and actions of the Lord Jesus Christ, bearing evil and giving good. This is summarized nicely by the words of Jesus in Luke 9:41: “Jesus answerd, ‘O faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here.’ Jesus patiently bears the faithlessness of his people, and then positively heals in spite of it. He does not withhold good even though he has been wronged. He does not return ‘in kind.’ This is where the good news comes in. We fail, and he endures our failing and offers us good. And experiencing that gives us strength to do the same for others.

So, how am I going to preach the text? I want to demonstrate the meaning, give examples, demonstrate how Christ personifies the meaning, reminding them of the suffering and compassion of Christ, remind them that they fall short, and call upon them to respond to Christ in faith that they might become more like him. ‘As I have loved you, so must you love one another’ (John 13:34).

The Misused Passages: 1 Corinthians 2:9, Eye Hath Not Seen, Nor Ear Heard

This will be the first of an ongoing series on the blog dealing with biblical texts that I repeatedly hear ripped out of context and misused. I have previously dealt with Jesus’ words, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged‘ (though I had not conceived of a series at that point).

In this installment we consider 1 Corinthians 2:9:

  • But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

Some years ago this verse, by itself, was our theme verse for a semester at chapel at a school I attended. And it was used, as it is typically used, to encourage Christians that they cannot imagine the things that God has prepared for them in heaven. Perhaps you’ve used it that way. So, what’s the problem?

Perhaps it is the ripping of this verse out of context that has led to the recent slough of bestselling books dealing with the afterlife. People are just dying, yes that’s a pun, to know what heaven is like. They want to know if the family pet will be there. They want to know what giant pearls look like. They want to know that everything really will be alright in the end. And so you get small children going to heaven and coming back to tell the story. You get ‘Close Encounters of the God Kind.’ You get guys with no interest in the Bible coming into my workplace telling me that he died and rose from the dead and wants to tell me what Jesus is really like.

The problem is that 1 Corinthians 2:9 should never be quoted without including 1 Corinthians 2:10. This is the reason the ESV actually inserts a hyphen at the end of 2:9:

  • 9 But, as it is written,’What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,what God has prepared for those who love him’ —

So what does verse 10 say?

  • 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

The glories of heaven will be just that – glorious. Human imagination could not truly conceive of the majesty of life in the immediate presence of God. But, this reality, and many of its actual elements, have be revealed to us by the Holy Spirit through Scripture.

Do you remember the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus from Luke 16? The Rich Man heads to Hades and gets to have a conversation with Abraham. He asks to be sent back to the earth so that he can declare the truth of the afterlife to his family. If someone rose from the dead to tell them, surely then they would believe! Abraham’s reply, told by Jesus himself in Luke 16:29, is:

  • But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. We need to fix our minds on things above. And God has given us one means of doing so – his own revelation – the Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.