December Newsletter: A Better Story

What I see is all I’ve seen

In my sweetest sleeping dreams…

One of my strongest early memories is waking up on Christmas morning at nine or ten years old, hours before anyone else would be awake. With nothing else to do, I laid in bed with my discman and listened to The Who Sell Out. Lingering in the dark stillness of night, anticipating with eagerness a morning of presents under the Christmas tree and coffee cake for breakfast, the songs wove themselves together into some beautiful story, too vast for words, an epic journey beyond the known limits of earthly landscapes and human emotions:

Now Captain, listen to my instructions

Return to this spot on Christmas Day

Look toward the shore for my signal

And then you'll know if in Rael I'll stay…

Recently I have been watching VHS rips of cartoons from my childhood, replete with early ‘00s commercials, and it’s reminded me of my tormented relationship with them. Once a cartoon captivated me, I would become deeply invested in its characters, then watch in agony as, episode after episode, they were used as mean and stupid cardboard cutouts in service of a half-assed plot. I could sense even in those early days that the strings being pulled were artificial, that the characters I cared about deserved better stories than the ones they were forced into. (I refer to this phenomenon now as “Foster’s Home Syndrome”. Bloo was a likeable and dynamic character, if the writers of a given episode cared to make him so; if not, he was a raging asshole whose cruelty became a source of cheap gags.)

The agony of feeling like I’m sitting through a cheap story, full of sound and fury and devoid of forethought or depth of feeling, never quite fades in my life. Earlier this week I found myself yelling at a book of commentaries on Genesis, recoiling against the poor preacher’s attempts to make sense of Abraham turning the knife on Isaac: “what about the kid’s feelings?” When we get passed down plot points so obscene, so horrific, that they defy attempts at logic and empathy, should we discard them out of hand and start over?

The song I have been quoting, “Rael”, borrows its imagery from the Crusades, one of the most abysmal black marks in Western history, a tragedy of bloodshed and genocide under the guise of religious conviction. That’s a story that we’re all watching play out right now in Israel and Gaza, seemingly helpless to change its course. When the blood is real, the story it’s meant to serve seems atrociously false, unspeakably artificial.

I don’t believe that we can renounce the past and give up on its stories entirely. When we run from it, we lose our chance to change it into something better. The story must be faced, retold with a more discerning eye and a gentler tongue, adapted to serve living experience, opened up to share its vulnerable heart with the hearts of its new audience. What we begin to tell now is what will become the future.

What I know now is all I’ve known

That has been good while I have grown

Bless the thoughts that made me sail

And the God who made Rael