Or, Processing Pain Page by Page
by Sean Higgins
Here are the notes for the talk:
Keeping Heart
“We read to know we’re not alone.” That’s a line delivered by a student of C.S. Lewis named Peter Whistler in the movie Shadowlands. Lewis himself didn’t write it anywhere, but William Nicholson included it in his play-turned-movie about Lewis. What do you think? “We read to know we’re not alone.” I think that proverbial bottle would hold some tears.
I also think it’s true that sometimes we write because we feel alone.
Loneliness itself is a kind of pain, and many types of pain cause the sufferer to feel unseen, to feel invisible, and so forgotten if not forsaken. Alphonse Daudet, a French novelist in the 19th century wrote:
“Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.”
Who understands? Who around you keeps caring? Solomon wrote a similar observation: “The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy” (Proverbs 14:10). We are in heaviness through trials that have as many colors as a three day old bruise (1 Peter 1:6). In our fallen world, everyone experiences this, whether it’s a short season of acute injury, or maybe it’s chronic and acute, or maybe the hurt defies any label and/or timetable. What to do?
In God’s mercy He’s given us a garage full of tools, if we can climb over the stacks of storage boxes between the door and the workbench. There are medicines, there is music, there are mountains and meadows. These are more than distractions, but they also can’t immediately heal a tumor, they can’t bring back lost health or years, or a loved one who is gone. They also cannot guarantee that anyone else really sees you.
Christians have the gospel, which reminds us that God’s own Son was a “man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). In the good news we’ve begun to taste the glories that His suffering purchased for us. That includes the promise of new physical bodies. It includes a new earth where God will wipe away every tear. It includes the hope of reunion with all our brothers who have died in Christ. It includes the Holy Spirit who dwells within and enables our access by faith into the grace in which we stand, or at least the grace by which we hang on.
And while the Lord keeps on increasing our capacity for bearing glory (2 Corinthians 4:17), we look to the page and pen to know we’re not alone. We read and write so that we won’t lose heart. Good fiction helps us endure grief by reminding us we’re not alone and by shaping some perspective for our pain.
Cheating Fiction
My talk to open this year’s Raggant Fiction Festival is the closest I’ve come to cheating. I’ve talked at two previous festivals about That Hideous Strength (and 1984) which were books at least written as fiction, even if the plots have become too true to life. Ha! But also not ha! While I am not twisting anything, three of the four goads for this session have non-fiction points. (Also, not trying to be a downer, ha, but a help.)
First, my title riffs on Lewis’ book, A Grief Observed. That little book is quite dramatic, but nothing about it is staged. Lewis wrote it, it seems, not planning for it to be published, and even put the pseudonym “N.W. Clerk” on it (in which N.W. stands for Nat Whilk which is an old English phrase that means “I know not whom”). It’s more than an open wound after Lewis’ wife passed away; the arteries of his throbbing grief are spurting out the neck of his pen. For three of the four chapters or more you wonder if his Christian faith is going to die on the table. He married late, and Joy died early, and the grief observed is his written attempt at working out his own response before God. It is not fiction.
Second, Mr. Palpant’s book, A Small Cup of Light isn’t fiction either. That book resonated with me in 2015 when I first read it, and I reread it last year after we knew he was coming for today’s Festival. It is not one of his fiction efforts, but his season of questions in crisis certainly informs his stories. I think he’d put it into the memoir genre, which maybe Lewis’ falls into as well. A memoir is like a selected parenthesis from what could be a broader autobiography with some more processing and reflection added in to thread a theme. Memoir is a chapter in the story of a man’s life. Ben is going to talk today about memoir, and good.
Third, one benefit of reading is that you can learn things you haven’t experienced. What a gift. And also, some things hit differently if you have had certain experiences. It’s part of the reason Lewis says in his dedication to Lucy Barfield in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that “some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” And my experience–in the providence of God–has included His working together for good some significant loss, and pain, and grief. And actually, my experience has included observing other’s grief. As a pastor I walk with some stuck and struggling sheep. As a husband to a wife with daily debilitations, we can’t avoid facing it. It’s not as “simple” as being without her, there are griefs to be endured, not just observed.
And fourth, reading, and to some extent writing, have been like braces to my weak joints, like glasses for my myopic perspective, like shelves for sorting my frustrations. It has not been non-fiction only that helps, but good stories and a little poetry that have more than make-believe edification.
Form and Feelings
The theme of this year’s Festival is “Form and Fiction.” Other than catchy alliteration, why “form”?
We’ve been lied to, and we’ve accepted falsehoods about, feelings, both positive and negative. Society lies. Soul-gurus lie. Some stories lie. The divine Author, and some of His servant authors, shine light on these lies.
One lie is that genuine feelings must be spontaneous. It’s worse than walking around as living impromptus, because we’re not even taking any minutes to prepare/put our thoughts together before talking.
A second lie is that we have no control over our feelings. At best maybe we can try to pull in the sail, but if the wind blows, our boat is going that direction. Our feelings might even push us over the falls. We’re at the mercy of the emotional waves that toss us to and fro. Somehow this is supposed to be more human, authentic.
But what about a rudder? A ballast? Even an anchor might be nice. Switching metaphors, a steady diet of puréed bologna soup won’t build your bones, and bones hold you upright. No bones, no standing. No bones, no enduring.
Verbal vomit of every opinion and reaction and emotion won’t help you or those you’re projecting onto. That is a fool’s pleasure (see Proverbs 18:2).
Paul did write that there are some sufferings too deep for words. Actually, he didn’t. He wrote that sometimes we don’t know what to pray and “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). But some sufferings demand effort and precision to process, both for our own endurance as well as for blessing others.
While not fiction, the book of Lamentations might be more brutal than Job. Jeremiah groans over the defeat and demolition of Jerusalem and expresses his feelings in an intricate poem. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 all have 22 verses, each verse beginning with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet; it’s called an acrostic poem. Chapter 3, in the center, is a triple acrostic with 66 verses (each letter repeated at the start of three consecutive rows). Chapter 5 is not an acrostic, but it also only has 22 verses. Lamentations has form, disciplined to work out the prophet’s grief. It also provides direction for others. He gives the faithful words, he gives them an example of a way to see.
The structure doesn’t make our hearts cold. The structure guards our hearts from incoherence. The form processes and portrays the sense, not necessarily of the damage, but of the grief over the damage.
In such effort we see some beauty. It appeals to us. It points the feelings in the way they should go. It provides some boundaries. A healthy cell maintains its walls. No fence around the garden leaves the produce exposed. And in all this we find that we are not alone in our grief. It is not removed, but it becomes more bearable.
Page by Page
So much of our culture is formless and void. Think how close our country was to electing President Word Salad. Yet stream of consciousness is torrent without telos.
Some have tried to herd the stream. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (1915) does make you think about balding and coffee and toast and tea, time passing and lost decisions, but Prufrock’s entire life is rootless. This isn’t what you read to not lose heart. It’s a 140 line poem of Prufock drowning in anxiety.
It’s interesting that most of the well-known authors, whether of poetry or novels, who tried this literary device lived and wrote during and after WWI, in a time of disorder and crisis, of skepticism about reality and truth. James Joyce (“Ulysses” 1922), Virginia Woolf (“Mrs. Dalloway” 1925), William Faulkner (“The Sound and the Fury” 1929), captured the angsty-grief but they didn’t relieve it. It’s all fragmented, out of focus. This kind of modern lit is like TikTok on a page, frenzy that takes attention but gives no focus.
Contrast that to Tolkien’s (begun in 1937 — overly? absurdly?) slow, tedious, painful story of carrying a burden. But you feel there is hope in the Cracks of Doom.
This applies to the pages of our diet and exercise.
In diet, I mean pages we read. Fun things can be fun (looking at you, P.G. Wodehouse), and temporal things can pass the time. Probably though, you’ll need more than amusement in grief. Solid food is for the mature. Read some BOOKS that take some effort to appreciate because they took some effort to create. With dead-serious joviality, Lewis said Eustace Scrubb had not read the right books so he knew nothing about adventure, and that Shasta (while truly Cor of Archenland, son of King Lune) had not read the right books so he knew nothing about nobility. Friends, have you read the right books so that you know more than nothing about enduring grief?
In exercise, I mean pages we write. I don’t mean posting in public all the things. But you can try on a private page. And also, why not give away a hard earned comfort? Maybe it’s bite-sized memoir in a Twitter text box. Maybe it’s a bad poem with poetic effort. If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth enduring how bad you are at first.
Enduring Helps
When it comes to recommending resources for your endurance, here are some Non-fiction helps: Lewis’s Grief, Palpant’s Light (plus Letters from the Mountain), Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places, David’s Psalms.
As for Fiction helps, here’s a selection of quotes that go with some recommendations from some recent re-reads:
In A Tale of Two Cities Dr. Manette gets to the point where he saw the power of his grief endured.
“‘My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris – in Paris? In France – who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille would touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in triumph. My old pain has given me a power that has brought us through the barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and brought us here.’ … For the first time the Doctor felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power.”
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Mrs. Bird (wife of Senator John Bird) who has lost her own child comforts Eliza Harris:
“There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.”
And it’s maybe too much on the nose, but later in the book, the narrator describes Uncle Tom’s endurance under Legree’s taunts:
When a heavy weight presses the soul to the lowest level at which endurance is possible, there is an instant and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.
In The Silver Chair, pain saves Puddleglum, along with the Prince and Eustace and Pole. Pain provides the vital perspective.
“There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic. …the pain itself made Puddleglum’s head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought.”
And one of my favorites, from Ransom in That Hideous Strength, when Merlin offered power to “suck up from the Earth oblivion of all pains”:
“No,” said the Director. “God’s glory, do you think you were dug out of the earth to give me a plaster for my heel? We have drugs that could cheat the pain as well as your earth magic or better, if it were not my business to bear it to the end. I will hear no more of that. Do you understand?”
And for the younger readers, try The Velveteen Rabbit and Charlotte’s Web, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows. Even Romeo and Juliet is a lesson in why not to kill yourself when your teenage feelings want to get the better of you.
Grief Not Grievance
In An Axe for the Frozen Sea Palpant interviews a poet (Li-Young Lee) who told him:
“We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not—it’s a complaint, it’s whining.”
Do not endure grievance, in your own heart or in those you love. Repent from grievance and grumbling. Enduring grievances will keep you from enduring grief.
This isn’t about escape, but how to endure. Fiction (and biography and memoir) is a tool for enduring grief because it offers fellowship and form; the pages help us process. We read and know we’re not alone.
