Mar
29

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The Theology of Comma-And

Category: Bibliography, Prose, Reflection Tags: , , , , Leave a Comment

In one of my writing classes in college, I was taught to avoid “comma-and” sentences, those sentences that contain two independent clauses, separated by the most-boring-of-all conjunctions: and. There’s no flavor in comma-and sentences. There’s no life! No transformation! You’re just tacking on two ideas as equals, and that’s just plain boring. (See what I did there?)

But as I’ve become a theology student, I’ve come to love comma-and sentences–not for their dullness. I still choose to avoid them in my writing. But I love comma-and sentences for the “andness” of it all.

I have a professor, Dwight, who loves the word and. I guess he has a tattoo of an ampersand on his arm or leg, to remind himself of what he calls &ing, a dichotomy that humans as God’s children experience:

We are bad, and we are good.

We are sinners, and we are saints.

We are weak, and we are strong.

For most of my life, I’ve been told that we are comma-but sentences. We are good, but we’re really bad–the latter negates the former.

Bad Theology vs. Good Theology

My boyfriend Nate and I were eating ice cream the other night when I declared to him that Rabbit at Rest is probably my favorite of the Rabbit tetralogy. (Dr. Brown was right.) I told Nate it’s because of all the humanity in the book. Rabbit’s cocaine-addicted son Nelson goes to rehab and comes back a new man, one who’s finally able to stand up to his dad:

Again, Nelson is silent. Then: “… I keep trying to love you, but you don’t really want it. You’re afraid of it, it would tie you down. You’ve been scared all your life of being tied down.” (p.379)

I wrote “Finally!” next to this passage. Finally someone is able to name what’s true about Rabbit: he’s scared. He’s a flighty rabbit who wants to just get out, to find another hole to bury into.

I told Nate that I love this book because there’s something so real and true about these characters. The plot is interesting, sure, but it’s the characters’ transformation that engulfs me, that leads me to tears by the epilogue.

Nate told me that’s why he loves Wendell Berry’s books so much–what matters is not what’s going on exactly, but who the characters are in relation to other characters, in relation to the time and place.

“See,” I said to him, “this is why I love studying this stuff.” And a pause. “I suppose this is more philosophy and literature, rather than theology and literature.” Another pause. “Or maybe that’s what good theology is–showing people’s humanity, their good and their bad, all mixed together.”

I’m proposing, then, that bad theology is recognizing only one part of our humanity–our saintliness or our selfishness–or raising one side up higher than the other. We are saints and sinners; we are comma-and sentences. One doesn’t negate the other. They dance together.

Dynamic characters are comma-and sentences

Last week I got to write a paper on a fictional couple, analyzing their marriage based on categories given in my Marriage and Family class. I chose, of course, Rabbit and Janice Angstrom, putting them easily in the category of having a chaotic, violent, and yet fabulous marriage. But the bulk of the assignment was not to name which category they were in, but to discover where they exhibit both tenderness and strength.

This was much more difficult.

It took me a while to see where this couple showed strength and tenderness in their marriage. But once I thought of a few examples, I started thinking of more and more. As I finished reading Rabbit at Rest, I noticed that this couple was often strong and tender, even in the midst of ugliness and betrayal.

All well-written, dynamic characters, like humans, are paradoxes. They carry both the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the tender and the strong. They are comma-and sentences.

(And that’s why we relate to them so well!)

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.

Feb
9

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Lauren at Rest: after a long week of Updike

Category: Bibliography, Prose, Reflection Tags: , , , , Leave a Comment

This has been a big week. I finished a first draft of my paper on the theology in Updike’s Roger’s Version. I love the thing, and yet hate it, knowing I couldn’t give Barth or Updike (or Roger!) the explanation they all deserve. And I also finished Rabbit is Rich, the third book of the Rabbit Tetralogy, and am on to the fourth and final: Rabbit at Rest. Rabbit dies; I know this. I’m not ready for it. He’s been a part of my life for a year now, and I’ve grown to love the guy. So I’ve been sad and reflective, ready for Rabbit’s story to finish and for my own paper to endure the editing process.

I’ve turned to Lauren Winner for comfort. She is, to be frank, who I want to be “when I grow up.” She’s a brilliant writer, a lover of words, and a professor. She is also, I learned from her most recent book, an Updike fan. Be still my soul. She writes,

Today Ruth and I have come, in the pilgrim economy of writerly tourism, in search of a relic: John Updike lived for many years in neighboring Beverly Farms, and Manchester-by-the-Book received a portion of Updike’s library after he died. [...]

There is, frankly, something of the vulture in me; I want some of those Updike books. I want the books he read, or even just books he kept stacked on shelves in the guest room. [...]

After we have scavenged the fiction, we paw through Updike’s religion books. I make off with three volumes of Barth; two of them I will give away next Christmas, but Against the Stream I will keep. Updike read Barth in his late twenties; he said the Swiss theologian helped him conquer his “existential terror.” He said Barth made him “able to open to the world again,” and Barth shadows Updike’s oeuvre–his novels and short stories, the interviews in which he mostly avoided religious declaration, his poems. In Updike’s fictional world, many of the most compelling characters are admirers of Barth, followers of, or locked in an argument with, the deus absconditus, the God who hides himself. The eponymous hero of Roger’s Version, who invokes Barth at the drop of a hat, knows that God is unknowable–knows even that God’s mystery is somehow tangled up with human hope–but finds that knowledge vaguely unsatisfying. [...] And Rabbit Angstrom is a Barthian, sensing that God is wholly other, that the best proof of God’s existence is Rabbit’s own desire for him, his own undeniable longing.

In addition to those three volumes of Barth, the bookstore’s religion shelves hold one of Updike’s volumes of Buber, some comparative religion texts, and several books about Hasidism, all immaculate, not a hint of marginalia; and then Ruth, who is sharper-eyed than I am, spies in Updike’s copy of Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World a little something penciled on the flyleaf. [...]

What Updike penciled is Deus est qui Deum dat. That is Augustine: God gives us many gifts, but “God is He Who gives God.” This is a good thing to affirm if you live in New England, the land of the hidden God, if you say, as Updike once did, that you find attending church “generally comforting and pleasant,” if you are lauded after dead as a Protestant novelist by an obituary writer who thinks he’s saying something quaint. I keep this book on my bedside table now, this gift from Ruth, and I open it regularly and mostly I do not read what Schmemann has to say about Eucharistic love, though I’m sure what he says is astute. Mostly I look at Updike’s scribble of Augustine and I take it as a good word from a ghost, from someone entered into glory, joined up to the communion of saints; I take it as a benediction from one so keenly aware of the gulch between God and God’s creatures: God is here through our longing for God; God gives us many gifts, but God is He who gives God.

– from “Manchester Pilgrimage” in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner

About Lauren Sawyer

I am a student of theology and culture in Seattle, Washington. I love coffee, rainy days, and John Updike. Learn more about me at laurendeidra.com.