photo by Collyn Ware

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and myself is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. –Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (2013)

Written in 1946 during her time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, 21-year-old Flannery O’Connor penned these words to God in a standard composition notebook. Years later, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published her 24 prayers for the world. O’Connor, a Christian writer, is one of my favorites, and I thought of her words last week as I walked at the nature preserve in the half-hour before dawn. The Supermoon was blindingly bright and so fully present that it consumed the world, filling each moment with incandescent glory. And I gave thanks that my self shadow couldn’t block it, that nothing could block it. I gratefully walked my miles in moonlight.

Again and again, O’Connor prays that she might accept what she perceives to be her spiritual and artistic mediocrity. She laments, If only I could hold God in my mind. If I could only always think of Him.The final prayer in her journal reveals this struggle:

My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a shame. I don’t want any of this artificial feeling stimulated by the choir Today I have proved myself a glutton–for Scotch oatmeal cookes and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

Upon reading this prayer for the first time, I thought: Yes, this is it exactly. I was moved by her struggle with worldly appetites that separated her from God. Here, O’Connor reveals her self shadow as it blocks the whole moon. She concedes that God has given her everything, all the tools, instructions for their use, even a good brain to use them with, a creative brain to make them immediate for others. Yet, she grieves that even as God is feeding her, she lacks a healthy appetite.

O’Connor presents us with fictional characters whose self shadows have no appetite for God. Instead, they insist on feeding themselves, on being their own light, and on trusting human intelligence and understanding. For a time, some believe they’re enlightened; ultimately, however, they find themselves consumed by darkness. They fail to see the price of their own arrogance until it confronts them, often violently. That O’Connor empathized with such characters, seeing her own spiritual struggles in theirs, is evident in her prayer journal where she reveals a raw and ravenous humility. She sees that her self shadow is nothing, and she prays fervently to get out of God’s way.

Through words, art, and music, some succeed–at least for a time–in subduing their self shadows, so that they might stand–stripped of all pretense–before God. They bring us under the Supermoon of His majesty, offering us such gifts as the Psalms, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and the Messiah. They make it possible for us to experience much more than a slim crescent of glory.

As I walked in moonlight last week, I recalled the photo my daughter took several years ago in which my granddaughter appears to hold the moon in her hands. An illusion, certainly, but the effect is powerful. Walking beneath the moon, I could imagine lifting it high into the sky, so my self shadow could never steal its light. I could imagine holding God where my shadow would never cast a sliver of darkness upon Him. Like O’Connor, I lament the many ways in which I get in God’s way. Too often, I find myself repeating the Apostle Paul’s words from Romans 7:15: I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.

There are many writers with whom I’d like to sit down over a cup of coffee. Flannery O’Connor is at the top of this list. But perhaps our time might be better spent without coffee. Perhaps we might walk together in moonlight. And perhaps, rather than converse, we might spend the time in prayer, asking God’s light to increase as our self shadows decrease.

_{“Lucy Barton, the stories you told me, for all that I could tell–had very little point to them. Okay, okay, maybe they had subtle points to them. I don’t know what the point is to this story!”
“People,” Lucy said quietly, leaning back, “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.’
“Exactly,” Olive nodded.} —Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything

In Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, writer Lucy Barton makes weekly visits to 92-year-old Olive Kittredge who lives in a care facility. They meet to share stories. Wasting no time with small talk, one or the other begins with “So, here’s the story.” Both occupy that rare space of being heard. They tolerate each other’s interruptions, for they understand the stories they spin often need clarification and elaboration to make them come fully alive.

When Olive becomes frustrated during one of Lucy’s stories and demands that she reveal the point, Lucy answers: “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.” These are stories of ordinary people living their lives, lives that both women narrate with uncommon care. Throughout this novel, I was struck with the same sentiment that a younger Olive Kittredge once shared: “All these lives,” she said. “All the stories we never know.” (Strout, Olive Kittredge) And I kept thinking how wonderful it would be if everyone’s stories could be told, their lives becoming known in the telling, their stories heard.

For decades when I taught the narrative essay, I was met with collective groans from my students who insisted that nothing important had ever happened to them, that they had no stories to tell. I knew what they were thinking: Hollywood producers would never visit their homes to hear the stories that would become feature films or Netflix mini-series. They were thinking there was no point to the stories they might tell. And yet, like all of us, they did have stories to tell, and their stories were poignant, funny, terrifying, and sad. They were people living their uncommonly common lives.

In this novel, Strout also develops the friendship between Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess, friends who walk frequently, so Bob can smoke his one secret cigarette away from the watchful eyes of his wife, the Unitarian minister. Their friendship is founded on the assurance that each will be heard by the other. Lucy often looks expectantly at Bob and says, “Tell me everything, Bob.” As they pour out their experiences in the intimacy of this friendship, they rest in the assurance they won’t be rushed or judged; they’re confident they’ll be heard. There’s something remarkable about how Lucy and Bob not only invest in each other but in so many others. Throughout their small community, people and their stories are being heard every day.

American author Barry Lopez’s novel, Crow and Weasel, is mythic fable of self-discovery. In it, Lopez contends that sharing stories is a powerful way to care for people:

The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves.

It seems serendipitous that everything I’ve read in the past few months has revealed this truth. In Chris Whitaker’s New York Times best-selling novel, All the Colors of the Dark, the protagonist, Patch, is abducted and held captive with Grace, who’s also been abducted and abused by their captor. Both seek to survive their captivity by telling each other stories so that, though blinded by the abject darkness of their basement cell, they can see these settings and events vividly, as if they’re living lives far from the despair of their imprisonment. After Patch is ultimately freed, he’s obsessed with the girl whose stories sustained him. The words of these stories echo through his memory, compelling him to search for her in hopes that she, too, somehow escaped. For weeks, Grace kept Patch alive, her stories feeding his imagination and fueling his desire to live. These stories, as Lopez says, “have a way of taking care” of people.

In an interview with Book Browse, Elizabeth Strout spoke openly about what she hoped to give her readers:

I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before. . . . I would hope that my readers feel a sense of awe at the quality of human endurance, at the endurance of love in the face of a variety of difficulties; that the quotidian life is not always easy, and is something worthy of respect.

The stories of our lives–of most people’s lives–are generally quotidian. That is, they are stories of ordinary people living their lives. And these lives, as Strout maintains, are often difficult and always worthy of respect. Yet, too often we discount the value and impact of these stories. Too often, we’re not the tell me everything kind of folk, neglecting to take the time and make the space for stories that deserve to be heard. In the sanctuary of such stories, however, we can learn much more about what it means to be human. This is holy ground where the lives of those we love and meet become the stories we remember and revere. Here, we discover heroes and heroines who endure the trials of our shared human condition and fallen world.

And this, as Lucy Barton insists, is the point of every story: though the settings and circumstances are unique (and oh so fascinating!), all people live, love, and endure all sorts of things. This theme is universally human. Although I try not to be discouraged, my years of teaching has given me cause for concern. Generally speaking, my students struggled to actively listen. Fed on a flashy diet of sound bites, Instagram posts, and TikTok videos, they weren’t in shape to listen to anything that took more than a couple minutes to deliver. Truth be told, they didn’t want me to tell them everything; they wanted me to tell them little and tell it quickly, to offer them a Reader’s Digest condensed version on a platter. A story, real or fictional, deserves the time and space to be told well. Most of my students didn’t have the will or skill to hear and read such stories. Regrettably, neither do many adults who often mentally will storytellers to “just get on with it.”

I’m not certain what it would take to ensure that more of us are in shape enough to enter the sanctuary of a good story. The training program, I fear, would be rigorous and time-consuming. Can you imagine meeting with 92-year-old Olive Kittredge or walking with Bob Burgess and setting aside time for them to tell you everything? Can you imagine listening with the same intensity and interest as you give an Audible book, living vicariously through each scene, holding your breath as the action rises, climaxes, and falls, and leaning into what it means to share this human condition? Can you imagine caring for people by hearing and sharing their stories?

Certainly there are those who have recorded and continue to record the life stories of ordinary people. These are the writers, the documentary producers, the journalists, and family members who make these stories available for interested readers and viewers. Through their efforts, I’ve learned about the lives of those who homesteaded the Sandhills of Nebraska, who endured the ghettos and concentration camps of WWII, and who’ve navigated the poverty of Appalachia, India, and so many other places. I’m grateful for these stories which transport me into lives that deserve my attention and respect.

What I’m proposing, however, is something for those of us ordinary people quietly living our lives. I’m hoping that more of us might be like Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess, intentionally making space and time for others’ stories. I’m suggesting that we might be better listeners who help others to feel “heard.” I’m envisioning a world in which more common people recognize the uncommon worth of their life stories. And I’m praying I’ll be patient enough not to grumble about the length of another’s story or its apparent lack of a point, patient and wise enough to remember, “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.”