It was a yellow day

It was a yellow day,

the light slanted

with its yellow scent.

She followed him as

he walked through

dirty streets, asking

him to come home,

no more drugs

no more drugs

to the baby they created,

to the baby she was holding.

no more drugs

no more drugs

A turn; his angry eye

silenced her, just as the bullets

tore through their bodies.

Last Sunday, we heard a sermon by the director of a street outreach ministry in Honduras. This poem, and the one yesterday (The photograph) are based on a true story. If you’d like to learn more, please visit The Micah Project.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The photograph

It is the only photograph

he has of her, his mother,

and not a real photograph but

instead a poor reproduction

printed in a cheap newspaper

the day after she died

(“unidentified woman found

shot to death”) in a bullet

storm that passes for gang

justice. He looks at the body

in the photograph, bullet-spackled,

the photograph folded and creased,

fading, tucked within small plastic.

He can’t remember her voice but

he can remember the sound

of the bullets.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

I Almost Didn’t Read Faulkner

My introduction to the writing of William Faulkner was indirect. It began in college and almost didn’t survive college.

Way back when, sophomores at LSU were required to take two semesters of English – American or English. The vast majority took English 55 and 56, American literature. English majors were required to take English 51 and 52, English literature, instead. I wasn’t an English major, but I opted for 51 and 52 (likely influenced by what I learned with my high school English teachers). We had small, rather serious classes, compared to the auditoriums overflowing with students taking 55 and 56.

At some point, early in my sophomore year, I became the unofficial English tutor for my fraternity. That meant helping pledges (and actives) prepare for tests, helping explain assignments, and reading papers.

Every sophomore at LSU who took English 56 had to write a paper on “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner. At the fraternity, that meant anywhere from 30 to 40 papers.

I came to hate that story. I came to hate reading about it, and reading a lot of really bad papers about it. One of the worst experiences I had was to see yet another fraternity member standing at the door of my room, paper in hand, smiling hopefully.

I didn’t look at anything with Faulkner’s name on it for more than a decade after college.

In 1983, I enrolled in a master’s program at Washington University in St. Louis, managing to balance one course per semester with work and family. Early on, I took a course called “the Nature of Story.” The required reading list included Faulkner.

I initially clutched, still haunted by reading those papers. Fortunately, the work wasn’t “Barn Burning.” It was The Sound and the Fury. I decided to plow through it, expecting to be gritting my teeth.

It was difficult, confusing, and a work that had to be read slowly and carefully. We had exactly one week to read it, and I think I used the entire week.

I loved it.

“Barn Burning” burnout was over.

I began to read other works by Faulkner. I took about master’s course on the Latin American novel, and discovered the authors that Faulkner had had a powerful influence on – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes (Faulkner is the patron saint of “magic realism”).

I read almost everything written by those authors, and continued to read Faulkner. Last month, I was in New Orleans, and visited the Faulkner Book House in the French Quarter, the building where Faulkner lived for six months in 1925. And there I learned that before he wrote novels, Faulkner considered himself primarily a poet, and had actually published a book of poetry shortly before he moved to New Orleans.

I just finished reading the one novel of his that I had never read before, Soldier’s Pay, his first novel and the one he wrote during those six months in New Orleans. More on that next week, but I can say that it is both a first novel and a definite foreshadowing of what was to come with the novels that transformed American (and world) literature.

This week, I wrote about the Faulkner Book House for Tweetspeak Poetry. Go take a look. If you leave a comment, your name is in the hat for a giveaway of Faulkner’s New Orleans Sketches. 

And, no, the sketches do not include “Barn Burning.” If you want to read it, and I still don’t, you can find it here. (Or you can get hold of the movie “The Long Hot Summer” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; “Barn Burning” is condensed into one mercifully short scene.)

Not your offerings

It is not your offerings

I want; not your wealth

or time; not your professions

or songs; none of these

do I want, for all fall

short of the glory. I do not

want you to do justice,

or to love mercy or to walk

humbly.

I want you to be justice,

I want you to be mercy.

I want you to be the humble walk.

I want you to be.

I want you.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Mustard Seed

It’s one of the famous sayings of Jesus, that he tells his disciples about having faith as “a mustard seed.” In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge notes the familiar characteristics of a mustard seed that do much to explain what Jesus meant when he used the metaphor.

It is a very tiny seed, Sorge says. “It grows very quickly and quite tall. Being an annual herb, it has striking growth – some plants will grow as high as twelve feet in a matter of weeks.” And I would add one more: the flower of the mustard plant is beautiful (as shown in the photo above).

Faith, like a mustard seed, can grow. It can grow quickly. It can grow large.

And because it is an annual herb, it has a season, like a life has a season. It’s created, born, flourishes for a set time, and then declines, ultimately ending in death. Death s a part of the natural order of life.

I’ve been pondering this idea of seasons lately for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the recent death and burial of my mother. She was 90; she had lived a long life. Her seasons had come and were finally gone. From dust to dust.

My father died some 27 years ago, and the passing of my mother means more than just being without parents. It means I’m coming to assume the place of my grandparents. My father’s mother was the same age I am now when I was born. My mother’s mother was 10 years older. I never knew either of my grandfathers.

I am now of their generation. It’s an odd feeling, and yet it’s part of the natural order of life.

I think about my grandmothers and this question of faith. My mother’s mother was a staunch Lutheran, as was my mother. My father’s mother, the one I closest to, was a staunch Southern Baptist (my father was not). The story of my two grandmothers’ faith, or faiths, is part of that mustard seed understanding. In ways that perhaps even they didn’t know, they contributed to my faith. Just like, in ways I may not even know, I’m contributing to the faith of my two little grandsons.

Mustard seed faith grows large and can occupy a lot of space.

And it is something that can be quite beautiful.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers. This discussion of the chapter “Don’t Cast Away Your Confidence” concludes the discussion of the book. To see more posts on this chapter, please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Morena Sangiorgio via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Literary Tour: Faulkner House Books, New Orleans

In 1925 New Orleans, it was called Orleans Alley, more a broad walkway from Chartres Street and Jackson Square to Royal Street. On the east side of the alley was St. Louis Cathderal. On the west side was the Cabildo and then a group of three-story townhouses built on what had been part of the Cabildo’s jail yard. The Cabildo was the government building from which the Spanish (1767-1803) administered the territory of Louisiana (what would later be known as the Louisiana Purchase).

Today, it walkway is known as Pirate’s Alley, renamed not because pirates haunted the area but more because this was the place where pirates, including Jean Lafitte, were often jailed (Cabildo tours include the jail area, but it’s much changed from the original).

It was in one of those townhouses, 624 Pirates Alley, that a young writer from Mississippi lived for six months in 1925. He lived in the first-floor apartment; upstairs was an artist named William Spratling who did work for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The writer lived there only six months, but it was sufficient to launch his literary career.

The writer was William Faulkner; during those six months of 1925, he wrote character sketches for the Times-Picayune; likely some poetry; and the draft of his first novel, Soldier’s Pay.

To Continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Interior of Faulkner House Books, New Orleans.

Donald Miller: The Gospel Medium is Also the Message

This is a revised version of an article that was first published at Christian Manifesto.

I first heard of Donald Miller during his cross-country promotional tour for A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life. References kept popping up on blogs and on Twitter, so I checked his web site, not sure what I might find.

What I found was the gospel, but presented, talked about and spoken in an entirely new way, or at least entirely new for this mostly conservative transplanted Southerner in the Midwest. I also found Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality, Miller’s earlier work (2003) that sold more than a million copies. He’s written other books, but it’s Blue Like Jazz and A Million Miles that I read together, and it’s those two that fit together as companion pieces of a life.

Miller tells a story in Blue Like Jazz about how he never liked jazz music – until he heard someone who really loved it play it. Then he understood. More than that, he also understood that really loving something was the most direct way of communicating that something. Like the gospel message. “Too much of our time,” he says, “is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. Bu reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.”

And it is that wonder that Miller strives to communicate in Blue Like Jazz, and he succeeds. He tells the gospel message through the story of his life: the abandonment of his family by his father; his struggle to find his own way; his experiences at Reed College in Portland, Ore., and unorthodox institution by just about anyone’s standards; even his (lack of) serious relationships. Donald  Miller’s life becomes the medium through which he tells the gospel story.

And it works.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years goes further. Miller is contacted by two filmmakers from Nashville who want to make a movie of Blue Like Jazz, and since he’s going to be deeply involved in the script himself, Miller has to learn how to write one. He takes a seminar from Robert McKee, author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting who teaches a legendary screenwriting seminar.

What Miller does is to adapt the principles of screenwriting as a way to tell his life story – and telling his life story is a way to speak, or live, the gospel message. He also discovers that he can deliberately choose to change his life story – rewrite the screenplay, so to speak. And that’s what he does. So we travel with him as his takes a bike ride – across America. And we sit with him when he finally meets the father he hasn’t seen for almost 30 years, because Miller chose to change the story and not consider himself a victim of abandonment.

He’s changed his original blog site; it’s now called Storyline and includes posts by guest writers like Alison Vesterfelt, Darrell Vesterfelt (Alison’s husband and director of marketing for Storyline), Joshua Becker, and Scott McClellan. Miller is still writing posts, and the site still bears his distinctive stamp – the Sunday morning sermon feature is just as likely to be a TedX talk as an actual sermon. But that’s a part of what Miller is up to here – engaging the culture, finding God in the culture (even when the culture might disagree), and aiming at a Millennial to late Gen X audience.

Miller has also developed an extensive speaking program, an online video course for creating a life plan, a small group study guide, and other resources.

Miller is still about telling stories. And he tells good stories because he considers his life to be a good story – and a medium for telling the story of the gospel.