You avoid forcing your characters to march too steadily to the drumbeat of your artistic purpose. You leave some measure of real freedom for your characters to be themselves. And if minor characters show an inclination to become major characters, as they’re apt to do, you at least give them a shot at it, because in the world of fiction it may take many pages before you find out who the major characters really are, just as in the real world it may take you many years to find out that the stranger you talked to once for half an hour in the railroad station may have done more to point you to where your true homeland lies than your priest or your best friend or even your psychiatrist.

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Fellow traveler let me take you to a place where I’ve found rest
Fellow seeker let me show you where I’ve found true happiness
Fellow beggar I have good news, I know where there is bread

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From Homer, who never omits to tells us that the ships were black and the sea salty, or even wet, down to Eliot with his ‘hollow valley’ and ‘multifoliate rose,’ poets are always telling us that grass is green, or thunder loud, or lips red. This is the most remarkable of the powers of poetic language: to convey to us the quality of experiences.

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Continued from this post: My Sister, Daniel Boone

Further up and further in! The cry comes from Lewis’s finale in Narnia as Aslan’s faithful race deeper into a redeemed landscape.  They race along a sort of spiritual frontier propelled by one belief: There is more.  The same conviction inspires my sister as she travels the world.  There is more.  It’s human nature to sweep that truth under a rug inscribed “Home Sweet Home”.  We settle for less, relax in the comfortable.  The professional field of education is a great example.  I attend professional growth conferences and watch veteran teachers duck out consistently throughout the day.  Sometimes by lunchtime, numbers have fallen by fifty percent.  Teachers, entrenched in their own system, exchange the opportunity for growth with the chance for a free afternoon.  Don’t get me wrong, many times I’ve counted the droplets of condensation on the Hyatt water glass.  But the mindset to settle scares me.  On the grand scale, any business system that allows employees to attain tenure risks the return of complacency.

Go for more.  These words rose up in my heart a few weeks back.  I took inventory of my life.  For the first time in years, I had not moved locations or jobs.  I had accumulated more and more Polos, furniture, and gadgets.  As I judged the exterior of my life, I began to worry that I’d settled into the white picket fence and 2.5 kids.  Might evil lull us to sleep in the crib of contentment?  That was my fear.  Go for more.  The message applied to the interior, and it combated the subtle whisper that I’d experienced all God had to give.  Theologically that sounds crazy.  Realistically and practically, though, count the spiritually dormant lives.

There is more.

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The best gift I can give somebody is how do I take what’s insecure and help it relax and feel secure so that I can discover who that person is in there, really.  I’ve never done that with and for someone that I didn’t end up absolutely enthralled with what I saw inside of them.

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Humankind is addicted to stories. No matter our mood, in reverie or expectation, panic or peace, we can be found stringing together incidents, and unfolding episodes. We turn our pain into narrative so we can bear it; we turn our ecstasy into narrative so we can prolong it. We tell our stories to live.

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In my life, I’ve always wanted to get a group of men together who have a common thought, common goal.  I don’t care who they are.  But if those men can come together, check their egos at the door and honestly care about each other for more than what they do on the field, I think something very special can be created.

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My sister walked in Ghana today.  A week ago she explored the streets and mosques of Morocco.  Before that she sipped sangria and danced the Flamenco through Spain, stopping to see a cathedral or ten.  She will venture to seven more countries before mid-December when her Semester at Sea completes its circle of the globe.  I’ve lived vicariously through her travel blog and sporadic Skype calls.  She inspires me with her insatiable efforts to press the boundaries of her experience.  Her blog lists some of her life goals: study at Oxford, take seminary classes in Israel, wander Italy, master the Spanish language, take voice lessons, and travel the world (a rather ambiguous goal that resists limits in its essence).  Did I mention she spent her summer serving in Nicaragua?  She looks at a map like a boy views the tree line beyond the backyard: penetrable frontier.

Her life challenges me to look inward.  I want my heart to see God like she perceives the globe.

Further thoughts to come…

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I begin every class with background music from a selected soundtrack.  Music captures the power of a story and allows us to relive it long after the credits roll.  On my morning drive, the Broadway recording of Wicked continues to arrest my soul to a captivity of wonderment.  I hope my students depart class with an appreciation for the vast number of stories that lurk in and around them and a hunger to further explore narratives.  This means broadening their perspective on the channels of stories.  Hence, the avenue of music.

Each day the students enjoy taking guesses to identify each week’s soundtrack, and I begin offering hints on Tuesdays.  Irish football fanatics would smile at the glorious playing of Rudy this week, the legendary account of the not-so-intimidating student that walked on at Notre Dame.  This morning the students bombarded me with pressure to reveal the movie title.  I offered this hint, thinking it was almost a sheer giveaway (two other classes shouted “Rudy!” before I could take in another breath), “This movie ends with a bunch of people chanting a character’s name.”

“What?!” an exceptionally intellectual 6^th grade boy that reads on a forty year-old level exclaimed, “A quarter of the movies in the world end like that!”

“Yeah, even Chinese movies,” added the girl in front of him before chanting, “Ching Chang, Ching Chang, Ching Chang!”

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Your lives are busy, useful, honest; but your faces are anxious and you are not all that you want to be. There is within you another life, a buried life, which does not go free.

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