I’ve been trying to solve a narrative puzzle in one of my manuscripts for quite some time. I’m 90,000+ words into the drama and dire things are afoot, but I haven’t figured out what to do with one particular character and this has put the brakes on all my progress (such as it is). What to do with the old man? I ask myself this question day in, day out, while I fiddle about the edges of the story, bedazzling the language with adjectives I will no doubt have to savagely edit out in a later draft. But what to do with the old man? It’s the question that plagues my thoughts.
Given that I’ve been in this holding pattern for quite some time, you’d think that when inspiration struck the other night as I was waiting for sleep to come, that I would have bolted out of bed and written it down. Aha! Eureka! Old man problem solved at long last! You might think that, but you would have been wrong. Morgan—as I condescendingly refer to myself when dealing with the personal attributes I find frustrating—Morgan thought, “I’ll remember and do it in the morning.”
Of course I didn’t remember. Of course I don’t even have a sliver of the slightest indication of what I was going to do with the old man. And so, now I sit, berating my lethargy in a blog post instead of working on the manuscript that is somehow ballooning into a series against all my wishes.
If only I hadn’t fallen asleep.
I feel like I’m always falling asleep when the plot is thickening; dropping out of consciousness at the most inopportune times only to emerge groggy and incoherent days later as though I’ve gone on some existential bender that I can’t quite remember. And not just regarding the fictional plots that I am working on, but the actual plot that I am in, as well. Questions flood my not-quite-firing synapses as I find myself looking blearily about. “Wasn’t God saying something to me? I feel like He was saying something to me that I shouldn’t have forgotten…”
It’s one thing to forget what to do with the fictional old man. It’s quite another to forget what the Son of Man has said. I’m not the first to feel this way;—that there is something terribly important to remember that is slipping past my fingertips. I am like Jill Pole in C.S Lewis’s The Silver Chair who was given important signs to look for from Aslan when she first arrives in Narnia, but the further into the adventure she goes, the fuzzier the details become. Were there four signs? Oh dear, oh dear…
Jill forgets and I fall asleep.
At times it seems that God speaks so clearly—He even gets me to repeat things over and over like Aslan instructed Jill, so that muscle memorization might save my faulty consciousness. But somehow even so, the lesser things of daily life drive the words from my mind. I think I won’t forget, but I do. I’ll happen across an old journal entry or a half-written blog post and find the echoes of an old conversation with God and I remember with a pang. It had been so clear, and now I can’t find the notes to the tune.
The atmosphere of the world that we all live in is soporific. It lulls us into a somnolent daze—like Dorothy and her Ozian friends in the bewitched field of poppies—we lay down for a moment and wake to find the world has changed and time is shorter than ever.
Dorothy wakes to the cold of snow falling, whereas I’ve woken to a world afire with fear of a virus. The media preaches panic. More than ever social media has revealed itself as an aggressive exchange of mutual ignorance. Now—more than ever—it is time to unplug from the collective wisdom of the world. The situation is no doubt serious, and serious situations have a way of bringing us all to full consciousness.
It is hard to stay sleepy when an alarm is blaring and the earth is shaking.
The thing is, the alarm that is blaring for me is not a warning about the danger of coronavirus. Sure, I’ll follow the measures that my local jurisdiction has enacted, but the alert that is sounding in my spirit isn’t about the spread of a disease. Instead, it is a call to faith. It is akin to the bugle call that summons the soldiers to the battle field, rather than a fire alarm that clears a building.
A summons to fight the good fight of faith is different than the warning a fire alarm. Those with no weapons, or training, or will to fight, will flee an oncoming battle at the trilling of the bugle, while those who are prepared will make themselves ready and show up to contend with the enemy for victory.
This is one of those moments when we wake up to the reality that our theology must become more than an intellectual adherence to a set of Christian doctrines. This is the bugle call to the spiritual battlefield of faith. And while for some that battlefield will take place in physical terms in facing sickness. For most of us, however, it will manifest in the realm of our thoughts. What do we really believe? Is it just a nice symbolic thought that God is our refuge in times of trouble? That He will protect us from the deadly pestilence as Psalm 91 proclaims? Or do we regard that as foolhardy and view the promises of faith as valid only in an abstract spiritual sense; possibly to only be cashed in on after death?
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits.” (Proverbs 18:21)
This verse has come to mind so many times as I scroll through the headlines hoping to catch a glimpse of the horizon on this pandemic. But I had it backwards. I kept thinking it said “Life and death” not, “Death and life.” Oh well, same meaning, isn’t it? And yes, I suppose it is, but a writer puts words together with care and that order is not indifferent to the intended meaning. Death comes first for a reason. Death comes first because that is our natural inclination in speech. We talk about what goes wrong. We discuss the mistakes and screw ups long before we add the addendum of what worked out—; that is, if we remember to mention the good at all.
Death comes first because it is the curse that needs lifting. Life follows it because it has the strength to undo the curse. At risk of going back to the same trope over and over, remember the uninvited fairy in the original fairytale of Sleeping Beauty who cursed the infant princess with death upon touching the spindle of a spinning wheel? The evil fairy sought that her pronouncement of death upon the princess would be the last word, but there was one small fairy left with a blessing of life to offer.
Death comes first because it is swallowed up by life, not the other way around. The proclamations of death are overwhelmed by the words of Life that follow. Jesus stunned His followers with a hard teaching and watched them all recoil and drift away. He then asked the Twelve if they would leave Him, too. And, Peter, in a shining moment responded, “Where are we to go? You have the words of Life.”
Death is swallowed by the words of Life. It's time to wake up and speak.
