Where have all the stories gone? Or where is my strength to tell them? Do I see only events and not the meaning stringing them together, dancing in between like giddy fireflies? Do I no longer read the tea leaves? Or look to the stars for something new? The announcement.
The wooden table at which I sit is covered by rings left by mugs and bottles and glasses, light near-circles in the tan series of two-inch strips of smooth, mismatched grain that make this table. The oily smears left by dishes set just out of the gas oven and upon the bare wood for a feast of who can remember what. I can. I can trace mornings and nights of my own life in the various marks across the surface before me. Some of them I am not consciously acquainted with, but they are there. Like, last week I sat down for a little grooming, and when I went to trim my toenails, the toenail on my left littlest piggy almost came off in my fingers. There was no pain at all. I was surprised. It was just hardly connected to me at all. I could not tell you when I could possibly have done enough trauma to it to make it ready to fall off like that, although there must have been a story there somewhere. This table too - I don't know all of the stories; I am sure they are there. I see evidence of it.
I come more and more to view my own body, and then, my own life this way. The Petit Prince on my back flying through the unknown stars holding tight to a tethering of des ouiseaux sauvages - wild birds. The pinkish strip of flesh on the inside of my right arm where I burnt it cooking. My right shin where I slipped in a Starbucks and bled a lot. The mark under my lower lip usually covered by my scruffy beard but visible when I make a certain face, where I fell down the stairs of my grandmother's old house with a bottle in my mouth not much more than a year old and warranting a couple of stitches. I see the scars as well as the tattoo across much of my back and briefly understand how I cannot choose all of the marks that will be upon me. I haven't chosen nearly any of them, but they are there. Telling me a story like rings on a tree - this was the year there was a fire, this here a drought, this a terrific snow and this so much a year of plenty. Do you remember? Do you see it? The world around me and also me in it carry the story of everything that's happened. That's not archeology; it's just living.
This has been some kind of year. Five addresses in just barely more than a year's time. Different cities, countries. Three deaths since May, the most recent just last week. And this is not nearly enough to describe the story it has been to live it and all else. I see it all not stoically but maybe more like somebody reading a book, one I appear in, though it is not really my own. There is some other story being writ, and I'm on the edge of my seat as much as anybody. And it makes each day an amazing thing to wake up to. The maxim is that Wisdom is Knowledge perfected through Suffering. I can see how the Lord is a gracious yet fearless storyteller. Just as I find meaning and guidance in the near-absence of my little toenail (remember where you placed your bedside table when you rise at 4am to pee), these marks which rarely carry physical pain do carry a story like a fire that is taken from place to place in warmth to set up camp.
Which reminds me: a couple of years ago, my brother Tim and I went camping in the highlands of Virginia to spend some time together before I moved away to Lyon, France. Neither of us is much an experienced outdoorsman, but neither is either of us the sort to readily admit that he doesn't have much to rest his principles on when building a fire at night. (Just ask my roommate Jeremy, as we have a fireplace in our house. There still sit barely-charred logs in the hearth that I can't seem to get to catch reliably on fire...) Tim and I went about working very hard and concentrated-like as if there was great and focused purpose in every pain we took. We didn't speak much if I remember it. We set up all kinds of complex architectures within the circle of stones in front of where we'd pitched our tent in the afternoon mountain sun, and as the light was fading unforeseen fast, we succeeded in making so great and satisfying a conflagration that before long we couldn't help but start to remark to each other on its size and warmth and what else you can say about a fire, doing less and less to hide how impressed with ourselves we really were. We sat for some time before the flames, periodically stripping both the standing and felled trees around us of their dead limbs, venturing forth with headlamps to find what brush and sticks we could lying in the ungrazed grasses. Then out of the moonless dark emerged a middle-aged lady and two children, a boy and a girl. She greeted us in a strong voice and a little out of breathe, pacing her company on over to our fire with a walking staff in her hand. She explained, unremarkably, that her boyfriend had grown annoyed over something or other and wandered off in the dark without a light, and now was separated and lost. She asked if we'd mind keeping the children while she went off to find him. I don't remember exactly consenting, it happened fast, but we must have because in another moment she was instructing them to sit and wait with us and then she passed out of the light of the fire and was quietly gone. It seemed to be some kind of a situation, and the kids weren't emoting or anything, so I wasn't sure whether to talk to them in comfort or just leave them be. I tried to chat with Tim, which we hadn't been doing in the quiet and peace of the night, but I wanted the kids to hear us talking and maybe discover something about us that way that might assure them that they were safe in our company. In retrospect, maybe they weren't even wondering at all. It was enough time to make me wonder before the woman returned with her boyfriend, of whom I remember very little other than how admiringly he remarked upon our fire and how a person could see the light of it all the way down and across the valley. Apparently it had helped to guide him back in. He sounded relieved.
I think about that. Two brothers who maybe didn't have a pocketknife between them building a fire to bring back safe somebody with enough sense to have a walking stick but not a flashlight with them. I marvel at it. We weren't writing our story. We were being written in it, and isn't it just like the Lord to give us light bright enough to shine into the darkened valley for the good sake of some other similarly flawed and prideful traveller. And we thought it was for us.
In the Hagakure, or The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo recounted long ago a story wherein "there was a council concerning the promotion of a certain man, [and] the council members were at the point of deciding that promotion was useless because of the fact that the man had previously been involved in a drunken brawl. But someone said, 'If we were to cast aside every man who had made a mistake once, useful men could probably not be come by. A man who makes a mistake once will be considerably more prudent and useful because of his repentance. I feel that he should be promoted.'
"Someone else then asked, 'Will you guarantee him?'
"The man replied, 'Of course I will.'
"The other asked, 'By what will you guarantee him?'
"And he replied, 'I can guarantee him by the fact that he is a man who has erred once. A man who has never once erred is dangerous.' This said, the man was promoted."
I'm constantly pulling price tags and labels off of things. I'm constantly prying answers from near-strangers to questions that only friends would think or like to ask or have asked of them. I want the underneath of the world and it's people. I want everything undressed and simple and exactly what it is for the love and honesty in it. Nothing to hide because that's not what we want from living or from even the Lord of it. There is nothing to hide but the very light we have been given by our scars and by our stories, and by the grace of God. I squint determinedly into everybody's eyes to see that holy, rough and tumble light. I long for it. Maybe I'll see it and get somehow across this midnight valley into the company of brothers and sisters who ought not either be alone. Maybe this is why I tell stories (my roommates have come to expect me sitting down before them saying, "I want to read you something") and why I'm asking you to tell your own every blessed time you're around. The Lord is there, and I don't usually see it but in the telling. Just as, I do not feel the warmth of the fire except in building a fire that I cannot keep from burning so bright and just long enough to be spotted and approached.
Come to this table that the Lord has prepared, and make a mark on it. Not something you'd called a pretty mark - and neat and sensible mark. Rather a mark by the bowl of bread from the oven that we'll break (the bread that is, not the oven). A ring by the glasses of wine that we will share. Our lives marked by the grace of this communion, and I'll understand at last why the apostles referred to us all as The Body. It looks so very much like my own.
