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Finding Faith

posted by Kate Good on 04/05/10 at 10:05 AM

When I applied to a master's degree program in creative writing several years ago, I submitted as part of my application two short stories with Mennonite characters. I figured these two pieces with faith-related themes might set me apart as an applicant. They did, but not in the way I had hoped.

A few months after I applied, I was sitting at my desk at work when the phone rang.

"We're a little worried about your application," said the director of the creative writing graduate program. "I'm on your side—but other people here are concerned."

 "Okay," I said.

"You're a Mennonite," he said.  

"Yes," I agreed.  

"Yes, well, literature is all about sin," he said.  "And we're not sure that you can handle that."

I can't remember how I convinced him otherwise, but I did spend my entire time in graduate school waiting for that moment of shocking sin he had warned me about. But maybe the man wasn't completely off-base. A lot of literature is about sin. But much of the best writing is also about faith and redemption.  

In a lecture several years ago, the writer Salman Rushdie, who is an atheist, argued that to write honestly about the world we live in, writers must address religion and the sincere faith that many people around the world profess. Plus finding and keeping faith can be great writing material, he said. Few have illustrated that better than the great Southern writer and devout Catholic Flannery O’Connor.

""Grace changes us, and change is painful," O’Connor wrote. She illustrated this excruciating transformation well in her sharp, biting fiction about characters who believed they were following the moral path only to realize that their sense of faith was deeply flawed. In her writing, O’Connor avoids the didactic and instead goes straight for the jugular. Her stories are brutal and painful but laced with shards of grace that push her characters closer to faith.

O’Connor portrays faith as what it is, intangible, fragile, often painful, but astonishingly resilient. Her writing, her insistence on capturing what she called "the truth of faith," pushed me to seek out other writers who write about this faith. I found them everywhere.

I discovered beauty and pain in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s lovely meditation on faith, loneliness, love, doubt, baseball, books and writing. Then I stayed up nights reading Julia Spencer-Flemming's mystery series about Episcopal priest Claire Fergusson and police chief Russ Van Alstyne. If you're quick to rule out a series of books just because they are shelved in the mystery section, reconsider. The plot of these books will keep you reading while Spencer-Flemming’s questions about faith and mortality will keep you thinking.

No genre seems to celebrate the search for religious faith more than memoirs. Anne Lamott has written a fine shelf of books on her discovery of faith as an adult after a particularly turbulent youth and early adulthood. Nevada Barr, the mystery writer, has also chronicled her search for faith in Seeking Enlightenment Hat by Hat. Many of these themes also appear in her bestselling mystery series starting Anna Pigeon.

One of the best books I've read recently was The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance by Elna Baker, a recommendation from my friend Winona.  Baker writes profoundly about holding on to her Mormon faith while working as a stand-up comedian and living in New York City, where people "think I'm a Mormon because I haven't read enough books yet."

She writes honestly about how truly inconvenient faith can be sometimes yet how impossible it can be to shake. "My life," she writes, "is a constant balance between saying no to substances, sex, porn and Starbucks and yes to adventure." Her warm but wry regard for her faith is both inspiring and remarkably honest.

The head of my creative writing department was right. Literature is about sin. But the best literature is also about faith and the lovely, painful and amazing power of grace. Great writing uses stories and images to discuss the themes we live with and pose the questions we struggle with. So it must address sin and redemption, belief and unbelief, doubt and faith. These conversations haven’t been relegated to the dusty tomes of classic literature. Fortunately, many great writers are wrestling with these ideas now. Finding faith, as told by these authors, is never boring. Instead it is a violent, fascinating, wrenching and redeeming process that makes for some great storytelling.

Good_kate Kate Good lives in Lancaster City, Pa.  She is a member of Blossom Hill Mennonite Church, Lancaster. She is assistant publisher at Good Books.

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