The Better Story 17 comments

By Kelly Foster

[Note: This post contains a “spoiler” for the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel.]

I am too credulous to entertain much religious doubt.

I say that neither as a slam against myself nor as a compliment.

Like so many things in life, my faith just is. I have brilliant friends who, when confronted with the same stimuli as myself, find that they cannot believe in God. I don’t think the fact that I interpret the data differently either makes me inherently smarter or dumber than them. I don’t primarily ascribe faith to intellect.

Suffering happens. People die. Husbands cheat. Children go hungry. Governments disappoint. Sickness comes at the worst times. Our bodies fail us. When we most need friends, we go unseen and unheard.

And yet, somehow, underneath the bedrock of fear and agony, and underneath the banal repetitions of anxiety, of cruelty, of self-excoriation, I believe that there is a God. That somehow, somewhere, sometime, God puts things to rights.

It may seem too late for me. It may seem too late for others. But somehow, suffering doesn’t get the final word. Somehow the narrative is not shaped primarily by agony, but by good—that not just the end of the story, but also its middle has some redemptive possibility.

When bad things happen to me, I am usually content to blame myself, even though I recognize both the futility and the hubris of such a stance. I made a bad choice. I should have looked both ways. I should have known. I should have tried harder. I should have been less difficult. I should have been more kind. I should have been more honest.

The day before I left my husband, a man I knew had been repeatedly unfaithful to me, I found myself reading a book about jealousy, about trying not to be too possessive—as if my jealousy was what had driven him away.

So God’s never needed to be my scapegoat. I’ll serve just fine in a pinch.

I suppose it makes a certain kind of gritty Puritan sense then, that in the months following my divorce, following quitting graduate school, following leaving my dream of life in Chicago, following a move back to Mississippi to live at twenty six with my parents, that I plastered my old bathroom cabinet there with Old Testament verses. I found the Minor Prophets made good company—Nahum, Amos, Micah.

And then there was Habakkuk, “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.”

And there was my old friend Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him.”

Faith was less about choice and more about necessity. My reality then, as it has been since with more frequency than I’d like, was utterly barren. I felt both ugly and invisible. I felt both garish and mousy. I woke up, went to a part-time job at a bank, came home to watch sitcoms in my brothers’ old bedroom, and then fell asleep reading books about codependency.

I did not need to or want to hear that God was going to make things better. I knew he might not. You can’t just wash Calvinist off.

Instead, I wanted simply to know that I, that mousy, ordinary, sad I could choose to believe that my aloneness had some kind of beautiful purpose, even if I never knew what it was.

If that’s naïve, it’s hard won. And it’s saved me on days I lacked the will to move.

I spent so many years of my life arguing theology, arguing apologetics—crafting elaborate defenses of the reasonableness of God’s existence, crafting elaborate defenses of the reasonableness of faith. I used to be horrified by anecdotes like the one I am about to relay to you. I’m not sure why I’m not anymore. Maybe I just got tired.

In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, a book I just finished looking at with my ninth graders, the titular character tells two very different stories about how he survived on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days. In one story, he is alone with a Bengal tiger that he is forced to tame. In the other, he watches his mother slain and eaten by the ship’s cook. After reciting both these stories to Japanese investigators who come to inquire why the ship sank, he finds that neither of the men believes either version of his tale.

He then asks them, “So which is the better story? The one with the animals or the one without the animals?”

They answer him that the better story is the one with the animals.

“And so it is with God,” he responds.

If I allow myself, I begin mentally to dismantle this argument, the terrible desperation of it, but something about it resonates with me despite myself. Though I ordinarily hold my personal belief cards, as it were, pretty close to my teacherly chest, I found myself growing passionate as we approached this passage last week.

We know only a very few things in this life, I found myself saying to my students. We will be born. We will die. In between we will love and we will suffer. Sometimes the choice will be less about what’s true and false and more about what’s better and worse. What you can live with and what you can’t.

So I’ll believe. I feel my feet crunch against the spent summer grass—even if it does not come back, even if he slay me, and even if the fig tree does not bud.

Yes, I’ll believe.