Praying for a Home: Some Thoughts on Writing and God

Elizabeth Dewberry

IN 1990, when my first novel, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died, was published, my mother asked me how I knew so much about abuse. I answered her honestly: "I don't know."

At the time I was writing an abortive novel called The Last Southern Gentleman about a dysfunctional family whose disintegration was being caused by and paralleled by the dissolution of the family business. I only later came to realize that the novel was in some ways about my own family and that the missing emotional core of that novel was my grandfather. He was the patriarch of our family, its emotional and financial center, the founder and president of our family business, and to a large extent the person who most shaped and controlled our lives. For reasons I couldn't explain at the time, I had left him out of the story. The novel also contained no information about the childhoods of any of its characters, mostly because what I could say about their childhoods didn't begin to explain who they were as adults and so didn't seem relevant.

My editor and my agent read the novel and told me in different ways that it needed something, but neither they nor I could figure out what that something was. So I put the novel aside and, again for reasons I didn't understand at the time, started writing a novel called Break the Heart of Me about a twelve-year-old girl who murders the grandfather who has molested her.

Slowly, as I listened to that character's anger and pain and affirmed her right both to feel and to express it, I began to understand my own memories of molestation at the hands of my grandfather. I do not know when I was first abused, nor when I had the first memory of it. I don't think I ever really forgot it, but I never named it either. I know that by the time I began to think of my memories as memories of abuse, rather than ideas for stories or strange imaginings of a mind I didn't trust, I had been remembering the abuse, and trying to ignore it, for years.

That a person who loved you—and at that time and for some years later I believed my grandfather loved me—and to believe that any person who loved you could also violate you in such a way is almost unthinkable. To believe both things you have to hold completely contradictory notions in your mind, and your mind is confused enough by that point. To believe God loves you and would let such a thing happen to you is at least as difficult.

By the time I finished writing Break the Heart of Me I had lost a lot of weight. I was down to under 100 pounds and my hair was falling out. It's just recently started coming back. I have one-and-a-half-inch-long hairs all over my head and I pull them forward in the mirror and with delight watch them grow. I'd lost my sense of smell and I was losing my sense of hearing and my sense of touch. I could be standing over a burning pot and not smell it; I could turn over bacon in a frying pan with my bare hands. I wasn't writing anything worth reading, anything true. I was shutting off the lights, one by one, and the way an artist puts out the lights of her soul is by closing off her senses.

The plots of Break the Heart of Me are fictional, but the emotional core of it, the anger and the abuse and the healing from it, are not, and after I'd found for my narrator physical and spiritual healing, which I think has something to do with grace, I had to do the same thing for myself. I went back to my childhood and identified the harmful baggage I'd been carrying around for the past thirty years and tried to lay it down. I eventually ended my relationship with my grandfather and divorced the abusive husband who had urged me not to end my relationship with my grandfather because it would mean being disinherited. And I married Robert Olen Butler (the author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain and other books), a man whose capacity to write beautifully powerful stories is matched only by his capacity to love.

Soon after we got together, Bob and I went to the Ozarks because I needed some time in a quiet place, remote and beautiful and unfamiliar and safe. One afternoon as cool autumn shadows were just beginning to gather, we sat on a stone bench in Mountain View and he held me and I pressed my face against his chest and families came together in the town square to play their banjos and fiddles and we heard them singing and clapping and we knew children were dancing in circles under the evergreens and I could hear his heart beating and I said, "Your shirt smells good." And we laughed in delight at the good scent in those wonderfully strange mountains that had brought me back to my senses and so back to my art and we knew our love was healing us both, making us whole. And we knew we would spend the rest of our lives together and that living together in the safe place created by our love would make it possible to continue to visit the frightening places our writing requires us to explore. And we walked toward the music and the people and I could smell barbecue and chrysanthemums and pavement and things I couldn't name and I kept smelling his wonderful shirt and feeling something open up inside me, letting stories back in.

And from that safe place, and because I couldn't and didn't want to divorce myself from my whole childhood, I began to search for things I'd left behind but could now salvage and even value. As I did so I learned something about redemption.

One of the things I discovered about myself in that process is how I came to the reverence for words and stories that all writers have to some extent or another. My parents were devout evangelicals when I was a child, and I was educated from kindergarten to twelfth grade in a very conservative church school where we were required to memorize Scripture. Almost everyone I knew expressed themselves with biblical language, using biblical metaphors and echoing the rhythms of the Psalms and the Beatitudes in their everyday speech. I remember memorizing the first verse of Genesis ("In the beginning God created...") and the first verse of John ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God") and thinking, "Well, which was it?" I still find the connection between God and creativity and words and beginnings fascinating and contradictory and ultimately mysterious. So I remember being very young, four or five maybe, and having a clear sense that language, the language of prayers, sermons, and hymns, was what connected us to God. It was words—"Let there be light"—that God used to create the world, and certain other words were sins to say. Words could be blasphemous, they could be holy, but they were never inconsequential.

From Psalm 19, which I had memorized at one point: "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world....Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer."

I learned as a child that it was through stories, specifically Bible stories, that we come to know God and begin to understand his world. Stories contained wonder and horror—the creation of the world, its destruction in a flood, families at war with each other, men trying, and failing, to run away from God, and one of my personal favorites, a woman who turned into a pillar of salt. Stories are where miracles happen, where the everyday is juxtaposed with the divine, absurdity with truth, myth with fact, fear with joy.

My mother taught Sunday school, and I used to play with her flannel-board characters, retelling my favorite Bible stories to myself over and over, trying to ignore the resemblance between the boy whose lunch Jesus fed to the five thousand and Betsy McCall, the paper doll who appeared every month with a new cut-out dress in my grandmother's McCall's magazine. My mother also had a set of flannel-board fairy tales, and although each story started out in its own envelope, eventually all the figures got mixed up together in one shoe box and I started making up new stories: "The Seven Dwarves Meet Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Lion's Den," "Whale Tosses Prince Charming onto Shores of Garden of Eden," "Mama and Papa Bear Try to Sneak Baby onto Ark." I told those stories out loud, but only in my room, alone, with the door closed, whispering. On some level, I knew even then that telling stories, making them up, is subversive, but now I think all stories, or at least all my stories, at their best, are also redemptive. They use language to celebrate the presence of divine mystery in everyday life, to transform pain into beauty and chaos into meaning.

I think it's significant that when Jesus tried to explain the nature of God, he used stories, and that when his disciples asked him to interpret the stories, he often refused. Stories come from the unconscious, the nonrational parts of our brain. Faith, "the evidence of things not seen," comes from the same place. Interpretations come from the conscious, rational parts. So art—by its very nature—cannot be written for the purpose of demonstrating a preconceived idea, even a religious or spiritual one. It must tell the ineffable truth about the human experience.

The artist therefore has to be willing to go into that place in her soul which is so deep and so dark that she can't see her way around, where she can't rely on traditional knowledge or conventional ways of knowing, and she has to open her eyes to whatever's there. That is in itself an act of faith. And whatever new understanding of God or human nature or the world the artist comes to in this process is deeper and richer than one achieved through rigid adherence to doctrine because it's been acquired in the context of an absolute and unwavering commitment to truth.

For the narrators in Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and Break the Heart of Me, the acts of telling their stories are religious at their core in that way. The tellings are part confession, part supplication, part railing against God, maybe even part praise. But throughout both novels, I think, is my narrators' sense that they hope to figure out who God really is, that they hope to get him to notice them, and, at times, that they're afraid he won't. Both novels are in different ways about having your heart broken and about forgiveness; as celebrations of the process of finding love, experiencing grace, and being healed, they are also acts of worship.

Writing is for me an act of worship. The words always come from the characters, from their voices, their yearning, their pain, and their joy, but for me they're also from God, and in those rare and wonderful moments when I feel "gifted" it's because I believe I'm being given words as gifts. Not all artists see their work in religious terms, of course, and I don't always think of my own work in these terms, but I think there's a sense in which all art can be understood as a form of prayer, an effort to commune with God, to discover and experience who and what he is, or at least an attempt to explore that Mystery at the origin of the universe that some of us call God, and that Mystery in ourselves that some of us think, or hope, communicates with God.

When I divorced my first husband and ended my relationship with my grandfather, it changed the structure of my family. Or maybe it just revealed the structure, cracked open the fissures that were already there. Although my parents and my brother supported me, both my sisters and all my aunts, uncles, and cousins sided with my grandfather, not because they didn't believe me—my sisters did—but because they thought I shouldn't have disrupted the family, I should have kept quiet, I shouldn't have hurt my grandfather's feelings after all he's done for me, embarrassing him and them. None of them thought I should have stayed married to my ex-husband, but they didn't really think I should have divorced him either. My grandfather says I'm crazy, and none of them argue with him. (I'm paraphrasing secondhand reports.) After I ended my relationships with my grandfather and my ex-husband, I saw my sisters once. I haven't seen either of them or heard from any of my extended family since.

I'm mentioning this because I don't want to give the false impression that there's been so much redemption and rebuilding that there was ultimately very little price to be paid for this new life. The loss of my sisters and relatives, and even in some probably unhealthy way my grandfather himself, is still painful to me. And although I continue to heal, although I continue to transform that pain into art, I don't expect ever in my life not to feel it anymore.

Which, ultimately, is probably a good thing. It pretty much guarantees that I'll keep writing, the thing I love most to do. When I write, when it's going well, it's something like hearing a half-remembered melody and trying to pick it out on a piano. It takes work and openness to have visions and willingness to do revisions to get it right, but there is something about the voices that is not a product of that work or of my will to get them down on paper.

Writing is an act of compassion, of empathy, of generosity of spirit, both from writer to character and writer to reader, and reading is the reader's act of reciprocal compassion. Writing is an act of faith, faith that if I tell a story honestly enough it will resonate into the lives of people who haven't lived these things, faith that if I listen closely enough to my characters their voices will resonate into the parts of my experience I don't directly share with them. It's a miracle, an act of transubstantiation not of wine into the blood of Christ but of words into the flesh and blood and bones and souls of fictional characters, an act of love and rage and sacrifice.

I recently wrote a play called Flesh and Blood about two sisters who view their shared past so differently that they can't connect in the present and one ends up stabbing the other in the back, literally. You can guess where that came from. It's not a play about forgiveness or healing except in the sense that it's about people who can't or won't forgive, about wounds that don't heal, so it's not on its surface a celebration of truth or forgiveness or healing or even the presence of God. But it is in its way a cry for those things, a scream of fear and anger and pain at their absence, and that, too, is a form of prayer. It's also funnier than it sounds.

On the 1994 National Day of Prayer for AIDS, Tony Kushner prayed this: "Must goodness precipitate from sky to ground so infrequently? We are parched for goodness, we perish for lack of lively rain; there's a drought for want of grace, everywhere. Surely this has not escaped your notice? All life hesitates now, wondering: in the night which has descended, in the dry endless night that's fallen instead of the expected rain: Where are you?"

That, too, is the prayer of Flesh and Blood. It's the prayer of the first half of most of the Psalms and of many of the prophets and of much serious literary fiction and much good poetry and perhaps most good drama. Tony's prayer ends, "I think you are our home. At present we are homeless, or imagine ourselves to be. Bleeding life in the universe of wounds. Be thou more sheltering, God. Pay more attention."

Art is a prayer for a home in God's universe.

It's also a cry for attention and divine intervention and immortality and an implicit apologetic for a universe whose apparent chaos means something, must mean something.

Certainly writing stories changes my understanding of the nature of God. I can't say I understand him more clearly than I used to. In fact, I understand him less clearly than I used to think I did. But I am more aware of his mysteriousness and the complexity of his goodness than I used to be. And if God is the Alpha and the Omega, if God is love and truth, if he's eternal, and if he is that Word that was there in the beginning, then writing stories, creating beginnings and endings, exploring the meanings of love and the reasons we live the way we do, confronting death and eternity, good and evil, reaching out to heal and create life, and using words to do that—it's all inextricably connected to God. So for me, as, I think, ultimately for my characters, finding God's grace has something to do with finding the right words and creating something good and lasting and true out of them.

Maybe you now know more about me than you wanted to. But I don't know how to write about my writing without writing about my life and I'm trying to speak honestly about where my writing comes from. And I don't know how to write, or how to write about writing, without going to the places in myself that are raw, the places that need the healing and catharsis that writing makes possible. And I don't think I would write what I write—I don't think I would have the courage to—if it weren't for that sense of need, and the sense of healing, or the hope for it in a world that desperately needs it.

Visit Elizabeth Dewberry as Image Artist of the Month for November '05

Issue #15 • Fall 1996