A Search for God
I talked last week about the years I spent plumbing novels for scraps of ideas about God. What I found in church and discovered through reading more traditionally theological sources was too expected, too much cloaked in arcane language, too certain of itself. I needed questions that didn’t come with ready-made answers. And so I turned to novelists, the creative minds that challenged and validated the rest of my world, for my theology, too.
What I rarely did, though, was to carry to my own work the questions I wanted others to explore for me.
But all that was before I tiptoed into Blue-Eyed Wolf, the novel I’m living in now. Blue-Eyed Wolf will be the first truly young-adult novel I have written as the field is defined now, and as such it opens possibilities that weren’t available to me with my earlier books.
Blue-Eyed Wolf is set in 1967-68 in the boundary waters of northern Minnesota. It’s about a fourteen-year-old girl, Angie, whose beloved older brother goes off to fight in Vietnam. It is also about the decimation of the wolves she loves.
More to the point for this discussion, though, it is about Angie's search for answers within her very traditional experience of Christianity. (It will be no surprise to those who know scraps of my history to discover that she is an Episcopalian and that her closest adult friend is her priest’s rebellious wife.)
This is the first time I have ever created a fictional clergy wife. And it is certainly the first time I’ve tried to trace my own lifelong questioning through one of my stories. I‘ve discovered that neither provides easy territory.
The rebellious clergy wife is hard to keep under control. I kept a cap on my own inner rebellion with a sweet face and usually a well-controlled mouth, but if I presented Maia that way she would be of little use to me. So she’s out there, and she’s bursting her seams the ways kids burst out of school at the end of the day. My first task is to make her believable to those who have understandably set expectations for their clergy wives. My second task is to make sure, every step of the way, that she serve's Angie's story.
Angie’s search, though, is even harder to navigate.
My perception is that our society in general has a low tolerance for God talk. If I lean too heavily on Angie’s longing for a God who can keep her disrupted life intact, she tumbles into territory for which the labels are too easy. Her search will appear sanctimonious to those who don't want to hear about religion. It will be naïve to those who have left the idea of God behind. Worse, from a craft point of view, she will seem a mere mouthpiece for the author’s ideas.
Perhaps even more to the point, if I let Angie work through and discard the religious ideas I myself have dismissed over my lifetime, she will offend many . . . probably especially the adults peering over young readers’ heads. If I set the God search aside to make my story safe, I will have failed my own vision.
A friend, a professor of creative writing in a University and a writer himself, said to me many years ago, “I can’t write the kind of fiction I most admire.” I was young when I heard that, and I found the admission deeply sad. How was it possible to face such a limitation of your own talent?
Well, I’m no longer young, and some days I’m entirely unsure when I sit down to Blue-Eyed Wolf that I can write the kind of story I’ve been seeking to read all my life. But I’m not yet willing to settle into an admission of my own limitations.
Angie’s struggle still calls to me. And her rebellious clergy-wife friend is great fun to write. I have the ideas, the convictions, a clear vision of what I want to say. Do I have the skill to shape a story that can make sense—even a little bit of sense—out of my own journey?
That remains to be seen.