Northwest Inland Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat: Interlude

I have done a little bit of reading about what I can do to encourage readers to come to my blog.

Surely one of the cardinal rules is to post once a day so that a reader doesn't have to go beyond the post at the top of the blog to read my most recent pieces.

To hell with that. If you are reading this Interlude, and if you are wondering what I've been up to, just go here to read about what I presented at Day 1 of the writing retreat and go here for Day 2.

Okay. Now. I have a few things I'd like to write and reflect upon regarding my role and preparation as the Inland Northwest Writing Project's Summer Writing Retreat's Visiting Writer.

First of all, in the field of writing, I'm not a big shot. I haven't published a book; I have published a couple of essays and a few poems. I told at least one person at the retreat that when I got hired to lead workshops, the Inland Northwest Writing Project hired a little shot.

I'm definitely a little shot.

I don't think I bring anything special to my role as Visiting Writer because I'm a little shot. I'm happy, however, that the Inland Northwest Writing Project was willing to take a chance on hiring a little shot.

As a community college instructor, I work with little shots. While some of us have presented at national conferences and a few have been published by national publications and one will be publishing an enormously compelling memoir, overall we spend the majority of our time focused on teaching, not building a scholarly resume.

Over the years, I have developed an unusual way of developing pedagogy.

I don't read and haven't (much) read books about teaching writing. I don't read books about teaching strategies. I don't assign my students books explaining how to write. Many excellent poets and fiction writers and memoir writers have written what I hear are wonderful books on writing in these genres. I just haven't read them. Or even looked at them.

When I came to work as a Visiting Writer, a small, but strong voice inside me says I'm a fraud because I haven't read Writing Down the Bones or any of Anne Lamont's books or Julia Cameron's and I've never taken a creative writing course and my reputation as a writer is pretty much limited to those, whom I deeply appreciate, who read my blog.

Oh! And those who have heard me preach. I think some of my best writing happened in the handful of sermons I've given at St. Mary's Episcopal Church.

What I'm getting at here is that much of what I've learned about writing came from sources that weren't dealing with writing at all.

For example, a book that has shaped much of my thinking about writing and has helped me understand my mindset as a writer is Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. His insight into connectedness, non-duality,being awake, and consciousness shapes how I teach writing and how I've tried to discipline my mind as an observer and agent in my life and has greatly expanded my imagination.

Likewise, Robert Grudin's book On Dialogue is not a writing handbook. Grudin's book explores the power of dialogic thought and the copious ways the mind can work in its pursuit of truth. His book encourages us to give our minds over to expansion, to seeing things as many ways as possible, to give ourselves over to the copious ways the mind works and to delight in the fertility of ideas, not to narrow them or reduce them.

As I write, I try to give myself over to the delights of copia. In my writing instruction, I encourage my students toward the freedoms implicit in thinking dialogically, of writing copiously.

Furthermore, when I read poems or stories or memoirs or philosophy or religion or the Bible or any other piece of writing, I always ask this question: what is this piece of writing telling or showing me about the act of writing itself?

For example, when Jesus instructs his disciples to be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, that's a solid bit of writing instruction, especially when I listen to Martin Luther King, Jr. who said that in these words Jesus was instructing his followers to be tough-minded and tender-hearted.

Again, solid writing instruction.

In the poem, "Her Right Eye Catches the Lavender", found here, the speaker of the poem describes Judy Rock's way of being with the gulls:

Knowing her as I do

I know she chose one of them and pursued him

relentlessly—her eye is part of her mind –

and though there would be patter she never would lose him

until he was gone.

Here's what writing demands of us: to zero in, pursue, to do it relentlessly, to unite the eye (and the senses) with the mind, and to commit oneself not to lose the subject of the mind's and sense's focus until it is "gone".

A good lot is going on in Stern's poem. A good lot is going on in the ruminations of Robert Grudin. A good lot is going on in the writings of Thicht Nhat Hanh and the teachings of Buddha. A good lot is going on in the teachings of Jesus and the preaching of Martin Luther King. A good lot is going on in the poetry, stories, memoirs, histories, and other genres of writing in the world.

In one way or another, these writings and teachings, at some level, are instructing us in the ways of writing, or at the very least, giving us models for writing.

So far, it's been reading and thinking this way over the years that has informed my ideas about and practice of writing.

As the Inland Northwest Writing Project Summer Writing Retreat's Visiting Writer, I tried to invigorate those who came to the retreat with the inspiration and knowledge I've drawn from such sources.

It's a Buddhist thing: I've learned the most about writing from sources that weren't about writing at all -- at first glance.

Self-Interview: Confessions (Part 1)

Religion/spirituality is on my mind all the time. I've been a Christian my whole life and I've given a lot of time and energy over to trying to understand what I think and what I experience as a Christian, especially in relation to the other world's religions that I spend a lot of time thinking about and teaching, one way or another, in my courses. I've been wanting to get my thoughts down. I've decided to interview myself and replicate the conversations I have with myself continually. This is, for the time being, my confession of faith.

You were born into the church, going to Sunday school, singing in junior choir, attending youth group, and have continued to be a part of the church, sometimes inconsistently, all your life. Is Jesus Christ your Savior?

I honestly don't understand what those words mean and I have never, except when participating in a liturgy, uttered them voluntarily. In fact, I'm distrustful of those words. Too often I hear them uttered as a line drawn in the sand, as a litmus test. When I was hired at Whitworth College on a temporary basis, full-time, in 1982, I had an interview with the college's president, Bob Mounce. The first thing he asked was whether Jesus Christ was my Savior. I answered in the affirmative. I knew it was President Mounce's way of asking me if I was a Christian, and I respected his way of asking that. But I felt uneasy. When I hear the words, "Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior", I hear hubris. Maybe it's the word "my" that I resist. It's one of those conditioned responses to Jesus Christ that I just can't say. I want to speak my own language for how I experience Jesus Christ, and proclaiming Him my personal Savior just doesn't work.

Well, then, do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?

I don't think so. I don't understand this concept. I respect, and sometimes envy, the many Christians I know who talk about Jesus being their friend or who claim a personal relationship with Him, but very little in my experience with Jesus Christ is anything like the relationships I have with my friends. I talk about books with my friends. I tell dirty jokes and laugh at theirs. I play cards with my friends, go on drives around the Silver Valley, talk about how to teach writing and literature, have coffee, tell tall tales, go on boat rides, talk about raising kids, reminisce. I don't have any of these experiences with Jesus. I have never experienced what many say they do, that Jesus Christ is specifically, uniquely, particularly concerned with what happens in my particular life. I don't think of Jesus in terms of me. I think of Jesus in terms of us, of the corporate body of Christ. The metaphor of personal savior or of personal friend doesn't work for me. I enjoy listening to others talk about how it does work for them. But, it's not my experience.

Well, how about the resurrection? Do you believe in it?

I don't think of the resurrection in terms of belief. In fact, I don't experience Christianity in terms of belief. To see the world through Christian eyes, is to see life as defined by resurrection. I do not have to make a conscious act of assent when it comes to seeing resurrection as the basis of the reality we live in. I do not have to say I believe in resurrection, or the resurrection. Resurrection exists. I don't say I believe in the concrete slab in my backyard. It exists. I experience resurrection in the same way. It's so fundamental I don't really ever get to the question of whether I believe in it or not.

But you've evaded my question. How about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It's the center of the Christian understanding of truth. To be Christian is to be constantly aware of new life, that what seems to be dead can be brought back to life again. I see it happen all the time and I experience it all the time. Nature most vividly illustrates resurrection in its cycles of life and death and the return to life again. Within the Christian world view, grace is the expression of resurrection. We forgive one another. Friendships, relationships at work, passages in a marriage, and other relationships can break, even die. When broken friends or spouses or colleagues find a way to forgive or extend grace, these dead relationships can be revivified, resurrected. Each of us can also die within ourselves. Passages of self-destruction, living out of harmony with the best ways to treat others and ourselves can drain us of life. But we can, as individuals, be forgiven, revived, resurrected. It's a kind of magic, the magic of the reality we live in that is defined by resurrection.

Regarding the Easter story, it's definitely an historical truth in the way that resurrection never stops. The story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ happens (although it is too often blocked by avarice, cruelty, lying, and other things we do that are not life giving). The story of Jesus Christ coming back to life from the dead is, to me, most important as a visible portrayal of an invisible truth in life. If someone came to me with undoctored videotaped documentary evidence that Jesus Christ emerged from his tomb alive, after being dead, I would be ecstatic. But, I don't think the fundamental truth of the resurrection changes because I think of the story as a profoundly enlightening fiction. The power of the resurrection, as we experience it personally and corporately or as we observe it in the natural world or in other aspects of life, continues whether Jesus walked out of that tomb literally or figuratively.

You know, there are those who would say that you aren't really a Christian. I mean listen to you. You don't experience Jesus Christ in a personal way, you experience the resurrection figuratively, and you can't bring yourself to say out loud that Jesus Christ is your Savior. Are you a Christian?

I practice Christianity. I am inspired and emboldened by worship from the Book of Common Prayer, by taking of the body and blood of Christ at the communion rail, and by my confession of sin. My Christian practice clarifies my thinking, informs my conscience, points me, delivers me from evil. I love the stories and poems of Scripture and am inspired by them to make my way in the world more sanely and wisely. I cherish the fellowship of the body of Christ. I've tried to give it all up, tried to pass off Christianity as rubbish, and I couldn't. I have experience God as a sparring partner and fought with God with all my might and I've also experienced God as the Great Shepherd, tirelessly in pursuit of me as a lost sheep. I experience what I understand to be the essential Christian experience. I am rather adamant, mostly within myself, however, not to let anyone define this experience for me and I will not hold my experience as a Christian up to anyone's litmus test. One person determining whether another is a real Christian or a true Christian or not is, to me, toxic sludge polluting the arteries of Christ's body. When I hear or read Christians engage in "he's in, she's out" talk, I shudder. I think an infinite God has infinite capacity to hold an infinite range of ways that people love and serve Him in His Bosom.

You just talked about God as a male. Do you believe God is a male being?

No. But, let's resume our conversation tomorrow and I'll tell you what I think about this question.

Sibling Assignment #86: I Am Light as a Feather

Silver Valley Girl gave us our newest sibling assignment:

Choose a book or story with a Christmas theme, and share about why it is special to you, and how it helped or helps make your Christmas more meaningful.

InlandEmpireGirl wrote about teaching the lessons of Scrooge to her students, here, and Silver Valley Girl writes about Christmas in her family in contrast to what the Grinch experiences, here.

I read this prompt and was stuck. I don't think I've read very many books or stories with a Christmas theme and, aside from the biblical accounts of the Christmas story, couldn't think of one that has or does help me out at Christmas.

So, I decided to do something about it. I've seen in the neighborhood of 20,000 versions of "A Christmas Carol" on television, ranging from Mr. Magoo to George C. Scott's renditions.

But, I'd never read Dickens' tale.

This was on my mind last week. One of the public radio programs on XM Satellite Radio featured an author who has just written about "A Christmas Carol" and I uncommitedly thought to myself that this Christmas season would be a good time to read it.

Yesterday, I made the commitment. I purchased a copy. I finished reading it this morning.

Dickens astounds me. What I enjoy the most is that he creates a concrete and particularized world to set his stories in and the world of "A Christmas Carol" is as important as its characters and is crucial to the way Dickens explores Ebenezer Scrooge's spirit, and the larger human spirit as well.

I need to back up a step or two. In my teaching and reading life, the works that have the most profound impact on me are comedies. Traditionally, as a literary genre, comedy encompasses the spirit of springtime. Comedies explore stories that begin in some kind of brokenness or separation, or even death, and explore revival, renewal, and/or resurrection. They often are stories about separation from home and the return to home again. Comedies tend to confirm the strength of the collective rather than the individual human experience.

I ground my particular way of understanding and enjoying comedy in the idea of vitality. Characters in comedies are most often dispirited as the story opens, often lost, and, the as the comedy unfolds, the character(s), with the help of others, are awakened to the sources of vitality in human life and, as these powers of vitality take hold, the renewal, revival, resurrection, or homecoming occurs. Comedies often climax in marriage, which makes perfect sense, because, traditionally, procreation follows marriage. Comedy, therefore, explores the continuation of human life, what sustains us, what keeps human life eternal. It explores the circles and cycles of life. Tragedy, on the other hand, focuses on death and magnifies the finite aspects of human life.

Personally, my study of comedy has helped me, more than anything else, develop my moral sense. I think the central moral question is whether the things we do bring vitality to our lives. The vitality test works much better for me than a law- or rule-bound measure of morality. My favorite comedies are ones where characters commit what, if looked at legalistically, are moral violations, but turn out to be life giving actions, turn out to invigorate the characters, and turn to be sources of new life. In the world of comedy, narrow, legalistic, rule-bound characters fare terribly. Comedy is about flexibility and those characters who are bound to narrow and predetermined moral codes either have to be transformed or else they don't survive the comedy's resolution. The hard of heart are anti-comic, but those whose hearts are or become soft, receptive, accepting, and pliant thrive in world of comedy.

You are probably familiar with the story of Scrooge and can see where I'm going.

Dickens creates in "A Christmas Carol" a world in desperate need of redemption. It opens with death: "Marley was dead, to begin with." The fog is thick. It's dark. It's cold. Scrooge will barely heat his office or his home and the impoverished Cratchit family suffers the cold at the hands of Scrooge's miserliness. Nearly every physical detail of the first four fifths of Dickens' story portrays the misery that is spawned by Scrooge's flinty self-centered speck of a soul.

Scrooge's "Bah! Humbug!" epitomizes his inward winter and we come to see that the dark, thick fogged, cold world Dickens so meticulously creates is an exteral picture of Scrooge's inward condition.

No doubt you really see where I'm going now. No doubt you've already said to yourself something like, "Well, if what Raymond is writing about comedy is true, compassion must be among the chief virtues of comedy."

You are so right.

Compassion requires sharing the suffering of another. Marley's ghost and his three servant ghosts take a gamble. They gamble that at his core, Scrooge is a good man. (Comedy tends to see humans as less like worms and more like angels.) They gamble that if they put Scrooge in the presence of suffering, and of joy, but mostly of suffering, his cold heart will begin to thaw, his hard soul will soften.

They are right. Ebenezer Scrooge slowly begins to witness and feel the the deprivation he has caused and the deprivation that dominates his very being. Even though deprivation is a form of emptiness, we humans experience it as weight. The weight of deprivation has shrunken, stooped, and deeply wrinkled Scrooge. His soul, created to be flexible, has hardened, grown heavy, unfeeling, largely because his life has been devoted, with singleness of mind, to Gain.

Giving, sharing, opening oneself and one's possessions and money to others vitalizes us. Scrooge has hoarded, pinched, and closed himself off and the vitality of his youth has withered away.

By the time the Ghost of Yet to Come unveils to Scrooge that his death will be marked by jokes, indifference, and happiness, Scrooge comes to fully realize that his devotion to gain has cut him off from fellowship and mirth, the twin engines of vitality.

He reforms.

My favorite passage of his reformation comes when morning, the time of renewal, dawns and Scrooge is a chaos of relief, joy, and lightness. He is bewildered by his transformation: "'I don't know what to do!'"cried Scrooge. . ."I am light as a feather, I am happy as an angel, I am merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man." Dionysus, the Greek god of revelry and intoxication is the God of comedy and Scrooge revels in the Dionysian moment of mirthful madness and vitality.

Scrooge runs to the window and discovers, "No fog. No mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; golden sunlight; heavenly sky: sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious. Glorious!" It's wondrous. To leave the deprivation of isolation and join in the fellowship of others, to be liberated from the draining ambitioins of gain is wondrous. It fills Scrooge with vitality.

How, then, does the story of Ebenezer Scrooge help make Christmas more meaningful?

I love Christmas as a secular and pagan time of celebration as well as a Christian one. For me, as a Christian, the two overlap marvelously, but I'll separate them for a moment.

Secular Christmas celebrations, ideally, are all about vitality. Families gather. We generously give gifts to one another. Wondrous displays of lighted Christmas trees and houses ablaze with lights push back against the darkness of the winter season. Bells ring, wine and champagne and beer and booze flow freely. Friends embrace one another. We dance. We sing. We feast. We put aside the concerns of gain and those things that shrink us and we let it rip. Christmas is a time to open our homes, visit others, have some cheer, and freely indulge the vitality of mirth and merrymaking. It can transform us.

For me, as a Christian, the Christ child is born into a dark world and becomes its light and his birth promises a way of living that invigorates the soul and the heart. What gives us more vitality than forgiveness, doing unto others as we would have do unto us, love, service, peace, and all the other virtues Jesus Christ comes to embody?

The light of Christ is the opposite of dark, but it also promises the opposite of weight and burden. Living the promise of the Christ child, we can give, be compassionate, serve, forgive, be joyful, and, in chorus with Scrooge, proclaim, "I am light as a feather."

"I Only Want to Know": Sibling Assignment #31

Inspired by seeing "Kiss Me Kate" this past Sunday, I assigned my siblings to write about a musical in whatever way they see fit. InlandEmpireGirl's post on "Annie" is here. Silver Valley Girl wrote about "Les Miserables", here.

When I started classes at North Idaho College in 1972, I enrolled in choir. Our director was Rick Frost, a Christian, an openly professing Christian.

Several members of the choir, most from Coeur d'Alene, were also openly professing Christians and had a history with each other in the Lutheran church through their involvement in youth group and in regional and national Christian youth conferences.

They were good people: Marian, Sandy, Jim, Kurt, Darrell, and others. One day I ran into Kurt in a hallway of the Aministration building. I liked Kurt, greeted him, and we began to talk.

Suddenly, Kurt asked me if I was a Christian. No one had ever asked me this before.

I didn't know what Kurt meant. I'd gone to church all my life. I was baptized at age 15. I had a lot of friends who also went to church and we never asked each other or asked others in the church or outside it if they were Christians.

What Kurt meant, I know now, was whether I had opened my heart to Jesus Christ and accepted Him as my personal savior.

At that point, I began to realize that this group of Coeur d'Alene kids had Jesus on their minds all the time. They talked about the Lord. They prayed together. They saw their lives through a prism whose light was the Lord.

They also understood being a Christian to be a matter of a special, overtly stated commitment that they talked about a lot and showed to the world by carrying Bibles, wearing buttons, like "I am Third", and putting bumper stickers on their cars.

I didn't like this. I liked these kids, but I did not like their overt confession of their Christian faith. It seemed clubby. It seemed that they were too interested in figuring out the Christian status of others and I thought these kids were looking for too many external signs and certain ways of talking that confirm, in their way of seeing the world, whether a person was truly a Christian. Or not.

For me, a person being a Christian was pretty much assumed if a person went to church and I understood our American culture to be primarily a Christian culture. I didn't see any need to talk about having received Christ (to this day, I've never claimed a particular moment when this happened; it's always been happening) or of behaving in ways that set me apart from my Kellogg friends, as long as I was good.

These new friends got me thinking.

Actually, they got me to asking questions. I began a process which is still at the core of my being. I did then, and I still do, experience Christian faith as interrogative, not declarative. I experience my faith with more of a sense of mystery than of certainty. I am less concerned with personal salvation and more concerned with the collective body of Christ and the impact of the life of Christ on social matters, less on individual ones. I see Christ as our Savior, not mine.

Salvation seems more a corporate experience than an individual one and, for years, I've thought that, the promise of salvation is a beginning point, and that focusing on it so much can be put aside and the question, "What now?" ought to be restlessly and ceaselessly asked and acted upon. How can Christians be a salve in a wounded world?

I've gotten ahead of myself.

When the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar" was released in 1970 as a record album, before it had ever been performed, it became a flash point of controversy. The opera looked at Jesus as a man. Its story ended before the resurrection. It looked at Jesus largely through the perspective of Judas.

I remember church members at the United Methodist Church of Kellogg not quite knowing what to think about it, wondering if we should have some kind of youth meeting to talk it out.

I heard a couple of the album's songs on the radio and didn't think much of the album until I received it as a graduation gift. Because I knew it was controversial, I listened to it with deeper interest and read the lyrics.

It was the best stuff, for my temperament, I'd ever heard regarding Jesus and the Christian faith.

There were the central questions: Who are you? What have you sacrificed? Do you think you're what they say you are? And, in "Heaven on Their Minds", Judas cuts loose with a pained and emphatic, "Jesus!" and exclaims:

You've started to believe
The things they say of you.
You really do believe
This talk of God is true.
And all the good you've done
Will soon get swept away.
You've begun to matter more
Than the things you say.

These lyrics began my career of skepticism and critical thinking. It began my lifelong asking of the question, "What if?" What if the good of Jesus got swept away because the name Jesus or the utterance of "the Lord" began to matter more that what Jesus said? What if this emphasis on accepting Jesus was the acceptance of a feeling more than of a way of seeing and moving and acting in the world?

What if Jesus had become more a Superstar than a Savior, more an icon than an embodiment of the Kingdom of God, where the meek, the poor, the mustard seed, the prodigal son, and the prostitute at the well, not the proud, the wealthy, the fancy gardens, the self-righteous, seething brother, and moralistic legalists come to stand for the values of God's Kingdom.

What if Jesus was more human than anything else? And what if his life was a PR campaign?

I loved these questions and wrestling with them strengthened my faith rather than threatening or diminishing it. What diminished my faith was buttons and bumper stickers and Christians who wouldn't say shit if they had a mouthful.

I've had a handful of transforming spiritual experiences when I could hear God speaking to me. One of those experiences was seeing "Jesus Christ Superstart" on stage in London. I'd seen the movie already, and enjoyed it, but somehow the story was diminished on the movie screen because of the movement of the movie from one place to another and because the characters themselves seemed small in relation to the landscape of the Holy Lands.

In the theater, the action and the songs were confined to a single stage. Having the story before me intensified the questions, made the passion of Mary Magdeline, the tortured soul of Judas, and the hours leading up to the crucifixion and crucifixion itself more immediate, more unnerving and glorious.

I was a junior at Whitworth College (now University) when "Jesus Christ Superstar" showed at Cowles Auditorium as the Saturday night movie. Afterwards, the halls of the South Warren dormitory, most of the discussion was of the movie's theology and whether it was sound.

In effect, I responded that "Jesus Christ Superstar" wasn't the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was asking us to look at the story of Jesus from an imaginative perspective, to see it from a perspective unaccounted for in the gospels. (I say this better now than I did in 1974!)

It was as if the story of "Othello" were told from Iago's point of view. The changed perspective changes the story, and while the point of view of the gospels is the canonical perspective, can't we, I wondered, imagine what Jesus looked like from Judas' point of view? Even if it's not canonical?

Furthermore, might this not be the perspective shared by many who are outside the faith? Shouldn't we entertain that perspective as well as the insider's view?

I'm sure many of the students that night minimized my point of view because I was a literature major and understood truth more in terms of story and multiple points of view than dogma or doctrine.

But, I was really, indirectly, echoing the words of Judas. Jesus' life and what his story has become in the 20th and 21st centuries inspires me to ask questions, look at a variety of perspectives, and to be driven by the same wish that "Superstar's" Judas has:

"I only want to know."

Unlike Judas, though, I'm not a traitor.

Three Beautiful Things 01/28/07: Mansions, Coffee, Motorcycles

1. The Rev. John Bishop, the retired Bishop of Idaho, preached a beautiful sermon on the absurdity of grace and the infinitely huge mansions that comprise the house of God, where by merely knocking, all are welcome. The whole idea of closing the house is not Jesus' conception of his Father's house. It's the nonsense of us, the followers of Jesus.

2. Molly was working at Starbucks when I was done at church. I did not know this. She treated me to a free coffee and scone.

3. Motorcycle students buzzed around in a circle in the Lane Community College northeast parking lot behind the theater and I remembered that I plan to join this class this spring with the hope that when I visit North Idaho, I can join my friends on a leisurely ride up the North Fork of the Cd'A River and on to the top of Thompson Pass operating a motorcycle instead of riding on the back of Ed's or Scott's.

On My Blindness (Part 6)

It's funny what goes through the mind when in a mortal crisis. When I was in the bottom of the roaster, I envisioned the Kellogg Evening News newspaper story telling the story of my death, illustrated with my senior picture. A great basketball player, Tommy Brainard, had been electrocuted in a whirlpool in December, 1967 and his picture had been on the front page. Somehow I was thinking I'd be afforded similar treatment.

I also was stubborn. I refused to pray. A voice inside me was telling me to go ahead and die, but not to do what my young mind thought of as cliched. Looking back, it's weird to me that here I was on the porch of death and I was imagining how my death would be treated in the local paper and thinking about whether praying for deliverance from death would be an original approach or not.

Similarly, after I survived, different people encouraged me to write about this experience. At Whitworth College, a handful of people saw a Christian analogy in the way I was in deep darkness with light shining above me and in the way I climbed toward the light to be saved. One faculty wife, and later a faculty member, who was beginning her career as a writer, encouraged me to submit my story to Guideposts.

She said that it was just the kind of story they were looking for, that they would pay for. I couldn't do it. I just could not see my experience in terms of a Guidepost rescued by the Lord tale. I couldn't see my story as a way to inspire others to come from their own darkness into the light of the Lord. I still can't. Such a story felt inauthentic to me.

Others thought I should write it up in a mythological way. They saw my experience as an embodiment of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. I agreed. I had fallen into the pit as an unformed young man and rose out of this darkness and suffering into the a stage of life that was more mature. But, again, however much truth lay in seeing my experience as the hero's journey or could be explained as the embodiment of Jungian archetypes, I resisted writing it up this way. I never did.

I'm glad I didn't. The most authentic way for me to regard my experience was through the perspective of existentialism. I learned about existentialism in the fall of 1973, the fall following the accident. Existentialism, especially as expressed by Sartre and Camus, taught me that I had an obligation, if I were to exercise my freedom as a human, to make meaning out of my life myself.

This appealed to me deeply. I didn't want external sources like the Bible or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung to make meaning out of my experience. I went to work to make meaning out of what had happened.

In short, and I'll write about this in future posts, Camus and Sartre forced me to confront the emptiness I had seen inside me when I was blind. I hadn't realized that any thinkers or writers saw this emptiness as a shared human experience. I hadn't thought that I had responsibility to make meaning out of my life. I hadn't thought that if I were to devote myself to anything in life, it would be my responsibility to live with what I decided and live with the consequences.

I had never been confronted with anything that felt so deeply moral in my young life.

So, I began to examine myself and my life and began the conscious effort to make meaning out of my life.

I didn't want my inner life to be empty.

I wanted my life to be meaningful.

I started my conscious search for meaning by reading fiction, poetry, and drama of the 20th century. The literature appealed to me because it told me that I was not alone in my sense of alienation and in my search for meaning in life. The internal darkness and emptiness I confronted within myself when blind turned out to be understood by these writers as a universal human experience.

I found this reassuring and stimulating.