Ron Hansen on sacramental writing

I saw an article by Ron Hansen, the Gerald Manley Hopkins Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University and the author of books like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mariette in Ecstasy, both of which became movies, and whose newest book is to be a novelization of Jesuit poet GM Hopkins's life. The article is Writing as Sacrament and I thought it might be interesting since so many of us are writing fiction as well as blogs. Here's part of it below ....

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WHEN Saint Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate, he chose the Latin sacramentum, sacrament, for the Greek mysterion, mystery. We understand these words to be highly different, but their difference is an efficient way of getting at my argument that good writing can be a religious act.

In the synoptic Gospels mysterion generally referred to the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, and, in Saint Paul's Epistles, to Christ himself as the perfect revelation of God's will. Tertullian introduced the term sacramentum as we know it when he talked about the rite of Christian initiation, understanding the word to mean a sacred action, object or means. And Saint Augustine further clarified the term by defining sacraments as "signs pertaining to things divine, or visible forms of an invisible grace." Eventually more and more things were seen as sacraments until the sixteenth century, when the Reformation confined the term to baptism and eucharist, the two Gospel sacraments, and the Roman Catholic Council of Trent decreed that signs become sacraments only if they become channels for grace. Twentieth century theology has used the term in a far more inclusive way, however, describing sacraments "as occasions of encounter between God and the believer, where the reality of God's gracious actions needs to be accepted in faith" (according to The Oxford Companion to the Bible).

Writing, then, is a sacrament insofar as it provides graced occasions of encounter between humanity and God. As Flannery O'Connor noted in Mystery and Manners, "the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is. The more sacramental his theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that."

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My first published book was Desperadoes, a historical novel about the Dalton gang from their hard-scrabble beginnings, through their horse rustling and outlawry in Oklahoma, to the fatal day in 1892 when all but one of the gang were killed in bank robberies in their hometown of Coffeyville, Kansas. "Crime does not pay" is a Christian theme, as is the book's focus on honor, loyalty, integrity, selfishness, and reckless ambition—the highest calling Bob Dalton seems to have felt was to be as important as Jesse James. But my own religious experience does not figure greatly in Desperadoes; most people read the book as a high falutin' Western, a boys-will-be-boys adventure full of hijinks and humor and bloodshed.

I fell into my second book because of the first. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is another historical novel, but is far darker than Desperadoes because I was far more insistent on a Christian perspective on sin and redemption and forgiveness. These were bad guys I was writing about, guys who were sons of preachers but did the wrong thing so blithely and persistently it was like they'd got their instructions all bollixed up. If Jesse James was a false messiah for those Southerners still in civil war with the finance companies and the railroads, then Bob Ford was both his Judas and his Barabbas, a self-important quisling who hoped to be famous and who got off scot-free for the killing of his famous friend, but who was hounded out of more than one town afterwards until he ended up as a saloonkeeper in Creede, Colorado. There he himself was killed at the hands of a man who claimed he was evening the score.

It's a form of bad sportsmanship for fiction writers to complain that too few reviewers pick up their hidden agendas, but in fact I was disappointed that the general reading of the book on Jesse James was pretty much as it was for Desperadoes. Hidden beneath the praise were the questions: Why is this guy writing Westerns? When oh when is he going to give his talent to a subject that matters?

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Mariette in Ecstasy concerns a seventeen-year old woman, Mariette Baptiste, who joins the Convent of Our Lady of Sorrows in upstate New York as a postulant in 1906. Her older sister, Annie, or Mother Celine, is the prioress there and on Christmas Eve, 1906, Mother Celine dies of cancer and is buried. On the next day, Christmas, Mariette is given the stigmata—those wounds in the hands, feet, and side resembling those that Christ suffered on the cross. Whether Mariette is a sexual hysteric full of religious wishful thinking or whether her physical wounds are indeed supernaturally caused is the subject of the novel.

I first thought about writing Mariette in Ecstasy after finishing Saint Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul. She was the third of her sisters to enter the Carmelite convent of Lisieux where her oldest sister was prioress and, like Mariette, she soon became a favorite there. You may know that Therese was just fifteen at the time she entered religious life and she did so little that was outwardly wonderful during her nine years as a nun that when she died of tuberculosis at twenty-four one of the sisters in the convent feared there would be nothing to say about Therese at the funeral. She did perform the ordinary duties of religious life extraordinarily well, emphasizing simplicity, obedience, and self-forgetfulness over the harsh physical mortifications that were common then, and she impressed some with her childlike faith in God the father and with her passionate love of Jesus. She can seem sentimental at times; there are those who would call Therese a religious fanatic and there are certainly psychologists who would diagnose her as neurotic. And then there are people like me who have a profound respect for her in spite of her perceived excessiveness. When you have a tension like that you're half way to having a plot.

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Saint Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is good in itself, and this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations and make something that is simply a good in and of itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full and does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.

Evangelization for Jesus was generally by means of parables that were often so bewilderingly allusive that his disciples would ask for further explanations of his meaning. Mark has it that "he did not speak to [the crowds] without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything" (Mk 4:33-34). Christ's parables are metaphors that do not contract into simple denotation but broaden continually to take on fresh nuances and connotations. Parables invite the hearer's interest with familiar settings and situations but finally veer off into the unfamiliar, shattering their homey realism and insisting on further reflection and inquiry. We have the uneasy feeling that we are being interpreted even as we interpret them. Early pre-Gospel versions seem to have resembled Zen koans in which hearers are left hanging until they find illumination through profound meditation. A kind of koan is Jesus' aphorism in the Gospel of Luke: "Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted" (Lk 14: 1 1).

We are challenged, in Jesus' parables, to figure out how we are like wheat sown in a field, or lost sheep, or mustard seed, or the evil tenants of a householder's vineyard, and in the hard exercise of interpretation we imitate and make present again the graced interaction between the human and the divine.

To fully understand a symbol is to kill it. So the Holy Being continually finds new ways to proclaim itself to us, first and best of all in the symbols of Christ's life, then in Scripture, and finally in created things, whether they be the glories of nature or art or other human beings. And those symbols will not be objects but actions. As theologian Nathan Mitchell puts it, "Symbols are not things people invent and interpret, but realities that `make' and interpret a people. . . . Symbols are places to live, breathing spaces that help us discover what possibilities life offers."

The job of fiction writers is to fashion those symbols and give their readers the feeling that life has great significance, that something is going on here that matters. Writing will be a sacrament when it offers in its own way the formula for happiness of Pierre Tielhard de Chardin. Which is: First be. Second, love. Finally, worship. We may find that if we do just one of those things completely we may have done all three.

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