CHAPTER TWO: YOUR FULLER STORY: Mapping
I am inclined to believe that God’s chief purpose in giving us memory is to enable us to go back in time so that if we didn’t play those roles right the first time round, we can still have another go at it now. We cannot undo our old mistakes or their consequences any more than we can erase old wounds that we have both suffered and inflicted, but through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
FREDERICK BUECHNER, TELLING SECRETS
Lord, all that I have discovered about you
I have done so by remembering.
AUGUSTINE
IT’S THE BEGINNING of the annual writers’ workshop in Alaska. Twenty-two people sit in a giant circle in my living room. We’re eating sandwiches and fruit, our lunches balanced on our laps. I am seriously happy. In two hours, we’ll all board bush planes and fly into the wilderness to write and explore for a week. I look around at faces I don’t yet know, men and women of all ages, from twenty-one to seventy, here from all over the country.
After I welcome everyone to Kodiak and to my house, I settle my turkey sandwich in my lap and ask, “Why are you here? Why have you come all this way?” And we begin.
“I’m not a writer,” says a youngish woman, “but my husband died a few years ago, and I need to capture some of our life together.”
“I’ve never done creative writing before,” says Stan, a fiftyish man with glasses, “but I’ve always wanted to. I have to tell about my son, Stanley, about all the miracles of his life. He’s not supposed to have survived his tenth birthday. He’s thirty now. People keep asking us to tell his story.”
“This is my third time here,” says Vina, a Filipino woman who has become a friend. “I’m working on a piece about my father, who was in the death march at Bataan, and melding that with my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure how it’s all going to work, but I’m really excited about it.”
“I don’t know if I’m a writer or not. I just know I love words, and I think they can teach me something,” says Sara, a twenty-one-year-old woman. “I want to see where they take me.”
“I want to write about adopting my daughter, and all God has done through that, but I don’t know where to start,” says Heather, a petite woman from Wisconsin.
I know how everyone feels right now. We’re standing on a precipice, looking out over our lives.
I felt the same way as I hung up the phone with Kate, my New York publisher.
She wants the story of my life? She wants my story? Where do I begin? Do I start with my first memory —the spider on the wall over my crib? Who cares about that and the thousand other details of this sprawling, uncharted, stupendous mess of a thing called my life?
And I know most of you reading this could stand beside me in a chorus line with your own questions. How much can we pass on? How much matters? How many turns and switchbacks, how many jobs, surgeries, how many weddings and grandbabies, science projects, camping trips, funerals? It’s overwhelming. Must we really account for all of this?
Let me stop this nervous dance with one word: No.
Covering the entire scope of a life is not possible. And this is why so many never start. No matter where I am, when someone asks me what I do for work and I say, “I’m a writer; I write books,” the response is often the same: “I’ve got a book I’ve always wanted to write,” or “Everyone tells me I should write a book about my life.” Some of them are young and they’ve traveled the world or survived terrible things. Some are in their seventies and eighties. They’re still waiting to write their story. If I am in the airport or the grocery store, keeping eyes on my watch, I smile, nod encouragingly, and let their words pass. But if I have even two minutes, then I answer back something like this:
I know you’ve got an amazing story. But you have to let go of one word: that four-letter word book. Toss it out. Take down that navy-blue, hard-bound tome with the gilded title on the spine that’s next to the Harvard Classics and throw it out. Don’t try to write a book. Just write some stories.
They always look puzzled at first, then in the next second, relieved, as if a whole shelf of leather-bound volumes had just been lifted from their chest. And it has.
Let me say this to you, too. Never mind “the book” right now. Never mind three hundred pages of the one story everyone says you must write. Set aside for now something I said in the last chapter, about discovering your story, as if there’s only one, and somehow you must make it all cohere. Dump that load. Throw open the library doors and windows. There’s a process, a way to walk into this. And right now, it’s just about remembering. That’s all you need right now. I want to send you out of the stuffy library and into the whispering fields of memory.
Remembering is a crucial activity for all of us. We will not know who we are without remembering.
The Hebrews in the Old Testament were called again and again to remember. In the book of Deuteronomy, they’re about to enter the land God has promised them —a new life and land where milk and honey flowed from every ravine! So much anticipation! —but even after wandering and longing and salivating for their new home for forty years, they aren’t yet ready to cross the threshold. They can’t cross over without these words:
However, be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you don’t forget the things which you have seen with your own eyes. Don’t let them fade from your memory as long as you live. Teach them to your children and grandchildren.
DEUTERONOMY 4:9, GW
What are they remembering? “But you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there.”[7] And in many places, God tells them specifically what they’re to remember about their story: “Tell in the hearing of your son and your son’s son the mighty things I have done in Egypt . . . that you may know that I am the LORD.”[8]
They’re to remember who they are, where they’ve come from, and how they’ve gotten there. And this story is completely wrapped around God’s story: who he is and all he’s done with them, for them. Without this remembrance, they are lost.
And so they were. They did forget who God is, the miraculous ways he freed them to make them his people, his daughters and sons: “And the people of Israel did not remember the LORD their God, who had rescued them from the hand of all their enemies on every side.”[9] In fact, the whole history of God’s people in the Old Testament is the story of the rise and fall of kings who do evil because they forget God. Then occasionally a righteous man emerges who “remembered” God.
Listen. I know I’m going all preachy here, but this is monumental for all of us, no matter what we believe about the Bible: The past is not done. It lives on in us, no matter how cleverly we disguise ourselves, no matter how fast we try to run from it. When we don’t turn and look behind, we lose our way. Even our very selves. Dan Allender writes,
Rather than living a life of freedom and creativity that finds meaning even in the meaningless places in our past, we purpose to forget. . . .
Forgetting is a wager we all make on a daily basis, and it exacts a terrible price. The price of forgetting is a life of repetition, an insincere way of relating, a loss of self.[10]
Which stories should we remember and pursue? Only you can answer that. For me, I knew the memoir I was writing for Kate would not be the story of my life. The whole of my life was too overwhelming and I sensed, even as I began, that no reader would follow me through those brambled trails. I knew this work would focus on my move to Alaska and the new life I was still struggling to define and live. That window would be enough.
The first summer I began work on the memoir, I scratched out a time line in pencil on yellow legal pads. Into that single horizontal line, I staked a peg, labeled it with an approximate date. I remembered my first visit to Alaska and to this island off Kodiak Island. How at nineteen, it was my first time in a plane, how I landed in a tiny village in a floatplane and was met on the beach by the family I’d soon belong to. I remember the sweater I was wearing: bright yellow, red, and green, flashy and optimistic. I remember the first time in a skiff the next day. Then the first time fishing in the skiff. The first time seeing the island I thought I would live on for every summer the rest of my life. I remembered working with my husband to build the house that winter, that whole year just the two of us on an island with no contact with the outside world.
I marked another stake years later, unexpectedly moving to another island. The birth of our daughter. The Exxon oil spill. Cleaning the beaches with shovels and rakes.
One memory triggered another. The time line marched across pages, and I laid them out on the table, one after another. Railroad tracks, horizontal and vertical marks across the expanse of my days. I took my time. I didn’t rush.
And already it began, a sense of relief. My childhood and even my early years in fishing were all cast in a cloak of secrets. As I marked down my memories and turning points, some fleeting and fragmentary, others vivid and overwhelming, I felt lighter. It was freeing to bring words and language to some of those memories. And I hadn’t even begun to write yet.
I didn’t yet know the science of “remembering.” Scholars and social scientists have studied the cost of keeping secrets. Protecting secrets saps our strength, erodes our health. When we suppress and hide events in our lives, we have no means of integrating them into our experience. We think keeping secrets is good, that it keeps us from obsessing or being stuck on whatever that hard truth or event is. But of course, the opposite happens. What we try to hide will show up everywhere.[11]
When we intentionally map out the pieces of our lives, the strangest and yet most ordinary thing happens. We are mapping chronos time, the Greek word for time that measures the earth’s journey around the sun, the steady ticktock calendar of our days and years —and then some pencil marks will drop us through the floor into kairos time. Kairos is the other word Greeks use for time, and it is time beyond measuring, beyond quantifying. This is the now from another now, and there we are, my newborn daughter and I both lying on the sawdusty, plywood floor of the new house, gazing at each other. She is fussing and squirming, just four weeks old and frustrated she cannot go where she wants, and I am exhausted from her colic, no longer seeing out through the windows of our half-built house the whales that spout outside in the bay. I lie beside her in a red corduroy shirt, seeing only her wide brown eyes, her appetite for always more. And I don’t know if I’m going to survive this love, these nights and days on this wilderness island that blur into the unending fatigue of the sleepless now, a love that surely will kill me —yet I am dying happy every day because I gladly give my body to this being who is teaching me how death and love are so much the same. This is just a moment, just three minutes. Does this belong on my time line? I mark it.
And the piercing of that tent peg moves to another, earlier moment, and I go again, falling or rising into one of the scariest moments of my life. It is blowing forty miles per hour, the sea a whirlwind of white. I have been given the job of running the skiff, alone, a mile down the channel, into the breaking waves to catch the net in the water and somehow to hold on, to hold on against the wind and sea and to tie on and wait, and I am pregnant and don’t know to say no to this impossible task. I mark it on the railroad tracks even though I am afraid to think about it or write about it. But I can worry later, whether to write about it or not. For now, I stake it down because it happened. And that’s enough for now.
As you enter the fullness of your own story, begin with the big events marked on your chronos time line. Within those, you’ll find kairos events that beckon you deeper. Right now, there is no hierarchy of importance. Mark whatever comes.
Another way to begin is to ask yourself, What have I been entrusted with? What “burdens of witnessing” have been “entrusted” to me?[12] Put those down. Map them on your time line. Or make a list. Here is part of my list, burdens of witnessing that come to me in no particular order:
- growing up rebuilding old houses
- a woman in commercial fishing
- living in Alaskan wilderness, fighting isolation
- two unplanned pregnancies in my forties
- raising six kids
- forgiving my father
These “witnesses” might lead me in another direction. I might feel more comfortable drawing, choosing an image as a metaphor for part of my life’s journey. When I think of the decades of raising my children, I think of a tall tree with deep roots. Each child is a branch. I brainstorm, adding smaller branches, hanging key events on leaves, until a redwood fills the page, rich and heavy with memories.
And don’t forget to mark down stories that make you laugh! Not that make your kids or your family or your friends laugh —but that make you laugh. For a few years, my boys loved to tell the story of when I hit the deer in Texas at night going sixty miles per hour. Their favorite part was when I screamed just before the impact. At this point, they gave a high, girlish scream of terror and laughed uproariously. I usually rolled my eyes in quiet protest. I gave up defending myself, that I saw the mule deer in the dark but too late to brake, so I knew I could do nothing but hit it. I gave up citing the statistics of how many people are killed every year by hooves-on-the-highways. And yes, I was driving a camper, but it was low to the ground and that mule deer could have come straight through the windshield. But I was one mother before five sons. The numbers were against me, so I sat there smiling what I hoped was a saintly smile, or I retaliated with my own stories. Remember, boys, how three of you begged me to lock you in the carpeted trunk of our rental car for the hour-long drive into Chicago? Remember how mad you were at me when I said no?
I give you permission to leave out all the stories your kids tell on you and any other story you want. And if you’re still a reluctant life-story writer, or even life-story mapper, hear this: You get to decide what stories you tell. (Yes, tell the truth, but you still get to choose what you tell!)
Don’t forget the bus laboring up the hill in the blizzard, the burnt turkey on Thanksgiving, the last radiation treatment and how you took everyone out for tacos after. Start your own catalog of witness, or follow the one written by a brilliant author nearly 2,600 years ago, a poetic pendulum that captures the swing and range of every life:
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
ECCLESIASTES 3:1-8
Maybe you want to write something that is beautiful and redeeming and that gives others hope. No matter who we are —agnostic, atheist, done-with-church, or lifelong Sunday-school teacher —we all share a human desire for the good, the beautiful. We’re all, at heart, I believe, “recyclers” who want to find beauty, even in ugliness and pain. We all long for some kind of redemption.
Or maybe you know already that you want to write something “for the glory of God.” What does that mean, exactly? It means, I believe, putting the attributes of God —his holiness, splendor, power, majesty —on display through our lives wherever we are. If you’re a glory person like me, then don’t think you must write some kind of super-Christian “testimony” with hand-painted flowers and a glistening rainbow at the end.
No matter what our impulse for writing, no matter what beauty or redemption or glory we’re seeking to unearth, the “teacher” who wrote Ecclesiastes shows us that we don’t have to paper over the other side of life.[13] In fact, for Bible readers, the rest of the Bible points us shockingly in a different direction. Because don’t those pages deliver full doses of both sides of the catalog of witnessing? Yes, there is sowing, mending, laughing, building, dancing. But also there is uprooting, killing, weeping, scattering, hating. If I had anything to do with the composition of this holy book, I would have been a much tougher editor. I would have cleaned up the endings of some of those books, as well as the accounts of some of its heroes. Including Solomon!
Many scholars believe King Solomon himself authored the brilliant words of Ecclesiastes, yet Solomon’s own life did not end well. His biographer unflinchingly summarized his last days:
Solomon married seven hundred princesses and also had three hundred concubines. They made him turn away from God, and by the time he was old they had led him into the worship of foreign gods. He was not faithful to the LORD his God, as his father David had been.
1 KINGS 11:3-4, GNT
Solomon had lived a long, fruitful, extraordinary life. Couldn’t that last part just be edited out? And what about others we find in the Bible? Samson, Jonah, and so many others whose stories end badly. Samson is captured and blinded and dies with a last prayer on his lips —asking God not for forgiveness but for revenge against his enemies. Jonah, holy man of God who spent most of his time running away from God, ends with a pouty face as God saves Nineveh. This unapologetic truth-telling, this whole-story-recounting continues, right on into the New Testament where Ananias and Sapphira drop dead for their lies, and Stephen is stoned for his faith, and on it goes.[14]
In this book of the history of God’s people and in our history now, the great forces of life swing us from tearing to mending, from gathering to scattering, from embracing to refraining, from keeping to throwing away. This is the reality of life for every one of us. While we lament the heavier side of our life stories, we also know that without experiencing pain, we cannot experience joy. Without scattering stones, we cannot gather them. The length and breadth of our lives will never line up straight and steady. In our story, too, the words we braid and toss will coil and snarl between opposites, may tangle and resolve only to knot up again. Our story may be longer than we know now. It’s a complicated story. It’s a messy story. Let it be messy, especially now. Open the doors. Remember anything you can.
Don’t write just yet —unless you have to. First, we must survey. We map the scope and terrain. We look at the long coil of our lives, no matter how long or short we’ve lived. Whether you’re seventeen or forty-three or seventy-eight, you have a lifetime of experiences.
We’re not writing a book just now. We’re not looking for answers just now. We’re after distance and breadth. We’re after wonder. We’re allowing the tension of contradictions. We’re seeking context. We’re learning about time and timelessness. We’re going to let ourselves pass through the face of the clock. We can’t know who we are now without remembering.
Time is short: Map your whole story, all that you can. Let it be complicated. Don’t be afraid. Find your fuller story.
Your Turn!
We’ve covered some important ground in this chapter, touching on a multitude of ways to trigger memories and to map out the scope of our lives. Choose the one that feels the most helpful, or try your hand at a couple of these. Spend as much time as you’re able. The more time you invest, the more you’ll recall and the more content you’ll have to write from in the next chapters.
- 1. Time line: Make a time line for every five to ten years of your life (depending on how old you are), marking important events: places you’ve lived, jobs you’ve held, major events in your family. Then, on that time line, see if you can identity some of these events as well:
- When you saw God at work in your life
- When you changed in a significant way
- When you overcame a great difficulty
- When you struggled with your faith
- When you wanted to give up
- When God answered your prayers in a special way
- When your understanding of God changed and grew
- When you forgave someone and/or when you were forgiven
- When you sensed God’s calling on your life to a particular job, place, or relationship
- 2. Burdens of witnessing: Let’s revisit Patricia Hampl’s words: “For we do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something —make something —with it. A story, we sense, is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.” Make a list of the special events and experiences, the “burdens of witnessing” that have been “entrusted” to you.
- 3. Artwalk: Choose an image to represent your life, or if you want to be more specific and more spiritually intentional, choose an image to represent your journey of faith. (Example: a tree, a church building, a labyrinth, a house, a mountain, a road map.) Draw it out on a large piece of paper, filling it in with key events, places, and people. If you haven’t used them yet, consider using the same prompts and events listed under #1.
- 4. The pendulum swing: Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 gives us an extraordinary range of activities. Many of them are metaphors that may spark particular memories. Recall some times that fit under each category. (Example: Under “a time to scatter stones” I might write “my children leaving home.” Under “a time to gather stones” I might write “our first wedding —Noah and Lizzie and how we were gathered again as a family.”)
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.