TELLING TALES

Since making the rookie mistake of saying out loud to people that I am writing a novel, I generally get asked one of two questions – each entirely predictable and without answer. What is it about? How far along are you?  I don’t know how to satisfy these questions. It’s not a baby – girl or boy, how many weeks? I don’t know what it’s about – I haven’t written it yet. I don’t know how far along I am – but I’m a very, very long way from done. I just want it to be healthy.

If I am feeling safe or risky or pressured, I will sometimes offer, It’s about Sarah. Blank stare. You know – Sarah? Yawn. Tucked between crisp paper sheets, back at the beginning of The Book, in a dead sleep. Abraham’s wife. Isaac’s mother. When your story is 127 years from beginning to end, I do think there is something faulty about not being identifiable by much more than that.

There are a lot of things that frustrate me about Sarah, and about the way we tend to read her story. I have yet to resolve for myself whether or not I even like her. I don’t know that I’m supposed to like her. Honestly, I kind of don’t. It’s difficult to write that. It’s difficult to say out loud, I’d rather be on an episode of ‘Cops’ than model my life after a woman like that.

 She must have been impressive. She’s the CHOSEN. The MATRIARCH. Overlooking a few notable very bad decisions and one cynical laugh, she’s a perfect example of that most definable and desirous of creatures – the Godly woman. She’s a living sacrifice, a testament to faith. She’s beautiful. She whips up a feast fit for angels on a moment’s notice. She’s the Tammy Wynette of Genesis – the emblematic long-suffering wife doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, and standing by her man. He, in turn, gives her a very expensive funeral.

Sometimes I want to skim over her. Make justification for how she used and abused her handmaid, Hagar. Not think too long and hard about how she tossed Ishmael – her own son, for all intents and purposes – into the desert to die once she’d birthed another on her own. Not consider why she did not rip Abraham apart with her hands, after he had tied up their child and tried to light him on fire. After that episode I would have put the God-covenant in a pitched basket and sent it down the river for someone else to find. I would have rolled that old man up in a carpet and hammered a peg through his temple while he slept. No. More. God. Encounters.

But I’ve been conditioned. I want Sarah to be holier than me. I want her to be devout, full of faith, relentless in her chasing after righteousness, courageous and indomitable, dignified. I want her to be always only a woman seeking after, and submissive to, God’s heart. I want her to be character flawed. A weaker vessel. A little cracked. I want to be able to read her story and press my hand to my forehead, and say wistfully, Oh, IF ONLY. If only you had just trusted God a little more, a little longer, you would have had everything you ever wanted. And how the world would be different now! I want it to just be a story.

God forbid Sarah should think and feel and behave like a real person. Nobody wants her to actually be a broken thing – shattered, spilled out, making a mess all over the floor, stinging our noses. It feels so wasteful.

If Sarah wrapped those crisp, white sheets around herself and crawled out from between the black covers, and spoke, I think she would be terrifying. She might float out over my bed at night, like Fruma Sarah from Fiddler on the Roof, and with musty burial wraps billowing around her she’d screech at me, How do you like me now?!

I ask God for the courage not to reach out and try to soothe her.

I pray to remember that God more than loves the mistake-makers. God chooses them. God goes galaxies out of the way to seek them out and to find them. God locks eyes and heart on the broken, the poor in spirit, the damaged, the beyond repair. God lays claim to their lives, and repurposes them. God writes the whole entire Story around them.