Still Life with Words

My brother and I grew up in a small house with four adults–two parents, two grandparents, all of whom had things to say. All of them told stories.

Grandpa’s long Faulknerian after-dinner rambles featured a large cast of North Carolina kinfolk, mostly poor, clever, politically divided.

My grandmother had her own repertoire of stories from a more genteel, if not more affluent, upbringing in rural Virginia. In one of the earliest classes of women to graduate from what was then Trinity College, she never quite got over her indignation that her alma mater forsook its sacred name for that of the Duke family. As far as she was concerned, their tobacco money might as well have been thirty pieces of silver.

Mom told stories, too, that educated us about the Great Depression in ways no econ class could. We learned from her what it meant to “make do” in hard times, and how humor and ingenuity were, along with those Paul mentioned, fruits of the Spirit.

My favorite of Dad’s stories was his tale of stowing away on a ship at 16, jumping overboard as they came into port in the Philippines, and working his way back home–an adventure he subsequently published in the L.A. Times. His war stories, no doubt carefully edited, were mostly amusing anecdotes about the  English and French. Whatever carnage he witnessed or fear he experienced were edited out.

I mention all these not because our family had more story material than others, but because I have lately been feeling renewed gratitude for the many hours of conversation and storytelling, not to mention Bible study and hymn singing, that equipped me for a life of reading, teaching, and enjoying the pleasures and the power of words. The lament that electronic devices have displaced or diminished the conversations that used to knit families and communities together has become something of a cliche.

Many parents and schools make rules about when to put the phones away, but the challenge of managing not only kids’ but our own attachments if not addictions to electronic and other distractions is surely something to take seriously. Or playfully.

Very few of us are likely to retrieve evening hours for the gentle art of rambling conversation by being shamed into it. But we might find ways to reintroduce old practices or try out new ones that can make our times together healthier and more life-giving–ways to be more fully present to one another, to ourselves, and to God. I offer a few here that we or others I know have tried.

— Prompts. I know it might sound cheesy, but at an intergenerational gathering homemade “conversation cards” can lead to surprises. I would emphasize homemade because boxes of conversation cards are available as front-of-the-bookstore merchandise but most of them (in my picky opinion) are too generic to be interesting. Sometimes oddball questions open wide doors: What has come to matter most to you about shoes? for instance, can lead to musings on the pleasures of going barefoot or to shoes as a measure of “cool” or to the undersung pleasures of long walks.

Our daughter’s family did a major household rearrangement after one of her boys gave a detailed, unexpectedly enthusiastic response to If you could change one thing about your house, what would it be? Imagining out loud a “lair” for two sociable teens actually made it happen. One birthday I looked down a long table of beloved family folk and said, “I’d like each of you to tell the rest of us who know you so well one thing you think we don’t know about you.” No pressure, of course, to make embarrassing disclosures, and no one did, but we went home that night with a repertoire of stories and a few new insights that deepened our tenderness for each other. 

— One-sentence challenges. These are texts I occasionally send kids now away at college. My message at the beginning of the school year is that I’m not expecting detailed emails with news updates, but I’ll be sending them a “one-sentence challenge” every week or so. All they’re expected to do is finish the sentence and send it back. Some of the challenges have been “One learning moment that came outside class this week was . . . “; “Living in a dorm I’m beginning to realize . . .”; and “I find myself wanting friendships that . . .”.  The fun part is that a couple of them can’t confine themselves to completing the sentence. I’ve gotten some sweet, thoughtful communications I’d actually call letters in response to one-sentence challenges. Oddly, lowering the bar can induce them to leap a little higher.

— Dinner and documentary nights. I’ve done this with church groups as well as family. We eat while we watch and talk about it afterwards. The range of compelling documentaries available is quite impressive. And for those who admit documentaries aren’t their idea of good entertainment, a good dinner can help. Or sometimes substituting a movie with a good plot and debriefing afterwards.

— Learning by heart. Singing is the easiest way to do this. Or learning a single Bible verse or quoted passage. It can be fun to give everyone a printed text and read it aloud, crossing out words as you read it repeatedly until all the words are obliterated and you find yourself reciting it. Memorization, paradoxically, makes our conversations less rote, richer with associations and allusions, and sometimes borrowed words or images fall, unexpected, into the flow of conversation and, in John O Donohue’s words, “bless the space between us.”

Regular conversation is as important, I believe, as eating vegetables, brushing teeth, and picking up after yourself. It’s a necessity for spiritual health. It keeps curiosity alive, which, I believe, is the basis of compassion: we need to find ways to keep asking one another, “What’s it like to be you?”

Conversation prepares us for prayer. Sometimes it is a kind of prayer, as we find our way into the deep places of heart and spirit and greet Christ in each other. God may know how to do more for and in us than we can ask or imagine, but we need to ask and imagine. Prayer is enriched by the knowing that comes from hearing each other’s stories, and sometimes shaped by it. One good answer to “teach us to pray” might be “Talk to each other. And then listen.”