One of my favorite things about living in a house with
people who are drawn to art and creative things is that we often find overlap
happening among our current projects and interests (read: obsessions). The connections
are profound sometimes, and so interesting to me that, despite our varied
interests, we find so much common ground.
We’ll start with the one closest to the ground. Atticus, our
three-year-old is hooked on Super Why!
Thanks to this show and the benefits of having a literary mama who is obsessed
with the written word—okay, mostly the show—Atticus knows nearly all his
letters already, capital and lowercase. It’s impressive enough to justify my obnoxious
bragging. What I like about the show is how it takes children’s stories and
reinvents them by showing how changing a word or two can change the ending of a
story, even save the day. So, for
example, in the story of Little Red Riding Hood, if we change the sentence to
read that “slippers” were in bed instead of the wolf, boom—sad ending averted.
No one dies. This model borrows from the old to make the new. It makes a story
that was once passive become interactive.
Daina, our thirteen year old, has recently become fascinated
with the show Once Upon a Time, a
show that also takes known fairytales and makes them new by locating some of
the storylines in the modern-day town Storybrooke. It’s no surprise that she
loves the show since she also loves Doctor
Who, which calls into question time’s being linear in nature and,
consequently, conventional narratives. In both cases, there is rewriting being
done. Reinvention is happening, and as a result, the same stories hit us in a
new way—we are reawakened.
This is not a new concept.
The fragmentation and reassembling in an attempt to make
something new is something we see in music as early as the 1960s’ dance hall in
Jamaica. Prior to this, in art we see artists like Picasso fragmenting images
and reassembling them, enabling us to see conventional images in unconventional
ways because of how they’ve been newly pieced together—same concept, new
format.
Prior to this, we have Ezra Pound’s modernist literature
paired with the preaching of “Make it new!” and the hope of a new era of literature
that broke away from all that had been done to death before.
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| Ezra Pound (poet among other things) |
One of my favorite of Pound’s contemporaries is Gertrude
Stein, writer and a friend of Picasso, who played with words in order to wake
people up to the newness of them, to refresh the words—or at least refresh our
eyes to seeing them in that new light. Of her sentence “A rose is a rose is a
rose is a rose,” she said the rose had never been as red as it was before that
sentence.
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| Gertrude Stein (yes, she's a woman) |
My husband Jonathan designs pedals and amps and does
woodworking. He loves analog and throwbacks. His book stacks are stocked with
books on fine woods and dovetail joints and joiners and other words I’m not comfortable using in sentences. He
is investing his time in seeing how things were done when they were done well.
Through his work, he is recreating what he loves and presenting it in a new way
so that we also might appreciate it in a new way.
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| I have no idea what this is. Location: bathroom sink, circa 2014 |
The idea of taking something known and adjusting our vision
so that we can really see it as we
had the first time when it was new and all its details soaked into our skin,
that’s the goal of so much of the literature I’ve been adoring lately. It’s not
changing the content so much as it’s changing my perspective so that I can see
it in a new light—really see it again as if for the first time.
I finished a book this evening that offers reinventions of
known stories. In The First Time We Saw
Him, Matt Mikalatos posits what the Biblical accounts of Jesus’s life would
be like if they were to have happened in twenty-first century life.
The book upsets routine retellings with beautiful, poetic
passages that illuminate new meaning like in the modernized version of Mary who
takes a pregnancy test she buys at the convenience store. She sits at home,
“staring at the test, waiting, and the small blue cross slowly appeared, bright
and certain and shining like a star.”
The stories are intermingled with exegesis, in which
Mikalatos explores familiar questions, such as where God is during dark times,
in very unfamiliar ways. This is Mikalatos’s gift: He stays true to the core of
the text, but he turns it on its head in such a way that you cannot see it the same way again. You
simple can’t.
If chapters got shout-outs, I’d give one to Chapters 5, 7,
8, and 12 through the epilogue. You see, I was reading along, minding my own
business, until Chapter 5 called “The Billionaire and the Teacher” high fived
me in the face. I want to cut and paste his casserole joke here (something all
Southern church-folk should ‘get’), followed by his explanation of what it must
have been like for the disciples to bring their lives full-stop and follow him.
I want everyone I know to read pages 62 and 63. He is honest about how bizarre
some of Jesus’s miracles were, and he is honest about how we respond to these
so many years later, many of us far too close to callous. We’ve just heard them so many times. Are
we really hearing them? Is it possible to experience them in the same immediate
way that his disciples did? Do we get it?
On page 92, he calls me out. Just gloss that. Keep walkin’
by. Try not to cry like I did on page 94.
Around Chapter 8 is when you begin to hope the book doesn’t
end. It’s powerful.
Most refreshing to me about The First Time We Saw Him is that it offers not only a new way of seeing Jesus
but also a new way of seeing ourselves. It invites us to engage more deeply
with these texts and to think critically about the ways we’re living—or not
living—in response to them.
If I had a billion dollars, I’d buy you all a copy. Because I
don’t, you’re on your
own, with a pocketful of promises from me that you’ll love
it.
This book does exactly what I love about books in general. When I finished, it left me different, and that's an incredible thing and an incredibly hopeful thought, that we can rewrite ourselves and make better pages of our days, that we can make new things--be new people. That nothing's done and nothing's perfect, that we're all works in progress with the power to revise and be revised. I just love that.
Thank you for reading.
I know I write long.
Bless it—and me—and
you.
