STRANDED IN SKIN AND BONES

Two-by-two they came together because a storm was without. And, of course, in Christ the storm rages without. Because the “ark is wherever people come together because this is a stormy world where nothing stays put for long among the crazy waves and where at the end of every voyage there is a burial at sea.”[ii]

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Take Kenny. Put him in your church. The smell of him in the Ark. Maybe even the blood of him dripping onto the floor. People won’t sit beside him. People don’t go to church to smell other people. They go to be heads above the rest. The dogs in the street. Incense is okay. It’s edgy. Probably better than the smell of Kenny. But maybe Kenny is edgy. Loving Kenny. Identifying with Kenny. Emerging from a modern wasteland without perfection on our breath.

The vision of greatness is now a broken epic. But narrative is not a direction. It’s not a concise definition of theology or a purpose-driven knowledge. It’s as Walker Percy says in his novel, The Moviegoer, “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” To be onto the possibility that the larger Narrative of the Blood is the storyline of authenticity.

●●●

We made friends. Kenny and I. Not hanging out at my house kind of friends, but I’d sit beside him. I didn’t mind the smell. I’m not saying I was a good guy. I’m not saying that at all. I sat beside him in the dugout during little league games because I felt for him. This is when I could still feel. This is when I could still see his father standing by the fence at first base. He never sat in the bleachers with the rest of the parents. I’m sure he felt ostracized.

“Now which one is your son?”—one of them may have asked. “Oh, yeah, the one with the red dirt on his crouch. I see him.”
His father stood by the fence and yelled every now and then. I wondered about his father. What would it be like to have a leaky kid? Would I stand at the fence?

“Come on, son. Let’s go home. You played well tonight.” They walked into the matching darkness beyond the stadium lights.
I’d speak to Kenny at school. He’d just look at me, as if I were setting him up, waiting on the right moment to get revenge. But he never caught on to my distant friendship. You can get ostracized for so long that you stop looking for your own narrative. You believe you don’t have one.

I leak. I stink. Here my father comes. That was Kenny’s narrative.
I’ve seen this narrative play out in various ways. I love. I’m rejected. Here no father comes. It’s different. Same storyline, though. We never get a perfect narrative. We can fictionalize it. Make it fake. But being authentic is the last and holy thing.

Frederick Buechner says, "The stories Jesus tells are part of the story you and I are because Jesus has become so much a part of the world's story that it is impossible to imagine how any of our stories would have turned out without him, even the stories of people who don't believe in him or even know who he is or care about knowing. And my story and your story are all part of each other too if only because we have sung together and prayed together and seen each other's faces so that we are at least a footnote at the bottom of each other's story. In other words all our stories are in the end one story, one vast story about being human, being together, being here."
[i] Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark (New York: HarperCollins, 1969; Harper & Row,
1985), 42.
[ii] Ibid.