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Sunday
Lory Widmer Hess, a long-time reader of this blog, has just published a book that uses Biblical stories the way that I use literary stories: to understand life’s pressing issues and find ways to address them. In When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible (Floris Books), Lory shows how the Bible’s narrative richness helped her handle a covert depression that lasted for decades. Her work with developmentally disabled adults also contributed to her healing process and to her understanding of the Gospel story.
Lory has identified 18 healing stories involving Jesus, from his work with lepers, with the blind and the deaf, with those possessed by demons, and with Lazarus. With each she looks at the psychological and spiritual dynamics at play before finding an equivalent in her own healing trajectory. Each chapter ends with a meditational prompt, and each is accompanied by a poem Lory has written from the point of view of the sufferer.
The title of the book is echoed in the epigraph, taken from Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott’s Nobel-Prize acceptance speech: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.” The reference to fragments brings to mind the line from T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land—“These fragments I have shored against my ruin”—although Walcott’s and Lory’s vision of the process is more positive. They write less from a defensive crouch, more in a proactive effort to construct a healthy life.
Lory, who shares with me a Carleton College education, has also worked as an editor and graphic designer and authors the blog Entering the Enchanted Castle: A Quest for the Magic in Life, Language and Literature. In the preface of her new book she writes,
Language has been the great love of my life, even at the times when it seemed to be the greatest stumbling block. Insofar as the gospels are stories, crafted in artistic language, I therefore have some experience in how to navigate them. Long before I started to study the Bible or to cultivate a conscious relationship with Christ, I was steeped in the magic of story, finding in it my own personal savior. How this personal salvation eventually became connected with the Savior of the world, and how my love of story eventually guided me to recognize and claim my own healing story, forms much of the background of this book. If you, too, love language and find relief for your suffering through narrative, I hope it will resonate with you.
For today’s blog Lory agreed to share how she came to write her book. I conclude today’s post with a poem that Lory wrote about doubting Thomas.
By Lory Widmer Hess
Words have always been magic to me — through them, I could enter into other worlds, enchanted lands, the minds and hearts of people who lived in distant places and times, or never existed except on the page. As a child I read voraciously, particularly fantasy books that would carry me along on a hero’s quest to uphold good and conquer evil. And I aspired to be a writer, to make my own words a part of that quest.
The words of scripture were familiar to me, since I sang in an Episcopal church choir from the age of eight. I loved the ritual and the sense of mystery, but when I turned to the Bible, I found it puzzlingly opaque. This was a gateway of meaning for many people, but for me it just brought up unanswered questions. What did it mean to “lose yourself to find yourself”? Why did a God of love so often sound threatening? If the events of Holy Week had been foretold by prophets, did that mean everything was predetermined? Where was human freedom in the Bible story? I remained intrigued, but an outsider in terms of religious faith. I didn’t want to just have faith, I wanted to understand.
As I grew up, while I carried my love of words and my questions into adult life, I lost the creative writing spark. It seemed to have been snuffed out, under the pressure of inner and outer obstacles. I couldn’t find the right words for so many things, for my doubts and fears and grief, for a buried anger that scared me too much to talk about it. Silence was safer than the scary unknown that would open up if I tried to express myself, to describe and name the monsters lurking inside me.
That changed when I spent time living and working with people who didn’t often express themselves in words, or not in the ways I’d been used to. Caring developmentally disabled adults challenged me to care for myself as well in an unaccustomed way. I had to learn to listen far harder than ever before, to communicate with my whole being and not with my intellect alone, and to strain to comprehend a reality that was powerful and real but not accessible to ordinary ways of thinking. As the effort slowly changed me, it challenged me to also change the circumstances of my life, to stop tolerating unhealthy relationships, to speak up and to have faith in my own feelings and my own voice.
The idea of writing poems from the point of view of the people who are healed in the gospels came to me as a gift during this exciting, but often scary and confusing time. Feeling as though some creative energy had finally been unlocked, I received it with gratitude, and then wondered how I could carry it further. The healing stories became more and more alive for me, showing me a new way forward. As my life settled into a new form, I continued to write — essays and memoir sections that complemented the healing stories and brought them into a narrative structure.
What had formerly seemed opaque and incomprehensible started to open up and reveal hidden depths. Thoughts that I’d gathered over the years began to come together, making fragments into a whole picture. I started to grasp ever more powerfully the Gospel story that is all about human freedom and divine love, guiding us toward a part of ourselves that seemed lost but has never truly been forgotten.
My “disabled” friends had been Christ-bearers for me, showing me what is also spoken and demonstrated in the way of the Beloved of God: we do not become human in the truest sense by becoming hard and impervious and self-defensive, but by making ourselves utterly vulnerable, admitting our need for help, daring to trust even though that lays us open to the greatest possible hurt. When this is done in innocence, humbly offering up the seed of our child-self that we all still carry within, the most amazing rebirths can happen.
Finally, though witnessing that process in myself and in others, I found that I’d begun both to understand, and to have faith.
When a publisher accepted the book I’d created, I was thankful that they thought my scribblings might be of help and interest to others. The book is now making its way in the world, and I wonder what will come of it. Will the seeds lying dormant in other hearts break open? Will the creative spark be ignited for someone else? I hope so, and I trust that good will come of the gift that was given to me. The magic of words continues to work in us and between us, showing the way toward the Word that made us.
* * *
As we are in the Easter season, here’s a poem Lory wrote about Doubting Thomas, which appeared in the Dec. 9, 2022 issue of the Agape Review. One can see in the poem the psychological drama that Lory explores in her book—how one can be “crowded with grief and disbelief” and imprisoned by doubt and “self-willed pain.” In Thomas’s case, Lory writes, he “had to feel before he’d heal.”
Doubting
By Lory Widmer Hess
But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. John 20:24-25To a room full of fear
No one can come near –
So crowded with grief
And disbelief
All doors locked tight
Against the night.
Yet He stood in their midst
And spoke of peace,
Awakening them
From their fearful dream.
One failed to see –
The skeptic, he.
Their message of love
Was not enough.
He had to feel
Before he’d heal.
And so we suffer
Instead of offer.
Imprisoned by doubt
We cannot come out.
Our self-willed pain
Shall still remain
Until we leave
Our unbelief
Behind and say
“My Lord, I see.”