I want to declare epiphanies, but you just want stories.
When I send you lyrics and six-winged seraphs, your eyebrow starts to twitch. I have spent all weekend over a hot tureen of allegory, soulish beans leapfrogging commas. Now my beads of sweat empty into salty rivers: “Thank you for your submission, but this is not a fit for us.”
But when I lightly toast two thousand words about a stroll in Toronto, you pull out the butter. You chomp and cheer. I gape at you, jaunty and jumping around the room in jeans as soft as suede. It fits. Soupy metaphors may tantrum, but story fits.
I could blame my seminary education for my high-calorie prose. Perhaps so much homiletics hogtied my heart, until I only have recipes for moral filleted of story. I shrink my day at the beach to one pecan sandy. I preserve comets in briny jars.
I should know better. No oratorio of opinion ever made me dance. No fistful of metaphors ever saved my life. What profit is it to rush the lovely landing and lose the story’s soul?
I’m learning, in fits and snits.
The Writer who walks me home in the dark does not overshoot the moon. He’s the only one who has the right to do so, but he doesn’t. He takes the trip downstairs to read us storybooks. He travels light years from pure poetics to play with dough beside us.
The Author I serve is stubborn about stories. He gave them names and wrote them in his image, and he will not reduce them to wordplay. Jesus chose surly farmers and mud-bound sheep over pretty words every time. Given the raw materials of a rumpled world, the Word was wonderstruck.
This is fortunate for the shaggy among us. We writhe and write in our own racing blood, thumping and weeping and enacting God in all directions. We are freckles and bones, not metaphors and ozone. We are essence and event, not sharpened points.
Street-sweepers or editors, we smell story on the stove, and we wake up.
We pile our plates with salty Samaritans. A man abandons his plans to save a stranger, and we lean in to hear what happens next. We will never cease to be the children who worried over storybook fauns.
You could write us a treatise on kindness or summarize the sturdiness of souls, and we would forget. You can write us a paragraph about a woman who lost a cookie or a man who climbed a sycamore, and we will be changed.
We forget. We pontificate. If we are lucky, we get rejected by editors who insist on sinew and story.
I want to tell you what I know of love, but I am in a muddy rush. The Writer is in no hurry.
The Lover lingers over details, noticing the one white hair in your eyebrow, or the hymn you don’t realize you hum after dinner every night.
We are infuriatingly specific. God will never reduce us to broth and by-products.
We are not canned ingredients for purpose soup. We are not convenient turns of phrase.
We are not cells and ideas, ethereal glitter in a bone box.
We are the hour we watched our dad carrying Communion wine down the stairs, wobbly with Parkinson’s.
We are the promise we made to sing “How Great Thou Art” at our friend’s funeral, and the prayer that she lives past a hundred.
We are the unicorn-shaped floral arrangement we sent our mean aunt at Easter.
We are the earrings we should have taken off and given the eight-year-old who worked up her courage to compliment them.
We are stories, and the One who writes is the One who leans in, yearning: “And then what? What next? Tell me everything.”
The One who can count infinities prefers to stop at one.
God is not satisfied with plastic wrap: “Lord, I wish to be loving. I aspire to be brave. I strive to be grateful.”
God wants the melty sandwich: “Father, I called my assistant a slothy little troll in my head today. She wrote something beautiful, and I didn’t acknowledge it. Please forgive me. Lord, I am terrified of the party. The host is judgy, and my stomach is acting weird, and I look like a potato in my dress. Will you come with me? Holy Wild Goose, my Mom made me laugh so hard this morning, I heard the rustle of wings. Thank you. Thank you.”
We will forget. God will remember us.
God will pull out our old notebooks, soft with years and scribbly with surprise: “Read this. Remember you wanted to be a writer and a pastor and a veterinarian when you were three? Remember you proclaimed that preposterous when you were twenty?
“Remember how every job turned to chip crumbs along the way?
“Remember how you didn’t want to be the fundraiser at the animal shelter? Remember how the years fed you your own words with a long-tailed laugh?
“Remember how you wrote and comforted and cared for animals? Remember how wise a three-year-old can be?
“Remember I know the end from the beginning? Will you remember the next time the chip crumbs are everywhere? Will you tell preposterous stories?”
No. I will forget.
God will be patient.
I will wrap myself in pretty words. God will dress me in overalls and hours.
I will try to turn hours into homilies. God will crowd them with characters.
I will pretend I am pure purpose. God will read me aloud.
has been the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary for sixteen years. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears in Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Porridge, and The Razor, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for 33 years and laughs with her poet mother every morning.
