How Novels Carried Me Through Suffering

When you love theology, you often wonder how others couldn’t love it as much as you do. As you bend the spine of another theology text (that could double for weight-lifting), the words and doctrines seem to pour passion and excitement into your heart. You begin to treasure doctrine. You revel and find relief in finally having the answers to every theological question your Sunday school teachers didn’t have for you. You feel as if entering these halls of doctrine changed your life.

Your life is coloured through theology stained-glass windows. Every song you hear, every word preached, every conversation you have becomes filtered through this very glass. Other people don’t see it until they “provoke” a spewing of our knowledge onto them. This glass illuminates your entire life and projects its colors onto every aspect of it.

Until, one day, that light slants over a darkened corner of your life and it doesn’t take the darkness away. The darkness only absorbs it.

From a young age, I loved reading Scripture and scribbling it on recipe cards that I plastered around my bedroom and bathroom. I had so many questions, though. My church-raised yet non-believing parents only knew so much. Sunday school teachers, youth leaders, and Christian camp counselors were often left speechless at my unending inquiries. When I discovered Christian living books, I devoured them. Soon, youth leaders passed me study Bibles and commentaries, and I feasted on everything I wrapped my hands around concerning biblical literacy and theology.

I had all the answers for a theology of suffering, and I had them always at the ready for any who would listen to me. However, I had yet experienced much suffering at that point (I’ve battled crippling anxiety since I can remember, yet I never viewed that as suffering but as an abhorrent sin in my life I had to murder).

When I became a mother, that changed.

A smattering of mental illnesses, church conflict, miscarriages, a tumultuous pregnancy and postpartum experience with twins sliced through my neat and tidy life behind my theologically-stained glass windows. And as the light slanted on that growing darkness in my life, I continued to grapple in darkness. I stood before my sagging bookcase and glared up at the rows of theology books. Their words fell cold, empty, and at times pithy. I wanted to scream at their words and fling them across the room.

Describing a similar personal experiences, Professor James K. A. Smith writes,

None of my analytical skills helped me claw my way out of the lonely trench in which I found myself, alienated from those right next to me. I won’t adequately capture the despair of realizing that my intellectual strengths were powerless to dispel the black sun that oppressed me. It was a profound experience of puzzlement and bewilderment … All of my vocational confidence in the power of reason was quite literally humiliated in the face of depression. I couldn’t think my way out of this.

As a writer striving to make theology practical for everyday life, this frightened me on another level as well. As I sat before my laptop trying to piece together phrases to help other believers see their life through these very same theological glass panes, I realized I couldn’t do it. It was like trying to capture sunlight streaming through a window with my hands.

Writing had become my greatest sanctuary through life—when all else felt impossible, writing never did. I found freedom and felt joy as words clacked across the keyboard. Yet suffering stole even that.

As I sat in my office, mocked by both a blinking cursor and a sagging bookshelves, an Elven girl beckoned in the back of my mind. I had imagined this girl three years prior, before my first son was born. As I walked to work, I imagined various scenes of her life with the people she loved and the people she hated, but I never put them down on paper. Writing novels was a nice thought, but it didn’t change people like my articles did. It was for that same reason that I hadn’t read a novel since high school.

Now, with the darkness of suffering threatening to block out every bit of light straining through, I wrote her story and picked up The Hobbit. And through them, a new light streamed into the darkness, and I began to see again.

Though Bilbo and I are quite different creatures and our journeys are starkly different, the light of Tolkien’s story broke into my shadows. In Bilbo, I often saw myself; someone taken on a journey they did not expect and felt quite ill-equipped for. When I felt shame for the long journey I was on in my mental health and how incremental my progress seemed in motherhood, I found a companion in Bilbo; his long, convoluted path to the dragon is what made him able to help conquer the dragon once and for all, and this gave me hope and patience for my slowness.

As I opened The Fellowship of the Rings, I met Frodo and again saw a mirror held up in the pages. Frodo, another fearful hobbit on a journey he didn’t ask for, believed he had to make his journey alone. But thanks to some meddling, persistent friends, he didn’t go by himself. While he tried to shield them from the truth and keep them in the dark, they knew better than to let him alone. As I read through the pages by the waning sunlight in the living room, I realized that my persistence in plowing through this suffering with my head down all by myself wasn’t what I needed. I needed to let my true friends come alongside me to help carry me along my journey.

Smith likewise writes of a similar experience that happened for himself. Reflecting on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, he writes, “There are layers to this: it’s not so much that I learned new information from this fictional minister, but that Robinson’s invention was more true for me than all my philosophical disquisitions. Her art found a way to say love; her words found a mode of incarnating the grace at the heart of the gospel.”

As I wrote about the Elven girl running along a tall stone wall, I didn’t realize I was reckoning with my own shadows in her story, too. I wrote that story blindly; I had no plan, I simply wrote what came to me. That made for a lot of editing on the other side of the manuscript and many loose ends I had to fix, but in the process I hurtled through the very journey I had found myself on. And God met me there too. I’ve come to see with Smith that “in our imagining, we may learn how to be human again, learn how to be empathetic and live with one another, just to the extent that we see one another again, in all our fractured complexity and mixed motives and dogged hopes.”

As stories have casted great light over the thick shadows of my suffering, my heart has found room for theology again, but I’ve grown to see that theology is not only taught in textbooks and lectures but in novels and stories as well. I’m learning to not look down on those stories anymore, but to see them as yet another way to meditate on the truths of God and have my affections stirred once more.

That girl who loved theology believed that the mind was the greatest part of herself. I believed my mind was the engine of my faith—my heart with its emotions and affections simply got in the way of believing and knowing God. As I did, I put away novels as something I didn’t have time for. They couldn’t possibly offer me something greater than a five hundred page systematic theology. If “good” emotions came along with that knowledge, all the better; but if not, I should put my head down and press forward. Emotions were a force to control and put away and didn’t have any bearings on my faith.

I had forgotten that Jesus is after not just my mind, but my affections as well. As Smith writes in You Are What You Love,

Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, and your longings. His “teaching” doesn’t just touch the calm, cool, collected space of reflection and contemplation; he is a teacher who invades the heated, passionate regions of the heart.

In these passionate regions of my heart, fiction reached down and renewed a drive to keep pressing forward. As it did, the dark became illuminated again. Our hearts play an integral role in our faith; without heart, we have no love for God and for the people he’s placed in front of us. Our heart is what leads us to obedience and worship. And when theology cannot stir our hearts to these ends, perhaps novels can reach inside instead.

Fiction likewise stirred my heart with affections for my neighbor. Where suffering had driven me back inside myself searching for some kind of light within, fiction flickered a light on the outside that drew me outward. Fiction teaches us empathy in ways no other mode of writing can. Reporting on a study on the connection between empathy and reading, one journalist writes,

The Canadian cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley calls fiction “the mind’s flight simulator.” Just as pilots can practise flying without leaving the ground, people who read fiction may improve their social skills each time they open a novel. In his research, he has found that as we begin to identify with the characters, we start to consider their goals and desires instead of our own. When they are in danger, our hearts start to race. We might even gasp. But we read with luxury of knowing that none of this is happening to us.

As fiction created sympathy in my heart for its characters, it gave me the strength to see my real, living neighbor as well. While it’s important for us to tend to our own souls in suffering, it’s likewise important that we extend our hearts to others. As Kelly Kapic writes in Embodied Hope,

Both the sufferer and those who care for them need to be committed to faithful suffering. They are called to be full of faith in God and faithful to one another, even amid the challenges. They are called to tell the truth about the pain and hardships even as they are faithful to point one another to Christ crucified and risen. For this to happen we need each other. It is not merely the caregiver who always upholds the wounded one. Far more often than is readily admitted, the one in pain brings courage and perseverance to the caregivers; it is most definitely not a one-way street. Each has gifts to offer and gifts to receive. This dynamic must be recognized and honored if there is going to be genuine love and care over an extended period of time.

By God’s common grace, he gave us novels and storytellers, and we shouldn’t look down upon them. For those of us who love to study theology and biblical literacy, it can go against our natural, worn down paths. Yet we forget that our God is one of story; he gave us Scripture as one true narrative of redemptive history and Jesus came to earth telling stories to teach his followers profound truths about him, his kingdom, the gospel, and the law.

If you are in the throes of suffering and the light of your theology texts aren’t dispelling any of the shadows, perhaps the words of a novelist could slant some light over them. Set yourself free from the guilt over reading fiction and let your imagination stir your affections for this storytelling God