Is Reading Fiction a Waste of Time?

When I first read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” I was naïve enough to get sucked into Mrs. Turpin’s world. That snotty-nosed kid, that acne-riddled teenage wretch, that chatty lady – yes, I saw them just as she did. How rude of that girl to call her a “warthog from hell.” She was just trying to be nice. Clearly. Nice. As the daughter of an evangelical pastor and his godly wife, I was trained in niceness, and I was good at it.

Each time I read the story, however, I became increasingly aware of the ickiness of her niceness, the condescending smarminess of her prim righteousness. I became uncomfortable with myself because I could see myself in Mrs. Turpin. I became shocked by the overt racism and the general acceptability of it by the characters I first thought most decent. I began to “move into” Mary Grace’s prophetic posture and condemned the whole nastiness of the scene. I became alternately ashamed and horrified and disgusted. The most recent re-readings have brought me a sense of sweet relief. As Mrs. Turpin’s virtues are burned away and she joins the parade of peculiars who march into heaven, I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude that she and her ilk (like me) also get in, and I laugh at my ridiculousness.

“Revelation” has seeped into my imagination in such a way that I can say my understanding of saving grace has been changed. What was a theological concept of divine forbearance that had regal and puritanical undertones, definite boundaries, and careful rules has become an outrageous and rather raucous image of sinners great and small, worthy and unworthy, petty and pedantic and nasty and wretched, streaming toward paradise in a hilarious celebration of unexpected and unmerited joy. I’ve not read a theology book yet that can create that image in my brain as well as O’Connor does.

For the last decade, I’ve been teaching Christian formation at a seminary, and part of the instruction has included a justification of the whole concept of formation, which has not been a common term in many evangelical circles. If I were to switch to talking about “discipleship,” evangelical minds might move into the ordinary grooves: Bible study, evangelism, small groups, intercessory prayer. For decades, this simple and tidy list of spiritual practices, which revolve around church and home, made up the evangelical’s limited arsenal for Christian living. When Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline was first published in the late 1970s, however, a whole new menu of practices – foreign to the evangelical world for the most part but rooted in ancient rhythms – triggered an awareness of possibilities to make the spiritual life deeper and richer.

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At seminary today we continue to engage in this ressourcement, the recovery of historical ways of thought and practice. Alongside this ecclesial archaeology, however, we need to tackle the marked differences between ancient disciplines and the modern world. Twenty-first-century technology, lifestyles, and societal norms have made spiritual disciplines of any kind more daunting, more squeezed, more focused on productivity and information management. There is no time to waste. Which is why the idea of making a new spiritual discipline for the twenty-first century, one that has no measurable effect while demanding a great deal of time, seems counterintuitive.

In The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis describes the soft, disenchanting voice of an enchantress who attempts to persuade Aslan’s emissaries that sun, Lion, and sky are really just lamp, cat, and dream. “Of course, the more enchanted you get, the more certain you feel that you are not enchanted at all.” It’s a wonderful scene, where the real world – sun, stars, sky – grounds the reader at the same time that the characters are experiencing such a level of disenchantment that the very world the reader indwells is banished from their imaginations, scorned as too fantastical to be real.

In Charles Taylor’s arguments about the rise of secularism, he posits that our modern selves have been “exorcised” of unseen realities and of sacramental meanings. We live in a “buffered” world where materialism and naturalism define reality. In Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved, we read of Nouwen’s secular friend, Fred, for whom he wrote the book in the hopes of extending a vision to him of the spiritual world. Nouwen, however, failed to speak into his friend’s life, and as he reflects on that failure, Nouwen writes: “Fred was quite willing to say that, with the disappearance of the sacred from our world, the human imagination had been impoverished and that many people live with a sense of loss, even emptiness.” This diagnosis, however, is not just in the secular world. We who belong to the church, who have cognitively accepted the Unseen Reality, as Evelyn Underhill described it, also suffer from constricted imaginations. The disenchantment we have all undergone as products of the modern world has critically stunted our spiritual development, our knowledge of ourselves, our hopes and dreams for God in the world.

We live in a “buffered” world where materialism and naturalism define reality.

I frequently find that those who shun fiction – many of whom believe it’s a waste of time – seem more confined by their theological commitments, more bound to right answers and absolute formulas, more troubled by the paradoxes of faith. Lines seem more carefully and thickly drawn; ins and outs more obvious. They seem less able to discern those “reasons which reason knoweth not,” to translate Pascal.

How can we possibly accept the apparent unfairness of God in a story such as Job’s unless we can imagine, in some incredible way, that the vision of God, the encounter with the creator and sustainer of all that is, is worth all the suffering? Job loses all, quite unfairly, and yet at the end of the day, he comes out ahead. He has seen God, and that is enough. Can we imagine a vision of God that makes everything we suffer all right?

Modern theology’s systematization and forced congruities, its embrace of certainties and transactional assurances, and its expectations of God’s predictability leave us completely destitute when none of it “works,” when the human soul is more complex, the chaos of life is too dense, the fickleness of relationships too painful. We need to exercise the imagination in new ways; we need multifaceted experiences of the one truth; we need to explore with our mind’s eye the vast possibilities of joy amid sorrow, of steadiness amidst betrayal, of deep goodness in the midst of tragedy.

Literature invites us to that exercise. It lifts us out of our own contexts, barraged as they are by calamitous news and scientistic remedies. In literature, we move freely in other cultures; we explore the ways others cope with problematic relationships; we see modeled extraordinarily humble forms of goodness; we learn of the challenges of true forgiveness. We gain insight into the sufferings of love; we understand at a deeper level the bitter realities of slavery and its enormous personal and emotional cost.

Perhaps most importantly, by reading literature we learn to know ourselves in new ways. Literature can help us to have mercy on ourselves and others, can divest us of the ignorance that places ourselves at the center of the universe, can make possible new ways of understanding our own befuddled choices. Augustine recognized that we cannot know God without first knowing ourselves. In complex characters and broken situations and deeply human conundrums we have space to explore facets of our souls that we hide from ourselves as much as we do from others.

It’s time we craft some new spiritual practices for a disenchanted, buffered world that has lots of answers and no room for mystery. We need to add disciplines that can jolt us out of our twenty-first-century spiritual banalities, practices that can counteract our flattened world. I’ve started assigning fiction.