I had the pleasure of reading to a favorite five-year-old yesterday. She snuggled on my lap; I had fun using all my best “character voices;” both of us got up from our literary session with sleepy smiles on our faces. I was powerfully reminded of something I knew very well, years ago, when my own children were young: the ritual of reading aloud to little ones is as soothing to me as it is to the little ones. 😊
The weird year through which we’re all living has me questioning many things. Last night, I pondered the phenomena of the Soothing Story Ritual. I wondered why characters who were emphatically different from one another and inhabited distinctive fictional worlds seemed equally able to settle blood pressure and release endorphins? Amelia Bedelia, Harry the Dog, the Cat in the Hat – these were not exactly sleepy / sedate personae, so why was reading about them so conducive to a restful state of mind? Was it a simple matter of “reverting to childhood”, however briefly? Or was there more going on?
On reflection, here’s where I landed. It seems to me that all short stories are uniquely satisfying. They feature a distinct beginning, middle, and end – and are written to be read in a single sitting, so that the reader experiences a completed narrative whole by the time he finishes. Children’s bedtime-storybook stories compress that full arch of meaning into the span of a five-year-old’s attention. The “once upon a time” and the “happily ever after” are guaranteed, even when not explicitly stated; conflicts are resolved, questions are answered, order is restored. Reading a story written for children is a highly concentrated experience of narrative wholeness.
Narrative wholeness lulls little ones to sleepiness while soothing their story-reader adult into a similar state of soporific serenity not just through the comforts of ritual and physical closeness (although those are precious, indeed!). Rather, they satisfy our human cravings for order and completeness. These cravings arise, quite logically, from the imago dei in which we are formed. God made Creation – everything that is – in an orderly fashion; God ordered Creation – seasons, days, lifetimes – with an emphasis on completion and with distinct beginning, middle, and end patterns.
Our real-life experiences often contradict the “beginning, middle, end” paradigm that is so pleasing in a good short story. In times like this year, we seem caught in a never-ending middle that refuses resolution. One narrative climax follows another, and the tension builds ad infinitum, without any hint that closure is visible anywhere on the road ahead.
The movie “Groundhog Day” (a classic – Bill Murray in all his grumpy 1993 glory) offers a much-more-entertaining version of what we’ve been experiencing in 2020: every morning, the same news leading inevitably to the same events and the same dead ends… essentially the same day, over and over again… a middle whose beginning has lost all meaning and whose end is out of reach.
But here’s another tricky truth about time, and order, and wholeness: the never-ending middle has been messing with our minds, on and off, literally for eons.
Take a time-trip back with me. One of my favorite songs by U2 came out in 2001. Truly a ballad of the never-ending middle, it is called “Stuck in a Moment:”
You’ve got to get yourself together
You’ve got stuck in a moment
And now you can’t get out of it.
Don’t say that later will be better
Now you’re stuck in a moment
And you can’t get out of it…And you are such a fool
To worry like you do.
I know it’s tough
And you can never get enough
Of what you don’t really need…I was unconscious, half asleep
The water is warm till you discover how deep
I wasn’t jumping, for me it was a fall
It’s a long way down to nothing at all…And if the night runs over
And if the day won’t last
And if your way should falter
Along the stony pass
It’s just a moment, this time will pass.
The song laments the “stuckness” of the moment even as it describes the sickening sensation of endless falling and the stoniness of a hard, steep climb. The cynicism is tangible – we can never get enough of what we don’t really need?!?
It’s worth reminding ourselves that U2 was writing not in a Covid-world, but in a pre-9-11 world. The Y2K (computer) virus scare was recent non-news; a contentious Presidential election had just been resolved with a recount of votes. A different world from ours; but also the very same world as ours… with the same stuckness. The same never-ending middle.
Look a bit further back – to 1966 – (Walt Disney had just succumbed to lung cancer, the Vietnam War was raging, and India was in the midst of a historic famine) – and hear Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel bemoan being trapped in a single conflated, imploded season:
Look around
Leaves are brown, now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winterHang on to your hopes, my friend
That’s an easy thing to say
But if your hopes should pass away
Simply pretend that you can build them again…Look around
The grass is high
The fields are ripe
It’s the springtime of my life…Seasons change with the scenery
Weaving time in a tapestry
Won’t you stop and remember me
At any convenient time?
Funny how my memory skips while looking over manuscripts
Of unpublished rhyme…Look around
Leaves are brown, now
And the sky is a hazy shade of winterLook around
Leaves are brown
There’s a patch of snow on the ground…
Autumn, winter, and spring banging into one another in the space of the song, while the singer hunches hopelessly over his “unpublished rhyme” with his cocktail in hand. This portrait of ‘60s melancholy is also a timeless image of the endless middle that fits into any decade of human existence.
Hopscotch further back a few centuries and hear the master of the English language lament the never-ending middle as only he can do:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare’s Macbeth may speak the cynicism in iambic pentameter, but it’s the same story as U2 or Simon and Garfunkel: stuck here. Stuck in this middle. No way out.
Even scripture chimes in, via the sardonic voice of the author of Ecclesiastes as he opens his meditation on the meaningless muddle of existence entrapped:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
3 What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south,
and goes around to the north;
round and round goes the wind,
and on its circuits the wind returns.
7 All streams run to the sea,
but the sea is not full;
to the place where the streams flow,
there they continue to flow.
8 All things are wearisome;
more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
or the ear filled with hearing.
9 What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Given the historic sweep and consistency of this witness to the dreary persistence of the never-ending middle, there is temptation to settle in to stuckness as a chronic or even terminal human condition. But here it’s critical to recall the larger story in which this middle seems to be dragging on forever. That larger story that began with the Creation and has an endpoint in the “now / not yet” present/future that is life in Jesus Christ.
The never-ending middle IS stubborn down the centuries. But the never-ending middle is NOT a permanent status quo.
Jesus promises that He is the end of the story – the “happily ever after” of humanity – returning someday to usher in the finale of this life (and the beginning of eternity – which is a whole different kind of “never-ending middle” – perfect and euphoric!). With that in mind, Jesus enjoins us: “You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” (Luke 12:40)
When we are mired in a moment that is stretching on ad infinitum, Jesus’s form of “being ready” offers us an escape from the boozy cynicism of Simon and Garfunkel (or the murderous nihilism of Macbeth, for that matter). Paul describes the process like this:
So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.
(2 Corinthians 4:16 – 18)
When we rely on the evidence of our eyes, the headlines will cement our stuckness in this messy, chaotic sound-byte of narrative going nowhere. But when we default to the promises of the One telling the real story here, we are set free from that illusion.
Paul, again, spells out our assurance:
“For now we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”
(1 Corinthians 13:9 – 12)
Face to face with the Author of our salvation and the perfecting finisher of Creation: What a “happily ever after” for us, especially in this moment of masked separation and wholly imperfect incompletion!
