The Great Revelation: Evangelical Testimonies and Modernist Literature (2021 Editor's Choice Creative Nonfiction)
Julia Dallaway
The stories we tell over and over again tend to become, in the manner of ancestral myths, sanded down artfully by repetition. Fifteen years old, I found myself in an evangelical church and discovered there a story of my own, which reiteration made beautiful. I witnessed there the enduring human desire, when we speak of our lives, to tell something whole.
A core ritual of that church was the telling of our “testimonies”— that is, Christian conversion stories—to one another. Although these stories were coloured in with personal detail, their outlines conformed to the same basic shape. ‘I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see,’ the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ puts it—a testimony in miniature. From the meeting of two words, ‘once’ and ‘now,’ a “before and after” narrative is born. This binary structure was crucial. The storytellers must embody their story’s stark division, its line in the sand: they must not be who they once were.
I had found the single narrative of my life, and so all other narratives could fall away. My “before,” a desperate sense of invisibility—manifested in unhappy fixations on people I thought could save me—was replaced by a sense of the persistent and patient love of God. This new love would not diminish me. The strange religious term idolatry began to make sense to me, as I saw the dangers and depletions of believing that another person is more than a person (or that oneself is any less). And joy entered in, for the first time in my young life. This was my “after,” a radical break from the past.
I eagerly consumed the ancient Israelite scriptures, internalising their alien dialect of oppression and freedom: He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction … He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me … those who devoured you will be far away. I found a single seam down the centre of my life and unpicked all the other threads.
I thought this was to be my second life.
***
Telling my story brought me praise, but I began to feel that the more I told it, the less true it became. My life was a mere vestige of the story’s linear and liberatory cohesion; two years on, I had stumbled upon another person to whom I was power lessly beholden for my identity. The “before and after” narrative then tormented me, as I sought to cling to it with all the guilt I could muster.
Now, I see that what had begun as a revolution for me—vastly expanding the possibilities of life—became a revolution story, increasingly mythologised and tightly policing my experience of further change. My miraculous ‘spacious place’ became a cramped box-room, which I had painfully outgrown.
The reality is that, in our personal biographies, there is often a long ellipsis between what we call our “redemption” and the “ending” of our mortal lives. A striving for stasis in the interim is unsustainable. Moreover, even a radical break does not cut every tie to the past; some ties will inevitably find ways of re-tying themselves. Hope may follow self-destruction, but tragedy, ambiguity, and confusion also wait their turn. Narrative closure within a life story begins to seem like an unhelpful delusion.
Literary biographer Hermione Lee aptly sums it up: ‘There is no such thing as a definitive biography.’ Perhaps, instead, our stories should be seen as maps: useful guides, but a poor substitute for the real exploration of our metamorphic lives. In a happy coincidence of neurology and poetry, the hippocampus—the part of the brain that deals with navigation—grows only when we are lost.
***
I lost my story. Four years on and in a different city, my faith had crawled through long tunnels of doubt and emerged as something tentative and new. On brisk Thursday mornings in the husk of winter, I got up in the dark, walked a couple of streets, and sat down in a small circle of bodies with a single candle at our centre. I sat there in my patch of darkness, relieved to be free of expectations. The room was walled with glass and looked out onto a garden, and during the half-hour of the silent Quaker meeting, the shadow cast by the candle dwindled and the room filled up with sun.
Later, I learned about apophatic spirituality: truth that is found where language becomes undone.
***
If I was to revise my autobiographical narrative in light of these more obscure experiences, I needed an alternative mode of storytelling. I found one in modernist literature.
Only around the turn of the twentieth century did literature in England begin considering the ways in which life does not translate well into story. The novels of the preceding Victorian period—written by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others—shared a common cohesion: a narrative arc of beginning-middle-and-end, a crisis followed by a resolution that produces a sense of closure, and often a moral impression to be drawn from the whole. But where Victorian literature offered cohesion, the new modernist literature offered, quite self-consciously, only fragments. In 1922, T. S. Eliot composed ‘The Waste Land,’ a bewildering expanse of poetry, littered with allusions to other texts. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ he wrote.
Similarly, the experimental novels of the 1920s, such as those by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, do not gather to an ultimate conclusion, or give way to a statement of purpose. Woolf looks down scornfully on writers who ‘palm off’ on their readers a version of life that—like neat and binary narratives—does not resemble what she calls ‘that surprising apparition,’ the chaos and wonder of daily subjective experience. In her novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf retaliates pointedly:
The great revelation had not come. The great revelation perhaps never would come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Within Woolf’s arresting notion of ‘daily miracles, illuminations, matches,’ I glimpsed the very possibility I sought: meaning that did not depend on cohesion.
‘Are there stories?’, Woolf’s later novel The Waves (1931) asks, pushing back even more forcefully against conventional literary forms; ‘Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.’ It is ironic that The Waves is held up by many as Woolf’s supreme artistic achievement, or magnum opus, given that the novel’s ending reckons with the fact that there is no all-encompassing, summative creative project—no ‘one story to which all phrases refer.’ Instead, we accumulate disparate ‘phrases’ over the course of a lifetime, and perhaps, if we are lucky, say a handful of things we meant to say.
Before the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, Marxists readily claimed to explain history in terms of economic class and Freudians did the same with their theories of the subconscious. Meanwhile, Christians told a cosmic metanarrative centred on the life of Christ. But modernists, as they began to think in terms of fragments, saw any such claim to an overarching story of human history—or metanarrative—with increasing suspicion. The notion of a Christian metanarrative persists in contemporary evangelical circles, where people believe in an authorial God with the power to dictate a story to which all our individual stories refer. But can there be faith without metanarrative? Where can we land when we fall through the slats of a story?
***
For me, the vanishing of stories did not lead to a disintegration of meaning (as is often the trajectory of postmodern philosophising) but rather to a deeper layer of meaning. These days, when I try to put words to my beliefs, I find a non-narrative theology. This is a theology not founded upon a stable narrative of God’s work within the world, but rather guided by spiritual experience. Divine disruptions—the outworkings of a God of surprises—repeatedly unsettle the stories we imagine about ourselves and about God. Even prophecies are but brief illuminations, and careful reading of Chris tian scripture shows its characters to be fallible in their ability to draw such prophecies together, to join the sacred dots to make the right stories.
God, perhaps, does not author the world so much as undergird it; our work is to pay the sincerest possible attention to the reality of God, that current of goodness, beneath it all. That attention preludes a slow bending towards God’s will, which is synonymous with our truest freedom and deepest experience of love. The will of God exceeds our best instincts; we are drawn towards loving more, learning more, forgiv ing more, worrying less, defending less, and becoming more open to future illumina tions. In our experiences of the Light, we do not wish to be anywhere else; we desire to align our lives to it in their entirety; we want to remember and preserve that desire. Our daily deviations from attention, our distraction by the stories that we plan to tell, could be appropriately described as sin—sin that, in the Light, feels amply forgiven.
***
This is not a definitive autobiography, nor a systematic theology. It is only an essay. Brian Dillon describes the essay (etymologically rooted in essayer, the French for “to attempt”) as ‘a form with ambitions to be unformed.’ The essay form combines the contradictory impulses of both clarification and mystification—the latter involving ‘a failure or refusal to cohere.’ This quality of conscious incoherence makes the essay a sort of fragment or collection of fragments, an appropriate form for the elusive depths of our lives and our religious beliefs.
The history of art, ever since the ‘ruin lust’ (to quote Dillon again) of the eighteenth century, makes clear that we find fragments oddly compelling; indeed, the suggestive potential of what is not revealed by a fragment or glimpse often makes its meaning more, not less, powerful, because it is edged by an boundless mystery.
***
Years later, I am sharing stories with a new friend; we consume each other’s pasts eagerly. The account of my life that I offer her is an unrehearsed, disjointed ramble that rakes through elements of my old story, mixed with elements of something new. God of surprises. This is a small joy: I have forgotten to tell something cohesive.
Julia Dallaway is an essayist, poet, and graduate student of modern literature, currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her writing features in the forthcoming New York Quarterly anthology Without a Doubt, as well as in student journals at the University of Oxford, where she studied her BA in English. Her preoccupations include mysticism, feminism, the natural world, and challenging linear narrative structures of autobiography.
“The Great Revelation: Evangelical Testimonies and Modernist Literature” was first published in the 2021 issue of Relief.