denouement

I keep thinking, “How do I even begin telling this story?”

Some of our stories are so long in the making that how it really began is non distinguishable anymore. Those stories that stop and start, sometimes seemingly coming to an end or serious conclusion only to start up again when and where we least expect. Stories and themes in our lives often have infinite beginnings and endings. Meaning they have not just one true beginning and never actually conclude cleanly. Often we experience beginnings that are more like endings. Usually the stories and themes in our lives are not neat, tidy, and linear…except maybe in retrospect. Life is actually a narrative. Go ahead, try to write yours out in a neat, tidy, and linear fashion. If you can, then I’ll hire you as my ghost writer while you’re waiting for the Pulitzer on your own autobiography. Life, as a narrative, is not neat. It’s not really “readable”. The extraordinary and mundane collide like maniacal bumper cars out on the floor in a carnival ride.

For this reason I find it difficult not only to trace my stories but also to craft them into stories that others might choose to read over a cup of coffee. “Difficult” is not a strong enough word for my obsessive distraction to make life “readable”. As fascinating and incredibly rich as life is, it is amazingly difficult to make it interesting in story form, and requires the ability to entertain so that an audience will be hooked. If you or I were to record my life the way we actually experience it, it would look like an endless unpunctuated stream of thought and dialog without composition and written on the back of envelopes sent to me by credit card companies who obviously have no idea that my credit rating tanked some three years ago. That previous sentence is a really good example of what it would look like.

True life narrative is more like a Dostoevsky novel --or any classic Russian novelist for that matter-- where, in wading through endless and run-on sentences (usually called paragraphs in Russian literature) and confusing dialog, one might wonder on more than one occasion if a plot might unfold at some point. Narrative is a rambling without stopping to explain. Narrative is somewhat unexamined in essence. Narrative is not necessarily confined or constricted into a neat easy to follow story with a clear beginning and end. It is fluid and unexpected. Serendipity is not contrived, and within the narrative are treasures that can be mined by the writer and eventually exploited for cash flow. There are ongoing themes, threads, predestinations, extraordinary moments that nearly defy words and take your breath away, and plots that thicken with every honest attempt to live authentically into your calling and potential. It is these things that rise to the top like cream as you churn your narrative. It is these things the writer tries to bring to the table –of both feast and communion.

Clearly though, out of true narrative come beginnings that are not always at the beginning, and endings that really aren’t. Sometimes a beginning is an end and visa verse. Some of us try to make our living sorting through all of this information, distilling meaning and truth. In fact, many of us do this for pay, but all of us do this all of the time. Even the most seemingly shallow. But some of us try to get paid for doing it. This requires talent, time, blind ambition, and sometimes(I’ve always dreaded this part) a ruthless loss of privacy.

The Beatles were mostly right when they proclaimed that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. However, I think they left out the whole certainty of “birth”, but then I think we all take coming to life for granted once we’ve gotten it over with. So then, there on either side of taxation (a.k.a. life) sits the two benchmarks of literary composition, birth & death. Beginning and end. Everything in between is narrative, unless, in your existential belief system you understand that there is life before birth as well as life after death, in which case your story has an eternal narrative to it. But let’s stick with the taxation period of your eternal life for the sake of my “point”, okay.

These two prime certainties exist in every story. Except the story of Jesus. Even if you aren’t a Christian you do have to at some point face the fact that the story of Jesus is the only story, believed by billions of people throughout history, of a person who actually lives postmortem, and not merely in a metaphorical or oxymoronical way. Not only is the story believed and transcendent, it transcends history and culture. However, we tend to view the world and our own lives in the context of “things have beginnings” and “things have endings”. Beginnings and endings are the standard protocol for stories. Ever watch a movie that just ends without proper resolution of the storyor does't set the stage from the beginning? Frustrating isn’t it. We don’t like sitting through a story where the plot lines aren’t clear and then reconciled. I heard Seinfeld was anticlimactic as well as The Sopranos finale. People still talk about how irritating that was.

How about a play with no resolution? No dénouement moment. Dénouement is a French word meaning, literally, untying. A dénouement is the final outcome of a main dramatic or literary complication (Jane Austin does it best). It is the outcome of a complex sequence of events. The culmination and untying of a thickening plot. It’s what we all hope life is filled with, not just theater, literature, and fiction. The dénouement. Art imitates life, only it condenses it to make it more interesting.

If you are at a cocktail party and someone asks you what you do for a living, they really only want to hear the beginning and the highlights in rapid succession. Then they want it wrapped up with a bow. Most impressive to your new cocktail party friend is a clever dénouement finale to bring it all together. If you were to amble lackadaisically through the intricate narrative of your professional life you might find yourself quickly abandoned for lighter conversation concerning sports and favorite vacation spots. As well, you might never be invited to another cocktail party (at least that’s been my experience).

All good fairy tales start predictably with, “Once upon a time…”, and end comfortingly with some variation of living “happily ever after”. Even the Christian/Hebrew bibles start out, “In the beginning…” and ends, “So be it” (a.k.a “amen”). We like closure to our beginnings, even if we’ve forgotten what the beginning looked like (such was my experience reading and finally finishing Crime & Punishment). We like the well crafted story. Who doesn’t?

A tidy story that has a clear beginning and a clear end is easy on the brain. I worship and love a God who lays claim to being “THE beginning” and “THE end”. Also referred to as the “Alpha and Omega”, God simply IS. I also IS but not in the same way God IS. God does not merely claim to have been “there in the beginning”, or “started it all and took off for Bali”. The Christian and Hebrew texts (and most likely the Muslim/Islamic narrative as well) say that God IS the beginning, IS the ending, and simply IS the sustaining force in all of existence. The Beginning and End are attributes of God’s personality. Wow, weird, huh?

Yet there is no beginning to God, really. And just because God refers to himself as “the ending” doesn’t mean Nietzsche was on to something when he proclaimed God had died quietly somewhere in the early 1900’s. My point is, since God IS (beginning, end, and everything between) then God is part of all narrative. It also means that God is the only one who can ramble on and on, with seemingly unrelate plot lines and threads, and get away with it. But as a writer I can’t get away with it. I often wish he would have found different writers for some of his stuff. The whole story sometimes seems fairly unwieldy at times. Also, the way God weaves a story in our actual lives would not take so much effort on our part to understand what he’s driving at if there were well defined and clear plot lines. Maybe?

Anyway, I do have a point to all of this. Actually, no, the function of this discourse is to prove that life is lived in narrative form, which oftentimes seems to elude detection of related plot lines and climatic endings. It is hard to tell where to begin when telling a story. It is equally hard to weave all the necessary threads into the story in order to illuminate the value of the dénouement when it does occur. Sometimes you just have to start right in the middle of the story, even if you’re not sure how to bring it all together. Sometimes you have to believe that the story itself is not your own. That it is a story we all understand and find meaning in. Sometimes you just have to start and hope that you’ll be invited back to the cocktail party again.

I went to a retreat two weekends ago.

I didn’t know a single soul when I arrived Friday evening (except a couple I'd briefly met prior). When I left on Sunday evening I knew my life had truly entered a new chapter. A chapter in the middle of the book.

The weekend was a beginning, an ending, a coalescence of my life’s story. It was the “aha” moment at the end of a long conversation with God. It was the meeting of new people who I fell in love with. I left with their kisses on my cheeks and a knowledge that I only have to pick up the phone to find a soul mate on the other end. No doubt.

A year ago I would not have believed you if you had predicted:

“In one year you will be attending a Christian retreat where you will sit with gay men and women worshipping God together. God will be there, and happy with all of it. The gay Christian is part of God’s whole plan of the church looking like Jesus. You will laugh and cry and tell one another that God is not only loving, not only intending to be glorified in, but is using the homosexual community as part of his ongoing story to restore people to himself. In one year you will see all the things God has told you over the years become clearer as you embrace a lifestyle you have felt it necessary to condemn up to now. You will find friends, not just friends but family, in a place that has always seemed off limits. A place you thought might drag you into a spiritually dark abyss. You will weep when you look out over a congregation made up of a grocery list of outcast and marginalized people, and you will suddenly realize how deeply loved by God each one is and how deeply loved God is. You will see Jesus. You will. You’ll look and see brother, sister, no walls, no differences. You’ll not have to work to be there, because you’ll know these brothers and sisters like you know yourself. You’ll cry not for your own relief. You’ll cry because you will suddenly understand that there is no exception to God’s grace in the communion of believers. If he is loved by someone, he knows it. You will see for the first time that God really loves. And you will finally understand this at a global level. You have longed to understand God’s love this way since the day you saw Jesus for the first time. You will see that God is indeed greater than you ever imagined, but hoped. And you will praise him for that.”

Early in that weekend I realized two things. One, I am definitely gay. Okay, I hadn’t been questioning that, but the experience affirmed in ways I’ll get into another time. Two, I wasn’t just making up justifications in my head when I sat on the couch 10 months ago and was oddly certain God was asking me to come on out and live a courageous life. That he would still be there with me…and people would see him. I wasn’t just making up that God breathed into me a renewed love for Jesus who loves, for Jesus who IS the church, and for Jesus who wants the unbeliever to see himself in us. I knew God was changing my limited view of his mercy, grace, and power that day 10 months ago. This is what God affirmed that weekend. Not just me sitting on a couch alone, but me standing with a whole bunch of crazy people who’ve heard the same thing!

I arrived knowing no one. Now I have another family (okay, let loose with the "YMCA" Village People jokes) in Vancouver, B.C. The church that put the retreat on, Rainbow Church (“Everyone is welcome…and we mean it”), is also raising money (like Obama, not like Hilary) to establish a building. Right now they meet in another church on Sunda evenings. But this new building won’t be only a church. That's a small part of it. It will be a place to seriously serve the hungry, the poor, the hurting families, the addict, the outcast. The same people Jesus concentrated his time on. They're already doing it. They just heard God say, "More light!"

I’m not exaggerating or being dramatic when I tell you that God is emboldening the homosexual community and it looks like Jesus. My heart feels like it sank its teeth into a big huge portion of _____________ (insert favorite comfort food).

The narrative of this one story is so complex. There are threads of so many stories that weave into this one 3 day weekend. The threads are too numerous, I feel, to adequately give this dénouement experience justice. I feel it might require a book to explain. But not a Russian novel. More like Jane Austin with the exception of...well, heterosexual relationships.