The Year of
finding meaning on the macro and micro scales.
How do you sum up a year? or a day?
I was thinking about the latter question just today, as I’ve been listening to Matthew Dicks’ book Storytelling, which is proving to be a surprising and excellent listen, and he talks about his “Homework for Life” practice. Every day, at the end of the day, he fills in a spreadsheet with the date in one column, and a short description of something that could be a story.
Now, story has a particular definition for him. It’s a personal story which involves change and could be told with interest at a storytelling event. Perhaps I’ll say more when I finish his book. But it got me thinking because it sounds like a good practice and I’ll try my hand at it. It’s kinda a form of journaling, one might say.
Tucked away in Ronald Black’s excellent but going to be forgotten ‘Big Red Book’ for Gaelic Learners,1 is a discussion of traditional Gaelic year-naming practices:
Bliadhna Theàrlaich - The Year of Charles (1945/46). Not Charles III of England, of course, but in fact the other Charles III, if he’d succeeded.2
A’ Bhliadhna a Ghais am Buntàta - The Year the Potatoes Rotted (1846-7), cf. the Great Irish Famine.
And that got me thinking about how you’d sum up a year. Or every year. In one’s own life. Some years are easy: the year the virus came; the year my daughter was born. Some are just punctuated by life transitions: the year I went to seminary; the year I graduated high school; the year I got engaged and un-engaged. Some I have no idea: did anything noteworthy happen to me in 2009 or 2015? I don’t have any emails from 2009 so it may not have even happened.
What does all this have to do with anything?
A reasonable question.
I once audited a class at an orthodox college that was an introduction to patristics. This was a little cheeky, because I had a PhD in patristics by this point, but it was a great way to attend an intensive with one of the best in my field. And among the things he said that stuck with me was a digression about how we are narrative, storied creatures and we tell our stories backwards.3
Narratives are powerful, but they are also deeply fraught because they are highly susceptible to fallacies based upon attributing meaning and intention. Is my life a narrative arc with character development? Is any particular episode meaningful and purposeful? What if it’s just a series of accidental and happenstance events with no greater significance.
That is, ultimately, a faith question. It’s why I can’t take secular progressives seriously when they talk about the progress of history, and the idea that society is evolving to a better, more moral, existence. Because why would you assume the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice when you don’t believe in any pre-determined arcs and think morality is mostly relativistic.
It takes a certain faith to believe lives have arcs and meaning and plot. I don’t think it takes a lot though, because I also think we are wired that way: we create meaning and find meaning and invent meaning, even if there isn’t any. I don’t think we can help ourselves.
A year gets punctuated by the big things, but days can be big or small. 2018 might be ‘the year my daughter almost died and no one told us how serious it was at the time’, but that was also a single day. And today might simply be ‘the day I started writing about all the days’. It might be the day I start writing about all the days, a habit I keep until death, or not. Only looking backwards will tell.4
People call it the Big Red Book because that’s what it is. First edition in 1984, and reprinted regularly - my edition was the 9th, from 2006. But I’m just not sure it’s going to survive into the new age of pedagogy.
Charles Edward Louis John Sylvester Maria Casimir Stuart. What a mouthful of a name.
He was making a broader point about how we tell stories backwards, once we know their ends, and how this is true of the gospel and Christian readings of Scripture.
If you see me this week, feel free to ask about “the day cookies locked our neighbour out”; best story I’ve got this week.