Tragedy and Fiction -LeAnne Hardy

For 45 seconds the earth shakes, half a city collapses, and 200,000 people die.  If it came out of Hollywood, we would say it was one of those ridiculous Apocalyptic movies with no plot but great special effects—except that this is real.  As real as a huge wave of water overwhelming coastal communities and sweeping away life as they knew it.  As real as airplanes flying into buildings that collapse on thousands.   Even as I write we are following news of another earthquake in Chile.  Thanks to the Internet and satellite TV, these images flash around the world instantly.  They make a dramatic background for fiction. 

But do we trivialize when we base fiction on such realities?

I have been reading Scared by Tom Davis, a novel about HIV in Swaziland that I first heard about on this blog.  It’s strong stuff.  The opening scene describes a 1998 raid by rebels on a town in Congo (formerly Zaire) where they murder the men, rape and kill the women, and pile the bodies to burn, desecrating them before they do.  Gruesome stuff, but, as a foreword from the publishers warns, this is reality.  Scared also describes scenes of child rape and near-rape.  I have worked with children affected by HIV in Africa, and I assure you that Davis describes nothing that is not true to life.

We often choose Christian fiction because we are sick of secular writers using gratuitous violence and explicit sex to sell books.  We want to be protected from all that.  But is there such a thing as being too protected—so protected that we lose our passion for justice and righteousness, that we forget how evil sin is—because we have glossed over unpleasant realities? 

I have been following The Livesay [Haiti] Weblog, the account of Troy and Tara Livesay, missionaries in Haiti.  (One of his beautiful photos opens this blog.) Tara ran the Disney Marathon with my daughter two days before the earth shook although the she and my daughter never met among the thousands running through the Magic Kingdom and around the lake at Epcot.  I have never met her family.  I knew nothing of their ministry before a friend passed on the link on Facebook.  But for me, reading their blog puts humanity on the things I see on TV and places my God firmly in the midst.  As a parent, one of the most poignant entries was when they took their six younger children (three of Haitian nationality) to the American Embassy to send them off with strangers on a cargo plane to the U.S.  I felt Tara’s relief when they got the message that the children were safe with family in New Jersey.  The Livesays have now gone to Texas for a time of healing with their children, but the blog continues to give me specifics to pray that will aid not just the general population of the country, but specific people who can be touched with the love of God.

Fiction can make us identify with realistic characters and so empathize with a situation beyond our comprehension.  The Livesay’s blog is not fiction.  It is current events.  Is it appropriate to use these huge tragedies in our fiction, or are we guilty of exploiting the suffering of others to sell books?  What limitations or qualifications would you put on fiction that uses tragedies like the Haiti earthquake as background?  Or are non-fiction accounts the only appropriate way to convey what happened?  Comment below and tell us what you think. 

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LeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books for young people come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will impact lives. Visit her at www.leannehardy.net .

Sunrise, sunset

By Alice Valdal

At Bible Study the other night, the leader asked us to name a particularly special moment from the past week. A moment? Hard to distill all the lovely times with friends and family and a short vacation into one moment. But I decided to name the sunrise.

For thos of you familiar with the West Coast of Canada, you'll know this is our season of grey, wet days. But, amidst our rain, we have had some lovely sunrises. I find myself watching that moment when the sky lightens and the red ball of the sun appears, streaking horizon beneath the clouds with brilliant colour.

My Dad loved the sunrise, so I find myself sharing those early morning moments with him, in spirit, and smiling. When he first passed away, I wondered if I would ever feel like smiling again, wondered if the memories would ever bring comfort instead of pain. Now, I know. Time does heal and God never leaves us to bear our sorrow alone.

With all the grief and suffering that have occurred in Haiti recently, it is so important that we remember that death is not the end for us. The cycle of birth, death, rebirth rolls on with every sunrise, every seed we sow, every turn of the tide. God's world is infinitely intricate and infinitely wonderful. How perfectly amazing that He cares for us, in all our seasons.

On Sunday, my Dad would have turned ninety. I'll watch the sunrise, then go to church and lead my junior choir in the anthem "Sing a New Song." And I'll thank God for all the seasons of my life.

Music speaks to me in ways that mere words cannot. Among my favourite hymns that remind us of the never-ending stream of life, is this one.

The day Thou gavest, Lord is ended,

The darkness falls at Thy behest
To Thee our morning hymn ascended
Thy praise shall sanctify our rest

The sun that bids us rest, is waking
Our brethren 'neath the western sky
And hour by hour fresh lips are making
Thy wondrous doings heard on high

( from a hymn by John Ellerton )

I'd love to hear about your favourite hymns. Leave a comment saying why a particular hymn or verse speaks to you and I'll enter you in a draw for a cd of Welsh Revival Hymns. Winner to be announced on Feb. 26, 2010. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law.

To learn more about me, check out my website http://www.alicevaldal.com

No Answers – Thoughts on Haiti

Marcia Lee Laycock writes from Central Alberta Canada. Visit her website - www.vinemarc.com

I’ve just finished reading a letter from a woman who was in Haiti when the earthquake hit and like many of the stories and images coming out of Haiti, it has left me stunned, weeping and asking questions.

Paramount among those crowding my mind is one thought – Why does God spare some and not others? Why did one man suddenly decided to leave his hotel for a “breath of fresh air” and stand on the other side of the street as the building collapsed, killing almost everyone inside? Why was that bus load of Canadians held back in the airport so that they were not in the Hotel Montana when the earthquake hit?
Why was an eighteen year old girl and another man killed on a busy Canadian highway when her car suddenly flew across a median and hit another head-on, five minutes after my husband had been at that very spot?

There are no answers to those questions, nor are there answers to the many others that plague us when disasters hit, when some are slain and others saved. The lack of answers might lead some to say, “There is no God,” or “God has abandoned us all.”

But there are other voices to be heard and heeded - like the voice of the woman who was dragged from the rubble of a building singing. Singing! And telling her rescuers there is no need to fear death because God is there. God is there. And then there are the voices of the people who gathered outside the crushed ruins of their church and prayed and sang and praised. The power of such faith is mesmerizing and awe-inspiring. They silence the voices of doubt and despair. They make all the unanswerable questions moot. God is there. Faith sustains.

Yet we, as communicators of the Gospel, need to puzzle over all the unanswerable questions, we need to wrestle with them, not so that we may arrive at any wisdom from within us, but so that our wrestling might bring us to moments of faith that echo and resonate with those we are seeing on our television screens.

Tragedies like the earthquake in Haiti open doors of opportunity for those of us who have been gifted with words or music or art, because it is at these times that people look for meaning, for purpose and for beauty in the midst of the chaos. They look to us and, as the scripture says, we must be “prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (I Peter 3:15). We must be able to point them to Jesus, in spite of the pain.

So as we weep, as we mourn and struggle and wrestle with God, let us dig deep into the foundations of our faith and cry out, through our art, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Truth STRONGER than Fiction?

Mary is a multi-published Australian author, especially in Christian romance novels. After being published by Harlequin Mills and Boon medicals and Barbour Publishing with inspirational (Christian) romance in America, her most recent novels are being released by Ark House Press, a Christian publisher in Sydney, Australia. Book One in this new series, Return to Baragula, has been released in America with Book Two scheduled for 2010. The third in this series, Justice at Baragula will be released in Australasia in 2010. Read more about Mary and her minister husband on www.mary-hawkins.com

Already amazing stories are coming out of the tragedy in Haiti. There are stories of miraculous escapes, rescues, people who risk their own lives searching for survivors in the rubble – like the young man who risked his own life to dig a tunnel for days to reach his next door neighbour’s little girl many days after the earthquake, but also stories of people driven by desperation to looting, rioting, grabbing and doing what they can to survive. In the weeks, months and years to come there will be many, many more stories in our newspapers, magazines, on the news, TV documentaries. However I can’t help but think of all the other stories that will never be told simply because no one bothered to record them. Sadly, only a comparatively few of the multitude of good and the bad events from these days will anyone in generations to come every know. Some of course over time may be best forgotten perhaps but shouldn’t families at least know their own families’ personal stories? After everything that can be is restored once more, how many of the survivors and rescue workers will eventually write down their own private experiences for their children and generations to come.

Over the years my husband and I have talked about how sad we are that our elderly relatives never wrote down their stories for us, our children, grandchildren and the generations to come. Strange as it may seem to many in this modern era of communication such as the world has never known before, in this day of the I pods, internet, email – even blogs! – we are in danger of losing permanent records. How many of us print off an email from a friend that once would have been in a letter form? One hit on the delete button and that information is lost, gone.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege of sorting out cupboards in my mother’s house before she had to go into a retirement home. My sister and I found a wealth of old letters she had kept going back to the late 1930s after she and my Dad left their parents and families in South Australia to start a new life thousands of miles away in Queensland. There were even several from one of my grandmothers to my sister and I, written in her own hand-writing. We have always been glad that a few years ago my mother was persuaded to write down the story of that very difficult trip from Eyre’s Peninsula across the harsh outback of New South Wales. Of course, over the years we’d heard some of the stories like the time my eldest brother, then only six months old nearly died of heat exhaustion in that harsh January which I’ve recently discovered was during one of the worst heat waves ever recorded. Also some years ago, I managed to use a mini-recorder and get my father’s brother to tell me some stories of my Dad who died when I was sixteen years old. Now somehow I have to transport that old cassette to a CD – or should it be an MP3 disc nowadays!

It is a cliché we all know that ‘truth is stranger than fiction.’ Many novelists have been told by readers – yes, and even editors especially – that an incident the writer knows really happened is considered too ‘unbelievable’ in their novel. I believe truth can be not only ‘stranger’ it can be even ‘stronger’ than the novels we try to write! But the truth does need to be recorded faithfully by eye witnesses.

Have you encouraged your family members to write down their personal experiences for the sake of future generations? Have you written down your own? And let us never make the mistake of thinking or saying ‘my life is too boring.’ For those who love you, who are related to you, in years to come it may bring you and your circumstances alive for them – yes, perhaps even the difficult days and the seemingly ‘boring’ times!