I marvel at the details several people have retained from their time at the Festival of Faith & Writing. They managed to capture every sight, sound, gesture, outfit, tone of voice, and numerous precise quotations in their notebooks and journals. Or perhaps they simply have a better memory. Some people are like that. I remember reading The Seven Storey Mountain and thinking, “How in the world does he remember the color of the wallpaper in a room he was in at age seven?” Same with Sting’s memoir. He drudged up all kinds of sensory detail from his childhood. Do they make it up, take good notes, or have a photographic memory?Well, I don’t like making things up unless it’s truly fiction…apparently I take terrible notes….and I don’t have a photographic memory.So my recollections at this point are sketchy at best.If you want more details–if you want to feel as if you were there–visit the following blogs:L.L. Barkat’s “Seedlings in Stone” (at the bottom of this post, she lists the previous few that highlight earlier days at the festival, as well…and there’s an extremely flattering description of me that I shall cherish for all my days…that is, if I remember to write it down). Llama Mama was there, too. She reflects on the experience here, here, and here.Starting with this post, Julana at “Life in the Slow Lane” will walk you through in remarkable detail the Festival experience including several sessions that I missed. I would have had to record the sessions to say so much about them. I need to get me some memory pills to boost my retention. I’ll make salmon for dinner tonight…more Omega-3s. Anyway, here’s what she recalled about Mary Gordon’s plenary address. Then she went to hear Luci Shaw, whom I missed, except now I feel like I was there. Then it was Mary Karr whom, again, I missed but feel that I lived vicariously through Julana’s memoir. And then, her experience of “The Reckoning,” a film presentation.Claudia Mair Burney, who is busy with her own fiction projects, wrote one post–one very poignant post–about Franz Wright.I may dig for others who are reflecting on their days at the Festival. But I thought I would amuse you with the sketchiest of sketchy notes that I scribbled out.Honestly, I seem to have gleaned only sentence fragments with little to no context.From Mary Gordon’s session that officially opened the festival (her words with quotation marks; my simple responses without):”A person of faith lives in the possibility of possibility.” I wrote it down to think about. Kathleen Norris repeated the same idea in her session later.Gordon also said that she feels that one of the most compelling passages in Scripture is the plea, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”Also, she said that “some things are only understood when pondered…We must look and think, and look and think, and look and think.”How many people take time to look and think, and continue to look and think, and then look and think yet again?That’s a lot of looking.And thinking.I want to look more, and think more, and Lord willing, truly comprehend.That’s all. Gordon spoke for, oh, maybe 40 minutes, and that’s all I managed to write down.Phyllis Tickle and Kathleen Norris both presented ideas that took some time to develop. Tickle talked about “Writing as Catechesis.” I think she was surprised when, after speaking, she asked, “You’ve all been catechized, haven’t you?”Silence.”What? How many of you have been catechized?”Hardly a hand went up.I wasn’t formally catechized, and I wondered how I would have responded to it, if I had been. She talked about how it was “in” her from her youth.She used an extended analogy of how we as writers each morning pray–at least we’d better pray–and then go through the closet into a type of Narnia, entering something like an Eastern market with lots of colorful stalls where we’ll do our shopping for the day. We take a big basket and visit the various sellers making our selections–a metaphor here, and a strong verb there, and maybe something to boost our plotline over at the far stall. And then we squeeze back through the closet–through the knothole, she called it–with our full basket, hoping that we will be able to put it all together to prepare a palatable meal. Those of us who write as Christians are constantly in the process of saying, This stuff that I’ve brought back, does it fit with Truth? If it does, I must use it, for I worship a God who is Truth. If not, I must leave it out.I like that idea of heading out each morning having prayed and asked the Lord to guide me into all Truth and then “shop” for the words and metaphors I need.She said much more, but I didn’t capture it. Sorry. She’s so engaging and lively, I just got caught up in the discussion and stopped writing.In another session, Scott Cairns and Kathleen Norris sat down to have a conversation. Here are snippets:Norris: “When I found the monastery and started having personal retreats, I remember saying to one of the brothers, ‘Where have you been all my life?’ And the Benedictines can honestly say, ‘We’ve been here 1500 years…where have you been?”Funny monk.She described her experience of stumbling into the monastery as the opposite of blind luck. “I think of it as ‘blind grace,'” she said.”In a world that changes so fast, there is stability in the morning and evening prayers,” she said. “It’s reassuring to know that they (the monks) did it yesterday, they’re doing it today, and they’ll do it again tomorrow.”She also said, “The world is so narcissistic, but living and praying in community, the monastics know that it’s not about them.”Norris, when responding to a question about the “theology of space,” said that Manhatten taught her about humanity. “There, I realized that if God loves all these people, I guess I have to, too.”Dakota taught her about Creation, raw and bold.She’s learning about caregiving for her mom in Honolulu.And in the monastery, she says that the guest room offers a silence that “sinks into your bones. In that silence, you can really begin to see what to do next with your life…in that silence, possibilities open up…the scattered person becomes able to be quiet and be whole.”She said that a documentary film about Trappist monks called “Into Great Silence” does a great job giving the viewer an idea of what life in a monastery is like.I had to laugh at myself. When she said the title of the film, this is what I heard:”Integrate Silence.”It made enough sense that my mind didn’t question it. I just wrote it down. Then, because the girl to my left kept looking at my page, I glanced at hers and saw what she had written: “Into Great Silence.”Oh.Embarrassed, I scribbled out “Integrate Silence” and wrote the correct title in the middle of the page and drew a rectangle around it.I wish I remember the question that preceded this answer from Scott Cairns:”Be a praying people. Developing a rule of prayer, a habit of prayer, will protect you from all manner of delusion. If not, we’re doomed to error.”And then Norris said, “I’m least faithful when I’m anxious or fearful.” It was tied in with the discussion on prayer, so I would assume that prayer is key for her to trust in the Lord and thus be more faithful to Him.Cairns told a story about traveling to Mount Athos with his Greek Orthodox priest. A man came rushing up to them and asked the priest, “Do you know Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”The priest paused. “No,” he said. “I like to share Him!”Those are snippets, and only snippets, that I preserved on the pages of a cheap, red, spiral notebook.I’ll continue tapping out a few others in my next post…that is, if I’m not boring you.If you prefer that I move on from literary snippets to other blog-worthy topics, I can show you a lovely photo essay I put together that will be my first ever (and probably only) cute shoe post. Oh, yes; I kid you not. I acquired a pair of tan-and-navy slipper-style spring shoes not long ago. You can judge the shoes’ cuteness, as they embark on a spring tour of our front yard.Oh, how I love to skip around in the possibility of possibility!From looking and thinking (and looking and thinking) to cute shoes, blogging offers up a blank template every morning, allowing us to dwell daily in the possibility of possibility.
The original version of this article can be found here: The Possibility of Possibility
