The human particular

Submitted by Nora Gallagher on February 19, 2007 - 5:46pm.

As some of you know,

I have written two memoirs, Things Seen and Unseen and Practicing Resurrection. They are about my own wrestling with faith inside and outside the Episcopal church. In writing these memoirs, I discovered that there are aspects of the memoir that are like the novel: you must have "characters," you must have a "plot." I learned the arc of a three-part plot from the Greeks: things get bad, things get worse, things are resolved.

I learned the hard way that a memoir must be about something more than the author's life, as of course the novel must be about more than the sum of its characters. Moby Dick is not "about" whale hunting. Whale hunting is the circumstance of Moby Dick; the novel is about obsession. Lucy Grealy's great memoir Autobiography of a Face, is the story of woman disfigured from repeated cancer treatments to her jaw. That's the circumstance. What is it about? A human person coming to terms with who she is. We have all read memoirs that were like awful, narcissistic train wrecks in which the writer never figured out that the subject of a memoir cannot be the writer himself, and we have also read memoir that divulged the most secret and painful things about a life that were not at all embarrassing but instead connected us more deeply to the human condition.

I found another similarity between memoir and fiction: There is a wonderful phrase in theology: the scandal of the particular. The idea is that God, this enormous creative force that "hung the stars" and created "that great leviathan just for the sport of it" would care about one of us. The idea that the God of Creation, ­Aristotle's Prime Mover or Plato's Divine Source­ would stoop to join us in the mundane details of every day human life, would care even if a single sparrow fell to the ground. This "Yahweh" was completely low-brow to the Greeks, a scandal: from Greek skandalon Œsnare, stumbling block.

And yet, it is a beautiful scandal, isn't it? That God would care about one singular, particular life. Where would we be, how would we understand our human story, without it? "The first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman," writes Rabbi Richard Friedman. "The story's focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and peoples to a single family." One family: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel.

When I worked as a journalist, I was drawn to the stories of individuals in the shadow of history-making moments. After the Berlin Wall came down, I went to Prague and interviewed families about what their lives had been like under the regime. I wrote about daily life in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. This may be the same impulse that makes me religious: that is, here we are working out our own lives, making mistakes, trying to discern one path from another, while waves of history ebb and flow, causing everything to change. I am interested in the waves. ­Who isn't? ­ But it's the human particular that captures me.

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