Mercy has a story to tell. It’s a familiar story—and a Catholic story. For this reason, it is not surprising that Pope Francis has singled out Jesus’s parables as the narrative arc for this Jubilee Year of Mercy. Mercy is so tied to the concept of story that to understand mercy is to understand story, say those in the know about such things.
Catholic Business Journal spoke with Catholic writers, publishers and teachers who explain—beginning, middle and end—what makes a good story. They also share with us the practical steps they’ve each taken to help bring mercy to the world, in original and moving words, and moving pictures; ensuring that mercy’s story never gets old.
Tell the story
In his official announcement of the Jubilee Year of Mercy, Misericordiae Vultus, Pope Francis explains why we should make the stories Jesus tells in the gospels our own story.
“In the parables devoted to mercy, Jesus reveals the nature of God as that of a Father who never gives up until he has forgiven the wrong and overcome rejection with compassion and mercy,” he says. “We know these parables well, three in particular: the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the father with two sons (cf. Lk 15:1-32). In these parables, God is always presented as full of joy, especially when he pardons. In them we find the core of the Gospel and of our faith, because mercy is presented as a force that overcomes everything, filling the heart with love and bringing consolation through pardon…”
Novel approach
The Holy Father is not only speaking to the profound nature of Christ’s storytelling but also confirming something those in the storytelling profession already know, or should know, about success in the trade. And when it comes to Catholic storytelling, few contemporary Catholic writers have been more successful than novelist Ron Hansen, who also happens to be a permanent deacon ordained for the Diocese of Jose, CA.
The author of nine novels, Hansen has been a mainstay of Catholic fiction—with plenty of non-Catholics counted among his fans—due in large part to his 1991 novel Mariette in Ecstasy (Harper), which recounts the story of a young novice entering a fictional women’s religious order at the turn of the century only to discover she may or may not be experiencing the stigmata. Hansen has also penned the 1983 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Harper), which was made into a 2007 Warner Bros. film starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.
Hansen’s most recent novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion (Scribner, 2011) recounts the notorious 1927 murder of Albert Snyder by Snyder’s wife Ruth Brown Snyder and her lover, lingerie salesman Henry Judd Gray. Both were found guilty and executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, NY, in 1928.
According to Hansen, the sacramental channels of grace and mercy are embedded in Catholic storytelling.
“Because of the Catholic emphasis on Communion, there’s less of a differentiating sense of “’ and thou’ and more a feeling of ‘us,’” he says. “And because of our Sacrament of Reconciliation, Catholics are used to taking ownership of their sinfulness, of what I have done and what I have failed to do. Both sacraments present the ideal conditions for storytelling, of seeing the world through another’s eyes, accepting the fact of wrongdoing and the need for amendment, and of a character’s possibility of change or the rejection of the necessary alterations to habits, addictions, and so on.”
The parables to which Pope Francis alludes are a fitting model for Catholic writers, Hansen says, because they are never explicitly religious but always grounded in a moral universe.
“Just as in the parables of Jesus, contemporary stories need not mention religion or faith at all to be considered Catholic,” he says, “Ideally, the moral emphases and grounding in Christianity will prevail in even the most seemingly profane of subjects.”
Even the villain of the piece, Hansen says, ought to be imbued with a sense of mercy. In his own stories, which include some of history’s more notorious bad guys—from the outlaw Jesse James to Adolf Hitler (Hitler’s Niece (Harper, 1999)) to more pedestrian killers such as Snyder and Gray—Hansen has sought to humanize his characters, good or bad, with at least the possibility of mercy having an effect on their lives.
“Writers can construct villains,” he says, “but in the best fiction they are fleshed out so that we can see their occasions of charm or goodness even when the sum of their actions is fundamentally evil. We are forced to keenly observe the lives of people not even remotely like ourselves and still see our commonality. Such awareness is the first step toward the habit of mercy.”
In A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, Hansen says, after failing several times to kill her husband, Snyder finally convinces Gray to do the deed.
“There’s an early scene of Judd’s uneasiness in his Protestant church because of pangs of conscience over his adultery, but there’s no other mention of religion until he’s imprisoned and finds his old piety,” Hansen says. “Likewise Ruth, who was not religious at all, converts to Catholicism while awaiting her execution in Sing Sing…..Recognizing the seriousness of the wrongs the couple committed, I still felt an obligation to note the similarities or variations to our own sins and tendencies. When each dies in the electric chair, I hope the reader has gotten to know them well enough that there’s considerable pain at seeing the lostness of their lives. That, I think, is how fiction both applies and inspires mercy.”
Hansen says that two writers who understood mercy, William Shakespeare and Russian playwright Anton Chekov, found nobility among even the lowest of characters.
“Chekov used to write a story, then reexamine it through the viewpoints of all the characters in it,” Hansen says. “Seeing things from separate perspectives enabled him to correct his missteps, notice psychological compulsions, and remind us that in many ways we are not unlike these characters. Mercy emanates from that.”
Mercy’s the thing
Today’s playwrights are more likely to capture their stories on screen than on stage. Even so, Catholic screenwriters should also know how mercy works in a story, says Catholic screenwriter Barbara Nicolosi because “mercy is in the DNA of story.”
Nicolosi has a number of Catholic-themed films to her name, including the 2013 film Mary, Mother of the Christ (Lionsgate), a story about the life of Mary intended as a prequel of sorts to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. She is also the founder of the non-profit Christian screenwriting guild, Act One (www.ActOneProgram.com), in Hollywood, CA, and more recently, with fellow screenwriter Vicki Peterson, she founded the screenwriting consulting firm Catharsis to train professionals in the art and business of movie entertainment.
“A good story is full of mercy because it is respectful of the humanity of the receiver,” Nicolosi says, explaining one of the first principles of her work. “After all, only a human person can puzzle through a story. The writer provides a certain distance between the story and the audience to achieve that respect.”
Like Pope Francis, Nicolosi looks to Christ’s parables as the exemplar of this sort of respect—this invitation to understand mercy through story.
“Jesus almost never tells people what the parables mean but respects them enough to let them figure it out,” Nicolosi says. “Figuring the story out is a huge important part of the process for an audience. The person has to puzzle over the truth in a story. As with other stories, a parable should be enough; it shouldn’t need a study guide or commentary.”
Believing in the power of a good story and its potential impact on contemporary culture—Nicolosi started Act One and Catharsis as a way to bring this same sense of mercy-informed story to the world.
“The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that stories ought to provoke catharsis,” she says. “The idea of Catharsis is to help new voices to frame story projects in ways that Hollywood would consider. We work with producers and writers and people trying to get their story heard.”
By the book
Initiating a similar project for words on the page, founder and publisher of Dappled Things: A Quarterly of Ideas, Art & Faith, Bernardo Aparicio García also sees mercy as essential to the success of short story writers, poets and novelists.
“Without mercy it is too easy for a writer to strip his characters of their humanity or too easy to turn them into monsters we can’t relate to or pets we find uninteresting,” he says. “The fall of man is an inevitable part of our experience as human beings. Some people say that stories only get interesting after the fall of man—and it’s true, only when you have struggle or conflict do things get interesting. But if all we had was the fall without the possibility of mercy, I don’t think there would be any good stories at all. There wouldn’t be any characters worth knowing.”
Starting Dappled Things in 2005, the summer after he graduated with an economics degree from University of Pennsylvania (four years later he also received a master’s in liberal arts from St. John College, Annapolis, MA), Aparicio García says that the journal was founded because Catholics have important stories to tell.
“We wanted to feature and create a space for Catholic writers and artists to develop,” he says. “We started Dappled Things because we saw that beauty had an important role to play in our culture. Dappled Things was founded to contribute to a culture that is human, a culture founded on a Catholic vision of things.”
And Christ’s parables, Aparicio García says, serve as a solid story-making model for this vision.
“Jesus’s parables exemplify that quality of how God’s mercy can come into the world and shake everything up,” he says. “The parables are simple stories. But they are inexhaustible; there’s always something deeper to find in them, in terms of justice and mercy, which are two sides of the same coin, really.”
Startling grace
Teaching and practicing this same balance of justice and mercy in his own work, Dr. Glenn Arbery is a Catholic novelist, and associate professor of humanities, academic dean, and interim president of Wyoming Catholic College, Lander, WY. According to Arbery, the parable of the prodigal son is, as Pope Francis notes, the virtual paradigm of this balance between justice and mercy in story.
“To my mind, justice and mercy aren’t really that far apart,” Arbery says. “For example, the prodigal son comes to his insight through a moment of justice when he envies the swine the husks they get to eat. He deserves to be where he is, and he knows it. But at the same time, he remembers his father’s bounty and realizes that, even though he no longer deserves to be his father’s son, it would be worth it to be his servant rather than live as he does now.”
“It’s particularly startling when the turn toward grace uses the very stuff of the world sacramentally,” he adds. “The son goes from coveting the food of swine to eating, entirely because of his father’s happiness in his return, the fatted calf. That seems to me the paradigm of mercy; it’s intensely Eucharistic. But would it come about without the enlightening moment of justice? I don’t think it could. The son has to be brought to justice first.”
Mercy is also every bit a part of Arbery’s recently published first novel in a planned trilogy, Bearings and Distances (Wiseblood). According to Arbery, the structure of the trilogy was inspired by another Catholic story teller, Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy is not only a classic work of literature but, like Christ’s parables, a touchstone of Catholic storytelling. And like Dante in the Divine Comedy, Arbery says, it’s going to take the three parts of the trilogy together to fully realize how that mercy works itself out in his characters’ lives.
“Mercy isn’t at the forefront of the novel,” he says, “but rather a very unsettling justice that unfolds over several generations. Bearings and Distances is the first of three novels, dealing with a largely Dantean movement from infernal justice, through purgatorial suffering, to—I hope—a paradisal perspective. Mercy will play a large part in the one I’m finishing now and the one to follow.”
But mercy, like good writing in general, Arbery points out, is a matter of showing, not telling.
“I don’t know that the depiction of mercy can or should be programmatic: ‘I’m going to write more about mercy,’” he says. “On the other hand, I’m a big believer in mimetic accuracy. A writer should try to depict, so as to reveal, the nature of reality, good and bad…. If mercy isn’t part of what the writer depicts, how can he be paying attention? Which part of his own existence did he merit, for example? What wasn’t a gift? And what is a gift but an act of mercy?”
What’s your story?
…And have you heard an good stories of mercy lately? Furthermore, have the success stories of Ron Hansen, Barbara Nicolosi, Bernardo Aparicio García and Dr. Glenn Arbery inspired you to invest more in Catholic contributions to culture? Let Catholic Business Journal know in the Comments section (you must register first to prevent spam), or on our FaceBook page.
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Joseph O’Brien is a national correspondent for Catholic Business Journal. He may be reached at jobrien@catholicbusinessjournal.biz
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