NOVEL
SERMONS: The Gospel in Literature and Life
2.
"The
Bird Artist"
Psalm
107
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
July
5, 2009
My great thanks to Don
Ray for so wonderfully launching our summer sermon series last week.
His gospel “take” on Moby Dick was a whale of a good sermon!
We got into this
series this year because my friend, Angus, for some time, has excoriated me for
not reading novels. A lot of my
reading in my adult life has been biblical and theological in nature, academic,
though interspersed in recent years, as you know, with a book or two of poetry.
But I have resisted novels. They
take too much time. Way too many
pages for what I might mine from them to use in a sermon.
But, and so, finally taking Angus’ bait, I figured that if I announced
a sermon series anchored in novels, it would force me to read some.
Another thing:
I do not consider myself to be a literalist.
Surely I am not when it comes to scripture.
In my writing, I delight in metaphor and hyperbole.
But when I watch movies and read novels, I turn into one.
Somehow I am oblivious to much of the symbolism and meaning they contain.
I’ll be watching a movie with someone and it ends and I say, “What was THAT about?” and my jaw drops as I listen to my movie
partner lay a dozen levels of interpretation on me.
The same with novels. The few
times I have read them, I can tell you the substance of the story, but I do not
do well in making applications of the stories for my life and for life in the
world.
Here is another way of
saying it: when it comes to movies
and novels, I am something of a dim bulb. In
(the faint) light of that, it will be good news to you that Don will be
preaching about half the time this summer with a Cormac McCarthy sermon by Angus
thrown in along the way.
Here is how bad it is.
After telling a friend about The
Bird Artist, our novel for today, it was my friend, who
has not read the book, who uncovered for me the thread that seems to make
the best sense of it. But more about
that later. I found The
Bird Artist, a book by Howard Norman and released in 1994, when reading
a list of actor Michael J. Fox’s favorite books.
He said that he was so enamored of The
Bird Artist when he read it that he wants to option it for a movie.
So I thought it would be a good one with which to start my novel
adventure.
The story is set in
the early years of the twentieth century. It
is narrated through the voice of Fabian Vas, a young man and the son of Orkney
and Alaric Vas. Here is the opening
paragraph:
My name is Fabian Vas. I live
in
would not have heard of me.
Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though;
I am a bird artist, and have
more or less made a living at it. Yet
I
murdered the lighthouse
keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal
part of how I think of myself
(page
3).
Fabian’s father is a
semiliterate carpenter. His mother
is well-educated and bored with her lot in life.
Fabian is a fairly talented bird artist who sells his drawings to
magazines. The center of his life is
a girl who is four years older than he, a kind of wild woman named Margaret
Handle who suffers no fools, cuts to the heart of things with surgical
precision, and does not care much what other people think or say of her – that
quality in itself enough to make her my favorite character.
She loves Fabian and they have an “arrangement” of sorts.
Fabian’s mother despises Margaret and so, in part to keep him out of
Margaret’s clutches and in part to launch Fabian out into the wider world, she
and Orkney, Fabian’s father, arrange for Fabian to marry Cora Holly, a cousin
of Fabian’s that he never has met met, in
However, while Orkney
goes off on a bird-harvesting mission to earn the necessary money for the
wedding, Fabian’s mother, Alaric, takes up with Botho August, the lighthouse
keeper. When Orkney returns and
finds out, wild chaos ensues and, when all is said and done, Fabian in the dark
of night has shot Botho August dead with Margaret’s revolver, though Orkney,
Alaric, Fabian, and Margaret all are suspects.
Right after the shooting, though, Orkney, Alaric, and Fabian head to
Before the hearing,
Orkney, via his ne’er-do-well brother, Bassie, manages to get word back to
Fabian telling him to blame the murder on him, Orkney, which Fabian does and so,
along with Alaric and Margaret, Fabian is acquitted even though the townspeople
“know” that Fabian is innocent the way we
“know” that O.J. is innocent. But
they are accepting of him nonetheless.
In the meantime,
Margaret gets dry at an alcohol rehab, the town minister makes a deal with
Fabian that he will stop making Fabian and his family the focus of his
judgmental sermons if he, Fabian, graces the church with a mural depicting the
bird and village life of Witless Bay, which Fabian does, Margaret and Fabian get
married, and the book ends like this:
I have had steady work at the dry dock.
As for painting, it has not been
poor fare; I already have sold drawings of an ibis and a merganser this
year,
and it is only July. I am
hardly in demand, though, and last year there were
no requests at all, and only one the year before that, a kittiwake for a
private
patron in
On his last mail run, Margaret’s father brought home a new journal,
“Canadian
Naturalist.” I intend to
try it unsolicited with murres, red knot, and teal.
We have become friends with Odeon Sloo, the new lighthouse keeper, and
his wife,
Kira. Their daughter Millie
looks after our Claire now and then. We
have eaten
at Spivey’s together, and at each other’s houses.
I am a bird artist (pp. 288-289).
I think what I liked
about this novel is that it is life in all of its crooked turns.
As much as we like to think of our lives as straight lines between first
day and last day, they are anything but and, were we to give up the illusion
that life should be pain free and Pollyanna, perhaps we would be happier and
healthier. Instead of being
mystified as to why things sometimes go “wrong” in our lives, instead of
turning sour at disappointment, instead of inflicting judgment on others like
porcupines inject their predators, perhaps life is best to be understood and
experienced outside the categories of “right” and “wrong” and
“should” and “ought.” Life
offers what it does and everything that happens is an occasion for growth and
grace.
This is where my
friend who has not read the book got it right in saying to me, “Maybe the story is about a kind of forgiveness that does not have to
do with right and wrong but with the ability to let each other be less than
perfect.” Sort of like the
prodigal’s father. Sort of like
Jesus saying in defense of the woman charged with adultery, “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.”
“Maybe the story is about a kind of forgiveness that does not have to
do with right and wrong but with the ability to let each other be less than
perfect.” That resonates with
me. How much hurt we heave onto
others because of the ways in which what they do or have done affect us.
We demand consistency and perfection from those around us so as not to
upset the equilibrium of our own lives. We
make our preachments and judgments on others in direct proportion to how their
actions impact or impinge on our lives. We
fear that the crooked lines in someone else’s life might threaten the
“straightness” we have worked so hard to cultivate in our own.
We draw our circles smaller in order to isolate others in our judgments
rather than drawing them bigger so as to accommodate the healing spaciousness of
grace.
When I read our
scripture passage for the day, it had to me the feel of the “call and
response” liturgy of the black church:
“Some
wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town; hungry and
thirsty, their soul fainted within them. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and
he delivered them from their distress…”
“Some
sat in darkness and in gloom, prisoners in misery and in irons…their hearts
were bowed down with hard labor. Then
they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their
distress…”
“Some
were sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities endured
affliction. Then
they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their
distress…”
The good news of God
and the gospel is that the story in which God invites us to be a part is about a
kind of forgiveness that does not have to do with right and wrong but the
ability, the grace, to let us be less than perfect.
In other words, human. “While
we were yet sinners, Christ loved us…” “While
we were yet human, Christ loved us…”
In reading The Bird Artist, I got the feeling that the people of
Amen.
Norman,
Howard, The Bird Artist.