PH: Wounded Literature: What is its Place in Faith-Based Fiction?

Have you ever wondered why some of us have a higher tolerance for the gut-wrenching truth in literature? I was recently involved in a discussion involving stories about martyrs and also wounded central characters. Some gentle readers in our market may avoid such stories in literature. I respect that we all have been informed by a very different past. I’d like to have known such a gentle perspective. I was a very sensitive and artistic child who grew up under a brutal mother and father. I was also the repeated victim of incest. The circumstances surrounding my tortured childhood were covered up and I was left to figure it all out after my parents’ death. (the perp was not my dad) While that all left me with a taste for the dark side, artistically speaking, it is only because that through Christ I’ve learned to not be afraid of the dark. I can stand in the middle of chaos fully at peace. Well, at least stand. I will admit that molestation themes such as are found in books like The Kite Runner, The Prince of Tides, and The Lovely Bones are very difficult to read. Not Mitford, those places. But for many women and some men, they are all truthful settings that help the deeply wounded come to terms with their pain and move on as they see the character moving on.

So I have learned to stop and listen to the artists who need to tell their stories because their story can only be told by them. And that is why we have a need for unique and truthful literature woven with the hope of God’s love. When my life is informed by the truth, even painful truth, I receive an expanded grace. Compassion becomes a fountain in me. The wounded person senses in that type of literature a benevolence for how they’ve also suffered, often in silence and alienation. I can read the martyr’s story as well and rejoice instead of recoiling. When I read it, their humility is poured out on me, an undeserving reader.

Martyrs have much to say about how their souls were enlarged as did almost all of the apostles. If it is difficult for you to look on man’s inhumanity to man, maybe it will help to think of how much more difficult it was to have to bear that pain and then continue the journey bearing such scars. And then realize this: When a martyr goes to his or her rest, ah, what precious reward awaits! No more humiliation, no more words to make you feel less than human, no more an alien, all pain vanished under the Father’s watchful eye. And then there’s His sense of justice. Think of the martyrs in Revelation crying up from his feet, “When will you avenge us?”

Imagine this sound as a holy cry for righting things that have been made wrong; also a fear that the evil persons who perpetuated this harm on the innocent feel they’ve gotten off scott-free. But then imagine a deep rumble of thunder coming from God’s nostrils. He is roused from that holy chair and rises to set right the wrongs. Heaven quakes, the angels fall prostrate, the earth’s foundations are shaken, the mountains split open, and the martyrs weep for joy that the Father of all those orphaned by the darkness will now witness their adoption papers signed and sealed by the Blood of the Lamb. Justice personified in the sight of all. I think I will feel twice His.

Would you care to share a title from your favorite piece of wounded literature? How do you think it helped you or another?

Patty
http://www.patriciahickman.com/
patty@patriciahickman.com
Coming summer of 2006, Earthly Vows.