Tell me the old, old story.

Graduation Address: April 22, 2006

Trevor Tucker

You get odd images in your head when you are asked to give a farewell address to students. Here we are sending you off to the world beyond…out into the great unknown. Like soldiers being sent off into battle. I find myself standing in the place of William Wallace: "They may take our lives but they will never take our freedom" or Gladiator Quintus Maximus "What we do now echoes in eternity…"

I have many images in my mind of my own commissionings / farewells. But there is one image that stands out so very clearly. I'm at a revival meeting somewhere on some backroad up near Pembroke. It's a ramshackle church and it's hot…the middle of summer. There is a black-haired, wiry French Canadian woman evangelist at the front. She has just preached her heart out. Now I am standing in a line of people waiting to be prayed for. When she comes to me (I don't recall if she pushed me or not but) she lays her hands on my head and I fall back. To lie on the floor. Maybe it was the heat. And as I'm lying there on my back she has her hands on my belly, shaking me. "Preach the word!" she is bellowing in her French accent, "Preach de word." And I am shaking all over.

I want to talk to you today about The Story.

Let me tell you what Frederick Buechner writes: He was born, the story begins-the barn that needs cleaning, the sagging steps, the dusty face. He was born into a world that has never been famous for taking care of the naked and helpless, he was born in the same old way to the same old end and in all likelihood howled bloody murder with the rest of us when they got the breath going in him and he sensed more or less what he was in for. An old man in the Temple predicted great things for him but terrible things for the mother… He got lost in the city and worried his parents sick. John baptized him in the river and wondered afterwards if he'd chosen the right man. It wasn't just Satan who tempted him then because for the rest of his life just about everybody tempted him-his best friend, his disciples, his mother and brothers, his enemies. They all of them tempted him one way or another not to go off the deep end but to stay in the bearable surface of things-to work miracles you could see with your eyes, to feed hungers you could feel in your belly, to heal the sickness of the flesh you could touch, to be a power among powers and to avoid the powerless, the sinful, the deadbeat like the plague in favour of the outwardly righteous.

He made precious few friends and a mob of enemies. He taught in a way that almost nobody either understood or wanted to risk understanding, least of all the ones who were closest to him. And in the end they got him. They got him. He wasn't spared a damn thing. It was awful beyond telling, god-awful.

And then it happened. However we try to explain it, however we try at all costs to avoid having to exmplain it because it was so long ago and seems so wild and crazy and because so many other plausible, manageable things have happened since; whatever words we can find for telling the story or for watering it down - what happened was that he wasn't dead anymore. He wasn't dead. Anymore.

I want to talk about The Story. Do you know The Story? What is The Story to you?

This message then has two basic sections: how do we tell the story, and why do we tell the story. By your grace, I will endeavour to be brief. But, remember, I am a Pentecostal at heart.

How do we tell the story. I am going to use this first section to remind you of some keys to writing.

Preliminaries that must come before everything.
Grammar. Get the rules right.
An essay is more than a patchwork of quotations.
Anticipate opposition and address it.
Be honest. If you don't know…don't pretend you do. Tell what you do know. Over the last three years I have read thousands of essays. People have heard thousands of stories. We can sniff out an impostor.

But there are four larger, conceptual keys that I want to address. Use the right words. Do the research. Use the best sources. Remember your audience.

Use the right words (a.k.a Concise language use).

Don't use cliches. Let us do a short exercise. I will begin a phrase and you finish it: At this point in when inflation threatens to rear its , it goes without that government over-spending must be nipped in the . It stands , that those in the halls of power lead the . We must not pull any . We must gird up our , and blaze a to prosperity. Let us strike while the iron is .

Using this kind of language is nothing but lazy writing. Using cliches is plagiarism. We use them because we don't want to actually think about what we are telling our reader. Each phrase, each word, must be your own. So it is with telling the story.

And each word must have meaning. Those men who "stand on the streetcorners and pray with their many words thinking that they will impress God," are just as common in writing. One day we will give an account for every idle word. William Zinsser would say, "Each word must do new work." Peter Elbow would say, "Each word that you cut keeps another reader with you, each word that you keep takes power away from the other words." So don't overuse modifiers. Its not "very unique, or very honest. Unique and honest will suffice. Don't say 'went' when you mean 'ran', 'scurried', 'bolted'. Don't say 'Saviour' or 'Lord' when you mean 'friend'. And not 'follow' when you mean 'obey'.

So let your words be few, and right.

Secondly, when you write, do the research.

When I come to writing, my mind should be awash in background information. I should know that if which I speak. I should be spending as much time as possible with my sources.

This is clearly not the model of writing where we sit down with a few books and a computer and plunk in the quotations that work and then later connect the dots.

I used to use the image of being able to access all the data banks…my mind connected to all the information. But that's not it. I must spend so much time in my research that it not only becomes accessible, so that I can quote it later…but so that it actually becomes a part of me. A part of my being. Synthesised with my very fibre.

When we talk of telling our story, this call to spending time with our sources is just as important. A. W. Tozer has said, "No one should talk to men about God who has not first talked to God about men."

Be immersed in the story. Can you see Zacheus' tree? Can you hear the rush of waves that are now walls that you and your cousins are walking beside? Can you just begin to imagine the gaze of the man who is looking at you and saying, "Nor do I condemn you, go and sin no more?"

Spend time with the story.

Thirdly, use only the best sources.

When you do research…stick to the best sources. Be wary of the new and trendy and novel. Let me give you the words of an eminent late-Romantic/early Victorian writer. William Hazlitt opens his essay On Reading Old Books with these words: I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumnes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire evert to read at all." He goes on to talk about how modern people feign at the thought of reading something that's old and out of fashion. He responds, "I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living….The dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality."

And here I need to add something else: you are not the best source.

Many of my students when they are writing, seem to assume that "they believe it, that settles it." It does not. You must immerse yourself in the best sources. Get acquainted with mold and dust. Lose yourself and all of your modern biases in their testimonies. Submit to the text…do not expect the text to submit to you. Reliable, time-tested sources. Sources that have stood up to the scrutiny of generations.

The same with the story: C.S. Lewis riding in the side car of his brother's motorcycle, wrestling with God while his friends looks at dancing bears in the zoo, knew the story. Martin Luther King sitting in Burmingham jail, knew the story. And my great grand-mother, doing her washing out by the wood-shed, scrubbing her knuckles raw as she prayed for her descendants knew The Story.

We immerse ourselves in the testimony of the apostles, and the testimony of the saints who have gone before us, and then we join our voice to theirs, becoming a part of this great cloud of witnesses.

Finally, remember your audience.

It is with them in mind that you should write. When you sit down with pen in hand, you should see your reader in front of you. What are they expecting? What will be their opposing view? What are their biases? What can they understand? What will connect most with them? It is with them in mind, always that you should write.

The same with The Story. I will remind you of Lewis' words on the vernacular. That if you can't give the story in the vernacular, either you don't understand it, or worse, you don't believe it. Look at Shakespeare. Look at Lewis and Dickens and Chesterton: all men who could speak the language in writing that they would converse with in normal life. The worst thing we can do as writers is to alienate our readers with language that is foreign to them. So we endeavour to use universal language.

Remember your audience. You must do all of this thinking so that the key message you want to present to your reader doesn't get lost among the package and trappings. I don't come here today and speak in my ten year-old track pants and my "Back of Government, this land is Our Land" t-shirt, as much as I would like to. Simply out of a sign of respect and also because I want my message to be as clearly transferred to my hearer without obstructions. I don't want static in the line.

So, what then again, are key steps to writing: Use the right words. Do the research. Use the best sources. Remember your audience.

That is the how. But now I ask, "Why do we tell the story? This is the more important question, for without a why…without a purpose…the writing is meaningless. We must write with an end in sight. We must write to meet a need whether within or without.

We tell the story because we need it. We tell the story because they need it.

We tell the story because it gets better every time we read it. Back to Hazlitt: In reading a book which is an old favourite with me (say the first novel I ever read) I not only have the pleasure of imagination and of a critical relish of the work, but the pleasures of memory added to it. It recalls the same feelings and associations which I had in first reading it, and which I can never have again in any other way."

Someone has said that kisses are cumulative. With each one we enjoy last one and the one before that, and the one before that.

One of the odd, weasel-like creatures in Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet tells Ransom this:A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered…when you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting.

So it is with The Story. Every time we hear it - or tell it - anew we build on the last time. Those emotions that we felt when we first heard the story-weather it was on the flannel-board pictures in Sunday school, weaping at an altar or hearing it at our fathers knee. Every time it just gets better. And so we tell it. And tell it. Do you remember the first time you heard it?

"I love to tell the story/ tis pleasant to repeat what seems each time I tell it, more wonderfully sweet."

We tell it because they need to hear it. We tell the story because we are all sitting around the fire together, waiting to hear. Waiting to hear our story. Needing to hear the story on this dark night. "The bible finds man as no other book finds him" has said Coleridge. And ultimately, this is why we tell it. Because as no other story, this one finds us. It vaults walls, it presses in like an unstoppable sea. It seems into our being filling holes like a sponge that we didn't even know were there.

For sheep lost without our shepherd, for us blindmen sitting by the road, for us downtrodden slaves pressed between our oppressor and an uncrossable sea…it reaches us like nothing else. It emancipates women and frees slaves. It enlivens the artistic and scientific imagination. It raises up and tears down empires.

"I love to tell the story for those who know it best, seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest, And when in scenes of glory, I sing the new, new song, twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.

Our world, it seems is losing the ability to tell stories. Heroes, real resolved endings, that awareness of something higher that calls the protagonist onward and upward…is fading. Into this culture that has lost its true story-telling ability…we must inject THE story. This is the story at the heart of it all.

You all can tell the story. If there were something I'd wish to do today…I'd lay my hand on each of your bellies and press upon you (literally) this message: tell the story. Tell the story.