Rewriting our stories III: Character

Dear friends, 

Paul Laxalt, a Governor and Senator from Nevada passed away last week.  He was a staple of national politics they say.  I don’t much about him, other than that he was close to Ronald Reagan and that he was of Basque descent.  Many Basques came to Nevada to become lonely sheepherders they say, so many that there is a chair for Basque language at UN Reno.  Let’s not all run out there all at once to take a class, shall we!  The Basques are interesting people.  Like the Kurds they are spread over several countries, for the Basques it is southwestern France and northern Spain and like the Kurds no one will allow them a country of their own.  There are about a million Basque speakers worldwide.  Around World War II the language almost died because the Spanish dictator Franco would not let the language be spoken.  A movement to save the language started, but the leaders of this movement had to decide on the dialect to choose.  The group decided that Central Basque would be the official language.  But there were many more decisions to be made.  One was whether to say the letter “H.”  Only the northern dialect used that.  They group decided on an h so they would not lose the northern representatives.  But to everyone’s surprise, the leader of the northerners got up and said: “if it means saving the Basque language, we will give up the “h.”  And so the language was saved because of the character showed by one man. 

                  Friends, the Czech novelist Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) writes about character:” … characters are not born of people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something about.”  The author of Ephesians is very concerned about character, not only about the character of those who speaks but also the character of the one who is spoken to.  Words should not be unwholesome or evil, but should be reserved for building people up. 

                  Novelist E.M. Forster wrote:” the test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way…..;when there is more than one factor to them, we get the beginning of the curve toward the round.” (Aspect of the Novel). 

Friends, we have hung around with the character of David for three weeks now,  probing no more than a few chapters in II Samuel.  Before that we saw how he was chosen to be the new king and we learned about the love he and Jonathan had for another. We have seen his love, his lust, his greed, his treachery, his power hunger and today his grief over Absalom in the lectionary readings.  David is certainly capable of surprising.  Also his character certainly becomes apparent in the things that he makes happen or that happen to him.  He is fully round character.   In the end what saves him is God’s purpose for him. David has to achieve certain things in the stories in which he is the main character.  Other than that he is a despicable figure in many ways.  I don’t think David will pass the Ephesians test on the front of our bulletin cover. This is the Old Testament in many ways: the characters are only relevant in their relationship to God.  They cannot stand on their own merit, because almost all of them have fatal flaws. We have looked at plot two weeks ago and at dialogue last week and saw how those two can be used to rewrite the story of our lives as we live them.  Now we look at character.  Friends, how would you and I be characterized by others, you think?  Are there parts of us we don’t show, because we are so deeply uncomfortable with them that we tuck them away under our bed, to be covered in dust and only to be discovered once we have moved out? Are we too concerned with how we are perceived that try to burnish this image of ourselves we cannot bear for others to see?  The best advice I think is to be fully round characters.  What we learn from all this is that our character does not show from our careful crafting of an image.  That would make us a flat characters. Our character is apparent from the key moments in our lives when significant things have happened to us that forced us to show who we are.  That is when we became either consistent or surprising.  We ourselves don’t know until we are forced to or force ourselves to take a decision. That’s when our character will show. David came out interesting, but not looking very good. Friends, through the mists of time, how will people characterize you?  How do you want to be remembered?  How can you live fully and honestly, but also in ways that build people up rather than tear them down? How will we rewrite our story? May God guide us.