By The Numbers

As I began to think about my final post to this blog while on Sabbatical, I realized that summary and closure would really be impossible.  So I thought I would just leave with some numbers.

My sabbatical lasted 92 days.  Of that, I spent 63 nights out of the safe comfort of my bed.

The generous grant from the Lilly Endowment Grant was for $50,000.  $35,000 paid for the expenses of myself and my family (which when added to the money I had already budgeted proved just $40 less than I actually spent).  The church's portion of $15,000 provided an all-star level interim in Charles Bugg (thank you so much Chuck!).  Three tremendous opportunities were provided for the members of Faith to explore storytelling through a variety of media.  And to the best of my knowledge, we won't have any money to return the kind folks at Lilly (Thank you so much and sorry!).

According to the Bing Distance calculator, I travelled more than 18,200 miles this summer.  That works out to about 200 miles a day and $2 a mile if your counting.

During that time, I've posted 101 entries on my blog here--counting this one.  I found one handy application that tracked visits to bobfoxstories@blogspot.com.  Over the course of my absence there were nearly 2500 hits and 4800 page views (Thanks Mom!).  It constantly humbled and reminded me that there really were a lot of people following along.

While this story of my life has reached its end, other stories are just beginning.  The experiences of this summer will provide a background and enriching for everything that follows.

So if we are going by the numbers, let me leave with one--one big thank you to everyone who made this possible and everyone reading this.

Half Full Or Half Empty

When I met with Mark Lucas, to discuss Absalom, Absalom, he made a remark that got me thinking.  He said that the Old South and England share a similar reverence of the past since both had fought and lost wars on their home ground.  The extensive re-thinking that is required to make sense of why one's noble forebears were unable to prevail leads to an obsession with the past.  It is a sort of second guessing.  Was their cause mistaken, their courage suspect or were they in the wrong?

This questioning leads to a more circumspect view of the world.  The real possibility of failure looms over every endeavor. It leads to a sort of realistic view of existence that can appear to be pessimism.  When you examine the work of Tolkien and Faulkner, you certainly see this sort of  harsh picture of living.  Death and sorrow are real possibilities intricately woven into the tapestry of their tales.

This contrasts with the rest of the United States where during Disney's life, the claim could be made that the U.S. had never lost in a war.  In fact, the U.S.'s primary role in Walt's experience had been to enter in on the right side of foreign conflict and tip the scales of victory to bring justice.  Losing was not a part of the experience.

So Disney's narratives lack the reverence for the past and the complicated texture of death and sorrow.  It is possible for him to have an essentially optimistic view of the world because defeat was unknown.

An interesting thought, loss leads to depth.  At least in this case, it appears to ring true.

Discovering The Story

William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom is a narrative masterpiece.  The facts of the story are rather spare.  Thomas Sutpen is shaped by a childhood rooted in his lower class roots and works the rest of his life to overcome it.  He goes to Haiti for riches where he marries the daughter of a sugar plantation owner.  When he finds out she is part black, he divorces her because she doesn't fit his plan.  He arrives in Yokanaptawpha County, buys a 10 square mile plot from the local Indian chief.  He develops it, marries a woman from the town and has two children, a boy and a girl.  When the boy goes off to college he meets a mysterious student from New Orleans who is named Charles Bon.  He brings him home for the holiday and arranges an engagement between Bon and his sister Judith.  Sutpen calls his son Henry in and tells him that Bon is actually his half brother from the mother in Haiti.  The two young men go off to war and when they return, as Charles comes back to marry Judith, Henry kills him at the door to the house.  He does this not because of the incest but because he has  learned that Bon is part black.  Henry disappears and Sutpen returns from the Civil War with no son to inherit his dream.  Finally he is killed by one of the poor white farmers who lives on the plantation because Sutpen fathers a baby by the man's granddaughter.

And that is basically it.  There are a few other details and the sad denouement, but that is the plot.  Admittedly it is a bit convoluted (a typical Faulknerian schema), but the book is 378 dense pages far more than seem necessary for the lean events of the narrative.  Faulkner's genius is in the way he tells the story.  These facts are not revealed in simple linear fashion.  Instead the structure of the book is like a spiral staircase with the same points in time returned to from the perspective of different characters who add new and important details.  It also is a bit like peeling an onion with layer upon layer of revelation.

The other technique which Faulkner employs is to have those telling the stories to invent the facts that fill in the blanks between the known.  The question is not whether these events are true, but rather if they make sense given what is known about the people involved.  The last part of the book focuses on Quentin Compson (who is tangentially brought into the story because of family relationships even though Sutpen lived well before he was born) at Harvard telling his friend Shreve the story at night in their dorm room.  They riff off of each others tellings and create a persuasive narrative of grand scope.

That Faulkner can pull this off without slipping into the boredom of repetition or the absurdity of fantasy is a real coup.  It is a reminder that the best stories sometimes lie in between the facts we know as our imagination builds a bridge.

Lurking Evil

In William Faulkner's novels Go Down, Moses and Absalom, Absalom, the characters who seem to be most evil lurk in the background of the stories.  The patriarch of the McCasslin clan who starts their downward spiral is never an active character in the narrative.  He merely exists in memories and the record of the plantation ledger.  Thomas Sutpen whose sins include his great desire for money and lineage and his racism also exists only in the flashbacks of memory.

In a way this is quite similar to J.R.R. Tolkien's personification of evil, Sauron, who exists only in a disembodied form at the the time of the final battle of Middle Earth.  His evil overshadows the story even though he is actually a minor character in terms of actions and focus.

What Faulkner and Tolkien seem to have realized is that the power of evil is in the power of shadow.  In the harsh light of day, it is not nearly as fearsome or as craven as it appears when shrouded in mystery.  Had they spent time focusing on the characters rather than their effects in the narrative world, their evil might well have so becharmed the reader so as not to seem that evil after all.

The characters found ways to justify their horrid acts to themselves and doubtless a closer look at them would have meant weighing those justifications.  By keeping them at arms length and in the shadows, Tolkien and Faulkner make the evil more clearly powerful and more sinister.

The problem with evil is its tempting allure.  No one is tempted to steal their neighbor's garbage--but things of value.  The key it seems is not to get too close to evil, because the seduction it provides is powerful and can result in a sense that maybe what it suggests isn't that bad after all.

Evil is best identified by its results not its arguments.  Giving a voice to evil is to let the snake speak in a hypnotic and sensible way, but to lose the key to the garden gate in the process.  So when Faulkner and Tolkien want to create evil characters, they limit their ability to speak and concentrate on the consequences of their actions.

A Super Sunday

In October of 2009, the Federal Trade Commission released their revised guidelines on endorsements.  These new policies included one that required all bloggers who received a material benefit from the product or service they endorse to disclose that information to their readers.

So to stay out of trouble, let me disclose my connections with Lexington Avenue Baptist Church in Danville where I attended worship this morning.

My first memories of LABC are from the 1970's.  My Grandfather and his brothers were members of the church and when we would have overnight visits, I would go with him to hear their pastor of the time, Austin Roberts, preach.  What I most remember about him was his unusual accent.

Then when I went to Centre, I attended the church while Bob Baker was its pastor.  After a year or two, I got a call from Bob asking me to consider leading the R.A. program there.  At the time I felt it was quite an honor (although now, knowing how desperate one can get to find volunteers I'm not so sure) and gladly accepted.

Then, sometime later, H.K. Kingkade (now the Director of College/Church Relations at Georgetown College) resigned as youth minister.  Bob and the music minister Bruce Richardson encouraged me to apply for the position and to my surprise I was hired.  A ministry that consisted of some good times, one blown up van engine and a variety of growing up experiences that make me cringe to think about later, I left for seminary.  The church's extraordinary kindness and love helped me in the formation of my ministry identity.

Through the years, I have kept up with LABC.  This morning I saw my Great-aunt Rose and my Second Cousin Sallie there.  I was glad to see my friends Tommy Valentine (their pastor) and Keith Stillwell (their associate pastor) in leadership.  Even though it was twenty years ago that I was there, I still saw some friendly familiar faces.

All that to say, it was great.  And if you're ever looking for a church in Danville, I reccomend it.

Some Commonalities

When I chose J.R.R. Tolkien, Walt Disney and William Faulkner as the focal points for my sabbatical I did so because they all hold a particular place in my passions.  When I tried to justify this odd triumvirate, I found that they all lived contemporaneously.  So, I based my Clergy Renewal Grant proposal on the variety of their works even though they lived in the same time period.

Over the course of the past three months, I have found many similarities some surprising between them.  Some of them I have noted.  Some may be important.  Some are clearly trivial.  I wanted to share a partial list with you of what they share and you can decide which belong in each of the previous categories.

1.  Each had a major work published in 1937 (The Hobbit, Snow White, Absalom, Absalom)
2.  Each served or tried to in World War I
3.  Each drank and smoked
4.  Each had dealings with Hollywood
5.  Each drew on the settings of their childhood for their work
6.  Each had a reverence for wilderness
7.  Each experimented with ground breaking approaches (Tolkien invented the modern category of fantasy literature, Disney brought stereo sound, color and feature length to cartoons, Faulkner's use of stream of consciousness, variety of narrators and non-linear storytelling were trail blazing)
8.  Each, in their childhood, were active in the church and knew its stories
9.  Each had a brother who was significant in their lives
10.  Each were recognized during their lifetime, but also had significant critics who questioned the importance and value of their work

There are others of course, but this list illustrates that the men's lives and thought have more in common than one might think at first glance.

It's a small world after all.

What To Do About Evil

Mark Lucas and I met today to discuss Go Down, Moses at a popular Danville coffee shop.  We spent over an hour discussing the plot and characters of this Faulkner novel.

He shared with me a very interesting account of words delivered by William Faulkner at the University of Virginia.  A questioner asked him about human responses to evil in the world.  He replied that he believed there were three.  The first response is to throw one's hands in the air and in despair determine that there is nothing that can be done.  The second stance is to recognize the evil and try to remove yourself from it.  The third attitude is to recognize the evil and work head on to change it.

In Go Down, Moses, the character Eunice embodies the first response.  When she discovers that the slave holder who has bought her and fathered her daughter has now raped his own child leaving her pregnant,  she walks into the stream and drowns herself.  She is overcome with grief but sees nothing to do but surrender.

On the other hand, the ostensible hero of the book Isaac McCasslin chooses the second course of action. He recognizes the evil and racism of the plantation system which he has inherited.  But, rather than addressing the issues, he chooses to repudiate his inheritance and instead to live in town while letting his cousin take over the family farm and its dehumanizing commerce.

Most interesting in the novel is that there is no character who recognizes the evil and tries to change it.  There is no Moses who demands that the people be released.  There are only flawed and broken folk trapped by the evil of a history of ownership and slavery.  But no character stands up and identifies the warped character of their culture and demands its change.

It is almost as if Faulkner leaves that task to his readers.  None of the characters in his book possess the moral vision and courage that is necessary to bring change.  They are ensnared and wait for some next generation, some Joshua to come and lead them into the land of promise.

It is as if Faulkner understood that the problems of racism were so deep that they would not be resolved in his generation.  He hoped as we still do for someone to come with the moral courage to bring change.

Seeing What You Look For

William Faulkner needed money.  He was land rich but cash poor.  At the time Go Down, Moses was published he was the largest landholder in Oxford, Mississippi.  And yet, he was constantly arranging loans and advances from his publisher.

Faulkner had found out that his short stories could be written quicker and were more profitable in the short run.  So he produced a number of these to alleviate his cash flow problems, but when completed there was not an immediate market for them.  At the same time Random House continued to hound him to produce another full-length novel.

Faulkner's solution was simple and efficient.  Put together some of his already written short stories, change them in ways to augment their connections and add a few new pieces.

The publisher, who was aware of this, first published his new work under the title Go Down, Moses and Other Stories.  The book was then read and reviewed as a collection.  But Faulkner didn't intend for it to be read that way.  The new material and changes he made brought a subtle but present narrative unity to the work that made the free standing stories richer and deeper when read together.

When readers thought it was a short story collection, they tended to read it without considering the context of each story.  It was only later when the title was changed that critics began to see not some ingenious little stories but a great novel.

The whole incident is proof that you often find what you think you will.  It makes me wonder how many treasures we pass by each day unappreciated because we have decided to see them as something less than they are.

Deer To My Heart

One of the interesting things about looking at J.R.R. Tolkien, Walt Disney, and William Faulkner concurrently is discovering unexpected commonalities.  Often there are things in common between two of the three (for example both Disney and Faulkner suffered from the lingering effects of horse riding accidents and neither of them graduated from college).  But to find a common thread among the three is more rare and more exciting to discover.

Take for example deer.  All three use the symbol of a mature buck in a similar way.

Tolkien introduces a jet-black buck in The Hobbit when Bilbo and the dwarves are losing hope in the dark forest.  As they are crossing the river, the animal crashes into their sight and then bounds across the river.  The party is very hungry, so Thorin quickly draws his bow and shoots.  It is unclear whether he hits the deer before it disappears, but they are unable to follow it.  Tolkien knew well that the presence of a black deer was an ancient symbol for entry into the fairy world.  The dwarves are just about to encounter the wood-elves.  The presence of the stag marks the border between the ordinary world and the magical wild.

Disney's stag is of course Bambi's father.  Known as the Great Prince of the Forest, he stands majestically as a symbol of the unbridled power of the wilderness.  Ultimately, it is only man's entry into the forest that causes him to run in fear.  The presence of Bambi's father is a reminder that the story exists in a world that is not controlled by men even thought they occasionally enter it bringing destruction.

In Go Down Moses, the majestic buck conjured by Faulkner is a mystic representation of life in the ancient forest.  Young Isaac McCasslin is introduced to the animal by Sam Fathers, the half-indian, half-black man who teaches him to respect the wilderness.  Sam takes Ike to a spot in the woods where they see the regal animal that he refers to as Grandfather as if he is an embodiment of the ancient Native American spirit of the land.

It is an unexpected congruence.  Within the works of all three men, the mature stag stands as the spirit of the wild:  their life and by extension the uncivilized world they represent  is in precarious balance because of the intrusion of humanity.  Ultimately each man saw the buck as a symbol of the fragility of the natural world and their concern for its survival.

Faulkner or Falkner

William Falkner.  That is the name he was bequeathed by his father.  It is not the name, or at least the spelling, with which we are accustomed.

William Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25, 1897 to Murry Cuthbert Falkner and his wife Maud Butler.  He was the first of four sons.

But he became William Faulkner in 1918 when he enlisted in the RAF in Canada.  Why he added the "u" is a mystery.  There is an unconfirmed story that when Faulkner's first book was printed, the title page included the "u".  Faulkner was asked whether he wanted it corrected and his reply was, "Either way suits me."

This is interesting, because Faulkner's use of names with his characters is definitely not an "either way suits me" sort of exercise.  The names characters are given and respond to illustrate the complicated web of their culture.

Lucas Beauchamp, the black grandson of the white slave holder from Go Down Moses is a case in point.  He refuses to call any white man by a hierarchical title, going to great lengths of circumlocution to avoid titles.  In the end, he only refers to the head of the plantation as "mister" to keep his wife from divorcing him.

His name was actually recorded as Lucius, but through his own will changed it.  He seems to have recognized that one of the first ways that slaves were re-oriented was to strip them of their cultural identity by giving them a new name.  It is a long held practice dating back at least as far as the bible story Daniel.  By forcing the person to give up their name, they are reminded of their subservience and their relative position in the dominant culture.  Lucas would not bow to the accepted conventions.

Also in Go Down Moses, there is a bear that achieves nearly mystical significance.  As a part of this, he receives the name "Old Ben."  The dog that ultimately is able to run him down also is given a name (Lion) even though every other dog in the pack and in the story is merely a hound or a fyce.

The point seems to be that names are important and sacred things that define who we are.  I think it probably meant a great deal to Faulkner to add the "u" because it made him a person with no progenitor.  He was an individual and changing his surname meant that he had freed himself from the bounds of the cultural web of the South.  In the end it allowed him to write more honestly about the world he knew so well, because he could both be of it and not a part of it at the same time.  Who would have thought "u" could mean so much.

We're Third

Yesterday, I was able to visit at Third Baptist Church in Owensboro.  It is a church that I have been familiar with for years.  When I pastored in Ohio County, I even had the opportunity to lead a Bible study there.  But, due to its distance and my own responsibilities I had never been there to worship.

It is a church that has a long and illustrious history.  The historic sanctuary is ornate and intricate in design.  They even have the best mission statement of any congregation I know (Jesus first, others second, we're Third).

The worship was very traditional.  We sang together the old hymns.  The Lord's prayer concluded the pastoral prayer.  There was even a children's sermon that ostensibly was about the Trinity, but seemed to be more of a lesson on making Kool-Aid.

My friend James Byrd, the pastor preached a sermon from the gospel of Luke.  He used the powerful illustration of the words Blaise Pascal (the famous mathematician) always carried with him and were discovered in his coat at his death to structure the sermon.  It is the description of Pascal's conversion:

The year of grace 1654
Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement, Pope and Martyr, and of others in the Martyrology.
Eve of Saint Chrysogonus, Martyr and others.
From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.

Fire

'God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
God of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
'Thy God shall be my God.'
The world forgotten, and everything except God.
He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.
Greatness of the human soul.
'O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known thee.'
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him.
They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.
'My God wilt thou forsake me?'
Let me not be cut off from him for ever!
And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.
Everlasting joy in return for one day's effort on earth.
I will not forget thy word. Amen.


What a story.  Perhaps we should carry our story with us wherever we go as well.

Relationships

I am re-reading Go Down Moses for my meeting with Mark Lucas this Friday.  Even though I read it for Bob's bookbag a few months ago, it is a work that has plenty of fresh ground the second time through.  The first read is like driving your car around a new town.  You establish the lay of the land and the major landmarks.  But when you come to the book a second time, it is more like a leisurely stroll.  Details that slipped by in a blur the first time around gain new context and importance.

Faulkner's novels are dense and complex.  One thing that returning to the novel has done for me is that it has helped me straighten out the family relationships in it.  Faulkner certainly understood that in a small town everybody is related to each other.  It really is no more than one degree of separation in both Georgetown and Yoknapatawpha County.

As I have witched out the relationships between Edmonds and McCasslins in Faulkner's world, I have discovered the same truth in Scott County.  I found out a few years ago that Mark Lucas was from Georgetown.  I think it was at Sis Curry's house and she told me that her daughter had dated him in high school.

Then when I announced my plans for sabbatical study, Horace Hambrick, Rick and Betty Covington and others told me that they remembered the man I first knew as Dr. Lucas as just a high school classmate.  They had lots of things to tell me about my professor who had existed to me less as a human being with history than as a role (fortunately they were all positive!).

So when I met with Mark (I'm making a conscious effort to use his first name--old habits die hard), I mentioned the greetings from his Georgetown compatriots.  Mark began to share with me some of his Georgetown stories.  They included his grandfather Armstrong, whose name graces the Old Armstrong subdivision.  This same grandfather had once lived in and owned Ward Hall.

It didn't stop there though, I went out to dinner that evening and was glad to see Brian Bergman.  Without prompting, he told me that Mark had given him some tennis instruction when he was young.

Sometimes its hard to tell which is easier to unravel, the relationship of Faulkner's characters or the web of Georgetown past and present.

The Never Ending Story

I came upon an interesting fact in researching Faulkner the other day.  It provided another unexpected link between Faulkner, Tolkien and Disney.

J.R.R. Tolkien in his design of Middle Earth created a series of creation and ancient narratives that lie in the background of his narrative world.  He collected these into a book he titled The Silmarillion.  While he flirted several times with its publication, it wasn't until after his passing that his son was able to collect all of it into a final form.  In the process, his son found that these stories were far from fixed during Tolkien's lifetime.  Over the years, changes had been made of minor and major importance.  Character's names were changed.  Events were re-ordered, added and dropped.  Middle Earth never reached a final form in Tolkien's life because he was always inventing it.

When Walt Disney completed Disneyland and opened it to the public, he did not view it as a finished product.  He said, "Disneyland will never be completed.  It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world."  On another occasion, he shared, "The way I see it, Disneyland will never be finished. It’s something we can keep developing and adding to. A motion picture is different. Once it’s wrapped up and sent out for processing, we’re through with it. If there are things that could be improved, we can’t do anything about them anymore. I’ve always wanted to work on something alive, something that keeps growing. We’ve got that in Disneyland."


This brings us around to William Faulkner.  When late in his life, he decided to continue his stories in Yoknapatawpha County, he realized that some of the later details in his stories did not reconcile with those of his earlier works.  He addressed this by writing, "The author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will--contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then." 


The power of the mythic worlds that these three created was due in some part to their living nature.  Rather than being static creations, the stories developed and changed over time.  Their works were not objects but as Disney suggested living things.


It seems to me that the story of the Church is like that a living story with new chapters still being added.  As Christians we not only celebrate the stories of the past but are making the stories of the present that will be told in the future.  It is a living world and our participation in it makes each one of us a part of the cosmic story that is bending towards redemption.

The Nobel Prize

William Faulkner was not a man to make public pronouncements.  When asked to speak publicly, he once told those who asked that he was just a farmer who told stories.

In 1950, though, this stance was forced to change.  Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize and as custom dictated, he went to Stockholm to accept it.  This required a public speech.  The words he delivered are a mere five paragraphs, but as with his dense narratives, the oration is full of rich resonance.

In it he bemoans that the great human questions and universal longings had been replaced in the modern consciousness with the single question, "When will I be blown up?"  The atomic bomb had become the major question and it assumed that humanity would destroy itself.  Fear had become the defining feature of human existence in much fiction, he believed.

Interestingly, though his fiction can seem fatalistic, Faulkner argued that fear should not define the human experience.  The questions that matter are those of truth, love and justice.  Humanity will overcome no matter the problem.  He affirmed that there is a future.  There is hope.

The conclusion to his speech is pure poetry and promise.  It speaks to the true power of story.

"The poet’s, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Earned My Ears

This morning I completed the Leadership class offered by the Disney Institute in Orlando.

Overall the course was a very positive experience.  And no, it was not a pretense meeting for having fun.  The classes lasted the better part of each day, leaving only the evenings for exploring Disney World.

What a whirlwind it was!  We covered an awful lot of ground in 3 and a half days.  In the reflection time, I was able to give serious thought to an exciting new direction I  am going to propose to move our church forward when I return.  The content was delivered by some of the best facilitators I have ever seen in a small group.

We sat in chairs and with restrictive rules completed a task in Duckburg (and, you guessed it, I was Goofy).  We put together a giant Mosaic poster of Mickey Mouse.  We built a monorail and lashed characters to the top of it (you've never lived until you tie a princess to the top of the train with a pipe cleaner and Tinker Bell is held on with a paper clip wrapped around her little fairy neck!)  We even got diplomas and mouse ears with tassels and a picture with Mickey in graduate garb.

I had a great opportunity to spend time and make new friends with some exceptional people who were also in the class.  The curriculum designer for the program was kind enough to sit with me at lunch one day and tell me about the hows and whys of the program.

I got to hear some unguarded comments from people that ministers often don't hear.  One of my classmates told me that he and his family hadn't joined the large church where they attended because they hadn't been able to figure out how to plug-in.  Someone else told me about the church decision she had made eschewing the one with the large beautiful sanctuary that seemed to always be asking for money for another where she felt that she was needed.  I also listened uncomfortably to another classmate who told about the last time in her life when she had visited a Baptist Church and left in tears after what she had heard.

We heard a lot of stories that were applications of the principles that we were learning.  My favorite was one that one of the leaders shared with me in a private conversation.  We were talking about the shadows of founders on an organization.

He told me that in the late 70's Disney began to struggle as a company after Walt's death.  He remembered a time when he was working the Jungle Cruise.  The ride was very busy and the line stretched out quite a distance.  The supervisor stopped the line and tried to correct a small mistake the operator had made.  In the course of his correction, he said, "We must ask ourselves what would Walt do?"  The captain in the boat behind heard the conversation, looked at the line of people waiting and said through the intercom, "Walt would put two more boats out here on the river!"

That supervisor may have been right about what Walt would have wanted from the pilot, but he had forgotten that there was a bigger picture and that Walt would have wanted something else from him.

It made me think about how many times we so concern ourselves with what really is small and unimportant and miss the big business of the Kingdom of God.

Disney and The Power of Story

I was immediately taken aback when I began to read the manual that was handed to participants in the Disney Institute Leadership class.  On the first page I found the following words.

"Beginning with Walt Disney himself, Disney leaders have used storytelling to perpetuate the Company's culture. . . Recognizing the "power of story" is the Disney difference in leadership."

If you don't understand my surprise, look up at the title of my blog (which was selected almost a year ago).  Apparently the Disney Company and I have a similar appreciation for the importance of narrative.

One of the tasks we were asked to accomplish as we gathered in our first session was to define what a leader is.  While the facilitator offered the definition--anyone who influences change, I preferred mine.  It takes seriously what the rhetoric in the manual suggested.  A bit wordy, but here it is--a good leader is a person who shapes a narrative reality in which other people want to participate.

A well told story has the ability to lead others to dream, believe, act and change.  Disney offers the rubric envision, organize, engage and commit as the ways stories can influence an organization to change.  The church has formed itself around the stories of the gospel, rather than some policy and procedure manual that Jesus left behind.

A question asked by the program was the long term measure of success for a leader.  Given that question, I suggested that the appropriate benchmark is the success of their followers.

Leaders are storytellers.  The best lead through compelling narrative.  And the best stories echo on through the ages inspiring the generations that follow to affirm the same values, practice the same behaviors and self-perpetuate.  There really is power in story.

Disney Institute

Today's Disney Institute class focused on leadership and Walt Disney.  Although much of the information given about Walt was fairly basic, the leadership training component was quite interesting.  The presentation was excellent, and the understanding and use of group dynamics by the two facilitators was masterful.

It is a really interesting group of people who comprise my 20 or so classmates.  Their careers include law enforcement, government workers, and IT professionals among others.  One gentleman traveled from Australia to take every one of the Disney Institute courses back to back.  He runs a successful restaurant chain, but had been working without a break for years and has decided to take a few months away from the business to recharge.

I was, as I guessed, the only minister in the room.  But I was very surprised to find that there are two minister's wives in the class.  One is married to a Methodist minister in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She even knew who Norman Wirzba is (and after my sabbatical, I'm beginning to ask who doesn't!).

The evening was focused on forming a definition of leadership.  Motivators were used to get the conversations started.  It was a very interactive format, including some blind computer polling.  The process modeled a way to ensure engagement and participation.

We were taken to Disney Hollywood Studios and got to see some of the backstage areas (including some that I had seen before on foot as I ran the Disney Marathon.).  In the park, we went through the attraction called "Walt Disney: One Man's Dream."  It is a sort of museum of the company's interpretation of Walt's life and work (it is much smaller than the family museum and even smaller than the one in Marceline--what it omits due to the lack of space seems rather telling in its own way).

We received homework for the evening and were sent off on our way.

I was a bit surprised that the company so heavily relies on Walt's image and ideas as it trains its cast members.  He is almost still a presence even though he has been gone 40 years.  I am quite sure he would not recognize the company now, and I am not sure he would approve of what it is doing, but his legacy is continually being refined and at times redefined by those who follow.  Anyone who says to heck with Walt would not last long here.  If you want to go in a new direction, the key is to find some justification no matter how slim from Walt's life or words and then do what you want to do.

In some ways, Walt's legacy is living as it is moved and shaped by people who never even knew him but bear his name.  I suppose a bit like the church which shapes Jesus' legacy.

Out of Step

I went early this morning to Cincinnati to catch my Delta flight to Orlando.  This my more serious trip to Disney  World.  Tomorrow, my class on Disney leadership through storytelling will begin.

As I sat at the gate and looked over the passengers, I noticed it was a very young crowd.  How young?  When they announced pre-boarding for those with infants or young children, almost two-thirds of those waiting got in line.

For me this is the last trip of a long summer.  I am glad to be here, but flying has slipped into a mind-numbing routine at this point.  Most of my travel has been on weekdays so far and those who have surrounded me have the zombie-like expression that can only be cultivated by those whose travel is frequent and required.

My Saturday morning traveling companions were cut from a different cloth.  I was really out of place traveling alone and with a purpose other than fun on my mind.

I knew it was different when a throaty cheer went up when the plane left the ground.  Not something you hear as the red eye from San Francisco goes wheels up!

There were a lot more cries during the flight (not only from the children, but also from the exasperated parents).  The plane was abuzz with the sounds of video games and movies.  It was like a kid's birthday party at 30,000 feet.

Then finally we approached Orlando.  An excited murmur swept the cabin as parents told their children what was outside of the window.  As we were on our approach to the airport, but still quite a way away and high in the air, a child's voice called out loud enough for everyone to hear, "Daddy, I see our hotel!"

I was reminded of the time when my kids were small and the magic that Disney promised was a reality in the wonder in their eyes.  They are bigger now, more world-wise and the teen age years are not so slowly draining the whimsy from their lives.  I even remembered  back just a little to my own childhood.

For a moment or two on that plane, I was transported back to that unfiltered expectant joy that only the young and innocent can attain.  I savored that lost time and mourned its necessary passing.  Because just for a moment I remembered when I could see the hotel from the plane even though I'd never been there and had only my imagination to paint its existence for me.  "Daddy, I see our hotel!"  I smiled a conspiratorial smile.

The Bright Light's of Hollywood

When William Faulkner was down on his luck, he decided to go to Hollywood and write for the motion picture industry.  From time to time between the 1930's and 1950's, he wrote movies to make some quick money.  The motion pictures he penned starred the biggest names of his day, but are largely forgettable. 


Joseph Blotner in his biography of Faulkner relates the following story.


"Faulkner's first days in Hollywood were portentous. He arrived on a Saturday, not long before quitting time. His boss, Sam Marx, noticed that he had been drinking, and that he had a bleeding cut on his head. Faulkner said he had been hit by a cab while changing trains -- in New Orleans -- but that he was fine and wanted to get right to work:

"We're going to put you on a Wallace Beery picture," Marx told him.

"Who's he?" asked Faulkner. "I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse."

After explaining that Mickey Mouse films were made at Disney Studios, Marx had his office boy take Faulkner to the screening room to see Beery as a prizefighter in The Champ, as the new film, Flesh, was to feature Beery as a wrestler. Faulkner did not want to watch, preferring to talk to the office boy:  "Do you own a dog?" he asked the boy, who said no. Faulkner said, "Every boy should have a dog." He should be ashamed not to own a dog, and so should everybody else who didn't own a dog.

Faulkner soon walked out, saying that he knew how the story was going to end. When alerted, Marx initiated a search, but Faulkner had disappeared. When he showed up again, nine days later, he explained that he had been wandering in Death Valley, but that now he really was ready to work."


Oh what a Mickey Mouse picture it would have been!

Race Relations

It is accepted, even expected, that a "Southern" writer will deal with the difficult questions of race relations.  The complex questions of how those who were once slaves and masters relate to each other both then and now is fertile ground for exploration.

William Faulkner certainly deals with this part of Southern culture.  He displays all the ambiguities of two races of people living in close enough proximity to form relationships that transcend and subvert their culturally assigned roles.

He treats the African-American characters in his novel with honest depth.  They can be saints and sinners.  Sometimes they are oppressed and other times they are actually in charge of their situation in spite of what their oppressors think.

Ultimately, he sees the blacks and the whites of the South bound together in a complex web of relations that is slowly destroying them all just as the Old South is slowly limping to its own destruction.

Unlike many other Southern writers, Faulkner was concerned with another race that inhabited the region.  He named his fictional Mississippi county "Yoknapatawpha" which he made from two Chickisaw words.  "Yocona" and "Petopha" which mean "split" and "land."  Faulkner claimed the combinations meant "water flowing slow through the flat land."

The whites did not arrive in the land until early 1800, before their arrival, it was the territory of Native Americans.  Faulkner haunts his stories with this first presence.  Their being pushed from the land is the first sin of the white people who would found their business on the backs of others.

William Faulkner understood that many of the South's problems were based on the long history of racial misunderstanding and domination.  Faulkner doesn't provide easy answers to the questions he asks, but he reminds his readers that their fates are intertwined.  Any progress will only come when all the races move ahead.

Time Flows Downhill

Stories exist in time.

When Walt Disney told a story, his concept of time within the worlds he created was a simple past, present and future.  Once upon a time (past) the story takes place.  The events happen one after another, with no real sense of minutes, hours or days.  One moment follows the next.  The scenes advance time without any specifics though, other than maybe day or night.  It all ends when the characters live happily ever after (future).

J.R.R. Tolkien was much more concerned about careful chronology.  Prior to writing his stories of Middle Earth, he calculated the moon phases for his specially created calendar.  He charted the movement of storms through his world on a calendar.  He researched the amount of time it took to ride a horse across different terrain.

Tolkien not only was meticulous about time, he took risks as a storyteller by looping his stories.  He would follow one group of characters for an extended period.  His telling would then go back in time to pick up another plot and bring it up to the present.  His editors told him that no one would want to read a story where the main characters are absent for more than a hundred pages at a time.  They were wrong.

William Faulkner seems to have been obsessed with questions of time.  His novels rarely follow linear time.  They are instead often filled with chapters that appear contrary to chronological sequence.  This can make his stories difficult to follow.  But at the same time, his narratives are richer as the juxtaposition of events which would generally be separated because of time often reveal deeper meanings.

We tend to expect our narratives to proceed in linear time, but Faulkner shows his mastery of storytelling by refusing to follow convention and expectation.  In The Sound and the Fury, which tells the stories of a families generations in the course of four days.  Benjy, one of the Compson brothers, is mentally challenged and experiences everything as if it is in the present.  Another of the narrating brothers, Quentin is obsessed with time.  The family slave Dilsey narrates the final chapter which is punctuated by the church bell marking the hour for worship on Easter Sunday.

Storytellers have many tools at their disposal.  Faulkner realized that one of them was a time machine.  

Faulkner and Religion

An examination of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Walt Disney and William Faulkner might lead a person to the conclusion that Faulkner was the most religious of the three.  After all, Tolkien never makes mention of the Christian tradition in his fiction.  Disney goes to great effort to remove any hint of religion from his work.

Faulkner's work, however is pregnant with Christian themes.  The characters make reference to Christian figures and often are part of church communities.  He uses the name of David's son Absalom as one of his titles.  The narrative structure of his novel The Sound And The Fury takes place in Holy Week.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic whose faith was an important part of his daily life.  He took great pride in the fact that one of his sons became a priest.  But he avoided religion in Middle Earth because he saw it as a pre-Christian world.

Disney was raised in a very religious home, but never made religion a central part of his life.  He enrolled one of his daughters in a catholic school for a few years as a child, but moved her to public school when he felt she was becoming too deeply involved in the religious aspect of the education.  He did once write a devotion for Guidepost Magazine, but he never attended church.  He seems to have had some minimal form of faith.

William Faulkner became very familiar with the Bible as a child.  But he doesn't seem to have committed himself in any way to Christian practice.  He was married in a Presbyterian church, but that appears to be the extent of his religious observance.  He seems likely to have considered himself an agnostic.

For a non-religious person, the references and allusions to Christian themes are surprising in both their accuracy and their deft application.  When asked about this Faulkner said that to write about the South, one had to write about religion.  He believed, what he called the "Christian legend" to be an important way to understand the people who populated his world.

The Christianity practiced in Faulkner's narrative world is very much like that in real life.  For some of his characters, religion is a crutch and a sham.  For others, it is their consolation and hope in the midst of desperation.  The church bells ring with hypocrisy, racism, community and compassion.  And it is always ambiguous for God never clearly intervenes in the stories.

Without being a Christian, you can understand the worlds created by Tolkien and Disney.  But without a Christian background, much of Faulkner is lost.  It seems ironic that the author who arguably had the least religious faith of the three was least afraid to address it in his books.

Faulkner may have doubted the existence of God, but he certainly understood the universal hunger of people for God.

William Faulkner?

When I interviewed Mark Pinsky about Disney and the Disney corporation, he confided in me that what particularly piqued his interest in my summer project was the name William Faulkner.  In summary, this was his mindset.  Walt Disney's work is accessible to anyone.  J.R..R. Tolkien wrote books that have a wide popular following and little critical acclaim.  But William Faulkner is not very accessible at all.  He is critically acclaimed and popularly unknown.  His prose is dense and nuanced.  He writes on a dark stage with few heroes, while Disney and Tolkien are all about the lead characters who bear light and hope.

To be honest, I still am figuring out where Faulkner fits in all this.  I chose him because I love his writing style and complexity.  His pictures of the South are pregnant with layered meanings and ambiguities.  You can feel the stifling heat and social mores in every sentence he writes.

I thought first about Faulkner because he was a contemporary of Disney and Tolkien.  He was shaped by the same global culture that produced the others.  While his world is clearly "Southern" in its sensibilities, he was certainly shaped by coming of age during The Great War.

Tolkien fought in France, although an illness limited his exposure to the trench warfare there.  Disney was too young to join the armed services, but he lied about his age and became a red cross ambulance driver also serving in France.

Like Disney, Faulkner was too young to fight for his country in World War I.  Also like Walt, his desire to be a part of the action led him to prevaricate to serve.  William Faulkner fled to Canada, effected a new persona who was old enough to join and enlisted in the RAF.

The only problem was the armistice came before he had completed his training.  So Faulkner took his earnings and bought a full RAF uniform.  He wore this upon his return to Oxford, but also now had an accent, a cane and a limp that he hadn't had when he left for the North.  In fact, he seems not to have had them when he began his journey back home.

He told those that asked that he had been injured in the service.  The people of Oxford seemed to have not thought much of Faulkner's new war hero stance.  They took to calling him "Count No Count."  This was their shorthand for the prominent view that the dandy Faulkner was a no account count.

William Faulkner was as colorful as the characters in his fiction.  It is going to be a fun month!