Episode 19: James K. A. Smith

Welcome to the habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. I'm Jonathan Rogers your host.

James K. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan and the author of many books including designing the kingdom. You are what you love and most recently on the road with St. Augustine. His work on St. Augustine has been exceedingly helpful to me both as a writer and as a human being as you will hear in this conversation.

Jamie Smith thank you so much for being on the habit podcast. I really appreciate you making time for us. Oh it's great to talk to you.

You know a Gustin has been such an important part of my sort of inner world for four years and really your work on St. Augustine has been very important for me really giving me the away end to make sense. So so thank you for the work you've done in imagining the kingdom and I guess it's a desire in the kingdom that whole series and in your which you love and and now on the road with St. Augustine which I which I have been reading I just love it I think it's going to be a really important book.

Oh thanks so much. I feel like. I've been sort of writing this book for 20 years because Augustine has been with me the whole way so yeah yeah yeah yeah.

I mean it's just his idea of you know the ordered and disordered and reordered loves. Actually it's so helpful for thinking about all of human experience for it and it certainly has been a big part of the way I think about writing and the way I teach writing.

Fascinating you know because every at every creative writing teacher who's ever lived I think you know has said what do your characters want. You know I mean at the end you understand your character. I mean you might say your character is his wants which by the way. That's what my character is to as a person is what I want. And and I make choices based on what

You know for for for writers to think about.

I love.

I love this connection you're making because. Yeah. And it also explains then why writing is such a science of the soul as it were. I mean it's the art that is the science of the soul and why why it's why a novel can tell me more about myself and can tell us more about humanity than you know a newspaper article because in a way the best literature is getting at people's hungers desires and is is getting at is trying to honor the complexity of that.

And I think a Gustin it's interesting.

In fact I'm talking to a friend who teaches at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop Garth Greenwell and when he teaches writing he teaches Augustine's Confessions and not just for memoir but for a kind of writing that is attentive to the dynamics of desire the way in which our loves are sort of the engine that drives our being in the world.

And I think you're right that Augustine is in that sense. I think one of the reasons why Dustin is still with us is because he was so prescient in that regard. And so it's at once was very very intimate. You know you can peer into a soul and yet it also helps you to understand others. So yeah no I'm encouraged to hear that that's helpful in teaching writing too. That's very cool. Yeah.

Maybe we should back up. I mean I've kind of launched in as if everybody listening knows what we're talking about as far as ordered and disordered lives and sure could you could you sort of give us a quick summary.

Yeah.

So I think probably the aspect of Dustin but most captivated me and I'm trained as a philosopher so that slightly skews maybe the way I came to Gustin. But what struck me was first and foremost that he's he looks at who we are as human beings and he sees the seat and center of the human person is located in the heart by which he doesn't mean just this mushy emotionalism. He just means that the the the engine room of our loves.

And so what really defines me and what motivates me and moves me and what kind of governs my my being is what I love. But so everybody to be human is to love. You can't not love hated Gus. That first paragraph in the confessions where he says you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless

But then a Gustin says that doesn't mean that we all love the same things. Nor does it mean that we love what we ought. Right. There's a kind of design claim here that humanity is made to love and it's ultimately made to love the one who made them to love God who who welcomes them. The effect of sin and brokenness and and tragedy in our lives is not that we stop loving something it's that we now our love gets disordered it gets misdirected it's it's aimed.

So now now we're looking for love in all the wrong places where we're we're chasing after facets of the creation glomming onto them grasping them as if they could be everything to us. And when we do that they sort of slip through our fingers they become nothing and we're still hungry. So that's our art. We can't not love. But our loves can be disordered.

And really redemption redemption is finding the right target for our love. You know remembering what we were who we were made for.

Yeah. It seems like every story you read is that story right. It's it's people getting into one kind of trouble or another because of some disordered love and sometimes usually it's their own sometimes it's somebody else's that causes heartache for them. And then in the end that resolution is some sort of correction.

Yes yes of their lives.

And it's a correction on the right. It's a correction or it's a restoration. It's a healing on the order of their loves. And it's not just you know what they believe about the world or what they think about the world. Right it's it's it's it's it's cooking along under the radar of all those kinds of things in

You know I might say you know you could have a character and it looks like oh well their problem is they believe the wrong thing or they have the wrong ideas but in fact usually that's just a symptom and a manifestation that they want the wrong things in them.

And so a resolution for a character is not always like figuring something out. It's it's actually sort of finding what they were made for and finding the end of their loves in that regard.

I mean interestingly I think that's exactly the trajectory of Augustine's own story and the confessions is that in a way it looks for a long time like his problem is this intellectual puzzle he has to solve. How should I think about God and what's the truth. But what's interesting is by the time you get to book seven of the confessions in a way he has resolved all those intellectual problems he knows. He actually sort of knows what the truth is. But he would still admit he's

And even that prayer Lord might be chaste but not yet it is. I know in my head what I need to be but my heart's not there yet.

Yeah yeah exactly.

And he knew I think that this is the difference between different kinds of stories too I think the heart of what would be an Augustinian story is the heart I need is itself always going to be a gift it's gonna be like what talking called you know the you catastrophe it's going to be something that's that's given to me.

And if there's an act I need to undertake it's an act of surrender it's an act of opening myself up of receiving which of course is a deep offense to my pride who wants to be able to say I've figured it out I achieved that I accomplished it yeah yeah yeah that's that's great as as you the this these longings send us on journeys right.

I mean the central metaphor of your of your latest book is yes on the road was in August. It's this this moving through time and space in search of something and not just your time and space is also a mental. A metaphor journey. And I'm sure you've heard the the the old saying there are only two kinds of stories. A stranger comes to town or a person takes a trip and I have not heard them.

That's that's certainly good.

And I thought about that as I was reading through your book on the road with Dana Gustin. Yes. This is why this is why that's where that saying comes from. Yeah. We're on journeys because we don't know because we well because we're because there's a there's space between where we are and what we want.

Yes. Yes. So there's that there's a sense in which to say that human beings are lovers first and foremost. Right. That we want that we long almost built into that is a picture of.

There is an out there that I'm after and that I'm said.

So humans who are lovers are also chasers.

And so it's almost by the very nature it propels you elsewhere. And so I think that's part of it. I also think I mean I think it's a really interesting question because there's something about the journey to which this locates me and maybe that's also what happens when the stranger comes to me.

There's a kind of dislocation where now I have to confront something about myself like in the journey maybe the comforts of home drop away and now I have to see something in myself or I'm encountering others who are a mirror for me that I never had at home.

And I think that explains the why pilgrimage is so crucial to the spiritual life in a way.

Yeah that that that disorientation that that I mean this is where a story comes from. Yeah. Right. Right.

And I think I've said this in this podcast before you know it. Florida is such a rich source of story because people are always running into each other who don't normally run into each other hand also the natural they find themselves in the swamp and you know the swamp itself is a place where the water meets the land and this kind of animal meets and that's kind of its it's that yes I've got yeah I've got to Florida thing but but the.

No that's okay. You know Lauren Groff trajectory. That's right. Have you ever thought of it that way.

I mean for Dustin too I think. And not just for Dustin but I think Dustin gets this. I think he he thinks this is part of the human condition that we are in a way all looking for another country. We are all exiles. We are all strangers in the land now. That's partly because we made ourselves strangers. But he he thinks there's too mean to try too big theological world words but he thinks there's this eschatological aspect that everybody is is looking for this kingdom to come.

So some version of that.

And so because we are all oriented to some end like that we're looking for another country like Abraham.

Everybody's on this track. And and the situation of Ragsdale also names something about the human condition.

And then the question is can you be an exile who also knows where home is. And I think there's a lot of rich possibilities for narrative arcs in between those two things.

Yeah yeah. You use the term out there a little while ago and I think that's you know one thing that's that's distinctive.

We we're used to the idea of pursuing our desires to pursue to to you know every Disney movie starts with the I want song right. You know that you know I want this reason in the movie into and an insight that I've run run into throughout your work and some of this is from from Charles Williams and Simmons from Augustine and but the idea that we don't get to we don't get to invent what's gonna make us happy we don't get to. We don't get to

And so the idea of something out there somebody it's not I don't look inside to know what I need. Who I am. But rather I look to something beyond me. I think that's a really important insight for a right or not. I mean not just for characters in a story but but for a writer to realize my work is not just a map of my inner world but rather I am I'm giving an account of what I've seen in the world a world that I didn't make.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean I wonder if that helps explain though to why maybe so many many contemporary stories don't have this purchase on us because I do think we live in a cultural moment where people do imagine they can make up their own kilos.

They imagine that they can make up their own good and then that makes for a terrible story because the world just sort of bends to your will and you try to.

I mean it's just fantasy in the worst sense of the word right. Like it's it and it's not true.

Whereas yeah for August and for the kinds of stories I think for the human condition it's actually about how do I find the way I fit into the world. I didn't make how do I find a way to fit and make sense of myself into a world that's given that yes given in the sense that I've run into it.

But also given in the sense that it's gifted hits it's created it's given to me and I think that actually just makes for much more interesting literature much more interesting narrative though and this is where in some ways it's almost hard to read Gustin from modernity because as you said we've kind of inherited this this assumption that the world is what's in our heads and what we make of it whereas interestingly for Dustin even when a gust and turned inward and he starts trying to plumb

Augustine so he uses this metaphor of a cave and he says when you turn me into myself and I start trying to plumb the depths of my own soul it's like I reach this cavern whose bottom I can never sound. And there's almost a kind of infinity within me.

And then you hear the echoes of God reverberating from the bottom of it.

So either for Dustin interiority is so different than modern interior.

No it's it has it in infinity about it because it's the soul that's made in God's image. And I do think so. I'm a huge fan of you know 19th century French literature and in many ways I still think they understood that. I think a lot of flow better understood. Despite all his sort of proto modernism I think he understood that we are always more than we could make of ourselves and trying to grapple with that mystery. I think mystery is a bit of a lost category

Great that there is there is I don't trust the story I would tell about myself because I am I don't have confidence that I know who I am and yet if I surrender myself to the one who made me and knows me in a sense I'm receiving the gift of a story that helps me narrate my own identity and that's perplexing.

I unfortunately I think what happens in modernity in an age where we think we know everything is mystery just has a negative connotation like what we're saying is the mystery is something that has to be solved it's all there's a puzzle and we're gonna figure it out whereas this historic you know even the St. Paul sense of mystery in the book of Ephesians or what a Gustin

It opens up some possibility. OK. If if you know there aren't many Christian bookstores left. But but when you go through a Christian bookstore you realize the extent to which Evangelicalism has bought into that that modernist D mystification. Yes. You know it's it we're going to you know here's seven steps to this in five easy ways to what you were going to solve this problem rather than wading into a mystery and saying I think this the universe is too much for me and God is too much

Yes. Yes. Yeah. No I agree. We often don't appreciate the depths to which modern Protestantism sort of drank the modernist Kool-Aid in that regard.

And it's it's it's one of the reasons why I actually think one of the best sort of imagination stretching exercises for Christian artists is to immerse themselves in ancient and medieval wisdom and traditions because it's just it's pre modern. And so they haven't they they don't they've never fallen into the trap of imagining that we're thinking things.

Yeah yeah. I've been I've been reading a lot of well as I say Aquinas really. JOSEPH Yeah I've been getting my Aquinas through Joseph good guide.

He's a reliable God man.

And this is rock in my world I mean this this business of conforming yourself to again we've used this phrase already to a reality that we didn't make me and I think that is so helpful for a right.

And I think it's freeing for a writer to say you know what was Edmund Spenser you says fools that my muse may look in the heart and write. But when I look in my heart and try to write I don't know what to say but when I look out at the world I say okay I can do that yeah I can I can I can give an account of what I've seen. And it's such a relief to get out of my head and instead write about well Florida or whatever you know.

Yeah yeah.

But it's interesting to then also imagine your reader and make room for her to dwell in mystery writer. So the other another temptation for us is to be sort of overly exposition all and to try to make it all work for our reader and to solve it whereas Well it's funny I had this.

I mean I'm a philosopher I'm an academic so I'm still very much learning how to write.

And in this book that writing on the road with St. Augustine was a new experience for me because I knew I wanted to move into a kind of writing that was more narrative and literary.

And one of the things I realized I had to learn is I had to actually say less and I had to make make room for the reader to have an encounter but to then not program exactly how every reader was going to respond to that encounter. And there is a certain almost a a discipline of a kind

So in other words they left room for mystery too. They didn't they didn't feel like they had to tie up all the loose ends.

Yeah.

Now I want to return to something you said a minute ago that you kind of just breezed past but the thought was really important and that is the idea of a lot of stories. Well I guess I'm just gonna.

It reminded me of something from from your new book that you were quoting Leslie Jamison when she was talking about the idea of of addiction stories in recovery communities the ways in which people find their identity in these stories and the value of stories is that they are unoriginal. You know yes.

As writers we so value originality because originality makes me seem smart but. But can you talk about this idea that that unoriginal stories are really valuable for people.

Yeah. So this is from Leslie Jameson's book the recovery which is kind of a memoir of her own recovery but then also a foray into the literature of recovery and one of the things she struggled with as a writer and as a novelist short story writer was Yeah the burden is to always tell a story that no one's ever heard before or otherwise you know who's going to publish it.

But then and then she would go to an AA meeting and so much of an AA meeting was just people trading stories back and forth. But it was always kind of a story you know like it was a very defined arc.

And she had this sort of epiphany where she realized Oh wait stories can do different things. These are stories that aren't supposed to be original. They are supposed to be stories we give one another so that I can actually sort of put it on and say this fits me.

And now I know who I am. Right. Like that's like somebody. Somebody gives their testimony as it were tells their story in an AA meeting and somebody who is there for the first time can say That's me. Yeah. Oh my gosh that is me and all of a sudden now they have insight into who they are because they they've received a story that helps them make sense of who they are. It's given them an identity.

And I think our culture has you know we live with such a cult of novelty and uniqueness and quote unquote authenticity that everybody thinks they are special. You know one of a kind.

And I don't want to discount it that there is a way in which that's true. But on the other hand it is an absolute burden to imagine that you would have to invent your utterly unique story whereas maybe actually finding rest from anxiety is somebody giving you a story and saying oh that's me.

Yeah yeah that's me.

I mean I just think of that as that's not being unoriginal that's being found which is a very different way to construe it.

Yes. You know I was I was talking back around Valentine's Day I did a little webinar on writing better love letters.

I should probably sign up.

Well I'll give you this for free. Jamie this is just one question just for the to write about your feelings when you're feeling something. You think that's unique. You think you think my feelings are really unique. The truth is your feelings are or what's not unique. Everybody look the way you feel about your wife. There are lots of people who feel that about their wives and what is unique is the particular the concrete the things that happened. The things that you and your wife have shared and

Yeah I think that's really insightful. You know David Foster Wallace also had a number of interesting reflections on cliche which is of course something every writer wants to avoid being cliche and we get exhausted by us like all real effort on the other hand he says. And this also comes from his own experience in recovery context what's on the other hand sometimes cliches work precisely because they're true. It's just that people have said them over and over and over again so many times.

So I love what you're saying that in a way the unique intersection though is when this received story even the cliche intersects with your history and your particular contingent

That's great. I love that once it it's I love from from your book you said identity is our name for being found by a story someone else told.

Oh I'm glad you like that. Yeah that's a great lesson I learned from Leslie Jamison too. And I think it's what a Dustin Gustin was such.

I mean he was just one of these people that you almost would love to hate because he was just brilliant and popular and you know all all these kinds of things. And yet he spent a lifetime sort of not knowing who he was. I mean that's his constant refrain is I don't know who I am. I'm a mystery to myself. I'm an enigma to myself.

And it's not until he picks up Paul's Epistle to the Romans and he reads this story again and he realizes that's me that's me. And then he sort of knows who he is and it's a gift to receive such a story.

Yeah and that's yes that's the gift that storytellers are giving to the world.

I wanted to end. And it strikes me by the way too because then you'll know this more than others.

But the trick isn't to tell a generic story right.

I think generic stories rags or have no purchase on us whatsoever because they don't feel it we don't feel like we know anyone. So what a Dustin does is he tells the very thick specificity of his own story. Yes hoping that somebody might read that and say oh well this is about a very particular guy at a very particular time in a very particular place. And yet there is something universally human about it so that somebody

Mm hmm. Yeah. Flannery O'Connor said one country has to do for all countries in your area.

You've got to this one country the only way you get to universal is through the specific.

Yes yes yes. Which is which is a very incarnation of idea to us isn't it. Yeah yeah.

Could you say one more sentence about that would you say it's just incense.

You know we sometimes talk about the incarnation of God in Christ is sometimes described as a scandal of particular hilarity.

Right. Like how how could the creator of the cosmos sort of channeled himself not become not charmed but become this first century Jew in Palestine. Isn't that exclusive. And yet it's precisely because he came in the thick specificity of this person at this time that then it actually creates the possibility of every human being finding themselves in his image. Right. That that the image of the invisible God could become the mirror in which we say That's me.

Yeah. Well that's great. Okay. Jamie I always end every episode of the habit by asking this question I didn't give you any heads up so. OK. All right. But the question is what writers make you want to write yeah.

Which her interestingly are often the writers who also make you say oh my gosh I can't write a word.

I feel like I could pick just I tried to pick amongst my children and saying Sure yeah could you go back to Flo bear.

What is about flipper that makes you feel there is I think in many ways I see a parallel between flow in August and feel there is such a remarkable psychologist so I see him as somebody who is has this incredible power of describing emotion and how emotion then is the way we interpret and perceive the world.

And he also he also creates character and worlds that are so evocative I guess what I love about so bear is he's sort of slow motion you know you slow the world down and over 15 pages actually nothing has happened but you've you've you've journeyed a million mile in someone's consciousness and I just find that quite delightful.

Great. Well Jamie thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. This has been great fun. We could have talk forever we could do it again. Yeah let's do great. All right. Thank you. Thanks Jonathan. The.

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