Corinne Forrester

October 4, 2006

My Passion

Yarns, legends, narratives, accounts, fairy-tales, chronicles, sagas, fables, parables, romances, tall tales– I am passionate about stories. In first grade I used to make up grandiose stories about the exciting lives of the senior citizens who used to eat lunch once a week in our cafeteria. I imagined what daring lives they lead before wrinkles, walkers, and grandparenthood set in. I was an incurable daydreamer, constantly looking out of the window at the autumn trees, stark winter frost, spring glory, imagining what someone else somewhere was doing right then. I remember every Sunday looking up at the huge, majestic stain glass windows in church and being mesmerized by something that overwhelmed the power of words. Everything tells a story when you look at it the right way.

What that makes me so intrigued by stories is the infinite depth they reflect. You can ponder why someone did something or why a mountain is a certain way or just a baby’s smile for a million years and still find new depths, shades, gradations, and tones from endless perspectives. The amazing scope and breadth of creation all point to a great mystery. In that mystery, a glimpse of the Creator is revealed through His creation. As I look back over my life, I see how everything I have done from tree climbing to skating to reading to church has been my way of flirting with that indefinable variable– God. Jesus used stories to help people understand the incomprehensible lave and dimensions of God. For me stories are that outlet that helps me understand the infinite manifestations of God in every part of my life.

Climbing the Anfallula Age 6

A picture of me climbing my Meme's tree

When I was a little girl, I loved to climb trees– my grandmother’s palatial magnolia tree, two twin skyscraper-like holly trees, the tough little oak that weathered the powerful winds at our farm, and just about every other kind of tree imaginable. I was a reckless explorer. I was always climbing higher and higher looking for that perfect branch, far above the bustle of the ordinary world. Often, I would sit for hours on a friendly branch and serenade my hospitable listener, the tree, with the songs I had invented. From this experience, I came to I believe every tree has a story and personality: some are old and tired, some are young and tender, and still others are wild and rambunctious. However, every tree from the mightiest oak to the tenderest sapling echoes the glory of their Maker My love of stories parallels my childhood tree climbing; I am still always looking to see more and differently than what is offered by the typical standpoint on the ground

As I got older, I became involved with sports. I loved roller-skating every Sunday, the whish of the skates below me, the power of my speed. Then, I became seduced by the hypnotizing rhythm of the pool, the endless strokes, the isolation from everything but the water and myself, even an independence from the need for air. Finally, in my teens, I began an affair with the tennis courts. I love the raw aggression of my power against someone else’s, the joy of outwitting and outlasting a surprised opponent, of returning a ball I know I should not have returned. In challenging my body to defy its limits, I came to have a respect for the wonderful way I am fashioned and for the freedom it gives me.

With Amigos in Mexico during mission trip

On another note, in high school I became interested in foreign languages. I am, admittedly, one of those fascinated gringos who liberally sprinkles their language with as much Spanish as possible. It seems incredibly mysterious to me that people all over the world throughout the ages express the same constant emotions– love, hate, reverence, jealousy, caring, want, sadness, joy– but by means of completely different mediums. I have gone on several mission trips to Mexico, which has drastically changed my perspective on life. I saw, with my very own eyes, that the whole world does not live within at least fifteen minutes of a Wal-Mart or carry an iPod or even have indoor plumbing or air conditioning. I also came to realize that people are not any less happy because they do not have all these nicer amenities of life. I saw that my little insulated American bubble, especially as an upper-middle class teenager, was blind to so much of the world. This summer I had another opportunity to travel when I toured Spain. The culture there was again so different. It was like being in Disneyland for me to be in the Muslim palaces that once housed rich harems, to see the fabulously beautiful Mediterranean style gardens, and even to be given a double-cheeked European kiss. From these trips I learned that to be able to appreciate the invaluable significance of the background setting of every story. I also realized that to be able to help one person understand another by means of language is nothing short of miraculous After all, what conveys the nuances and subtleties and flavors of a story better than language? It is the coin of exchange in all communications. Because of language, I am connected with dusty children playing soccer in the Occidental Mountains of Mexico and cosmopolitan Spaniards taking siestas under blooming orange trees.

Now my life revolves around the church doors, the daunting and august spiritual intensity of Christians earnestly seeking God. I am constantly seeking to explore and strengthen my faith. I see God as the ultimate storyteller. One of the inspirations for this paper is a Yiddish quote that I heard a long time age “God made man because he loves stories”. I do believe that God in some sense must love stories. That helps explain why I love stories and how that integrally relates to my relationship with God.

You may wonder how does this patchwork of ostensibly dissimilar activities—tree climbing, sports, language, Christianity— fit together? The answer is they all tell a story, the story of God’s glory, shown through nature, through competition, through language, through the love of his followers. He is present in everything if you know how to feel it. The variety of my interests is as wide as God’s imagination because underneath the surface of every seemingly mundane thing is God.

I see God most clearly through the stories of people in movies, books, and people themselves. After all, He made man in his image so it would be the most obvious place to find the truest refection of Him. My passion for stories began early, I loved movies more than anything else, when I was little- The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Matilda, Harriet the Spy, The Little Princess, Shirley Temple movies, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Casablanca. I was caught up in the magical world of childhood. In my deepest imagination I was a mermaid princess, a maid in love with a beast, a brilliant girl with gross parents, an orphan princess from India, and even the daughter of a sultan with a private menagerie.

Picture I took of my favorite book, Little Women, Meme gave me this edition

Then, I learned to love books. I cannot express the enormous impact this discovery has had on my life. My grandmother taught me to read before first grade, giving me a dollar for every book I read, until I saved up enough to buy my very own bicycle. My reading career started in earnest when I read Little Women in the third grade and then went on from Alcott to Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Girl of the Limberlost, Rebecca, the Brontes, Gone with the Wind, Charles Dickens, To Kill a Mockingbird, J.K. Rowling, Chaim Potak, Somerset Maugham, Atonement, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, The Kite Runner, and every other book I could lay my greedy little hands on from elementary school to college. I can easily be consumed by stories, staying up all night just to get to the tantalizing last page. Time seems to grow wings when I am wrapped around a good book. My idea of heaven on earth would definitely include an enormous library.

It is reading that opened my mind and pointed out to me that there must be a God and that God is part of everything from the perfect symmetry of flowers, to the orbits of the galaxies, to the freckles on my little sister’s nose. This intuition was verified were I started to explore my faith as a Christian and read the Bible. Although I love many books, the best book, the story that resonates with me most, that I read and am humbled by its truth and meaning, is the Bible. In most stories it is just a particular moment that moves me— Melanie’s death scene in Gone with the wind, Laurie’s proposal to Jo in Little Women, Jane’s attitude to Mr. Rochester after the marriage scene in Jane Eyre— but in the Bible every word has such eternal significance that it cuts my self-deceit to the quick and resonates in every part of me. The Bible itself does not have one-dimensional stories of how the good are rewarded and the bad punished. Rather, it presents sorely tempted and imperfect characters: King David was an adulterer and murderer, Samson was betrayed when he fell victim to his own desire, Paul massacred viciously many Christians, Peter denied in the most cruel way the man he acknowledged as his God. If the Bible was a play, it would certainly be a tragedy.

My grandmother in about 1940

However, people do not only pass on stories through movies and books, their very selves tell the most revealing stories. Their voices, their words, their expressions speak volumes. I could drown in my grandmother’s voice; it seems to tell the whole story of Mississippi. Every time I hear her speak in her eloquent southern drawl, I think of a story she told me when I was little about a rich Louisiana plantation owner. He married a beautiful adopted girl from the neighboring plantation, but when their first child was born it was dark, and he abandoned her because he assumed she must have black blood in her family tree. Only later, after she had drowned herself and the baby, did he find out his own unseen mother was an Octoroon. My grandmother’s voice seems to convey all this tragedy and romance and pride of the South just by the soothing lilt of her voice.

When I think of people telling stories, just by their countenance, I also remember of the eyes of my fifth grade teacher at Catholic school, Mr. Ladish. He was the most intelligent, funny, and best teacher I ever had. A year after I was in his class, I saw him again on the cover of our city’s newspaper for molesting a ten-year-old girl. I still think of his haunting, livid eyes in that mug shot, spewing self-hatred, telling more clearly than any reporter could of his sickening acts. I also think of my sweet, goofy tennis coach and his intensity for the game and sense of humor. I did not understand why he was always so compassionate until during my own parents’ divorce when he told me about the years of abuse he suffered from his own father. Then I understood the story his kind blue eyes were always telling- the compassion bred by hurt. Whether in pain or love or just in the details God is always there.

I do not think you could truly know me if you did not know my passion for stories. One of my happiest moments is when I hear a story and something in it resonates right through me, from my toes to my hair to my soul. Resonate is actually a very apt word; I learned in physics that when a wave is exactly the same frequency as the object it is passing through it shatters it, this is resonance. This resonance occurs in me during my favorite moment of a story. In that perfect, unexpected point in the middle when something indescribable and heartbreakingly poignant and complex about the human soul is conveyed. I reach this moment when reading real stories about real people and their valiant efforts to do right in this murky world. Stories have given me the wisdom to try to imitate this effort. Loving stories has given me the courage to be an incorrigible dreamer in a left-brain world, the inspiration to remain a curious child in a jaded world, and the wisdom to mature as a Christian in a dark world. I have no idea how my love for stories will fit into my career, but I do know they will always be an integral part of my life in some form. It is like that song “Wear Sunscreen” that says that most interesting people don’t know what they want to do with their lives at the age of twenty-two, and some of the most interesting forty-year-olds still do not know. I wonder what my own story is and will be. I do not know, but I hope to be an interesting person, someone who revels in the adventure God has given me and follows the chase wherever it leads.

Word Count: 2163

Original Word Count: 1786

Words Added: 377

Bibliography:

Author’s Personal Photo. Taken by Mavis Simmons around 1990.

Author’s Personal Photo. Taken by Linda Forrester around 1994.

Author’s Personal Photo. Taken by an unknown citizen of Mexico in March 2005.

Author’s Personal Photo. Taken by Corinne Forrester October 2006.

Author’s Personal Photo. Taken for Blue Mountain College around 1940.