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About the Author

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, The New Republic, Time Out: New York, Tin House, Verse Daily, and other publications. He has taught writing and literature in public and private middle schools, high schools, and colleges in California, Vermont, New York, and Maine and currently helps direct The Telling Room, a nonprofit community writing program in Portland, ME.

Thinking Out Loud

I'm not much of a Biblical scholar, and, depending on the day, my name for the unknown force that suffuses our universe might be God, Creator, Great Nothing, or Chance. But I do know stories: how to read them closely and connect them to others I've read and heard. As Robert Coles tells us in The Call of Stories, "There are many interpretations to a good story, and it isn't a question of which one is right or wrong but of what you do with what you've read."

I've just been reading and re-reading a sentence from Romans, chapter 10: "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart for you to observe." In other words, what we need-faith, hope, love-is all around us and in us, if we pay attention to it. It reminds me of a young German poet named Rainer Maria Rilke going far, to Paris, to be near Rodin. It is said that Rilke, then only twenty-seven, learned two things from his extended stay with the great sculptor, two things that would help him become one of the great poets of the 20th century: to look and to work.

I love the simplicity of that lesson, that tiny story that always helps bring me back around to what matters. How easy it is to forget to look at what's right in front of us. How often do I forget to take a second just to look at my wife coming in the door or my son banging away on his plastic tool chest or the massive oak tree that shadows our backyard, or any of the people, places, and things that make up my daily life? Would once a day be enough? Hardly. This passage calls us to pay attention, to take the time to look at what's in and around us, and, as Rilke and Rodin remind us, to work at what means the most to us.

I've also been looking at that classic passage in Luke in which Jesus fasts in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, resisting the temptations of the devil. I've probably heard this story at least once a year for the last 32 years, but only this time-perhaps taking a little longer to look at it, to listen to it-did I notice a simple, powerful turn of phrase: Jesus "was led by the Spirit into the wilderness." Led by the Spirit. The wilderness, that awful place of deprivation, temptation, and confrontation, was where he was supposed to be.

Coles asks: What do you do with what you've read? I can't help but ask another question: Which wildernesses might I be led into, if I listen for the call?

Maybe, right now, it's the landscape of memory, not my own, but those of a young man from Somalia whose story I recently read and heard as part of project I'm working on. Given one story to tell, this seventeen year old-let's call him Mohamed-wrote about being woken up in the middle of the night when he was five years old, still living in his homeland. There was a militia of some kind outside his house, led by a one-armed colonel. That night, Mohamed saw his younger brother and father killed and his mother wounded. It was never clear why this happened-maybe the militia knew Mohammed's family was part of the tribe in the minority, maybe they just thought Mohammed's father had some money in the house.

Though it's hard to believe, Mohammed's story, like Jesus's trip to the wilderness, is one of triumph over evil. In Mohammed's case, the 40 days and 40 nights took 12 years. You see, just a couple of weeks ago, I watched Mohamed stand tall in front of a class of his peers and read this story aloud and talk about his father. There was a kind of warrior's confidence in the way this quiet kid told the story: as if just the telling of it gave him some power he didn't have before. Mohamed survived, and he stood before us all, now an intelligent, gentle, and humble young man.

Here's the good news about the wilderness we're called into: we won't be alone. Psalm 91 teaches us that God is both refuge and fortress. "I will be with them in trouble," it says, and, "When they call to me, I will answer them." Though my own faith often stutters and falters, I have to believe some higher power has been with Mohamed, in and around him. What mere human power could have possibly brought a young boy through such an experience?

By the way, just so we're clear, Mohamed is a Muslim, a small but vital detail in the story. It brings us back to Romans 10: "For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him." Or, in the words of the 13th century Islamic mystic and poet, Rumi: "I am neither Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, nor Muslim; I am neither of the East nor of the West, nor of the land nor of the sea. I seek the One, I know the One, I see the One, I invoke the One." Whatever name we use, God is with us when we ask, when we hear a call, when we we observe what's in and around us.

I return to Coles's question one last time: What do you do with what you've read? In Mohammed's case, after we listened to his and other students' moving stories of the violence and dislocation that brought them to this country, we had some food, and we played some music. We celebrated a little, and that seemed like the right thing to do. As the 26th chapter of Deuteronomy says, when God delivers people from evil into "a land flowing with milk and honey", "Then you together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house."

Not one of us arrives at such brief moments of celebration without a willingness to look at and listen to the words and stories in and around us and without a willingness to enter the wilderness when called.