Dear Church Family and Friends,
Recently, I finished the novel Still Life by the bestselling mystery writer Louise Penny. The book is the first in her Inspector Gamache series. The metaphor that lies at the heart of the novel comes from a remembrance that the inspector has. He recalls someone explaining to him how each of our lives is like a long house. We enter at one end of the house as babies and move through it until we exit the other end at our death. All the people we have ever encountered are in that house. Gamache’s recollection of the long house metaphor continues:
Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they’d continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.
One of the main characters of the novel deals with both the good and the bad characters of her long house by literally painting the scenes of her life on every wall, ceiling, and floor in her actual house. Her work is stunning, and upon seeing the inside of the house for the first time, Inspector Gamache is overcome with emotion: sadness and melancholia as well as joy and delight. As it turns out, Gamache is also convinced that the clues to a murder are located in the paintings that provoke this response.
If each of us were to paint the scenes of our own lives, we hopefully would not find the clues to a murder, but we would likely find the clues to our spiritual health and wellbeing. We would find the clues to what unravels us as well as the clues to what lifts us up. For my part, one of my joy-filled paintings would be a large mural of our church and all the people within it. I imagine this painting would help me to forget and drown out the hecklers in my long house.
Whether or not any of us paint, we can each be artists in how we handle both the difficult and happy moments of our lives. I invite you to think about how you would paint the scenes of your life. Think especially about the scenes that would reveal the clues to your own joy and delight.
Your brother in Christ,
Pastor Brooks