Translating a World on the Edge

My husband and I have been married for fifty-three years, so I know a little bit about the subject. Marriage can be viewed through many spectrums: love, of course; sacrifice; commitment; responsibility; patience, forgiveness, and courage. But since I’m a writer, I’ll use the poetic analogy of a boat for the married state. I began the adventure of marriage sailing in one boat with a man I fell in love with. In time, five children took up resident in our boat, as well as suitcases of sporadic joys and sorrows, constantly  opening and closing. Yet, the vessel never seemed too small for any of us. And even on very wide waters, in sometimes frightening weather, our little boat never stopped its aim for the farthest shore.  Looking back, I call that a mystery.

I have asked myself the question: How did my husband and I last through for these fifty-three years? Because there were times. . . .Oh yes, there were times, when each of us may have wanted to ‘get out of the boat’ and be done with the trip, but again, because of some mystery, we remained.

My husband and I met when we were seventeen years old as freshmen at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He was from North Alabama, a transplanted Yankee only a year before. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Southern girl born and raised in South Alabama. He borrowed a pencil from me in Theology class, and broke it. Later he told me he’d broken it purposely so he could stop me after class and give me a verbal apology. We were at once attracted to each other. Who knows why that happens–instant attraction—except it did. And what is that fragile web of affection between a man and a woman that teases by word and touch, by sight and appetite, and fastens two separate souls into one? Well, I call that a mystery, too.

I was an art major, and he was a history major with an eye to Law School. In ways, we were complete opposites. I saw our life together as a painting in progress, a changing of colors from dark to light to brilliant, and sometimes back again to start all over with darkness, requiring a complete and utter gesso of the canvas. He saw it measured against the annals of what succeeds and what doesn’t. He was–and is–the logical foundation. I am a believer in imagination, always wanting to paint things a little brighter. But we are the same when it comes to seeing our marriage as our most important vocation, the vehicle which will take us to heaven. We see our marriage as a sacrament. Another mystery? I think so.

In the original Greek scripture, the word for “mystery” actually meant “sacrament.” The sacrament of marriage was intended to reflect the unremitting love that Christ has for His people, the Church. My husband and I never considered that we could, or would, get out of our Catholic marriage, no matter how many bad times we would go through–and there have been many. In other words, we believe in the mystery and in the sacrament.

Today, the concept of marriage, who and what it’s for, has changed in the eyes of many people who are unwilling to take on the honest commitment that marriage requires. These are spouses– husband and wife, or both–who have been led to believe that “Life is all about ME.” That statement is poison to marriage and family, because it makes marriage as disposable as a paper plate, a sign of our times.  Today, many weddings seem to be only expensive occasions to party, and afterwards, the marriage sometimes bears little resemblance to the sacrament of Holy Matrimony as God intended it to be–husband and wife holding on to each other through good and bad times in a vehicle of His grace, helping each other to become the best person each can be.

And if any vocation needs grace to survive, it is surely marriage. Because if we fall out of the marriage boat and drown, we may watch our children drown with us.

No matter how well matched they may be, it is not easy for any two people to live together day in and day out, year after year, with their inescapable faults and personality defects grating upon each other. It’s not easy to help one another grow in goodness and nobility in spite of those faults—little by little adjusting to one another so that the faults of one “fit in” to the perfections of the other and unity arises from the very differences of the two persons. This is a beautiful evolution, like the emergence of the butterfly from its chrysalis; but it is not easy. No matter how selfless a couple may be, it is not easy for them to face the prospect of responsible parenthood, with all the sacrifices that entails. Especially it is not easy to face the prospect of an ultimate judgment, in which they will have to answer to God for the souls of the children who have been entrusted to them..–beginningcatholic.com

Traditional marriage is a sacrament instituted by God who loves us. It is His grace that gives us commitment to keep going. And yes, the water IS wide, the boat sometimes constricting, and the trip often difficult. But love that works through difficulties can lead to holiness and everlasting life with God.

“In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque. Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Flannery O’Connor

What are the “far things” O’Connor is talking about?—the connection between close-up realism on Earth and a higher spiritual Truth. God and our relationship with Him, however weak or strong or strange; this is what O’Connor writes about. This is what I’ve striven to write about, too, in my eight published books, two of which are Independent Press Award Winners in Religion Fiction for 2018, and again in 2019.

To show God’s presence in the world, a writer who wants to bring far things close up often uses the strange or the outlandish. Flannery O’Connor called it the ‘grotesque.’ She was an author who wrote fifty years ago, when not only the South, but most other areas recognized the outlandish as just that.

Today, the rules concerning what is strange have changed. Oddity has become almost normal. Yet God hasn’t changed. He is just as apparent in our world, maybe even more so. And to present Him in fiction, a writer cannot use quietly sentimental fluff to show His action through people. Because God’s action– His grace–coming to fruition in people who want to be restored is sometimes harsh. A writer concerned with presenting the chance of salvation has to come to grips with this noisy, often nasty and distracted world.

Many of us yearn for a chance of restoration. And most readers have a desire for some redemptive act in a novel or story that offers the chance of restoration as well. We long for that moment of grace that will turn us, or better us, or lift us up to higher place in the eyes of those we love. Yet we often forget that the price of restoration sometimes takes the grotesqueness of a Crucifixion.

From a distance, I watch the red veil of silt cover the box they bury. He is so far away from me now. If I could go back to the night of his death, I’d cut out my tongue before I could say what I said to him. I did not mean those words. I loved Peck. Always. And I always will.–from my latest novel, “The Distance Between High and Low.”

A Finalist in The William Faulkner/William Wisdom Competition, and Finalist for The Tuscany Prize for Fiction, The Distance Between High and Low is a Southern Gothic novel about the consequences for two young people who set out to learn the identity of their father. Teenaged twins, Lizzie and Peck live in the house of their eccentric, widowed grandmother Pearl–a house of history and secrets– along with their unstable, drug-addicted, artist mother, Lila, and Izear, a half-Cherokee Indian devoted to Pearl who took him into her house many years before. Often with dark humor, the story focuses on the strivings of complex characters in the fictional town of Highlow, Alabama from the 1960’s into the 1980’s.

PRAISE for The Distance Between High and Low:

With masterful control and skillful writing, Kaye Park Hinckley boldly explores a wide range of wounded souls, ultimately finding love in the unlovable, and grace in the sufferings of a complex world. –Cassandra King Conroy, Tell Me A Story: My Life with Pat Conroy (coming in October)

Once again, Kaye Park Hinckley has written a truly Southern novel, deeply rooted in a small town yet universal in appeal. Strongly wrought characters wrestle with half-understood desires, half-articulated questions, half-intended sins – with emptiness and fulfillment, love and anger, sanity and absurdity. All in all, this is a wonderful book that struggles with the imperfections of our human condition. — Arthur Powers,The Book of Jotham (2012 Tuscany Novella Prize), A Hero for the People (2014 Catholic Arts & Letters Award)

EXCERPT:

We all got our customized cravings, our particular drugs you might say; habits, traditions, our routine ways of coping. Even Pearl has strong inclinations. Take her Fine China, restored with Super Glue to keep up her Highlow family, yet Pearl was powerless to fix the genuine break in her grandson’s heart. I like to think it’s fixed now. I like to think that Sister Perpetua flew down from heaven, took Peck back up with her, and told him what she once told me, “You may not know it, little fellow, but Jesus loves you. Oh yes, He does!” Then I think about my own Fine China, that drug I used to crave. Lila thinks I killed her son, but the thing that took Peck was the simple narcotic need for a father. It was his own customized craving that killed him. Not me. No, not me.
— Hobart McSwain, The Distance Between High and Low