In today’s episode, Sr. Orianne Pietra René and Sr. Julie Benedicta are joined by Sr. Allison Regina to talk about using fictional stories in evangelization and catechesis, and as a way of building our faith. They also talk about storytelling as a form of creation that happens in imitation of God, our Father and Creator.

1.    Story Nathan tells to David: 2 Samuel 12:1–10

2.    From Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners:

The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions. It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter, and this is what the beginning fiction writers are very loath to create. They are concerned primarily with unfleshed ideas and emotions. They are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.

The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art.

One of the most common and saddest spectacles is that of a person of really fine sensibility and acute psychological perception trying to write fiction by using these qualities alone. This type of writer will put down one intensely emotional or keenly perceptive sentence after the other, and the result will be complete dullness. The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.

Now when the fiction writer finally gets this idea through his head and into his habits, he begins to realize what a job of heavy labor the writing of fiction is. A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but if you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.

O’Connor, Flannery, Robert Fitzgerald, and Sally Fitzgerald. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993.

Call to action:

1.    Consider, what is a fictional story that has touched you? Can you pray about that?

2.    Prayer for all the Media, by Bl. James Alberione:

We adore you, O Lord, Creator of heaven and earth. We thank you for having placed at the disposition of humanity such a wealth of goods for the present life and eternal life. “All these are yours; but you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (see 1 Cor 3:23).

O Jesus, Divine Master, in your mercy enlighten and direct us so that all the discoveries and means of social communication may be used for edifying and uplifting, never for spiritual or human ruin.

Today we pray for all the media. We offer you, Jesus Master, our prayers and our daily apostolate to atone for the misuse of these gifts and to ask of you that everything may be for the glory of God and peace to humanity. Amen.

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The Daughters of St. Paul, also known as “The Media Nuns,” are missionaries sent forth in the spirit of Saint Paul the Apostle, called to proclaim the Gospel to the world through the most effective means of communication. Pauline Books and Media is a mission of the Daughters of St. Paul that publishes Catholic books for the whole family. To learn more, visit https://pauline.org/