Thursday, September 7, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Long-sentenced visitors to Lake Wobegon
Here is the longest sentence I’ve read in a long long time.
Brothers and sisters: from the day we heard about you, we do not cease praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, so as to be fully pleasing, in every good work bearing fruit and growing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with every power, in accord with his glorious might, for all endurance and patience, with joy giving thanks to the Father, who has made you fit to share in the inheritance of the holy ones in light.
Mr. William Faulkner made long sentences famous, and although I dare not quote his longest of 1,288 words, here is the tail end of it, just a bit of it, 44 words, from chapter six of Absalom, Absalom:
… that the task was hopeless – blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.
Paul’s sentence greeting the Colossians is more edifying, but I am very curious to know the rest of Faulkner’s run-on thought. The story itself, caught up in the imagery of David and his long-haired rebellious son, pits black against white, brother against brother, father against son, and at last it ends with a plantation in ruins, the only living heir being a mentally deficient mixed race great-grandson. The race-based culture of Mississippi takes a savage hit in this 1936 novel, but it lives to fight another day. It certainly does.
The Lord has made known his salvation.
Not-even-close-to-retired host of Prairie Home Companion Garrison Keillor, at age 81, mixes his own sentences heedlessly. Well, maybe not quite. Responding to a grateful reader, GK wrote:
Short sentences work well for the cowboy/soldier/adventurer narrator but I prefer the headlong rush of thoughts inextricably linked, bursts of enthusiasm shifting and turning, which is therapeutic for someone like me who was brought up by evangelicals who spoke bluntly and avoided irony and metaphorical elaboration, so that’s what I do, but only in the personal essay form.
Fiction is different.
In Lake Wobegon, Minnesota where Garrison imagined he came from every week for forty-two years, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. Minnesota Public Radio maintains a website where we can hear every single show from every year. Free.
Free?
Yes, free!
Mr. Keillor’s sound effects folks helped him with skits like Guy Noir and Lives of the Cowboys. Over the years he created a number of alternate advertisers, including Powdermilk Biscuits, the Catchup Advisory Board, Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, and American Duct Tape Council.
These days he is 81 years old, a veteran of aortic valve replacement like me, and presently scheduled to do fall 2023 and winter 2024 shows in California, South Carolina, North Carolina, Indiana, New York, Kansas, and Texas. He loves to talk (and write) about his experiences of church, real and fictional. He’d make a good preacher. Oh, yeah. I guess he already is.
Come after me, says the Lord, and I will make you fishers of men.
(Colossians 1, Psalm 98, Matthew 4, Luke 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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