My goddaughter Kate Darnell, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is a fine writer. Honing her journalistic skills, she has spent summers as an intern with the Cynthiana Democrat, her hometown paper.
My favorite Kate story is about, not by her. According to her mother, Kate was assigned to write a story that required a visit to a pig farm. It would be difficult to describe to anyone who doesn't know it the peculiar and penetrating odor that comes from pig farms.
Kate drove to the farm, walked about and gathered information. And a little something else: early that afternoon her mother found her drying her hair, fresh from the shower. Kate explained that she had carried away more than memories from her assignment. Aroma. In fresh clothes she set out for Lexington to shop. She was in the middle of a department store when she caught a whiff of something familiar and unpleasant. How was that possible? She'd neglected to deodorize the car.
Besides Kate's story and the movie "Babe," I like the pig story Mark tells in his gospel. Jesus came by sea to the country of the Gerasenes. There he exorcised a man with a "legion" of unclean spirits and allowed the spirits to enter a herd of pigs, who then ran down to the sea and drowned. To a little girl in the congregation of a friend, this seemed hard on the pigs and on the herdsmen. The priest explained that in the time the story was written, readers might even have seen humor in the unclean spirits going into unclean animals and drowning. I don't know whether the little girl bought it.
Mark has another troublesome story in which Jesus, finding a fig tree without fruit, cursed the tree, so that it never bore fruit again. The next day the disciples found the tree withered. I know Jesus was hungry, but this seemed to me a little harsh. On a seminary examination paper, I came up with a number of explanations to excuse Jesus' behavior. When the paper came back, the professor had written, "It was just a tree."
Of the four gospels in the New Testament, Mark's was the first to be written. Matthew and Luke both used most of Mark's work, adding material from another source and some of their own. John's gospel is very different, looking Jesus' life from a later time.
There is a tradition that claims that Mark was Peter's amanuensis, and wrote the gospel in Rome some time before 70 AD as a summary of Peter's preaching. Mark's is a wonderful account of Jesus' life. Some years ago I saw a man stand on a stage and recite the whole King James Version of Mark, without props, without comment. It was a stunning performance.
John has a beautiful and soul-grabbing prologue. Matthew begins with Jesus' genealogy. Luke starts with an explanation of his reason for writing. Mark is thrifty with words and jumps right in with, "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," then goes to a prophetic passage from Isaiah and immediately to John the Baptist preaching and baptizing.
The pace is furious; it's story after story with hardly time for a breath between: Jesus did this in a certain place and then "immediately" he did that in another place and on it goes, immediately, to the heart of the story: the Passion. Mark tells it simply and heart-breakingly and takes us with the women to the discovery of the empty tomb. There is no resolution to the story; it ends, "and they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid."
I hope for Kate, that whatever she dedicates her life to, she'll keep on writing. She's got the stuff, and if she can catch just a little bit of the God-possessed fire and life and truth that Mark presents, she can be a great writer. Even writing about pigs.