102 - Young Men and Fire: Normal Maclean and the Pastoral Vocation

Young Men and Fire: Normal Maclean and the Pastoral Vocation
By Philip D. Jamieson

In his recent book, The Poet's Gift,¹ pastoral theologian, Donald Capps if reminds us of the importance of poetry in the practice of pastoral care. There he offers `an invitation to consider poetry as a source of vision and inspiration for the pastoral task and as a source of renewal, not only for the ministry of individual pastors but also for the field of pastoral care itself."² Though the aims of this essay are less ambitious, here I would like to offer a work of non-fiction prose as also providing important insights into the monumental task of the cure of souls.

Norman Maclean has become well known through his novella "A River Runs Through It" and the subsequent movie made from it. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Maclean grew up in Missoula, Montana. He worked in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. After that, he began a new life as a professor of English at the University of Chicago. There he was a noted expert on Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. He retired in 1973 and died in 1990. Young Men and Fire was published in 1992.³

In a biographical note to the book, we learn that this work remained unfinished at the time of Maclean's death. But more intriguing, we discover that the author did not begin the work until he was seventy-four. He would struggle with the work for the next eleven years until his own failing health made it impossible to complete the manuscript. We will see later the importance of Maclean's own context in the writing of this work.

Young Men and Fire is the story of the Mann Gulch tragedy, a Montana forest fire that claimed the lives of thirteen Smokejumpers, the U.S.

Philip D. Jamieson, whose doctoral studies were in theology, is pastor of Magnolia United Methodist Church in Magnolia, Ohio.
¹ Donald Capps, The Poet's Gift. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
² Ibid., p. 3.
³ Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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Forest Service's airborne fire fighters. Their deaths occurred on August 5, 1949 and haunted Maclean, who finally began to tell their story in 1976. Of the men killed in the fire, almost all were between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. As Maclean points out, only people of that age are so fully convinced of their immortality as to parachute from an airplane into a raging forest fire. The Smokejumper's job was to jump into the heart of the fire and there create a fire-line to cut off the fire from its source of fuel.

The expectations of these young men on the morning of August 5 were that they would quickly get their job finished and hike out of the woods that same day, But something unexpected happened-something catastrophic occurred. The fire exploded and trapped the men, forcing them to run up a hill in order to escape the blaze. Only two were able to outrun the fire, and another survived by ingeniously setting a small fire and lying face down in its ashes. In this way, the main fire passed over him without any fuel to consume in the already burnt area. The rest of the men perished in full flight.

Maclean's task in telling this story is to bring honor to these men and to seek to make explicable the mystery of the catastrophe. On the surface, therefore, the book is something of a detective story. It is an attempt to recreate the human decisions and natural forces that together formed the cataclysm. Maclean states his purpose expressly when he says that the detective work will be an attempt to change the Mann Gulch incident "from catastrophe without a filled-in story to what could be called the story of a tragedy. . . ."

HISTORY AS REFLECTION ON MORTALITY

It is that purpose that causes the reader to begin to discern that the recreation of the events of August 5, 1949 is only one aspect of the book. One soon realizes that more stories are being told by means of this narrative than simply those of the Smokejumpers. Principally, this is a work of autobiography, for Maclean is reflecting upon his own mortality, but it is the power of his craft as an author that causes the reader to hear her own story also being told.

This is not merely a historical work. It is an experiment in plumbing the depths of compassion. In 1985, Maclean offered as a possible foreword the following:

As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being around on the oxygen-side of the earth's crust only by not standing pat on what I have hitherto known and loved. While the oxygen lasts, there are still new things to love, especially if compassion is a form of love.

Of course, the allusions to oxygen refer to the way in which the young men died: They suffocated as the raging fire consumed all the oxygen from the

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air. But we also learn this in the book's closing pages:

From our knowledge of others close to us we may learn something about how it felt this near the end. In the spring of the year my wife died from cancer of the esophagus, she remarked to me, "I feel as if I had spent all winter with my head under water." Later, when I asked a doctor what he thought it must be like to die in a fire, not from the burning but from the suffocation and lack of oxygen, he replied, "It is not terrible," and then added, but not as an afterthought, "It is something like drowning." If you compare my wife's remark to this more scientific attempt to speak of death by suffocation, you can see how careful my wife was, when she allowed herself to speak of such matters, to speak with precision.

The final agony of the young men and Maclean's wife's final days have come together. His quest is to love both the Smokejumpers and his suffering wife compassionately by telling their story and understanding his wife's and his own life in its light.

The author does this when, metaphorically, he becomes a fire fighter, himself. Now, it must be understood that such fires are not fought by directly extinguishing them. Instead, they are brought under control by digging trenches. The trenches cut off the flames from additional fuel. Thus, they burn themselves out rather than being put out by the fire fighters. By bringing the events of August 5, 1949 into the light of day, Maclean is digging a trench around them. No longer can the horror of the day burn as an unmanageable catastrophe. Through understanding, it becomes a "tragic" story. The events of the day remain horrible, but a degree of order is restored, and, in this way, honor is paid the victims.

THE NARRATIVE QUALITY OF PASTORAL CARE

Maclean has given pastoral caregivers a clue to working with those who undergo and have undergone catastrophic suffering. By seeing his wife's suffering and his own impending death through the prism of the Mann Gulch tragedy, he helps us see the narrative quality of pastoral care. Clergy constantly encounter people living in the midst of catastrophe. Terminal illness, addictive behavior, dissolution of marriages and the death of loved ones are all characteristically catastrophic. Such problems have an irrational quality that drains the sufferer of understanding, thus increasing the level of the situation's power to victimize.

Through careful observation and the recreation of the past, Maclean has allowed the young men to tell their story from the grave. The author has returned voices to the dead, thus empowering them to move out from the fire. Perhaps the most important way that pastors give care is by inviting sufferers to tell their catastrophic stories. Pastoral listening is the beginning of the restoration of honor and dignity to the person victimized by life's difficulties. Donald Capps speaks of pastoral caregivers as assuming the role of "confessors":

[S]ufferers know that their stories will not go any further, that [the pastoral caregiver] will not compound their burden by revealing to others what has been disclosed to him. Nor will he blame. The "quiet sharing" seems to help

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as each is able to go forward. The other's need to tell her story has not gone unmet. This much the confessor has been able to give.⁴

Listening is an invitation back to life because it is an invitation to rediscover meaning. The pastor's willingness to listen silently allows the sufferer to move his or her problem from an irrational catastrophe into a tragic narrative. As Maclean listened to the story of the young men and the last courageous days of his wife, he restored a dignity to them that was not obviously theirs at the time of death.

Maclean's narrative is thoughtful instruction in how not to offer help. He is reticent in sharing any conclusions he may have reached prior to allowing the dead to speak for themselves. Sound advice for all caregivers, for pastors who quickly offer explanations of the situation or advice regarding solutions have stepped beyond their vocation. They have attempted a task for which they are not equipped. No pastor has the tools to extinguish all blazes, Therefore, the movement from the chaotic to the tragic should in no way be misunderstood as a facile explanation of "what happened." For example, at no point are we informed why this tragedy ultimately occurred. Nowhere will we discover Maclean offering sophisms such as "it was simply their time to go." Theodicy is not Maclean's primary task, nor can it be that of the pastoral caregiver.

"Theodicy is not Maclean's primary task, nor can it be that of the pastoral caregiver."

Instead, the first task is to contain the problem, and this is done through the construction of the narrative hedge. In this way, the problem is not extinguished (it continues to burn), but it has begun to be enclosed. By inviting the sufferer to speak and by listening to the story that emerges, the catastrophic problem's threat to engulf all of life has begun to be diminished. By taking on its true nature as only one story in the midst of other stories, its power to overwhelm the sufferer has been lessened.

So a hedge has been constructed. The fire will not overwhelm the sufferer. The narrative hedge has transformed chaos into tragedy. A degree of dignity is restored to the sufferer. Maclean has built a hedge around his wife's death and his own mortality as well as the young Smokejumpers. A modicum of meaning has been restored. But can one go farther?

In order to fulfill one's vocation, the pastoral caregiver will go farther. Again, Donald Capps:

Besides listening to the other's story of pain and remorse, the pastor's role is to invite the other-when ready-to accept the hospitality the world offers to all of its guests, most of the time. It was Job's counselor friends who tried to

⁴ Capps, The Poet's Gift, p. 93.

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give reasons for all of Job's losses; it was God who did not give reasons but extended Job an invitation to take renewed interest in the world around him.⁵

In narrative terms, this invitation is extended when the sufferer is offered the opportunity to see his or her individual tragedy in the light of the Great Narrative.⁶

IN THE LIGHT OF THE GREAT NARRATIVE

Again, Maclean gives the pastor a clue. At the end of Young Men and Fire, we read:

The two living survivors of the Mann Gulch fire have told me that, as they went up the last hillside, they remember thinking only, "My God, how could you do this to me? I cannot be allowed to die so young and so close to the top." They said they could remember hearing their voices saying this out loud . . . The most eloquent expression of this cry was made by a young man who came from the sky and returned to it and who, while on earth, knew he was alone and beyond all other men, and who, when he died, died on a hill: "About the ninth hour he cried with a loud voice, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"

A new dimension is added to the story of the young men when it is seen alongside the story of the other "young man who came from the sky." This comparison moves the sufferer's story beyond human honor and dignity. In narrative terms, this is an invitation to move beyond tragedy to comedy. It is an invitation to place one's own story into the Great Narrative and understand it anew as a part of the cosmic Comedy.

For the Great Narrative ends neither in fear nor pity but in joy. The Great Narrative speaks of a final resolution of all the conflict that drives the basic plot. Ralph C. Wood has convincingly argued the comic vision of the Christian narrative.

Faith, in this reading, is the supremely comic act. It takes joy in the fact that God enjoys his people. It freely owns the fact that we are owned. The believer is permitted no frowning disdain on the world's passing parade.... The merriment of faith does not blithely disregard the sinful ambivalence wherein all things remain bound. It does not blink the awful reality .... No matter how grim the immediate prospect, no matter how great the likelihood of being calcined in a nuclear bonfire, the Gospel announces that history's final destiny has been graciously fixed.⁷

⁵ Capps, The Poet's Gift, p. 99.
⁶ What I mean by the "Great Narrative" is the biblical story as understood by the church through its history. This is, of course, the Christian sacred story. I follow Stephen Crites definition of a sacred story where he says, ". . . these are stories that orient the life of people through time, their life-time, their individual and corporate experience and their sense of style, to the great powers that establish the reality of their world." "The Narrative Quality of Experience," in Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology, edited by Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), p. 70.
⁷ Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 32-33.

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Again, the comedic final resolution does not take away from the reality of present suffering. However, it does offer the hopeful way for understanding the tragic events of the present.

So, having carefully listened, having helped the sufferer build a hedge around the problem with the accompanying restoration of dignity, the pastor humbly and carefully retells the Great Narrative.⁸ This story of God's great acts in history (the sum total of all our stories) alone has the power to transform us-to move us from horror to tears to laughter.

"The telling of God's story is an invitation to live one's own story in a new framework in which life is ultimately comedy and not tragedy.

The telling of God's story through word and deed is an invitation to faith. It is an invitation to live one's own story in a new framework in which life is ultimately comedy and not tragedy. The final chapter is not the lonely suffering of the young man on a hill but rather it is the early morning discovery of an empty tomb. The individual tragedies that the pastor encounters are all too real. They burn their victims, inflicting terrible emotional pain. But, in the light of the Great Narrative, they are not allowed to have the final word. They hurt, but not forever.

Pastors and all those who seek to live their lives in the light of that story have much for which to thank Norman Maclean. He has provided us with a beautiful book about the dignity of suffering. Not only that, he has provided tremendous insight for all who would live compassionately with those who suffer. And at its most basic level, is that not the pastoral vocation?

⁸ I realize that there are some pastors who would maintain we can not expect some sufferers to understand their problem in the context of the Christian story. Some sufferers have understood their problem to be partly derived from the Christian story-or at least from those entrusted with telling the story. Examples of these would include victims of clergy abuse and women who have heard their physical abuse biblically justified by Scripture-quoting men. No doubt, much of the time, the church has failed in addressing the real needs of sufferers. And that is one reason why it is only with great humility that Christians tell the Great Narrative that stands over the lives of all.

Yet, our postmodern age cries out for some narrative structure-for some great story in which our individual stories can still be understood. In spite of all the details of human failure, if not the Christian story, than what?

Finally, I am not attempting in this essay to argue for the truth of the Christian story. This is only a discussion of the way in which narrative can aid Christian caregivers in their vocation. The burden of justification falls on the person who as a Christian would use another foundational narrative than that of the Bible.