Telling Stories, Asking Questions

I have been talking lately with the group at Incarnation about storytelling.  The Christian faith, and the good news of Scripture, is a kind of story.  And one of the primary tasks of Christian communities is to help one another imagine ourselves within the story of what God has done and continues to do.  We also become storytellers ourselves, learning to find God in the ordinariness of our own stories.  Yet, this theme of faith as story suggest a few questions, some I anticipate others asking, some I am asking myself.   I couldn’t get to them all on Sunday, but here are five of them.

1. A question about foundations - who wants to base their life on a story?  Aren’t stories flimsy little things, much too fragile to be invested with any real weight?  Those among us who are hungry for a life of meaning and purpose might be inclined to ask, “When are we going to quit playing around with ‘stories’ and ‘imagination’ and get down to arguments and evidence and truth and what to believe?  Some will be disappointed to hear that there is no such thing as certainty on such matters.  But in this disappointment there can be a new, more interesting beginning.  I’m afraid “story” is all we have to offer one another - a story about a God who creates, sustains, loves, suffers, and renews.  So the problem isn’t really about whether we can sign on to a list of beliefs or expectations about our moral performance.  The issue is mystical: we listen to the telling of sacred stories and wait to see whether the secret mystery of love always present to us calls out in recognition and desire - ah, that’s it!  That’s who I am.  And that’s what I want.

2. A worry about freedom - I’m a unique individual called to live out and express myself in freedom.  Won’t inhabiting a story alienate me, burden me with a role not my own, cut me off from my uniqueness?  Doesn’t the biblical story promote a kind of conformity that can’t tolerate the radically plural forms in which we express ourselves?  It can, and often has, of course.  Yet much depends on what is meant by “freedom” and “expression.”  If the question is whether self-expression as the ultimate goal of the good life is compatible with the Christian story, then the answer is clearly “no.”  The way of life that emerges from the Christian story parts ways with much of what accompanies the current idolization of “expression”: Enlightenment individualism, cultural self-absorption, and the capitalist celebration of consumption as a form of expression.  On the other hand, faith is, fundamentally, a freedom story - it invites us into its newly imagined freedom and inspires us to be more ourselves than ever.  There are infinitely many ways to inhabit the richness of God’s story.  At the same time it also questions our obsession with our own lives, and invites us to work for the freedom of all who are not-free.

3. A question about pluralism - aren’t there other powerful, redeeming, liberating stories?  Yes.  The point is not that Scripture is the only place to find God.  Nor is the point that Christian communities are always in the position of teaching others - we have much to learn from other communities and traditions - both religious and nonreligious.  Yet Christians confess that there isn’t any clearer manifestation of who God is than one finds in the gospel stories.  These stories - this  story - is unsurpassable.  Anyone who has taken the time to read the sacred stories of the various religious traditions knows that they are not all “saying the same thing.”  But there is no reason for Christians to doubt that much is true in other religions, even about God and God’s relation to us.  Moreover, Christians have no reason to doubt that we can find God, goodness, truth, and beauty everywhere in nature and culture.  What we need is to learn the skill of discerning when and where God is present.  One way to do that is to join a community whose imagination is shaped by the unsurpassably powerful story of Jesus as told in the gospels.

4. A question about power - isn’t it true that many have made a naive appeal to the Scriptural story as a way of wielding power?  Yes.  Isn’t it true that these stories have been used to harm, to oppress?  Have been misused and misunderstood in a thousand ways?  Yes, and yes. What’s to guarantee that we won’t keep doing that to one another?  Nothing guarantees it.  That’s why we’re called to live together as a community and hold one another accountable for treating our stories as gift and not as weapon.  The story of God’s coming among us isn’t magic.  It doesn’t interpret itself miraculously so as to prohibit communities from distorting it.  Thus, great modesty is called for: to cultivate the habit of listening for the voice of God.  At bottom, it’s always dangerous to take an “I’m starting from scratch” approach to interpreting the story.  Much better to listen not only to the story but also to the way this story has been told and heard throughout the centuries and around the world.

5. A question from those of us who don’t think of ourselves as “religious”: when we say that the goal of the spiritual life is to find our smaller stories within God’s larger story of grace - this makes all of life appear artificially religious, does it not?  It makes it seem like the goal of life is to be religious.  To be thinking about God all the time.  Can’t we just be the ordinary, practical people we are most of the time?  Isn’t it alright just to live each day concentrating on our work, enjoying our friends, pursuing our projects, and spending time with our families?  Here we need to make a distinction.  The appeal to organize our lives around God at the center is not an appeal to be “thinking” about that orientation all the time.  (We love others but we’re not “thinking” about loving them all the time).  Traditionally, Christian communities worship together once a week.  This worship is an imaginative and embodied enactment of the biblical story.  Here we celebrate God’s presence in our lives and focus on it in ways we don’t the rest of the week.  The goal of worshiping God is to return us to our daily lives of work and rest, productivity and play, family and friendships, with a sense of joy and delight and gratitude.