We Tell Stories

[I wrote this over a year ago, so long that I can't even remember where I got the Joan Didion quote from. I don't think I've ever read a book called 'The White Album,' so it must have been quoted in another book, but what that book was I'll never know. In any case, this is one of my more polished pieces, I think]

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."
~Joan Didion The White Album

Students everywhere realize pretty quickly that people (teachers especially) tend to overestimate the importance of their own subject. Math teachers will tell you the whole world is run by equations, Philosophy teachers believe it all depends on the ideas in our heads, and so on. It’s an old, old notion, perhaps best expressed by Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poetry: "self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties."
So I probably need not tell you why I, as an English student, was interested in the quotation above. What better way to justify my love of stories than to say that stories are not just reflections of reality, but constitutive of it? If I have read Joan Didion right, then what she is suggesting is not that our life makes stories, but that our stories are life. We cannot understand what’s going on around us, and so we make narratives that cut and paste reality into a diorama of our "life".

But perhaps this theory isn’t just the rantings of someone who read too much as a child – maybe this theory actually has credibility (not that the scientists of the world don’t have a pretty good claim on Unified Theories of Everything, but at the moment, I’m the one on the microphone). Incessantly and unconsciously, we create a tv show (or a novel, or a movie, or a play – the media doesn’t matter) of our own lives – we watch ourselves to understand what it is that we’re doing here. Whether that creation is a tragedy or a comedy (or, God forbid, a slasher flick) depends on us, on our proclivities and our fears. At the end of each day, as we compose ourselves towards sleep, does the heroic music swell and the lens swing to a wide shot of our hero silently celebrating a job well done? Or does the eerie minor key and quick cut to black indicate that all is not well, that something is very rotten in the state of I?

Believing in the power of story is something what fuels my interest in (nay, obsession with) the Bible. While the debates on the authenticity of the Bible are important, I find them secondary to the importance of the story, of the way the Isrealites and the early followers of Jesus went about shaping their experiences into something intelligible (strange and bizarre, certainly, but intelligible nonetheless). We all want to find meaning in life, and the stories of the Bible give us that, give us a narrative of sin and redemption which can be applied to our own personal experiences. I screw up, I feel bad about it, I receive some kind of forgiveness. I live to screw up and be saved again another day.

The Israelites reference to the "God of Abraham and Isaac" isn’t just a way of claiming a kinship with those set apart by God, it’s also (and perhaps more importantly) saying "We believe in the God who promised things to Abraham, the God who both condemned Isaac to death and and saved him." Believing in the God of Abraham and Isaac is bound up with believing in the stories of Abraham and Isaac. Likewise, believing in Jesus means investing in the stories he tells, in understanding what it means to be a prodigal son or a lost sheep "carried home to great rejoicing" (Luke 15:5). For those of us interested in historical and literal truth, I mention the parables as an example of a story that is True (with a capital T) without needing to be factual.

But stories need not be written down to be important. In my rampant bibliophilia, I sometimes forget that the religion I believe in is called "Christianity", not "Bible-anity". In the religious sense, stories are not only past relics of what God has done, but current explanations of what God is doing. The long tradition of "testimonials" (a word now corrupted by crass tv infomercials) shows us that as believers we need to hear the stories of other believers. In times when God seems to be missing-in-action, we receive stories of healings and miraculous interventions as eagerly as the desert drinks up the rain. An inveterate skeptic, I usually hear reports of miracles and let out an internal "Hmph!", but I cannot deny my own need for stories of hope and faith justified. I knew for several years that a mentor of mine had a story of healing which he had stopped telling because he wanted to allow it to be his son’s story. While he did, finally, explain what had happened, I realized that even without knowing the story, it gave me comfort to know that someone so solid and real and normal had had an extraordinary experience of God’s love. The idea that there was a story there (even if I didn’t know it) was enough to feed my faith.

I believe, and so I, in Joan Didion’s words, select faith as "the most workable of multiple choices". I freeze the "shifting phantasmagoria of my actual experience" and I see the face of God. As people of faith, we are called to embrace the story (with all its plot twists and reversals of fortune and anguishing cliffhangers) and acknowledge that as much as we may speak or write our own stories, we are not in control. As any writer will tell you, what you intend to write and the story that ends up on paper are entirely different. So it is with life. We live in the hope that we can understand the meaning behind things, that there really is a "sermon in the suicide" – and I’d like to believe that there is. But perhaps the meaning is one we do not want to know, or one that is beyond our capability to understand. We tell ourselves stories so that we may live, and God gives us stories so that we may hope. And learn.

So go out and tell stories. Go out and find stories. Go out and recognize that the life we live may not have happy endings or easy morals, but it is filled with meaning anyways. And recognize the buried treasure in your life; those stories of God (against all reason and sense) actually showing up.