In the grip of story
I wish I could have listened to Jesus tell his own parables. What a storyteller he was. He was awake to the world, he paid attention to the moments he was living and found things to feed his imagination…an imagination wrestling with how to communicate so much with the people he so loved. Wheat and fig trees, sheep and vineyards, oxen and estranged sons became the paint with which he colored the canvas of his days, bringing life to concepts no propositional presentation could. How brave, and trusting, to allow his audience to filter his stories through their own experience of the world, and through the exercise of their own wills, arrive at their own conclusions.
I love spending time with people whose heritage is still infused with the value of oral tradition–or who just know how to tell a good story. Whether around a campfire, from a podium or on the written page, a well-told story grips me. It slips past my mental defenses and grips the core of who I am, leaving me to consider the world and what is real in ways I may not have otherwise.
What are the stories I respond to most? Why? What does it look like for me to be more awake to the world around me? What are the stories which are uniquely in me, that I have been given to tell?
posted by Amy Wevodau
August 10th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Well said and well asked, Amy. It seems that stories do for Late/Post Moderns what foundational/a priori knowledge has done for Moderns. They both act, in their respective contexts, as that which gives definition and direction to our lives.
Stories ground us. They are as close to touching reality as a Late/Post Modern can hope to be. To use Stanley Hauerwas’ term, we are all part of particular Story-Formed Communities that give life or take life from our soulful existence.
After recently watching and writing about the movie Fight Club I am more keenly aware of some influential and formational stories concerning the ‘American Dream’ or the great ‘American Experience’ which devastate the soulful experience of our common community with one another.
Jesus on the other hand seems to retell ancient stories with an invigorating contemporary and kingdom relevance which serve to build up and refresh a connection with reality that stirs the soul in a positive formation of community living.
And THAT is a big task for today’s story tellers who must incorporate (as Jesus did) current events, sex, media, science, and epistemology into their diverse stories…. We have been so focused on propositional truth telling in recent centuries that we are often at a loss when it comes to sharing and learning from stories.
August 11th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
[...] First things first: this post is an expansion of a comment that I left on a relatively new blog, Via Affirmativa. Via Affirmativa is a blog that deals largely with the intersection between Art, Beauty, God and Faith Communities. A poet friend of mine wrote their latest post titled, In the grip of story. Please feel free to leave a comment about her brief article at Via Affirmativa if you are so inclined. [...]