CHAPTER 1
GOD'S STORY AS OUR STORY
The ability to sustain a narrative that defines its life is one of the crucialelements of viable community. We become a people, a community, as we acquire astory. And we remain a community so long as we retell that story. Our identityis dependent on having a story that tells us who we are; our understanding oflife's meaning and purpose is dependent on having a story that tells us whatthe world is like and where we are going. To be a community of faith, we must bea people with a story: a common memory and vision, common rituals or symbolicactions expressive of our community's memory and vision, and a common lifetogether that manifests our community's memory and vision.
The church is a story-formed community. Baptism is our adoption into a story,God's recreative story, which is recorded in the community's story book (theHoly Scriptures), incarnate in the community's life, and made present throughits sacramental rituals, especially the Holy Eucharist. Each of us also has astory. To each community Eucharist we bring our stories and reenact God'sstory so that God's story and our stories may be made one story. In thecontext of our liturgies we are initiated into God's story and we appropriateits significance for our lives so that it might influence our common life day byday. And as we journey through history and traverse life-cycle passages, theretelling of God's story sustains us and moves us on.
Our most important and fundamental task as Christians is to learn God's story.All our Christian beliefs, experiences, and actions are dependent upon ourinternalization of God's story, that is, making God's story our story. Thisexplains why for a number of years I have described the first aim of catechesisas the acquisition and appropriation of God's recreative story, throughparticipation in the church's rituals and through reflection on theintersection of our life stories and God's story, so that we individually andcorporately may more faithfully manifest God's story in our lives.
All of this may seem obvious, but it has not been normative in the church'slife and learning. I am continually surprised at how few people in the churchknow God's story or are able to express how their stories and God's storytouch and inform each other. More important perhaps, I have discovered that eventhose who claim interest in God's story as found in the church's story book,the Holy Scriptures, are more interested in doctrine than sacred story. Thetemptation of theology is to interpret the foundational stories of the Christianfaith and then treat the interpretations as if they were that which wasoriginally given. Theology is founded on thoughts and concepts that, if takenoverseriously, will replace with dogma and institutions the stories that makefaith and community possible. Indeed, the vast majority of books on the churchyear turn out to be books primarily on doctrine, as do the majority of so-called"Bible-centered" curriculum resources.
Have you ever tried to discuss the Bible with a literalist? For literaliststhere is no story, no poetry, no imagination, only doctrinal truths to bebelieved, that is, to be asserted intellectually as true. The Bible for thembecomes a collection of proof texts for doctrine, ideas about God to be believedrather than a story book to be dramatized and lived out within a story-formedcommunity. Indeed, to say that the Bible is essentially myth or sacred story(true story)—that is, history but much more—is offensive to many. Sacredstory, or God's story as found in the Holy Scriptures, embraces history but isnot merely history. Sacred stories are destroyed when taken literally, for theirfunction is to point beyond themselves to God and to bring the experience of Godinto our present.
The stories were not collected by the church as a theology textbook. Nothing canreplace a story. Stories resist definitive interpretation and invite commentary.Theology is abstract but not story; story invites participation. We discusstheology but experience story. Theological speculation limits and divides; storyfrees and unites. Only adults can engage in meaningful theological reflection.Stories are for all ages. "Tell me a story" is the request of every child.At the heart of the Christian faith is story, not dogma.
The major roles in Peter Shaffer's play Equus are an adolescent boy and hispsychiatrist. The young man has blinded a number of horses after being seducedby a woman employee of the stable. The psychiatrist's task is to analyze thecause of this psychotic behavior and free the young man for productive life.What is unveiled in the drama is the mental torment of a patient and the storyhe developed to make it tolerable. The psychiatrist comments, "We need a storyto see in the dark." We all need such a story. Stories are the means by whichwe see reality. Without a story it would appear as if we lived in an unrealworld. Without a story we cannot live. Without a story we cannot have community.In the beginning is a story that provides us with both a memory linking usmeaningfully with the past and a vision calling us to a purposeful future.Without a story life makes no sense. The story that is foundational to our lifeprovides us with the basis for our perceptions and for our faith. Faith ismanifested in story; story communicates faith. Anyone familiar with Chaucer'sCanterbury Tales will remember that the pilgrims told stories on the way to theshrine of St. Thomas à Becket. Stories are the imaginative way of ordering ourexperience. The pilgrimage of life requires a story.
The gospel began as a narrative including stories, sayings, songs, andinterpretations remembered by those who had experienced life with Jesus ofNazareth and had concluded that he was the Christ. Later these were collectedand arranged for various purposes (Matthew as a catechism for Jewish Christiansand Luke as a catechism Gentile Christians, Mark as a spiritual journal, andJohn as a witness to sacrament), written down, and in the end authorized forinclusion in the church's canon. Christianity is based upon and arises out ofthat story; the church's faith and life are first communicated by and laterconceptualized through its story. Still it remains a story handed down fromgeneration to generation as a symbolic narrative that forms and transforms ourperceptions, evokes images, fires our imaginations, and thereby turns daily lifeinto holy history.
Stories are concrete and particular. They are not expressions of doctrine oruniversal truth. Stories are open-ended. They are not to be read literally; as amatter of fact, stories give the storyteller freedom in their retelling. Storiesstimulate the imagination. There is not only one interpretation of a story;indeed, the listener is encouraged to listen freely and discover personalmeaning. Stories are experiential. They are told by a participant, and they areto be participated in. Stories are the bottom line of human communal life:Nothing else is ultimately needed.
The Bible is a storybook. Basically, it is a love story between God andhumanity; it is a story of a covenant made, broken, and renewed, again andagain. God as creator, redeemer, and perfecter loves each creature, personallyand as members of the whole human community. In return, we are expected to loveGod, ourselves, and each other.
The Bible is a book of faith: that is, the Bible presents a way to perceive lifein general and our lives in particular. The Bible is a book of revelation: thatis, the Bible unveils those intimate relationships with God experienced byothers so that we might share in them. The Bible is a book of vocation: that is,the Bible gives us a vision of how we ought to live our lives with God and eachother day by day.
We need to enlarge our grasp of this love story—to learn it more completely,to understand it more deeply, to possess it more personally, and to live it morefully. This is a lifelong task. But the place to begin is always the same: Weneed to learn to tell the story as our story. And the purpose of our learning todo so is always the same: to transform individual and social life so thatGod's will might be done and God's reign might come.
As a storybook, the Bible is made up of various kinds of stories. They aremyths, apologies, narratives, and parables, to name four. Each serves adifferent and unique function.
The function of myth is to establish our world. Myths explain that this is theway life really is, in spite of any evidence to the contrary. Myths are notfalse stories. In fact, as the Pawnee Indians were wise to point out, it ishistory that is composed of false stories. Myths are true stories, because theyare about God; they are more than history in that they point beyond history toits meaning. The stories of Jesus' birth and resurrection are myths. Theyexplain the meaning and purpose of life. They are true stories, in the mostimportant sense of those words, for they explain our world. Everyone lives bysome collection of myths. No one finds meaning or purpose in life without them.
Apologetic stories defend our myths. They are primarily biographical, for whatbetter defense is there for a particular way of envisioning life than the livesof those who believe it and live by it? It is difficult to argue with the personwho is willing to suffer and die for a particular way of understanding life andits meaning. That is why the stories of the saints, the ancient and modernheroes of the faith, are also important to know and share.
Narrative stories explore the world that our myths establish and the biographiesof believers defend. For example, one myth may tell us that God is a mercifuland loving God, but our experience may indicate otherwise. Narratives explorethese contradictions and in the end reaffirm the myth. The story of Job is aperfect example.
And last, there are parables whose function is to subvert the way our culturesees life so that we might perceive the world in ways consistent with our myths.For example, the second half of the Jonah story and Jesus' story of thevineyard have a similar message: God does not give us what we deserve, but whatwe need. That is consistent with the Judeo-Christian myth of a gracious andmerciful God, but it is subversive to those of us who live in a reward-and-punishmentworld. This world defines justice as getting what you deserve and hasdifficulty supporting welfare for fear people will get something they do notdeserve.
Of course, there are other sorts of material in the Bible, such as propheticjudgments on people and communities who live lives that violate the implicationsof the community's myths. There are songs and prayers that celebrate life asit is lived within the context of our myths, and there are words of wisdomgleaned from experience that support the community's myth. But at the heart ofit all is a love story, the Christian myth that must be known, owned, and livedif we are to be Christian.
Our greatest human need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in ourlives. An understanding of the meaning of life is not suddenly acquired at aparticular age. At every point in our lives, we need to discover some meaning.The whole process begins in childhood, when we learn through stories. To holdour attention, a story must entertain us and arouse our curiosity, but to enrichour lives, it must stimulate our imaginations and provide us with ever new anddeeper meanings. Stories emerge from and speak to our responsive, intuitiveconsciousness. That is why it is meaningless to take our sacred stories of oursymbolic narratives literally; it is equally meaningless to try intellectuallyto discover their meaning by searching for what can be rationally verified inthem. Sacred stories speak to our deepest, unconscious longings and questions,our problems and predicaments, our inner and outer struggles in human life. Theyexist in the form of truth that only intuition and imagination can provide,truth just as significant and real as the truth that comes through logicalanalysis and scientific probing.
The Bible story is a symbolic narrative. That is why it enlightens us aboutourselves and fosters our growth. It offers meaning on varying levels andenriches our lives in countless ways. The meanings of each story will change atdifferent times in our lives; insights will vary, depending on our needs andexperiences at the moment. That is why it is a mistake to explain a story ortack on a moral at its close. When we use the Bible to indoctrinate people, wedestroy the story and do injustice to the Scriptures. When we simply tellstories without explanations, people want to hear the stories over and overagain. And when we have derived all we can from a story, we will temporarily setit aside until it becomes relevant once again.
It is important for us to remember that both children and adults need stories.It is human nature to order our lives in accordance with a story. Stories makesense out of the chaos of life on the level of the unconscious: that is, poeticstories provide our imaginations with the means of ordering our experiences.They leave us open to new insights and inspirations. Stories preserve the memoryof past events and the experiences to help shape our lives.
Stories are fundamentally oral and communal in nature. They are meant to betold, dramatized, sung, danced, and expressed through the visual arts. They arenot intended only to be read. We forget that the biblical story was written downonly because the community was worried that its storytellers would forget ordistort the story, or neglect some important aspects of it. We need to return totelling and celebrating our story, as a people of God.
Stories are of central importance in human life, and they are enacted throughour rituals. We humans cannot live without ritual; our religious life isexpressed collectively through symbolic narratives (sacred stories) and symbolicactions (rituals and ceremonies). Perhaps no aspect of life is more importantthan our ceremonial life. We humans are made for ritual, and our rituals makeus. No community exists without a shared story and shared repetitive symbolicactions. Our understandings and our ways are invariably objectified inceremonial observances. Faith and ritual cannot be separated. Thus, when theprophets sensed that the people were forsaking their faith, they attacked therituals as empty substitutes. But when the people had lost their faith, theprophets called them to return to their rituals. Without rituals, we lack ameans for building and establishing purposeful identity; we are devoid of anysignificant way to sustain and transmit our understandings. Rituals, likestories, emerge from and speak to our intuitive, emotional consciousness. Thatexplains why dance, drama, music, and visual arts are the basic means by whichour rituals are enacted. And that is why poetry more than prose is the basicmeans by which ritual is expressed in words. When worship becomes toointellectual or wordy, it loses its depth and significance.
One of the problems in western culture, especially post-Reformation,Enlightenment culture, is that it is ocular in nature: that is, it is a book-orientedculture that reads and writes. We speak of the "eyes of faith" andhold that "seeing is believing." We are wordy and our preaching isdiscursive. We turn sacred story into historical event and doctrinal statement.We produce people who use the biblical story as pornography (a subject turnedinto an object) or as idolatry (a means turned into an end). In an oral culture,on the other hand, learning involves all the senses and the imagination as well.In an oral culture truth is poetic, and storytelling is understood as thedoorway into the realm of the sacred. People in an oral culture experience lifeas whole, integrated, and interconnected. The biblical story becomes a sacredstory that is to be imagined and participated in, not studied objectively orbelieved literally. Oral cultures understand that rituals are symbolic actions,expressive of the community's story, that thereby preserve the memory of pastevents and the anticipation of future events in ways that have power to makesense out of life in the present. Ritual storytelling is every community'sprimal way of knowing.
We humans live in two worlds: the world of outward events or visiblemanifestations and the world of inner experience or spiritual reality. To behuman is to integrate the inner world of imagination, intuition, and subjectiveexperience with the outer world of interpretive, intellectual, objectivereflection and moral action. Similarly, the Scriptures are a record of eventsand a witness to religious experience in the form of a sacred narrative. It isthe re-presentation of this symbolic narrative or sacrament that integrates theinner and outer worlds by producing an outward and visible manifestation of aninner spiritual reality.
