Telling stories

Most mornings when the alarm goes off, I’m awoken to the sound of NPR droning on about the day’s headlines, the progression of the Wars in the Middle East, or the latest Brad Pitt flick. It’s a nice way to wake up (even given the sometimes depressing nature of the news), infinitely preferable to the panic-inducing buzzer that causes my first morning sentiment to be confused anger. On Fridays, my NPR mornings are especially nice, since they include a segment called StoryCorps, where regular people from around the country interview each other and tell just a bit of their stories. These stories range from sweet to sorrowful, unnerving to uplifting, as they touchingly reveal the complexity and fragility of family, of love, of friendship. They are achingly human.

I remember one story about a math teacher from Michigan who took in and raised his fifteen year old student and that student’s newborn son. This teacher just saw potential in his student and, moved with compassion, became his father and a grandfather to his child. As adults, they went on StoryCorps and thanked one another in simple gratitude for the sacrifice and care only fully known years later. One woman, whose husband was suffering with Alzheimers and could hardly recall her name, recorded the story of how they met. As she described the glance across the jazz club and the handsome soldier who approached her, you could hear the emotion choking her shaking voice. You could hear it all—a lifetime of love and the richness of memory, tinged with the reality that that they would never dance again.

These are stories of loss, of charity, of endurance, of comedy, of providence.

What is it about stories that so moves us as people? Why do we each think we have a story? And why is an encouragement to both hear these stories and to tell them?

Edward Said, the famous literary critic, once commented, “the novel is a specifically Christian form of writing. It presupposes a world that is incomplete, that is yearning toward salvation and moving towards it.” Said recognizes that the very form of the story is an expression of expectation, for the good ending, no matter how many conflicts emerge in the course of the novel.

The foremost historian of African American religion Albert Raboteau puts it this way in his work A Fire in the Bones: “History and religious faith coalesce for me in their mutual admission of the necessity of plot. Both present narrative constructions of reality. Both answer to the human drive for order. Both lead us to search for the ‘hidden wholeness’ of life, the connectedness of apparently fragmented and chaotic bits of experience and knowledge.” He persists, “Historical narrative places a mythic structure upon events by the very act of arranging them in a sequence of meaning, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Instead of viewing time as random acts of atomistic experience, history assumes that the past has structure, meaning, consequence. Christian faith also asserts that the events of human experience have meaning, a coherent pattern, a telos. But the source of that meaning for the believer ultimately lies outside history in the will and providence of God.”

Raboteau and Said are exactly right. For a Christian, the details of the story may be a mystery but the Divine storyteller is known. He is the Author and Perfector, He is sovereign and ordains all tings in His mercy and love. The Scriptures remind us that “…in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there were none of them.” (Psalm 139:16) Before the dawn of time, our Father knew every moment of our lives, he had written the beginning, middle and end of the story. This divine providence may seem impossible or even infuriating as we traverse through deserts, face brokenness in our families and ourselves, hear cancer diagnoses. But the promise of good is as sure as the goodness of the Storyteller: “All things work for the good of those who love Him who have been called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28). The story may be unknown, but the goodness of the ending is sure. “It is finished,” evil has been defeated, “Death has begun working backwards.”

So as I wake up tomorrow and hear the voices of America telling their stories from across the radio waves, I must remember that these stories do not exist in isolation as a random arrangement of events both happy and heartbreaking. Rather, they are decidedly meaningful, part of an incomprehensibly complex yet beautiful story of redemption and goodness that we will all understand someday.