The Stories We Tell

There's something powerful, almost magical about telling stories. When I was three or four years old, living with my aunt and uncle, my Grandpa Churchwell would read my cousins and I stories from picture books, but he wouldn't just read the words in the book or hurry through to the end, but he'd linger on the page, ask us questions, get us thinking and telling stories of our own. He wanted us to use our imaginations, begin to ask questions, and think about what else was going on rather than just what we saw.

As I got older I remember going to Cub Scouts den meetings and the stories around campfires, or the rides in the back seat of station wagons to and from the campground, or the stories classmates would whisper during study hall about ghosts, Freddie Krueger, and girls' bodies. If it hadn't been for Stoney Thompson, I would have never known about the plotlines for all the Friday XIII movies and Nightmare on Elm Street. And if it hadn't been for Jay Battleday in band class, I would have never been introduced to Cheech and Chung, Strange Brew, or Ernest Goes to Camp. And if it hadn't been for Bill Shinabarger and Chad Howell, I might have had less wrong information about a woman's body.

Stories are the ways we remember the past. They're the ways we define ourselves and create our identity, at least the one we let others see. They create community, reinforce or challenge our value systems, and build relationship and intimacy.

I've thought a lot about the kinds of stories we tell and how it defines us. Sometimes we tell and retell the mistakes we made, wearing our mistakes as a badge of pride. We define ourselves as the bad boys and bad girls who live on the edge, and like it. Sometimes we tell the stories where we come out the hero, or the victim, or the trickster, or the outcast always misunderstood. Maybe it's important what kinds of stories we tell, because they'll be the stories we become.

Plato believed that we should tell stories only about good heroes who do moral things, the ideal philosopher kings, because these would be the kinds of people we'd strive to become. In Christian circles, I remember people defining themselves as sinners saved by grace, usually with the emphasis on the sinner and not the grace. Because of this, there wasn't much grace in their lives (maybe because of the stories they told). Augustine falls into some of this. He doesn't retell in detail the sins of his youth, but the way he reframes the telling of his own life story is by focusing on his inborn sinfulness, and an overwhelming, almost overpowering grace that he has no responsibility for or claim to. Incidentally, he also bypasses telling about the feud he had with the Donatists (contemporary "heretics") that may have cast him in a less than positive light.

I think it's also significant that Jesus gives new stories and new terms for thinking about our relationship with God. He says, call him "Daddy," because that's who he is to you now, and you're sons and daughters of a king, not beggars and paupers. These aren't just new stories, but new ways of thinking about ourselves, of identification, and, most importantly, of being.

I've seen people who have struggled their whole lives with childhood abuse. They retell the stories, relive them vicariously, and never seem to be able to break free of the bondage of these events. They have done more than let these stories define them, but have become enslaved by them. I've seen others who have lived through similar situations, who also take these same stories, but they've added other stories to them. The stories of abuse have been reshaped, reframed. What was meant for evil has been turned into something that helps others--helps others see they're not alone, helps them see there's something on the other side.

Lately I've found myself telling harder stories, revisiting the worst memories of my childhood and overlaying them on the present. Am I trying to work through this pain and emotional deadness to get to something on the other side, or am I trapped by giving too much power to these harmful stories? I don't know. I'm obviously trying to sort this out.

For the most part, I've quit wanting to blog, at least not in the ways that I did at first. Blogging became a personal diary, a way to indulge in some public narcissism. Some of the best stories I've read though (Narnia, Tolkien's Middle earth, Terry Brooks' Shannara, Camelot, Frank Herbert's Dune) are bigger than the people who write them. People don't come to read about C.S. Lewis' childhood or Tolkien's views on politics, but are brought into a story and a world that they can explore and find bits of themselves. In the process they'll find bits of their creator, but they've been invited into a place that they can make their own, and live out vicariously their own stories through the stories of fictional characters.

So stories are powerful, they're the magic woven deeply into our blood and imaginations. And good stories, those are the best stories of all.