The Story Shaped Life

By Jim Holland (written October 2013)The one thing that I noticed about all of my children, and now my grandchildren, is their love of stories. I may lose them is giving them the abstractions of theology, spiritual principles, or moral guidelines, but when I settle back and begin to spin a yarn, they get wide-eyed. It does not matter what age; storytelling is a genre that they all love and hear. One of my children that is older now, with children of her own, used to tell me when I pulled out a book to read, “No daddy, tell it with your mouth,” meaning, “put the book down; tell us a tale.”The call of stories is not something that we graduate from when we get older and move into more mature and sophisticated forms of communication. We never leave stories behind, though we might think we do. In fact, a few years ago I read a statement by Coleman Luck, a syndicated columnist, who said, “We’ve heard a great deal over the past months about the idea that we are a nation ruled by law. Untrue. We are a nation ruled by stories. The stories we love reveal who we are and what we are becoming.”  I suspect that that is true of each of us, and the power of story is seen in the fact that as Christians, we are shaped by the story of a dead man who got up out of the grave and told us that one day, we will too.The basic thrust of God’s revelation is story. The Bible is the story about Jesus and his rescue of lost humanity, and this revelation usually comes to us in narrative form. Eugene Peterson tells us why this is so fundamental: “The reason that story is so basic to us is that life itself has a narrative shape—a beginning and end, plot and character, conflict and resolution. Life isn’t an accumulation of abstractions such as love and truth, sin and salvation, atonement and holiness; life is the realization of details that all connect organically, personally, specifically; names, fingerprints, street numbers and local weather, lamb for supper and a flat tire in the rain….Story is the most adequate way we have of accounting for our lives, noticing the obscure details that turn out to be pivotal, appreciating the subtle accents of color and form and scent that give texture to our actions and feelings, giving coherence to our meetings and relationships in work and family, finding our precise place in the neighborhood and in history..” (Leap Over a Wall)If we are uncomfortable in this environment, we will not get very far in becoming human. Stories dignify who we are. When we tell our stories to others, we do something holy: we invite them to look at who we really are.In preaching this sermon series called The Story of God, I see the call of stories and how they shape life in a powerful way. For instance, there is great power in the story of St. Patrick, for whom this church is named. In story, you are not reading theory or principle, but what God did in the concrete with the frail flesh of a human being that was shaped by the God story of the Bible. In my own life, the story of God is what shapes me. I want to enter that story. I want to let it enter me. I can dismiss “principles of evangelism” or “three steps of spiritual formation” or something theoretical. The story of St. Patrick, I cannot! It is actuality, it is real, it happened in time and space, and because it did, who knows? It might happen again. God might reconnect culture with Christ. He might so shape our moral imagination with what God can do in an ordinary life that the story of our lives as individuals and a communion of believers are never the same. Who would have predicted that one man’s sufferings from the hands of barbarians would drive him to God? Who would have thought that he would go back to them, and through his preaching a fierce, poetic, nature-worshipping people who spiked their hair with lime, painted themselves with blue woad, and fought naked, would become the means of salvation to the larger culture? Would we have ever imagined that in the backside of nowhere, St. Patrick’s faithfulness would be a hinge point of civilization?The answer, of course, is that we would never have thought it. Principles of spirituality can be dismissed as theory by our tired, cynical minds. But a story like this takes root in the moral imagination; it becomes a metaphor for our lives, and also a “case in point” of what can be. Stories like this make us hope, give us faith and give fresh meaning to the promises in the Bible. They give the texture and detail of a God-intoxicated life. They give us roots; this is part of our family. They also remind us that life is not an equation, in which we plug in the data and out comes the solution. Life is surprise-filled, mysterious and full of wonder; who knows what will happen? God may crash in at any moment, and just like in a story, take us in a direction we never imagined.Years ago, a teacher asking us to think about the three events or people that changed our lives and shaped us into who we had become. The funny thing about that exercise was that when I really thought about it and looked at what I wrote, I could never have expected any of it! I was not looking for these things, I did not plan them, and I would never have wanted them, yet somehow God had and did. Only in narrative could I account for the unexpected, unlooked for, and unsought-after events that have shaped me. Only in narrative can I connect the dots and see the subtle textures of my life and how God is at work to bring about who I am today. When I do this, I inhabit a story, a story that connects me to the great story that God began thousands of years ago with a wandering Jew named Abraham. And when I really see it, I realize that it is all a mystery, and I am filled with wonder, awe, and praise.