Storytelling, doctrine, and spiritual formation

Anglican Theological Review, Winter 1999 by Wallace, Catherine M

At a family gathering a few years ago, I introduced myself to the new wife of a second cousin once removed, a pleasant young woman who had been sitting alone, looking intimidated by this mob of new relations, all of whom look too much alike and talk too fast. I learned that she is a physical therapist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, where she teaches people how to walk again after accidents. But her subspecialty is teaching people how to walk down stairs. By the time she was done explaining her work to me, I was afraid to walk back to the buffet table for coffee. I had never realized that walking is so complicated.

Rather than risk walking, I showed her my remarkably doublejointed ankles-an inherited condition known to make orthopedic surgeons flinch. (Watch Irish step-dancers closely, and you will understand. ) My second cousin once-removed in-law looked even more dubious about the wisdom of marrying into this clan. But she got up to get coffee for both of us-and maybe to find her husband-so I had a moment to myself in which I could marvel that even someone with ligaments and tendons like flaccid elastic nonetheless walks down stairs every single day, without a scrap of thought or conscious effort. Telling stories is a lot like walking. If you look closely, storytelling is astounding. But like walking, we do it quite well all on our own, instinctively, without knowing all the details that specialists have come to admire. Like walking, storytelling is a gift whose marvels we are likely either to take for granted or to overburden with complicated explanations whose weight incapacitates practice. I hope here to walk that fine line-loose ankles and all-toward an imaginative vision of the reciprocity of storytellers and theologians in the life of the church and, specifically, in the process called "spiritual formation."

Storytelling and Abstract Thinking

Storytelling can be invisible because it is everywhere that people gather, if we are listening to each other attentively. But storytelling can be invisible for another reason as well. In the modern world-by which I mean, for English-speakers, since about 1600-storytelling has often played second fiddle to thinking modeled upon what looks like the objective rationality of science. Telling tales doesn't seem to count for much in comparison with counting and calculus and astrophysics, much less the prowess and the promise of industrial revolution spun out into internets and the information age. And so theology, the queen of sciences, the science of God, found herself in all the predictable predicaments and thence decided-no small mistake-that whatever truths stories might tell could be told even better, even more clearly and cleanly and objectively, by systematic theologians, a separate and professional community in conversation primarily with itself. Even the stories in Scripture were seen as primitive, not primal: poets and storytellers would have been systematic theologians, if only we knew how. Shakespeare himself, by this thinking, would have beenwho?-Holinshed redivivus? And all of this is not a new story, not any more.

But there has been of late a resurgent interest in storytelling. Narrative is hot stuff as the dark night of nihilism has closed in upon us: we may not know for sure, in fact we may not know at all, postmodernism claims, but oh the stories we can tell. If on the one hand all conceptual structures are built only of blood and oppression and privilege defending its privities, then on the other stories are neither true nor false but only chronologically sequenced narrative "display," mere sentiment proclaiming its own dreamy opinions. Theology is fiction, God is a figment of our own devising, and we are to eat, drink and be merry, tell tales and be glad, for when that final curtain closes there will nothing be, nothing at all, not even a dark and empty stage upon which to strut.

So be it, if you will. There can be no argument upon such grounds. There's not even room to swing a cat. And so I propose instead to step outside as if to start over, to explain what I see as a believer and a literary critic properly trained and yet dwelling these days outside the camps either of church or academe. These are not "my" fights, "my" territories professionally defined. Not at all: I am a poet, a storyteller, neither scholar nor priest but all too inclined to conversation with distant relations.1 I seem to have the fey gift some storytellers have, which is to elicit stories from everyone else, to sit in the coffee shop on Central Street, around the corner from your choice of churches, and to hear quite ordinary people listening for God. I listen to the power and the passion and the nuance of their stories; I listen to these kind and decent ordinary folks who find themselves starving in a time of spiritual famine, and I am baffled that the churches nonetheless seem to be floundering.

"What is a good story?" is not much different from "What good is a story?" You have heard a good story when you know it might have happened to you, just like that. You have heard a good story when you see the world differently when the telling is done. You have heard a good story when your heart leaps up at what you have always known but couldn't find the words to say. In a good story, truth comes alive and grabs you by the throat before you have time to think thoughts like "the Incarnation is manifest trans-temporally in a realized eschatology among the narrative resources of a discourse community." In a good story, the Incarnation is a real God meddling in our all-too-real ordinary predicaments-and not merely an abstract element in the systematic speculations of scholars.