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Storytelling, doctrine, and spiritual formation
Anglican Theological Review, Winter 1999 by Wallace, Catherine M
Consider, for a moment, how much would be involved if you actually were to try to tell me this story you have in mind. We don't know one another. So in telling me the story, you would have to provide the context I need to understand what this event meant in your life at that time and of course what it means now. But in creating that context, in fleshing out the simple memory into a whole story, you would have to be very selective or telling the story would take months. A friend of mine teaches a course in biography and autobiography, and he starts out by observing that if someone videotaped every event in your life, soon enough you would need a whole warehouse just to store the tapes, and it would take yet another whole lifetime just to watch all of them once-and that doesn't begin to include realities that can't be videotaped, realities like dreams or fears or arguments with yourself in the middle of the night. So in telling your story, you have to focus on what really matters. But what really matters? That's a big question. What do you think really matters in your life? Questions don't get much bigger than that.
Russell Baker explains that when you are telling a story about yourself, the problem is that you know too much. 18 There are a million things that might be said. You have to pick. The solution, he says, is to leave out almost everything. A good story is not the whole truth. It's about one-half of one percent of the whole truth, because that's about all that will fit into a good story. What we are doing in picking that onehalf of one percent is deciding what contexts will matter.
God is a context that matters. Exodus from bondage is a context that matters: forgiveness and redemption, grace and exile and calling. We can situate ourselves as self-actualized individuals just brimming with self-esteem and low-fat high-fiber values, or we can situate ourselves as vulnerable, compassionate creatures made in the image of a God who calls us out of mere success into service, out of mere competition into compassion, out of the dark into a light that darkness cannot comprehend. We can situate ourselves in a world in which all we do is fight over a glass that is always half empty; we can situate ourselves in a world in which the cup is brimful and shared. In the kingdom of God there are no zero-sum calculations: the only measure is one that is packed down and overflowing.
The other context that matters is the audience, the listener. Every story has an audience, real or hoped-for, because storytelling is a social act. We cannot tell the stories in which hope has foundations unless we have listeners who also know that hope is possible, that grace is real, that God is mysterious but indisputably present. We cannot find what it takes to tell the stories in which we change this nasty brutish world into the kingdom of God unless we have listeners for whom such transformation is possible-even if only now and then or briefly. We cannot tell the stories in which history is changed unless we have listeners for whom conversion or repentance or moral growth can be imagined. And theology is or articulates the conceptual structures or paradigms that underlie how it is that all these individuals, with all their stories and all their listening, comprise a coherent tradition sustained over time and despite massive cultural change.
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