Letting story shape us

"Being a Christian involves living within the tradition and letting it shape our lives. It means letting these stories have their way with us." — Marcus Borg (emphasis added)

Last week I listened to the book of Genesis on audio. It had been some time since I’d read or listened through it in its entirety. What a rich tradition of story!  And like all good tales, the stories of Genesis and the rest of the Bible are ambiguous, often open-ended, full of drama and conflict, and rife with characters who reveal both the best and worst of humanity, sometimes in the very same person. No easy moral tales are these; nor should we make them so.

So how do we read the stories of the Bible? Even the question points at the struggle—since the stories were not really meant to be read, but to be heard and passed along by communities in group storytelling. For hundreds of years before the printing press, biblical stories were passed along orally (or later, read aloud) by people far more skilled as storytellers and story-listeners than we are. We call these masses of pre-modern people illiterate. But it is we who are largely illiterate when it comes to knowing the value of story and how it shapes us. Our deprivation comes from too much story, from inundation and information overload, and from being unable to make out our own unique tales. Our state is akin to standing in the middle of a stereo store with so many kinds of music playing on dozens of different speakers that we are unable to hear a single strain long enough or well enough to be moved and consciously shaped by it. In a way, most of us are shaped by the cacophony.