The Story of Life
What is life if not an adventure story? I was just at an excellent writer’s conference in which I attended a workshop about the structure of a story. I could not help but think how closely a story resembles life.
Interestingly, I recently read three very different books for various reasons: I read GK Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man because it had a great influence on C.S. Lewis; I read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ The Great Partnership because it had great meaning to a friend; and I read Kathryn Craft’s The Far End of Happy looking for meaning after I attended her workshop on the structure of stories. Who would have guessed that in all three of those books I would find the same thread woven between the pages: the importance of stories to human lives.
Chesterton discusses the importance of philosophy and mythology to mankind and finds the perfect marriage of philosophy and mythology in the story of Christ or what Chesterton calls the “philosophy of story.” He recognizes the historical tension between priests and philosophers. After all, Socrates was put to death in ancient Greece out of respect for the gods. He describes the way in which Christianity differs from mythology because it is a vision, and from philosophy because it is not a pattern but a picture, not a process but a story. All humans have a normal narrative instinct that fairy tales and myths were based on, but unlike fairy tales the story of Christ is true. Unlike philosophy, it is not just an abstract simplification with regular repetitions or processes that lead right back to the beginning.
The life of a man is not a philosophy but like the story of God it is an adventure story, which like all stories, must be told by somebody to somebody else. Man has a target he is aiming for, but we have to wait until the end of the story to see if he hits it. All stories have surprises which we can’t just figure out in the abstract. As a result of free will, the question of how the story will turn out cannot be measured or quantified as a straight line or a curve because it all depends on how the characters decide to go on. Life is “the tale, the test, the adventure, the ordeal of the free man.”
Chesterton believes that every story begins with creation and ends with a last judgment. He sees Christianity as the unity of philosophy and story, the bridge between the longing of our souls for romance and for truth. Man has the soul of a story.
Sacks believes faith is the story of a man with free will, lifted by God, who embarks on a journey, confident that it will lead to a destination. For there is no story without meaning. Like Chesterton he points out that the philosophy of Plato is abstract. In the Hebrew Bible there is no abstract theory articulated, just stories. Sacks sees reason as opposed to revelation in the same way that argument is opposed to narrative, since argument puts forth a verifiable case, but stories give meaning. He describes humans as meaning making animals. It is narrative that makes sense of the world, gives man intentionality and a sense of aiming at something. Like Chesterton he discusses the ability to test an argument and the inability to test a story.
To be fair I must point out that Chesterton is extolling the unity of philosophy and stories, of argument and narrative, while Sacks suggests that since Jesus spoke Hebrew, a language of stories and the New Testament was written in Greek, the language of arguments, that this joining led to later problems between science and religion. It is not my purpose to delve into where the two authors differ in opinion, but to focus on their agreement that our lives are given purpose because a God outside the universe created us with a calling that only we can answer and it is our choices that determine the end of our story.
In the workshop on story structure, Kathryn Craft taught that a plot is not the same as a story because a story must have meaning. A story includes a premise, an incident, a character, stakes for failure, a crucible, a setting, complications, a dark moment, a climax and a resolution. To me it sounded like what she was describing was life. It made me consider what makes my life a story and not just a plot.
Sacks and Chesterton both believe that man is different from other animals because man asks “Why?” Craft quoted from the book Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron, saying that storytelling was more important to humans than opposable thumbs. In my notes from her workshop, I put a star by Craft’s statement that “people don’t change unless there is pressure to change, and a safe way to change our inner lives or outer lives is by telling a story.” When I got home, I read Craft’s book, The Far End of Happy, and discovered that, in a gut wrenching moment near the end, the protagonist reaches out to her son by telling him a story. It tied together all the loose ends of my recent reading.
Rabbi Sacks ends his book by doing the “Jewish thing” as he calls it and telling a story. I would go one step further and say that in ending with a story he is reminding us of the thing that sets us all apart as human. All our lives are a story, for our lives have meaning. What story are you writing with your life?
