Kindle Notes & Highlights
throughout my book, I interact positively with the emerging discipline of narrative psychology.
In my seminary classes, I use the mantra, “Everything is narrative, but narrative isn’t everything.”
Stephen Crites observes that thought and imagination find outlets other than narrative, and for a good reason.4 The human mind needs rest from the unceasing temporal flow inherent to story. Non-narrative forms of expression—painting and sculpture, philosophical analysis and abstraction—offer us rest from the stream of time into which narrative plunges us.
If our society as a whole is directionless, it is because we have abandoned many of the defining stories of our past without finding adequate replacements.2
Alternative medicine (don’t let the phrase spook you!) affirms the multiple health benefits of owning and telling your life story.7 Here are a few of the benefits: • Medical Health: When we hold our story tightly inside us (for reasons of fear or shame), we increase the physical symptoms of stress in our body. When we let our story out, we experience relief—emotionally, and even at the cellular level.
“We tend to think of the Bible as a story of redemption,” said Jordan.12 “But that is only one of the plotlines. Within the Old and New Testaments, we may read a story of victory over evil. We may also read a storyline that revolves around growth into maturity.” The speaker had my attention. He continued, “In the Old Testament storyline, the phases of Israel’s leadership develop from priesthood, to royal sage, to prophet. The story arc, from phase to phase, involves increasing freedom and responsibility for the leader. Priests—their responsibility is limited. They must concentrate on strict
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“The three phases of Israel’s story may be taken to symbolize three phases of our personal growth into our teaching vocation. As children and adolescents, our task is assimilation of instruction, and accurate reproduction of the material. As college and graduate students, our task involves extending the insights of our instructors. Finally, if we eventually become pastors or professors, we must search for a distinctive, God-given vision of our own.”
A proverb I had once heard (from a venerable African-American preacher) resurfaced in my brain: “Your thirties are the adolescence of adulthood; your fifties are the youth of old age.”
• When our stories collide with Christ’s story, transformation occurs. Jesus’ narrative unsettles, rearranges, and heals our own incoherent scripts. Our identity renews in Christ. New metaphors, derived from Jesus’ story, redefine our roles. Christian faith, Christian confession, means owning Jesus’ story.
“It is possible that the failure of mythology and ritual to function effectively in our civilization may account for the high incidence among us of the malaise that has led to the characterization of our time as ‘The Age of Anxiety.’”21
Our quest for an autobiography takes a detour through the maze of moral relativism.
We become terrified lest we “impose a story upon the facts.”
I have tried to cluster the questions into a helpful progression. So I organize them under these headers: • The Art of Remembering • Dimensions of Time • Dimensions of Plot • Stories that Shape Me • Stories in Seed Form
Begin by getting a handle on your memories—the preliminary raw materials of your life story. Generate a list of major events and experiences. Use standard techniques to jog your memory. See if any provisional patterns emerge from these raw materials.
Our next section takes our previous work to a deeper narrative level, by exploring dimensions of plot in the events of our life. We ask questions designed to surface narrative arcs that connect the major “acts” of your personal “drama.” The questions focus on: your life setting; trigger incidents; escalations; crises; and resolutions.
The Art of Remembering
Suppose you were told that all your memories will evaporate in thirty minutes unless you name them in writing. What memories would you want to preserve?
Now expand your written list of memories by using external triggers: • Personal literary artifacts: letters; diaries and journals; substantive emails; etc. • Family photos; your hoarded objects that “hold the energy of the past.”99 • Muscle memory: physically reproduce body movements, e.g., distinctive motions performed in a previous job. • Physically revisit geographical locations (or use Google Maps/Images!) • Draw the floor plan of your childhood home. “The house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.”100 • Research cultural artifacts of the time
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Seasons
How many seasons make up your past? • What initiated and terminated each season? • What makes each of your seasons distinct? • Does anything remain constant across your seasons? • How would you label each season? • Do you see any kind of progression from your initial season to your current season?
Pivots
A list of turning points offers another way to structure past time.
Write down all the events you consider turning points in your life: high-points, low-points, and irreversible changes. (Be honest about what matters to you. Don’t rely on conventional social markers; maybe high-school graduation meant nothing to you!) • Organize these events into chronological sequence. • Label them as relatively major or minor. • Looking over your list, do any of the pivots cluster into phases? • Looking at your list from start to finish, do you see any progression (e.g., intensification of a problem; proximity to a goal; etc.)?
Try to think of your past life as a novel, with the different phases as chapters. How many chapters would your unfinished life story contain? Try to give an apt title to each chapter of your story.
How would you title the “next chapter” of your life?
My Present
Do you identify with any current social/cultural/religious movements? If so, in what direction do you think your movement is heading? What challenges does your movement currently face?
Stories in Seed Form (Microcosms and Foreshadowings)
Dewdrops and Rainbows
Almost one hundred years ago, a New Testament scholar suggested a brilliant analogy. His proposal: each episode in the Gospels is like a drop of dew on a field in the morning sunlight. As it catches the sunlight, the tiny pearl of water hosts a miniature rainbow. Inside the dewdrop, the full spectrum of the seven colors of the rainbow. Likewise, each episode in the Gospels is a microcosm of the entire story of Jesus.
The religious tradition, which previously could be authoritatively imposed, now has to be marketed. It must be “sold” to a clientele that is no longer constrained to “buy.” The pluralist situation is, above all, a market situation. In it, the religious institutions become the marketing agencies and the religious traditions become consumer commodities.150
By contrast, the older agrarian economies at least provided common tasks and shared symbols to unite large communities. (Think of the communal importance of the harvest, and its frequent “mythic” connection to transcendent narratives.) Similarly, the machine age united large numbers of workers in factories, and this often gave the workers a shared narrative (such as “class struggle”).
(Post)Modern Art
Why would art impact the stories we live? Humans use arts—such as painting and sculpture—to freeze the experience of time encountered in narrative and in life: Experience is molded . . . by narrative forms, and its narrative quality is altogether primitive . . . [But] there seems to be a powerful inner drive of thought and imagination to overcome the relentless temporality of experience . . . The kind of pure spatial articulation we find in painting and sculpture, with all movement suspended, gratifies this deep need.152
Perhaps this is one reason why traditional painting frequently depicted scenes from biblical and classical narratives, as well as scenes from everyday life. But when we turn to modern art, scenes from life and from traditional narratives disappear. In their place, the abstract geometry of Mondrian, or the paint-thrown-randomly-onto-canvas of Jackson Pollock. Implication: traditional narrative scenes cannot truly represent reality.
A few years ago, a well-known shampoo manufacturer designed their bottles to resemble a Mondrian painting. Art critic H. R. Rookmaaker describes his style: “Pictorial elements were reduced to their simplest and most rigid terms: black horizontal and vertical lines, white, red, yellow and blue colour[sic]—and nothing else.”153 What drove the abstractness of modern art? A quest for the transcendent, the universal, the absolute.154 However, previous generations of artists had abandoned the themes and subject-matter of classical narrative—the traditional house of the transcendent.155 Accordingly,
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Meaning was no longer “given” in a painting, but the viewer had to figure out what the splashes of color might mean: “In all this type of art the onlooker is asked to be active. He has to “go into the picture,” and in a kind of irrational, completely free action get his own meaning out of it.”157 Analogous to “reader-response” approaches to studies of literary texts, such art enthrones the autonomous self over against external authorities (such as traditional narratives).
Liberal Democracy
Yes, many nations proudly recount their struggle toward liberal democracy. But then the irony kicks in. Once achieved, free and democratic societies tend to curtail the heroic impulse which birthed them.
Post-Colonialism
Circa 1980, pop musicians UB40 penned this guilt-ridden lyric about the British Empire: “I’m a British subject, not proud of it / While I carry a burden of shame.”
Bauckham owns the sense that the Bible presents a metanarrative of sorts. But, he contends, it is one that privileges the poor and the “least” and expects multicultural expressions to thrive—working against the grain, therefore, of the socially and culturally coercive and oppressive effects observable in other metanarratives.171
The “Linguistic Turn”
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the focus in philosophy generally shifted from history to language. Human beings are now thought of not so much as creatures of the past as creatures of language. As a result . . . interest has shifted . . . toward questioning how a text as a piece of language determines who we are and how we think.172
The linguistic turn encourages a hermeneutic of suspicion toward metanarratives (and thus reinforces the post-colonial turn discussed above).
Philosophy and Science
The modern western intellectual project labeled “the Enlightenment,” aptly described as “the story that kills stories.”177
First came religion in the form of stories, then philosophy in the form of metaphysical analysis, and then science with its exact methods . . . each of these ages supplanted the other as a refinement in the progressive development of reason. So stories are pre-scientific.178
Unfortunately for Christianity, its roots belong to the biblical world of story and symbol. In the age of philosophical and scientific rationality, modern Christianity behaved like an adolescent embarrassed by the clothes received from their parents, and eager to dress in the more fashionable garb of the times. Whether in “liberal” or “conservative” form, modern western Christianity largely abandoned storytelling in favor of rational propositions.180
Generation X
