Kindle Notes & Highlights
Let me illustrate. I invite you to read Psalm 13. Pay special attention to the na...
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Now, I am not offering this psalm as a one-size-fits-all script for handling setbacks (after all, we have many different psalms of lament, contoured to the complexities of suffering); nevertheless, it may help to outline the structure of Psalm 13 as an example of a biblical script for handling adversity: • Honest, full disclosure of suffering; including impatience with God. • Facing the worst; desperate cry for light and hope. • Remembering the metanarrative. (“Covenant faithfulness” evokes God’s promises to Abraham and to David, among other references; “salvation” connotes God’s interventions
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16 A Better Life From Kindergarten to Cultural Scripts In this chapter, we begin to zoom the lens out, from individuals to society, from autobiography to cultural scripts. Let us start with a couple of snapshots from early childhood development, and then fast-forward into adulthood.
As we grow into adulthood, our society offers us cultural scripts within which we can live, move, and have our being. These scripts shape our identity, our values, and our decisions.
Reduced to its bare bones, script theory posits that “Human beings are fundamentally like playwrights who create scripts in which they play the leading roles. From the earliest weeks of life onward . . . people unconsciously fashion scripts to organize and make sense of their lives and to set the stage for future action.”564
A Better Life
An example is found in Carlos, the protagonist from the Oscar-nominated 2011 film A Better Life. Single parent Carlos lives in California, and works seven days a week to support his teenage son Luis. “Undocumentado,” an illegal immigrant, Carlos’s career option equals low-paid yard-work.
But he dreams the American Dream.
The New Testament book of Hebrews likes the word “better.” According to Hebrews, Abraham searched for the land of promise, but found something better. He came to desire “a better [country]—that is, a heavenly one” (Heb 11:16). He looked forward to “the city having foundations, whose architect and maker is God” (Heb 11:10).
We all know people like Carlos, whose dream has become frustration. Is the frustration an invitation to embrace the faith of Abraham, to seek the better, heavenly country?
Suppose someone told Carlos the story of Abraham. And suppose Carlos embraced the vision of Abraham. Then, ...
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But I do wonder if the American Dream is more a distortion of proper God-given desires, than a simple falsehood to be rejected through cessation of ambition.
Paradise: could desire be redirected toward the restoration of paradise promised in the Bible? Along the lines of Hebrews, inviting the reader to imitate Abraham in a quest for a better (that is, “heavenly”) country. (I explore Hebrews further in chapter 23 of this book.) Ascent: instead of increased social status, could our ambition for ascent be channeled into growth in virtue, culminating in what 2 Peter 1:4 boldly asserts: “participation in the divine nature,” no less. (For further exploration of 2 Peter 1, I invite you to turn back to the end of chapter 2 of this book.)
17 American Graffiti No Pain, No Gain?
Cultural scripts are powerful.
Cultural glue.
Widespread aimlessness in society warns us that our national myths are losing their plausibility.
In the existential moment, an unexpected circumstance, how should we behave? Cultural scripts offer a “style guide” for the minutiae of human interactions. We will illustrate this shortly, by studying how four different ethnic groups react to the experience of hospitalization.
My Name is Gladiator
Any self-respecting Empire needs a compelling foundational story to legitimize its power. For Rome, that story was supplied by the epic poet Virgil, whose Aeneid was penned a couple of decades before the birth of Jesus.
Caesar entered Rome in triple triumph . . . The streets rang with joyful festivities . . . Caesar himself . . . reviewed the gifts from the world’s nations . . . The conquered people marched on past In long procession, each as different in their clothes and gear As in the tongues they spoke . . . The loose-robed African people, The quivered Scythians . . .577
Compare and contrast this vision with Revelation 7:9–10: After this I looked, and behold! A great crowd that no one could number, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, stood before the throne and before the Lamb . . . They cry out in a loud voice, saying: “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
Can you feel the cultural rhetoric of Revelation in this scene? In place of Caesar’s triumphal procession, the triumphal procession of the Lamb (who was slain by the Roman practice of crucifixion). Using a multiplicity of such rhetorical devices, Revelation systematically deconstructs the Roman imperial myth, replacing it with the ultimate truth of the story of the gospel.
This is what apocalyptic literature does. Apocalypses unveil the truth behind appearances. They expose false stories, a...
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A Cappuccino, With a Shot of Postmodernism For the purpose of identifying prevalent contemporary cultural scripts, I am indebted to a book by Steve Wilkens and Mark L. Sanford, entitled Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories that Shape our Lives. The authors have two main theses, which resonate strongly with me: 1. World- and life-view is, for most people, absorbed unconsciously via daily social/cultural interactions (imbibed via “coffee at Starbucks”); 2. Worldviews all have story at their core. The story shapes identity and behavior.
In terms of narrative metaphors, the dis-integrative trajectory goes from melting pot, to multicultural mosaic, to tribalized war zone. These three phases of the story are worth fleshing out:580 1. America starts as a melting pot, a nation of immigrants from diverse lands, whose identities-of-origin get melted down and remolded on American soil. The immigrant arrives, for example, as an Italian; her children grow up hyphenated, Italian-American; her grandchildren drop the hyphen—they are simply American. This is the dreamlike phase of the story. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled
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Tribalism. Nationalism. Which story is the truth? Such questions are hard to answer. But I have to confess, at the present time, reality feels closer to the experience described in the postmodern tribal narrative. I perceive this in the loss of civil discourse, the harshly polarized rhetoric from the right and the left of the political spectrums.
Babel Undone So I have been searching for a better story. Just as the book of Revelation subverted the Roman narrative with the story of Jesus, I believe that we today can discern and live a better story than the discredited nationalism or the demoralizing tribalism.
Around a decade ago, a wealthy, totally Anglo, Presbyterian church in a major Texan metropolis decided to plant a Reformed church for the huge Hispanic population. That population is, of course, served by the Pentecostal and Roman Catholic denominations, but no Hispanic Reformed church existed in that city.
But events didn’t unfold according to the script from the Presbyterian “church planting” manual. Along with abundant Latino growth came a mixed multitude of representatives of virtually every continent on the planet. White Americans. An Englishman. Albanians. A Croatian. Ethiopians. Koreans.
Was the original vision of the church plant too tribal? I give my wife Dawn the credit. She was the first to discern the alternative story that God appeared to be scripting before our eyes. (Sadly, this alternative plotline never came to fruition–but that, as they say, is another story.) She calls the post-tribal narrative “Babel Undone,” and here are the CliffsNotes.
Genesis chapters 4–11 chronicle the ripple effects of the exile from Eden. Fratricidal violence. The law of the jungle. And then Babel. In God’s sight, the scattering of humanity into dis-integrated tribes was a lesser evil when compared with a monolithic self-exalting humanity.
But the effects of Babel were not without evil. A re-unification of the tribes is hinted at in the very next chapter of Genesis, when God promises to Abraham, “In you, all the f...
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As the twenty-first century unfolds, cultural pluralism increases, the plethora of competing scripts multiplies, and many of us become paralyzed by disorientation and confusion.
In this context, the American church also seems to be struggling to find a script. A way of embodying the ancient Christian narrative in the postmodern world.
18 Selves under Construction (1) Losing the Plot
Think of your own common self-talk (or ask someone who has to listen to you on a regular basis!) What are some of your most frequent shorthand expressions to describe your life? How are these phrases windows into your version of a life story? Does your “plotline summary” have any negative impact on how you think and behave?
My own story has included an unrealistic quest for idealized place, manifesting both sides of the “someday”/“if only” script. Once this script entangles you, escaping its delusions becomes next-to-impossible. For me, researching, writing, and reflecting on this book revealed the multiple threads that tangle this script into every strand of my story.
If the absence of a narrative script can produce anxiety, the availability of too many competing and mutually cancelling scripts can produce apathy: In a pluralistic culture, in which many stories are simultaneously and powerfully presented to the young, a certain confusion, malaise, and loss of confidence often result. No one story commands allegiance. Action, therefore, lacking a story to give it significance, seems pointless. Why bother to do anything at all? . . . The young often begin to sleep a lot. Not to have any story to live out is to experience nothingness: the primal formlessness
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As one who has struggled with depression (see chapter 2, above), I resonate with MacIntyre. For me, the mire of depression resembled that phase of folk tales (like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty) when the protagonist is asleep, paralyzed under a spell. Ultimately, my depression was failure of belief, or failure of imagination. In my many struggles inside the dark cloud, one sign always foreshadowed eventual release: I got a tiny glimpse of a positive future for myself, a story with a role worth playing.
Put bluntly, the past is fixed and the future (relatively) open. Accordingly, the narrative of our past can and should have greater depth and fixity than the narrative we improvise in the present and tentatively project into the future. Our mental health requires it. “Psychic strength includes both a strong sense of self-identity, rooted in the past, and an equally strong power of self-transcendence, directed toward the future.”609
We all arrive on the world stage with a backstory—the lingering impact of storylines lived by previous generations. And this may not be a bad thing. It can even be positive, a form of inheritance, a gift of stability and direction. Our inherited scripts can enable us to improvise a healthy version of our own personal narrative.
This chapter has floated a simple thesis: psychological malaise accompanies defective life stories. We’ve only drilled a few inches down this potentially very rich mine of wisdom. But hopefully we’ve illustrated the value of narrative as a critical tool for diagnosing the ills of the soul. Here are our examples of this, in condensed tabular form: Defective Life Story Psychological Malaise “someday . . . ” “if only . . . ” delusion paralysis absence of script over-abundance of scripts anxiety apathy lack of positive ending nihilism; depression; fatalism; paranoia indeterminate past fossilized
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19 Selves under Construction (2) Healing Plots
If defective life stories contribute to psychological malaise, the antidote seems obvious: “A growing number of clinical and counseling psychologists are beginning to see psychotherapy as fundamentally a process of story reformulation and repair.”612
Likewise, some group therapy programs for heroin addicts rely upon a narrative: “A first phase in which the newcomer understands his problems and finds the will to solve them . . . a second phase in which he finds alternative behaviors . . . a third phase in which he, by continuous practice . . . makes the new behaviors his own.”614 In terms of archetypal plots, the addict is summoned into a quest narrative: “Wisdom is the most rewarding prize waiting at the end of the path.”615 The phases of this narrative, reinforced by weekly therapy sessions, intentionally replace the “magic fatalism” of
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Escapism Escapism! That’s bad, right? Well, it depends. C. S. Lewis aptly notes that every act of reading involves escape, in the sense of mental projection into the world conjured up by the text.620 According to Lewis, there are two kinds of escapist readers. One egocentric (and baser), one self-transcending (and nobler). The former reads narrative for “egoistic castle-building”—the vicarious thrill of imagining the protagonist’s exploits (erotic; military; entrepreneurial; etc.) as one’s own.621 The latter seeks the “enlargement of our being” that comes from exposure to other worlds and
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Dignify the Mundane
Stories are a sacramental medium: “Stories hint that our taken-for-granted realities may, in fact, be fraught with surprise. There are ‘rumors of angels’ and grace abounding in our world. If a frog might be a prince, a lost sailor an angel, a pilgrim the Christ, then all of creation may be a sacramental presence pointing to ‘Something More.’”632 Furthermore, since most stories told by humankind have positive resolutions, we often emerge from the world of narrative with renewed hope.633
Hope
