Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

Tolkien (in Tree and Leaf) describes the archetypal upbeat ending: “A sudden joyous ‘turn.’ . . . However fantastic or terrible the adventure, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to tears.”634

The film producers of Hollywood recognize the enormous emotional impact of this archetypal plot structure. Whether for base commercial or noble philosophical reasons, their films rely on the same upbeat plotlines as classic fairy tales and the Judeo-Christian narratives. (Ironic, given the tendency of conservative Christianity to demonize Hollywood.)

Establishing a Personal Point of View Narratives give us tools for constructing a life-affirming personal story. Through narrative, we find perspective for healing the pain of our past. “Story . . . helps the person to go back, not to change an unchangeable situation, but to reinterpret it creatively.”639

By reading other stories, we learn to tell our own unique story. We become “a subjective storytelling ‘I’ whose stories about personal experience become part and parcel of a storied ‘me.’”640

Many of us have been captivated by classic “coming-of-age” stories, because their plot emboldens our search for our own voice, our own identity, our own story. (Think of the power of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, or the poignancy of the movie Dead Poets Society.) Perhaps there’s a particular book or film that established and empowered your own view of the world. If so, you may benefit from contemplating that story’s impact on you. Was the story simply a one-time trigger for ...

Through the temporary sojourn of reading, we gain a self-transcending viewpoint on our own situation. We get the lens of di...

To illustrate how story can bestow the healing gift of personal point of view, let us mention the Freedom Writers.642 In the 1990s, Long Beach, California was dubbed the “Gangsta-Rap capital” of the USA. Walking to school, teenagers risked the cross fire of gun battles between rival gangs. Every teenager knew someone who had perished in gang violence. As a new teacher, Erin Gruwell found her class overwhelmed by apathy. She wrote, “To some of these kids, death seems more real than a diploma.”643 Nevertheless, Gruwell found a way to motivate her students. She assigned two classic diaries, written by teens under the dark shadow of war. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl; and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo. Seeing so many stark parallels between these lives and the lives of her students, Gruwell wrote, “I think they’ll be surprised how life mirrors art.”644

The result: her students began to devour literature voraciously. They began to write their own diaries. They found their own voices. They abandoned the fatalistic belief that violence and racism are inevitable. They began to believe that stories could change the world. Read the book (Freedom Writers Diary) for yourself; or, at the very least, rent the movie adaptation (starring Hilary Swank).

20 Selves under Construction (3) A Work in Progress

In the last two chapters, we have felt out the power of story to shape our identity—both for good and for ill. Chapter 18 underscored the harmful effects of owning a defective personal narrative. Chapter 19, as a counterpoint, highlighted the healing power of healthy narratives.

How does one acquire a story? The culture in which one is born already has an image of time, of the self, of heroism, of ambition, of fulfillment. It burns its heroes and archetypes deeply into one’s psyche. The tendencies and fears of one’s parents, the figures one hears described in church, the living force of teachers and uncles and grandparents and neighbors, the example of companions along the way, the tales read in books or visualized in legend, cinema, the arts: all such influences impress one’s imagination with possible courses of action, possible styles of life.652

Such lists do not exhaust the sources of our life scripts. We can sprinkle some other influences into the mix, and get the following (non-exhaustive) inventory of influences: • cultural scripts (see chapters 15–17) • the arts: stories in the form of novels, films, plays, etc. • role models (from real life) • daily conversations (oral storytelling) • virtual conversations (online storytelling) • rituals (see below) • games (e.g., most video games are “dragon slaying” or “quest” narratives) • role-play653 • replayed memories (e.g., “the Sculptor” [discussed in chapter 18])654 • dreams and daydreams655

Actually, most of the listed sources of scripts have been around for millennia, and people survived with their identities intact. However, the twentieth century immersed us in an accelerated culture, in which script bombardment increased exponentially. Let’s tabulate three cultural epochs to illustrate the problem:657

Traditional Society Modern Society Postmodern Society oral culture print culture digital culture (TV, internet, computer games) relatively limited stock of mythic-religious stories wide range of stories (novels; newspapers) limitless choice of stories (global narrative industry)

Facebook. Twitter. Email. Voicemail. Feel overwhelmed? Join the club. Kenneth Gergen (a psychologist) coined two terms that describe the disorientation felt in the electronic village. “Multiphrenia” (i.e., schizophrenia on steroids); “the Saturated Self.”658 Our identity gets molded by two-way traffic: stories we tell and stories we hear in daily social interactions. When the quantity of that traffic increases exponentially, and the kind of traffic diversifies pluralistically, the self-image equivalent of a multi-car pileup looms ahead. Hardcore postmoderns go one step beyond Gergen, and affirm (or celebrate?) the death of the stable self. “Rather than cementing an identity as an ontology of the person . . . [we] start from the assumption that narratives form something like a playground—a ground that allows us to test out identity categories.”

Even if we disagree with these postmodern denials of coherent personal identity, we must still take seriously the shaping power of conversational stories. Informal social interactions (real or virtual) give us the platform for telling the story called “this is who I am.” For every weekly sermon that Christian teens fidget through, they have thirty, sixty or a hundred digital social media interactions. To an extent far greater than most of us realize, “selves are ‘talked into being’” via mundane everyday discourse.661 Let’s give a concrete example. As a writer, my eyes and ears are always open for material. (Don’t tell me your personal stories, if you wish them to remain private!) Here’s some material I heard riding the subway. The speaker: Yolanda, a young African-American lady (single mom?) The addressee: a girl, around ten years old (her daughter?) The discourse went something like this: Them bitches in my hair salon, they done me wrong. Rich lady comes in, they sez to me, “Yolanda! You sweep up the hair!” I’m new, so I don’t get no say. So I’m sweeping the floor. Rich lady sits down. One of them bitches gets to cut her hair, and gets her big fat tip. Bitches only ever let me work the poor customers. But them bitches are going down! Once I work there another month, I’m getting in their faces, and they’re going down! Listening to this narrative, I sympathized with Yolanda. I’ve had jobs where I was low down the pecking order. That said, I did wonder about the impact of Yo...

This was a very one-sided conversation. Usually, however, there’s two-way traffic. Our audience impacts the telling of the tale in which our identity takes shape. The self-image we project, and the plotline we own—both are impacted by our audience. When a group of teenagers share stories, the need to “hold the floor” is paramount. This social constraint tends to skew the way narrators depict themselves. Suppose the narrator participated in a traumatic event. How do they describe their role? McAdams notes a bias toward extreme images of self: “as brave and courageous (John Wayne), [or] caring and concerned (Florence Nightingale).”662 Audience also shapes the plotline we own (or are allowed to own). Take the stories typically told in support groups for caregivers married to patients with Alzheimer’s disease.663 Caregiver narratives oscillate between two extreme plotlines. One, with caregiver as “martyr,” is a subgenre of tragedy. (The caregiver fights a losing battle, persevering in a relationship that becomes increasingly one-sided and one-dimensional.) At the opposite pole, caregivers who position themselves as “realists.” Their I-have-my-own-life-to-live plotline is a subgenre of rebirth narratives, in which they project a future freed from the increasingly futile caregiving that consumed their identity. My job isn’t to pass judgment on either narrative. Rather, I would simply note that caregivers tend to feel guilty about voicing the second plotline. Accordingly, the sec...

In sum, constructing our narrative identity is a collaborative effort. It happens in conversations, in which our audience shapes our story (and we shape theirs).664 Let me offer a powerful example of this multi-vocal experience—a true clash of narratives.665 Our protagonist: Tom, “a 66-year-old married, middle-class White man . . . diagnosed with a chronic depressive personality.”666 ECT didn’t work. Medication didn’t work. More in desperation than hope, Tom’s psychiatric unit handed him over to narrative therapist Stephen Madigan. The latter encouraged Tom to tell his own story in his own words. Since retirement, Tom had felt “bored and unaccomplished.”667 The hospital treatments had only increased his sense of futility. Tom reached the point of questioning if his life was worth living. Interestingly, though, an unquenched passion for gardening flickered amidst the despair. Madigan took the unusual step of inviting Tom’s friends to write Tom letters of encouragement, containing these upbeat narratives: In the letter could you relay an experience you have had with Tom that you see as neither boring nor unaccomplished, and indicate what kind of future you would like to enjoy alongside Tom.668 In response: forty-one letters, with hopeful counter-narratives about Tom. Emboldened by these alternative scripts, Tom held a celebration party, and checked himself out of the psychiatric unit. Taking a birds-eye view, we can approximate Tom’s journey as the “rebirth” archetype (discu...

The dialogic quality of personal narratives; the unpredictability of the future. Two reasons why our life stories remain works in progress. Our narrative selves “are on the way to becoming authentic, as long as they continue to transcend themselves and recast themselves in the light of every new step of self-discovery.”669

In sixth grade, Dennett dreamed of building the perfect robot.673 Through grad school, he was lured by an image of elegance: perfectly-regulated robotic movement. This aesthetic quest has dominated his professional life. Intriguingly, though, his private life differs. A series of (largely unsuccessful) relationships with women; all his partners being spontaneous, passionate (and highly unstable) types. The opposite of robots. Dennett’s quest, driven by an image of control, was successful in the professional sphere. But the successful quest left a void: the absence of spontaneity, which he compensated for in his private life, via his repeated choice of out-of-control partners.

Dennett’s life story unfolded through the pull-and-tug of competing desires and values. The emotional austerity of his professional life, versus the emotional excess of his private life. His turbulent romantic relationships represent a kind of “Mardi Gras” for the engineer. (The cultural script of Mardi Gras institutionalizes a time of carnival and feasting prior to the season of austerity of Lent.) How does this resonate with your own story? Are there some areas of life where you compensate for the limitations of your major script? If so, what does this tension reveal about your values? How has the pull-and-tug shaped the big decisions over the course of your life?

The story of Dennett the robot-designer also hints at a broader reason why we often need to revise our personal narrative. This reason surfaced in chapter 11 of this book: the approximate fit between tidy narrative genres and the messiness of the real world. In order to plan our life trajectory, we need a plot. But standard plots are merely ways of entering into conversation with our past, a conversation where our past threatens to have the last word: “While local and broader narrative formats offer familiar or conventional guidelines for how stories might unfold, they do not determine individual storylines. Who and what we are is not frozen in available discourses of subjectivity.”674 This dialectic, between genre and reality, is neatly illustrated by the “narrative elasticity” of the standard recovery template offered in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.675 In the standard AA narrative template, “hitting bottom” is the crucial turning point. Before you can receive help—runs the original script—you must reach a point of total despair, where you realize alcohol is costing you everything, up to and including your very life. However, in later versions of its script, AA modifies its t...

The journey into a true story is rarely smooth. But the journey metaphor sheds light on the process. A journey into a true story implies an exodus out of a false (or inadequate) story. So let’s focus briefly on deceptive stories, and the possibility of escaping from self-deception.

Narrative psychology appears to offer a sharper account of self-deception. Sarbin argues that self-deceivers, like all of us, rely on narratives to explain their role in the world. They are the protagonists in the stories they tell. Their stories rely on the standard narrative elements of contexts and causes. Only, in the case of self-deceivers, key contexts get skewed (or omitted), and erroneous causes get attached to events. The benefit accrued from these narrative distortions? Protecting or enhancing the identity or image of the protagonist.

Here is a criterion I can fully resonate with. The story of Jesus is the ultimate touchstone of a good story. To end this chapter, let us reflect on some of the processes through which the story of Jesus can reshape our personal and communal narratives. * * * * *

“The Holy Scriptures are story-shaped. Reality is story-shaped. The world is story-shaped. Our lives are story-shaped.”686 Indeed, we humans may literally (biochemically) be hardwired for and by stories. As evidence, consider the research of Paul J. Zak, a neuroeconomist (yes, this is apparently an academic discipline nowadays). Zak showed participants a short, poignant film about a father coming to terms with his toddler’s losing battle with cancer.687 The film was classically crafted to follow the five-phase dramatic arc of tension (discussed in chapter 7 of this book). The result: viewers’ brains showed increased levels of cortisol (the chemical associated with distress) and oxytocin (the chemical associated with empathy). However, if viewers were presented instead with merely the bare, undramatized facts of the account, this produced little if any emotional or chemical response. Accordingly, when God re-shapes us, He uses the gospel narrative—in many media. Here are some of the rich media through which we internalize the gospel narrative. Formal expositions of Scripture. Private meditation upon Scripture. The church year. Prayer. Ritual. Conversation with fellow-disciples. We won’t discuss all of these here, since many of them feature elsewhere in the book. Here are the cross-references for some of these topics: • Expositions of Scripture: In Part 4, I provide extended commentary on several biblical texts, as a lens for exploring various dimensions of a life lived insi...

Which leaves prayer and ritual—two powerful means for internalizing the story of Jesus.

We don’t always think of prayer as participation in God’s narrative, perhaps because our prayers are so atomized (“Lord, please speed up my recovery from my bout of flu!”). However, if we undertake a study of prayer in Luke-Acts, paying attention to the strategic plotline location of its major prayers, a striking conclusion emerges: “Luke associates prayer with the movement of God’s redemptive drama, with gaining or disclosing insight into the reality of that drama and its central character, and with preparation for participation in the same drama.”689 Prayer, then, is a means for fusing our story with God’s story.690 So is ritual (which, of course, overlaps prayer).

Daniel Taylor discusses the overlap between narrative and ritual: [The] power of stories derives in part from their partaking in the character of ritual. Rituals are those things we do over and over again . . . Sacred rituals are those that tie us somehow to the transcendent, to everlasting things that are larger than ourselves. Human beings always have been and always will be creatures of ritual. There is something comforting in chosen repetition . . . it may begin as early as the unborn child’s familiarity with the mother’s heartbeat. It is reinforced by the rhythms of day and night, and of the seasons. At its most fundamental, ritual is a vote against chaos and randomness and arbitrary death.691

But it did make me ponder: are we Christians making enough use of our own rituals that embody the redemptive narrative of the gospel? Let’s end the chapter with mention of a couple of our obvious Christian rituals: song and Eucharist. Let’s start with the Psalter. The psalms, of course, were originally poems set to music. The parallel rhythmic structure of Hebrew poetry, plus the enhancement of music, intensifies the affective power of the material. And much of the material of the Psalter is narrative. Many psalms are compressed autobiographical narratives, in which the psalmist struggles before God, trying to make sense of his troubled life story. Many other psalms are dramatic recitals of the mighty acts of God in history. The rhythms of Hebrew poetry shaped the hymnody of the primitive church; the well-known nativity hymns in Luke 1–2, for example. In addition, many scholars detect hymn fragments in some of the letters. One of my favorites: Col 1:1–15. This hymn celebrates the comedic plotline of cosmic reconciliation, in which Christ ushers in a reign of universal peace under God. Perhaps this hymn was in mind in Col 3:16, where Paul encourages the ritual of sacred song as a means of internalizing the gospel narrative. Lastly, the Eucharist. Liturgical scholars have noticed the narrative performance dimensions of our celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

I like to think of the Eucharist as “a tale of two feasts,” encompassing the grand sweep of salvation history. The Passover/Exodus echoes root the church deeply in the ancient covenant narrative of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The prospective dimension of the feast looks forward to the end-time banquet, celebrating the final victory over death, announced poetically in Isaiah 25:6–8. When I participate in the Eucharist, I participate in the sweeping metanarrative that runs from Exodus to New Creation. According to Robert W. Jenson, recovering the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper and its surrounding liturgy may be the single most important task for any church that wants to communicate with the postmodern world.696 Jenson points out that postmodern people no longer inhabit a “narratable world.” (Recall our discussion, in chapter 5, of postmodernism as the loss of the “grand narrative.”) For postmodern thinkers, there is no big-umbrella story under which all humanity can shelter. There is no overarching coherence to world history. Accordingly, the claim of the Christian gospel frequently falls on deaf ears. In this context, Jenson offers a thoughtful response: “If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.”697 How, exactly, can the church be the embodiment of a narrative world? Through the liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, which symbolizes and enacts the great drama of Scripture, the true story...

Before we leave this chapter, I cannot resist briefly mentioning another (re-)emerging medium for indwelling God’s story. I’m referring to the contemporary recovery of an ancient practice—the memorization of scripture for oral recitation in community. This practice recognizes that the Bible was the product of an oral (mass illiterate) culture. Back then, most written texts were scripts for public performance. So think of the four Gospels as dramas to be reanimated, with voice and gesture, in a communal setting. Or the letters of Paul as speeches in the classical tradition, to be “channeled” by a sympathetic interpreter, whose vocalization and gesture embodied the virtual presence of Paul in the church gathering. In response to these insights, I helped form a “troupe” of performers of Scripture. Our basic method: 1) select a sequence of texts, from Genesis to Revelation, which work together to highlight the narrative arcs of Scripture; 2) internalize and embody these texts, via interpretative vocalization and gesture; 3) perform the sequence for a live audience. You have probably never experienced anything like this, neither as a performer nor as an audience member. But the feedback we get, from both performers and audience, typically goes like this: “You enabled me to dwell in God’s story in a new and fresh way.”699

21 Twelfth Night

By contrast, the Gospels depict an apocalyptic Jesus who overturns our assumptions, much as he did the tables of the money-changers in the temple (Mark 11:15).

In the next two sections of this chapter, I will explore practices which can expose us to heavenly lightening bolts (even if they do not guarantee an epiphany). We will reflect upon the spiritual benefits of indwelling the church calendar, and of indwelling the Scriptures through the art of meditation.

In John’s sacramental worldview, the mundane can always open a door to the transcendent.

The song goes on to celebrate the twelve days of Christmas, ushered in by the Feast of the Incarnation (December 25th) and culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th). Nowadays, few churches even bother with Twelfth Night. However, “In Shakespeare’s England, Twelfth Night was such a big day that special entertainments were composed just for that occasion.”718 (Think of the Shakespeare comedy of the same name.) Traditionally, Epiphany celebrated the cluster of events that revealed Christ’s glory, including his baptism, the visit of the Magi, and the miraculous wine at the Wedding of Cana.719

In the House of the Galilean

Is there a remedy? The default Christian response to the problem advocates greater self-discipline. A stoic system of read-through-Scripture in one year. Don Hudson exposes the flaw in this behaviorist regimen: If the Bible really is the story of God, why must I treat myself like some prisoner in a labor camp who must discipline himself to do the dreaded duty of reading his Bible again? If you were an outsider hearing most Christians talk about reading their Bibles, you would think they were speaking of root canals or tax audits.727

Is there a way back to the garden, a gateway to a “second naiveté”? Suppose we discard our critical filters, abandon our quest for utilitarian moral/doctrinal nuggets, and give ourselves to Scripture like an expectant reader of Tolkien? Use our imaginations to enter and inhabit the narrative world of the text. Adopt a “childish” reading strategy as our entry into the kingdom of God (Mark 10:15).

If we follow our imaginations into the text, we may find our pathway converges with the venerable reading practices of the pre-modern church. The practice known in the Latin as lectio divina (“spiritual reading”), with its four connected phases: read; meditate; pray; contemplate. In the twelfth century, the ancient four-dimensional practice was crystallized by a European monk, Guigo the Second: Reading, as it were, puts solid food in our mouths, meditation chews it and breaks it down, prayer obtains the flavour of it and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us.728

In the history of the church, no one has unlocked the potential of this imaginative reading strategy more than Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1491–1556). Taken with discernment, we may learn much from him. Let us begin with a bit of his backstory.

Over the course of several weeks, I journeyed back to ancient Galilee to encounter Yeshua the Sage. Each day began with an imaginative walk. I pictured myself walking down a dusty street through a small Galilean village. (It helps to have toured the Holy Land; otherwise, illustrated Bible dictionaries may prove useful.) I felt the hot Middle-Eastern sun on my neck; smelled the animals jostling with the human traffic; paused to enjoy the shade of a palm tree. At the end of the street, my destiny. The yeshiva. Flat-roofed; secluded by a courtyard. Entering the narrow doorway, I am refreshed by the cool of the dim interior. The Rabbi sits at a table. He doesn’t notice me at first. His rich, resonant voice intones Torah; he sways gently, in a rhythm of body expressing the soul of the sacred words. He senses my presence. I greet him; he beckons me to sit down, as if he had been expecting my arrival.

Each episode in the Gospels is like a raindrop on the grass in the early morning sun. View the raindrop from an appropriate angle, and it captures the full spectrum of rainbow light. Likewise, each Gospel story, when it comes into focus, is a microcosm of God’s epic drama.

This present chapter is a bridge to the next part of my book, in which I share some of my formal meditations on texts of Holy Scripture. These meditations all engage the Bible as an overarching story. Entering and emerging from that story, I have often been changed as if by theophany. Maybe not Moses-and-Burning-Bush theophany, but the palpable presence of God nevertheless. In attempting to give verbal form to my meditations, I recognize that, apart from the energy of the Holy Spirit in the reader, they remain ink on a page. But I trust that the Spirit may honor my attempts to witness to the story of Yeshua.

Part 4 The World is a Dark Place—Stories Bring Light

22 A Clean Slate (John 13)

23 Redefining Your Personal Space (Hebrews)

“I wish I could find my place in life: somewhere I could thrive, realize my potential.”

Had I squandered an opportunity of a proper academic career, many irretrievable years ago? What fateful, regretful decisions!