The power of story

Everyone seems to like a good story. I certainly do – I learned to read early and have been an avid reader ever since.

I think one reason stories work so well is that they don’t demand that we understand them a particular way. They come alongside us, gently inviting us to find meaning in them and parallels with our own lives.

This leaves us wonderful room to find our own connections with the story. Since our brains love to find connections, we do and are often shocked at how powerfully a story touches us.

This works best when the story is new. Sometimes a story strikes us as a sequel: we’ve already met some of these characters before. We’ve already decided whether they are good or bad. We’re locked into a certain meaning by our previous experience and associations.

Or maybe not completely locked; but to accept a new meaning we need a very compelling reason to put aside the old one.

According to the Bible, Jesus told a lot of stories and he often didn’t seem to want to explain them. Why? Could it be because Jesus wanted to leave room for people to make their own connections and find their own meaning in his stories?

I think it’s fun to explore a story together and share the connections and meanings we find in it. My sense is that Jews have always done that with their sacred stories (the Torah). I like how they traditionally made up stories (called ‘midrash’, I think) which expanded on what the text says. I don’t think anyone pretended these additions were true – rather, they were devices to bring out meaning and discuss it.

Conservative Christian Bible teachers and preachers are often good at taking a story (usually from the Old Testament) and exploring meaning and connection in it. However, this is not a mutual exploration. The teacher or preacher is the Leader of the Expedition, cutting a new path through uncharted territory. The job of everyone else is just to follow along. It may be a meaningful path to many; after all, we’re all human and what connects with one of us will connect with others too.

But what about those expedition members who get excited about what they see in another direction and start cutting their own path? Instead of that being valued, they’re told it’s ‘wrong’ and that they need to get back on the ‘correct’ path instead. What if the Expedition Leaders were to say to those people “here, take my cutting tool – you have a go at making the new path now and we’ll follow you!” They generally don’t; they tend to hold pretty tight to their leading tools. After all, they are the ones qualified to use them – not their team members.

Now I understand why I feel resentful when the teachers and preachers talk about what hard work it is being Leader of the Expedition. It’s because I know they love it and find it exciting. And I don’t think it’s fair that they don’t share the fun around. If it’s that hard work why don’t they take more breaks and give other people more turns at it?

Is it safe to tell stories and let people find their own meanings and connections in them? What if the people get it wrong? What interests me is, Jesus didn’t seem worried about that. I wonder if he would have explained any of his stories if people hadn’t asked him to. Why wasn’t Jesus worried about people getting the wrong end of the stick because they came up with their own meanings for his stories? Maybe because he figured that God was big enough to handle whatever people would come up with. Maybe because ‘getting the right answer’ isn’t actually what life is all about, much of the time.

I think the power of story telling is often lost by methods used in evangelism. A big problem is that people already have bad associations with ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christianity’ or ‘the gospel’. Telling those people that this is the only story and they need to change their associations has not proven very effective.

Why not find new ways to tell the story, without the bad associations? I’d like to think there’s a story which works for everyone, if only we could find the right way to tell it.