Following on from Sunday’s thoughts on the Bible, someone sent me some articles on story. Below is one from Melvyn Matthews (formally Canon Chancellor of Wells Cathedral in Somerset), from his book, "The Hidden Word".
"Survival in the wilderness depends upon reaching the next oasis. Oases are watering places in the desert. Here springs of water flood out of the dry ground and date palms reach up to the sky. Here the travellers stop, pitch their tents and take on water and food for the journey. They rest awhile and in the evenings gather around the camp-fires to eat and tell stories. Some tell stories about themselves, about where they have come from and where they might be going. Others tell stories about those who have gone before, about their ancestors, those who have been travellers long ago. Some sing songs, ballads of loss and conflict, poems of fear and longing and desire. Some of the stories are true to history, others are true in different ways true to the inner life of the teller and his friends. Some travellers are voluble, seeking to impress. Others sit and listen, checking what they hear against the stories which course through their heart but which cannot be found on their lips or in any books. And the story-telling goes on a long time, well into the night. Some fall asleep where they sit and the fire grows dim. They love to tell and they love to listen, for the stories themselves are a kind of food on the way. What one tells is encouragement for another, but also each one’s story is encouragement for the one who tells it, since it enables the teller to see, perhaps in a new way, where he or she has come from and how it was that God spoke to them on the way. The stories are bread on the journey, revealing to tellers and hearers the,’ pattern of God’ action in the past and giving a promise of sustenance in the days to come.
The next morning the travellers set out again in different directions, grateful for the refreshment of body and soul. The body is refreshed by the food but the soul has been refreshed by the stories that were told. This refreshment is not just derived from the fact that these stories were entertaining - that they certainly were - but more deeply from the fact that they spoke about the human condition. Both the tellers and the listeners have heard about themselves in a different way. They saw themselves in the characters they heard about. They saw their present reflected in the past."
He goes on to say that the Bible is not so much a book of instruction, but a book of memories, a set of stories about our past, that as we listen to these stories we see ourselves as we truly are and are restored to our rightful place in our history. It is a book of remembering, in the sense of bringing the past to mind, and re-membering, putting ourselves back together with the past with which we belong and from which we have come - a putting ourselves back together when we have been dis-membered by the dislocations given to us by the spirit of the age in which we live.
When I listen to stories something inside me is stirred, moved. Today I listened on the radio to the story of a Christian woman whose husband had killed their two children 11 years ago, and how she was still grieving today, struggling to forgive, to move on. It was deeply moving and somehow I entered in some small way her world, and was moved with compassion. I didn’t want to tell her that she really should forgive … didn’t she know what Jesus said … that it would make life so much more bearable if she did …
Stories have the power to transcend what is right and wrong, and inspire love, hope, courage and faith …
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