No matter your trade, station, vocation, or hobby, at one point or another you will likely come across the opportunity to tell a tale or two, be it about the size of the fish you didn’t catch or the distance of the marathon you didn’t run. We all tell a tale or two given the occasion.
Our lives are storied lives; we live stories, and we live within stories. Stories make for us a symbolic world within which we may reside. Given this, I think not of stories to read “before I die” but of stories to read in order that I might live richly. Some stories are like an entire house, while other stories are like the furniture inside a house. I tend to think of my own life as a story similar to the latter and the biblical story as a story similar to the former. My story resides within the biblical story. The biblical story then creates a symbolic world within which I may reside. Sitting in a single room of the house will not, of course, divulge all the happenings in the rest of the house. Discovering other rooms then is half the fun, and discovering other rooms in the house provides more symbols with which I might engage life.
Needless to say, the bible is not the only story. There are myriads of other stories. Whether we realize it or not, we are furnishing our houses with the stories we watch, hear, and read. If this is the case, then we will surely be careful what sort of stories we involve in our furnishings. I doubt if anyone desperately desires to put a mud puddle in the middle of the living room. However, some stories are not pleasant, but they are important. Therefore, I do not suggest that anyone should furnish the house with only pillows. We need more than pillows, lest we make for ourselves a padded room – and those are for crazy people. Also, it might be said that it is quite easy to decorate your house without spending so much as a bead of sweat and a dollar. But those who are unwilling to do the work may find themselves in a house without windows, a house resembling a coffin.
Regarding stories in such a manner, it is then less about reading particular stories “before you die” and more about reading particular stories in order that you might live with them. Whether we like it or not, we live storied lives, and the stories we invite into the house will most certainly set the trajectory for the sorts of lives we will live and the sorts of stories we tell.
What is the psychological importance that is so often attached to being inside the 'greater' story that is God's story. In other words, why do people feel positive sentiments about this as a fact? I don't understand it. Teach me.
ReplyDelete