The power of stories to transform

Stacy, I think you might have misunderstood my rather too brief comment.

The Bible is not simply the story of a people - it is the product of a people, it reflects a community’s self-understanding. It is also, I think, intended to shape the life of a community - not merely the spiritual experience of individuals in relation to God. The whole of the Old Testament deals with the life of a nation. The whole of the New Testament deals with the life of believers in community - as ‘churches’.

In this respect it seems to me that the Bible is not like other literature - or it is like the collection of stories and traditions that a tribal community tells about itself in order to preserve identity and coherence.

What attracted me in your comments was the thought that a story can be transforming for an individual. My question was simply whether the biblical story could be transforming in the same way for a community, as it is read communally - not according to law but according to grace, in a manner that is genuinely healing, gracious, and life-giving.

I don’t see that the Bible has to work within the community setting purely as a ‘legal document’. Why can’t it function as a ‘work of art that holds deeper truth than we can ever comprehend’ as it is read communally? This may not come easily for us - I agree that too often the instinct of the herd is to look for rules to follow. But surely we have the opportunity in this postmodern transition to learn a different way of responding as ‘churches’ or communities of faith to the narrative of scripture?

For example, rather than think of scripture as providing ‘rules’ for community life, why not think of it as more like the script of a play that a community of actors performs or even improvises around? The group finds its identity and coherence and purpose in the script but must also bring it to life - and must do so for an audience. What moves the audience - and the actors, for that matter - is not a set of mechanical instructions. It is the drama of the piece, the passion and hope and change of perspective that it generates. That is a far more powerful thing than one person picking up the play and reading it in private.

If, generally speaking, we give up on community because we have been seriously disappointed or hurt by it, I think we greatly diminish the scope of the biblical vision for creational wholeness and life. I understand that for many people at the moment the only way to preserve faith and sanity is to withdraw from dysfunctional Christian community. But we can’t stay there. We have to move beyond isolationism.

This whole conversation so far reminds me of a book I read, "Eat This Book" by Eugene Peterson. He writes a lot in it about the importance of narrative, that we cannot "change or discard the form without changing and distorting the content". If you're really interested in this I'd recommend his book, I found it incredibly useful. And in relation to the above comments… I think we need to have 'churches' in some form, we are exhorted not to neglect the meeting together of believers, right? Those meetings will by nature mean they are more appealing to some than others. But that does not and should not come at the expense of our willingness to include everyone. Jesus never (that i know of, I could and very possibly am wrong!) calls us out of our culture or community… he calls us to live out the transformation within those communities.

Hi Stacy, please don’t throw your oar in, just keep splashing it about and you might help us all make some progress!

This is my first engagement with your contributions to the site. I recall, about six months ago that you had an exchange with John (Doyle) about the recycling of basic stories that you have to do with Disney, which he found hard to believe. (Someone hasn’t read Booker’s Seven Basic Plots!) And it’s probably me, I got halfway through and thought he was being over generous. If there are seven basic plots only a couple of them seem to get produced!

I want to try to weave some points from the discussion together here.

We have had two distinct understandings of ‘story’ so far in this thread. Andrew speaks of story as the product of the community. Elsewhere I took a similar but less theological line in a True Myth thread. You and others have taken a more contemporary line with story, the way we respond to the stories made by others and their impact upon us, individually and culturally. I expect that you, in the industry, have had conversations about ‘can film change lives’ and the like. I am skeptical about this because of the distinction between these two types of story. We have story as commodity, as entertainment, and I believe this type influences little but expresses much. But I would take a different view of the cumulative cultural effect of, say, a generation of subtexts (where much of the most potent narrative emerges).

In this arena I suppose the reason is that we hear lines or read events in these stories and where we identify, we accept, and where we accept we take something away with us. But the deliberate narrative in these produced stories is far less potent, still, than the stories we live. So, the story buried inside the High Street, or the shopping mall, is far more potent than the story we might take in at the cinema, simply because this is a lived story.

What strikes me about this is that the effect of story seems to come less from the surface of the stories, from the tale if you like, and more from the unspoken, the non-verbal levels.

Where I think we narrow the conversation too far is in our suspicion that we somehow have to draw dogma from story as if this were the pearl (subjugating narrative to doctrine, again!) What if the paradigm were different, what if our quest were to derive wisdom from narrative? Wisdom is not a topic that has featured highly in this sort of discussion so far. What if the task were to draw inspiration from the text?

There was a little book a friend of mine wrote a few years ago called ‘Uncommon Sense”. His premise was simpler than the book, there is wisdom in scripture for every area of life. (He is currently working on another book on biblical wisdom for American foreign policy). But here I think he has made a useful contribution, God has wisdom for architects, for mothers, for dentists (somewhere there must be something for dentists!) and, massively, for politicians and economists!

While not wanting to go into this here, I think this sort of approach gets close to what the Bible says about biblical authority, that all scripture is inspired and is useful, where the question is about what use we make of it.

Just now I am exploring some non-verbal narrative with my network of friends, asking each other, given where we have come from and what we believe, how then should we live. Quite literally, what should our homes be like, our way of being community and so on. This has led to a speculative project in domestic/community architecture, how we design spaces for a community of people who want to be together in order to be creative and express something of our connectedness in an inclusive way. The process is fascinating, as all creative processes are, not least because of how there is potentially a prophetic element even to architectural design. We are proposing and opposing different things in the design, consciously resisting some qualities and embracing others. Even if our ‘cloistered community, where walls act like doors’ is never built, the design process is teaching us a lot about what our story really is.

I guess this leads to a single point. Stories come at us all the time, but the stories that work are the stories that come from us. And I guess this can begin anywhere, where two or three are gathered over a pint and cigar perhaps, and how these few welcome others in the pub into their conversation and seek common ground, shared experiences, and the meaning we give these things.

Scriveners of the world unite, and one day we’ll make sense of something!

Keep splashing.