Stories and the will of God

Life is worth living when the clutter of living is organized into stories.

It's not an easy thing to pull off.

A large part of life seems to be just clutter. And to counter the excessive clutter, we're constantly trying to arrange all of it into stories.

If only ... if only I can arrange this mess I'm in into a story, then it would all be worth it...

The trouble is, there are true stories, and then ones that are not so true. You can understand a person's life just by looking at the stories: The ones he tells others about himself. The ones he tells himself about himself. If the two batches are the same, and more or less of equal measure, chances are you have an honest person.

And then there are the stories others see in his life. Those are the most important.

One of the things I notice about the Middle Ages -- that is, the period of time in Western history after the collapse of the Classical world (read: the fall of Rome in the 4th century AD) -- is that lots and lots of stories began to fill culture. The medieval centuries were filled with stories.

Of course the Classical world had its stories too: Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, for example, or all of those escapades of the gods.

But the Middle Ages were filled with stories, not necessarily about mythical heroes, but about common people. Even animals had stories attached to them: the Bestiaries.

The lives of common folk, and common life itself, became organized into stories. Lots and lots of them.

Another term for those times is the Christian Middle Ages. Christian. I think about that in relation to the stories.

Can it be that, with the advent of Christ, and with the infusion of the Christian worldview into culture, the individual life of a common person -- not just the life of this or that king, but the life of a common person -- ascended to the possibility of stories?

That's what I look for in my life. Not willful actions on my part stitching together fictions or scenarios.

But in everything, I want to wait for the story to come.

I wait for the clutter to be organized into genuine stories.

Logos2Go

Hebrews 12.2 ... looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith ...