humankind has always told tales. ‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world,’ says Philip Pullman.3 Stories are how we articulate our values, longings and anxieties – how we pass on what’s important to our children. ‘Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceivable,’ says writer Melanie Tem. ‘Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.’4
Stories give us room to grow. C. S. Lewis, whose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe continues to capture the imaginations of new generations of children, put it like this:
We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to ourselves... we want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own... We demand windows... my own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through the eyes of others.5
Sharing our own lived experiences, trading stories with one another, is a way of revealing that there are new possibilities, alternative narratives. Another way to travel, as Jeanette Winterson says: ‘True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier...’6
18
Let your body do the talking
‘If it’s something you understand,’ said the fourth-century Christian teacher Augustine, ‘then it’s not God.’1
Still, throughout history, we’ve tried to understand God and then tried to capture the understanding in language. Usually in words.
In the Christian tradition people came up with creeds – formulaic collections of dogmatic statements designed to button down correct belief. And they sought to exclude what they thought was incorrect, which came to be known as heresy. It took ages. For example, the most widely agreed creed used in churches today wasn’t settled on until around 300 years after Jesus’s death. It’s framed like a legal contract. (Sign here.):
... the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
before all worlds,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
being of one Being with the Father.2
It’s unlikely Jesus’s friends in first-century Palestine would have addressed him using language like this, unless they were taking the rise out of his growing reputation. Most of the time he was a bit of an enigma – often quite shy about revealing himself. There were times when he even told witnesses not to let on about some remarkable act he’d been involved in.
Whatever his friends thought about him, Jesus often gave the impression he felt called to speak for God. What we know about his life suggests he was onto something that we all should know. The novelist Tim Winton puts it like this: ‘Christ is an imaginative avenue to a larger mystery, the Divine.’3
Those who choose to follow the life of compassion, healing and generosity Jesus modelled think it signals something unique. Not just what he said, but who he was. ‘A body language for God,’4 is how the theologian Mark Oakley phrases it. A body language of signs and signals, an imaginative way of communication which is less precise and more open than words. Maybe that’s why one of the earliest records of Jesus’s life says that he spoke in parables all the time: ‘Without a parable he told them nothing.’5
These stories were open to interpretation, meaning different things to different people. Pretty much like Jesus’s life itself, says Professor Nicola Slee: ‘It is a story characterised by elements of shock, surprise, extravagance and reversal, and like the parables it is a story that is open to multiple interpretation, thus respecting both the freedom and creative imagination of every reader.’6
Who we are, and how we live, may be more significant than what we believe or how we say it. As Francis of Assisi is reputed to have told his followers: ‘Preach the good news at all times and, if necessary, use words.’
19
Seize the day
Some days you wake up and it feels like morning hasn’t come. And that it won’t. You reach for the alarm and turn it off and now the alarm’s inside you. Warning you this will be a dark day. And then that thing which is not light dawns on you.
She’s gone.
He’s not going to make it.
It’s over.
Perhaps it’s less personal, more political. It really happened. Change was going to come, and it came, and it was not a good change.
The sense of dread rises. Queasiness. The pit in your stomach as your fears become physical.
Notice these emotions, don’t deny them, says the Persian poet Rumi:1 ‘Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.’
These sorrows don’t have to be buried. Bleak is how some days look, and we don’t have to know how to react. We might have to sit in this gloom for a while. Perhaps time will help our sight adjust.
‘Dear Americans,’ wrote Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, the day after the 2016 US presidential election: ‘It will be all right in the long run. (How long? We will see.) You’ve been through worse, remember.’2
‘History takes such a long, long time,’ as the songwriter Bruce Cockburn, 3 sang. It was our mistake to think we could dictate its arrival time. No one knew this better than Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King, even on the darkest days. ‘The arc of the moral universe is long,’ he insisted, ‘but it bends towards justice.’4
Hope is not a synonym for optimism. Optimism is generated by the available evidence. But hope, says Professor Cornel West, will dare to defy the evidence. Hope says we can ‘go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities... to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever’.5
No guarantee, but our agnosticism about the future provides what essayist Rebecca Solnit calls a ‘spaciousness of uncertainty’. ‘Hope,’ she says ‘is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don’t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.’6
The waiting is our chance to decide how we’d like things to be. ‘Hope imagines the future,’ says theologian Walter Wink. ‘And then acts as if that future is irresistible.’7 People of faith may draw on the conviction that good is at work in history, the hope the ancient psalmist had when she could say: ‘Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.’8
For others, hope may rest in a sense that, for all
