The Death of Storytelling, Part 2

Some further reflection on this idea came up during conversations tonight, primarily the connection between the passing away of the art of (personal) storytelling, and the difficulty of our age with having faith.

Go back with me for a moment to the ancients, who lived like 900 years according to Biblical accounts. I imagine it would be much easier to have faith in something like the creation narrative when you had someone talking to you who had been there a few hundred years before. You can argue logic, science, and theory all day, but you really cannot argue with someone’s personal experience.

Karen told me today about a family we know, the father in whom had difficulty relaying to his children stories from his past. It was a huge event for them when he finally did so, and, in fact, they felt deprived of something until he began. Our faith was initially passed on orally, and the spoken word held so much power in nearly every culture for centuries. Now that we have attempted to replace that with something meant to augment it or walk alongside it (i.e.: the visual), we have become much more prone to fall into the realm of strict objectivity. This is a deadly cause of harmful forms of doubt as we are faced with shorter and shorter life spans. I find it difficult to even imagine Vietnam. When I no longer have my father’s stories to paint a picture of it in my mind, that ability to accurately imagine it will grow even more dim. I could easily see how history can be forgotten with this effect. Already we have those who claim that the Holocaust never occurred.

If we lose our passion for telling the story, then we lose the primary evidence we have for believing that history happened: personal experiences. Even generations removed, the accurate re-telling of someone’s personal experiences, even if they are long since passed away, hold enormous power. Similarly, the records of Christ’s life hold power to us today. God did not inspire writers for no reason.

Further, we have to turn from the the fact that we have forsaken instilling a love for fantasy and magic and miracles in our children for the instilling a love for objective science. No wonder it is difficult for us to believe in miracles when we haven’t grown up being told that the fantastic and unexplainable can, in fact, happen. Thus, we make the fatal leap in logic that a miracle cannot occur because we’ve never seen one (“a virgin can’t have a baby…when have you ever seen that happen?”).

To illustrate truth, Jesus used fiction. He told parables to paint what He needed to say about life. How is it that we have grown so obsessed with analyzing that life that we’ve forgotten the way He modeled perpetuating it? If we don’t re-discover this passion, I tremble for our future. I truly, truly do.

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