Author Archives: Dave

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.

During the time I’ve worked with adolescents, I’ve discovered a frightening dis-interest in reading or communicating experiences. I remember a high school student saying about Scriptures to me at one point that, “If it were a movie, I’d watch it.” Don’t get me wrong, I love film, but we can never permit it to replace literature.

Something else I’ve noticed as a disturbing trend is how adolescents have a horrible distaste for writing, or re-telling what has happened to them. Instead of using the ability to post photos or video of an event to assist others in experiencing their story, the desire to tell the story has been completely replaced by posting photos or video. The next generation has lost its desire to tell stories.

Now, I’m generalizing a great deal. I’m worked with and know many of that age who don’t fall into the problem of which I’m writing here. I’m speaking as a rule, though. Listen to the average middle school (or jr. high, depending on your locale) student when asked to write a story from their lives. Talk about a deer-in-headlights look.

What would the world look like if we lost the art of story telling? I don’t mean documentary recording, I mean story telling. Even the Scriptures were first primarily transmitted orally. I fear it is something that may die in our culture if we don’t do something to resuscitate it, and quickly.

I was grilling out with some family this weekend. While standing on my uncle’s deck, we became engaged in conversation with my uncle’s neighbor, who was also grilling out on his deck (don’t you just love suburbia?). This guy was a missionary, and had a million stories to tell. He said that his wife was a writer (just as I was about to offer my ghostwriting services) and planned to record his memoirs some day. I hope they do.

Or my grandfather on my wife’s side, who has tremendous war stories to tell, and who we may not have much longer. To have a life pass is not that tragic with the certainty that we will see that person again. But to lose the stories…our culture will suffer for that.

There is a private library where we live that has many letters and diaries and journals from those long since gone. Karen loves to go there and explore…she even did a paper on it in grad school. At first I thought it wasn’t really my thing, but how amazing to have those stories preserved.

Every life forever alters history, and irrevocably touches those around it. To honor that life by preserving its story must be the highest respect we can pay. If we lose our cultural aptitude for telling the story, we will have lost our link to our past, and, to overuse a cliche, be doomed to repeat it. We would also lose the fascination for telling fictional stories, one of humanity’s greatest creative endeavors. We would have lost so much, and it would be so difficult to regain.

What do we do to prevent this from happening? Well, the education system doesn’t seem to be working, so who knows. Perhaps spending time with people instead of working two jobs, or placing our elderly in nursing homes instead of listening to them. Whatever it is, we must do it quickly, or be forced to treat the literary casualties of a generation.