Narrative: What's Yours?
Stories inform our lives.
Everyone loves a good story, after all. Give me a harrowing quest, unlikely friends banding together, and unexpected love any day. I will soak it up like a sponge. It doesn’t matter which medium either: box office, theatre, ballads, novels, biographies, ballet, or livestreaming services. It doesn’t even have to be a good story. Leave me there with it long enough for me to understand the gist of it, then try to pull me away. Good luck. Sure, I might roll my eyes at bad acting or poor quality CGI, but secretly, inwardly, I just want to know what happens!
Stories are everywhere. There really aren’t that many original plot lines, if you put your head to it. Unrequited love. Boy meets girl. Impoverished girl falls in love with prince. Tragic love and feuding families.
Romance not your thing? Try unlikely heroes, ragtag friends, and a quest to save the world. Or a brilliant, socially awkward detective who solves unsolvable crimes. Or your regular Clark or Peter suddenly picks up superpowers and saves the world from the next ugly villain.
Note the themes: love, knowledge, courage, good versus evil, saving humanity. I’m going to propose a few things.
First, we gravitate to the stories that tell our story.
I heard once that many early comic book writers were Jewish. What do all comic books have in common? A superhero to save the world from otherwise unvanquishable evil. What do all Jews have in common? They are waiting for their Messiah to come and save them from the evils of this world.
A little closer to home, I can testify that I am drawn to Cinderella retellings. I truly can’t count the number of Cinderella stories that I have read or watched. I love Cinderella. Why? A girl who has nothing and no one is seen and heard by her fairy godmother and her dreams become reality. She longs to be loved, but she is desperately afraid that her prince will not love her when he sees her as she is: poor and entirely unlike him.
Psychoanalyze that all you will. There is a depth to that story that speaks deeply to my heart, namely that there is a deeply rooted fear of being rejected for who I am when the glitter fades and the coach poofs back into a pumpkin.
Second, we internalize stories.
The stories that we gravitate to end up shaping our lives. Unfortunately, they can deform us rather than inform us. Take my example of Cinderella: if I think that I must simply show up to a party in a beautiful gown and voila!, I will live happily ever after, I will be sorely disappointed. There is no easy love. There is no prince who will perfectly fulfill all my dreams. I love my husband dearly, but love is certainly not all pumpkins and glass slippers, and I don’t “get my prince” by dressing myself up to be someone I’m not. Real love is about going through the nitty gritty together and making a commitment to stand fast through the bad as well as the good – but you don’t learn that from Cinderella.
Third, every story we tell reflects the Great Story.
Unrequited love, courage in danger, powerful knowledge, and good triumphing over evil… all of these are reflected in the great narrative told to us in Jesus Christ. There is one big difference though, from this story to the ones we like to tell ourselves today: we are not the subjects of the Great Story. We have taken the narrative of an unfaithful people and an ever-loving covenant God, of a God-man teaching, healing, and suffering for his created humanity, of the epic struggle between Good Friday and Easter Sunday and we have turned it into Prince Charming and Superman. We have made the Story about us trying to redeem humanity, love, and courage.
We end up disappointed. For truly, only one King can rule perfectly and justly, only one Saviour can vanquish every dark place and corrupt villain, only one Lover can love deeply, passionately, and unconditionally, and only one Lord solved the world’s most unsolvable riddle. Any attempt to tell the story with a different character in the middle of it falls flat.
I’m not saying to stop reading fiction or streaming Disney+. I am asking this: What narrative are you gravitating toward? Which story are you internalizing? How does the Great Story begin to meet your need for whatever it is that you are looking for in your favourite narrative?
