Present in every human being are two desires, a desire to know the truth about the primary world, the given world outside ourselves…and the other desire to make new secondary worlds of our own. (W.H. Auden)
These words illuminate profoundly an aspect of life that is more central than we might at first realize. For as true as these words are, as authentically as they touch upon desires and capacities within us, is it not also true that they do not express everything? What about our desire for love and relationship, our yearning for the invisible, and indeed what about all the other ways of relating to the world than mere “knowledge”? Also what about all the other forms of creativity that do not fit into the category of “secondary worlds,” as well as our desire to be of service to our brothers and sisters in the concrete reality of this world itself? But in fact, despite their limitation these words of W.H. Auden can help to illustrate an underlying truth that illuminates all of these other desires and fructifies them in a marvelous way. Namely, this is the primacy of storytelling.
Each one of us is caught in this mysterious drama between the already and the not-yet, between the given world outside of us which we yearn to know, to experience, and to live in all of its rich and variegated beauty—but which we also know is profoundly marred by evil, pain, and loss—and our longing for a world that is not yet tasted to the full, or rather this world (our own world!) made perfect and carried to beautiful and glorious fulfillment. Here is where the mystery of storytelling takes its place, not first of all in the sense of imaginative writing—“creative writing” as we call it in our education programs—but in the sense of the longing in the heart of each one of us to make contact with the narrative that makes sense of our life and of our world, and to participate with, to express, and to enhance this narrative so as to make this world a more beautiful place. In this respect, the longing “to know the truth about the primary world,” to be wedded to its truth and meaning in such a way that it becomes the lived experience of our life, is united profoundly with the desire “to make new secondary worlds of our own.” This is because we have the hearts of storytellers; we yearn to live and to tell stories; we yearn to create and to give life just as we have first been created and have received life. Seeing the beauty of the world, as well as its anguish, we desire to understand this, to get to the root of it all and make sense of it, to find enduring meaning within it; and stirred by the truth of this reality, we also desire to enrich and expand this reality, as it were, through our own creative activity, whether that be worldbuilding, storytelling, painting, drawing, sculpture, music, dance, or bringing forth children into this world and aiding them in discovering the truth, or seeking the benefit of our fellow men and women in all the varied forms of kindness, service, and presence that lie before us in this shared story that is ours.
But as per our theme at present, if we are to focus on storytelling and on the mystery of “story” more deeply, we realize something beautiful. We tell stories, we create secondary worlds, for one reason alone: to get a glimpse of heaven already now in this life, and to communicate this same reality to others. But surely that is an overstatement? Or at least a false simplification? There are countless reasons that we tell stories, in a certain sense as many reasons are there are persons, for each story is a reflection, an expression, of the creator’s own story and of what they see of the story of the world; and every secondary, imaginary world that a person fashions is born from the womb of their own creativity, from the hidden richness of their own inner life. And this means that their reasons for creating are as various as are their stories themselves; one person creates in a spirit of childlike wonder and play, another creates as a way of inciting societal change, and yet another writes as a way of processing his own anguish, trauma, or loss, and yet again another creates because he is told to, because he gets paid for what he creates. On the surface, this appears to be an obvious and indubitable truth, does it not? We are all so different! We should not do injustice to the uniqueness of each person and their motivations by trying to reduce everything to a common denominator! And yet even in the few examples given above about why a person may tell stories, we realize intuitively that not all reasons are of equal value, and some are simply inadequate, at least unless they are held in a deeper and broader reason.
Now it would be true that all reasons are equal if we were the sole tellers of our own stories, if we were the sole artisans not only of our own worlds but of the primary world itself. But when we look deeply as this reality, we realize that we could not create anything, nor would we desire to do so, unless we were first created, indeed unless we were created in the image of the Creator. In other words, we are creators because the very creative genius, the very self-outpouring love of the Creator of all things, lives within us and marks us in his likeness. The desire to create, therefore, is the divine spark within us, just as is, for example, the desire for endless life, the desire for everlasting happiness, and the desire for relationship, for love, for truth, the desire to enter into intimacy with another and to allow them, in turn, to take up repose in one’s own heart. This capacity for truth and love, of which storytelling and all the forms of creativity are a part, is what sets human beings apart from all other creatures upon the face of the earth. Animals also perform activities of various kinds; they also hunt and gather and mate, and some of them even build their own homes, even using an elaborate process that reveals a profound intelligence at work not in their own perception but in the reason and purpose that has fashioned their very existence and the instincts by which they live. We look all around us and we see a world filled with beauty and with profound meaning; we see a world rife with activity, with movement, with change and development, with countless species of creatures large and small, and with other living things that bring nourishment both to the flesh and to the spirit, nutrition to sustain the body and beauty to sustain the heart.
But unlike all other created things, the human person stands alone: alone in his difference, alone in his uniqueness as a person, alone as an “I” ever seeking a “You” in whom to rest. For he only of all creatures longs for more than this world can offer; he alone longs for more than himself; he alone becomes restless for a life more than that of the flesh, more than that bound by time and space, even as this deeper life also must give meaning to time and space, to this world and its stories as well as to the narrative that continues after the mysterious doorway of death. He alone can reflect back upon his own existence, its meaning and its origin, discovering within himself as it were a “bounded infinity,” a capacity for the infinite, a solitude-open-to-relationship that is crying out for communion with something, with Someone, who is greater than the world. He longs for a life of communion and enduring relationship—of love and truth and everlasting beauty—beyond the world, which nonetheless starts already in this world, sustains this world, and permeates it through and through, filling it with endless meaning even in its every detail. And thus the human person alone, this most bizarre of creatures who is at home in the world and yet not at home in it, can contemplate and delight in the glimmers of beauty, of truth, of goodness that shine through the fabric of reality, speaking of the Creator, and, in the light of this vision, yearns to create, to fashion, to give birth upon the model of what he has beheld. Indeed, all of his “seeing” and the creating to which it gives birth, upon deeper inspection, is born of and expresses the experience of “being seen” without which no coherent meaning or storytelling is possible.
This is the seed of truth that is expressed so poetically by the Storyteller, a blind old elf who has lived for millennia, and who upon touching objects and holding them in his hands can relive their “stories,” in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous:
The world is not made of things or matter even. It’s made of stories. They move from the past to the future, piercing our world at the point of ‘here and now.’ They give meaning to everything, they are the meaning, and everything else is only the setting required for stories to exist. There is nothing more real and alive than a story. And anything real and alive can die or be destroyed. Distorted. Forgotten… But as long as I carry these stories with me, they will not be lost.
Stories provide coherence to life, giving it a beginning, a middle, and an end, giving it a trajectory that makes sense of its various parts. Indeed, stories help to illuminate life and are in a sense, as the Storyteller explains, the very fabric of which reality is composed: the final analysis of reality is not scientific inquiry or proof, nor abstract philosophical speculation, nor the acquisition of power and wealth, nor even mere ethical or religious obligation understood in isolation, without the narrative, without the relationship that gives it meaning. Of course most of these are true and necessary as far as they go, and are part of the story of our life; for scientific truths or philosophical insights, for example, express and give concrete voice to the “givens” of reality, and help them to discern their contours more deeply, and thus to integrate them into our story more consciously. But without a consistent narrative, without the meaning that gives form and direction to the disparate insights, they remain just that: ideas floating in stagnant water with nowhere to go. And the inverse is also true, that even the most ignorant and simplehearted among us, who understand neither science nor philosophy, can be in communion with the very heart and meaning of reality, provided they are living intimately the true story of the world, and their own personal story within it. In fact it is often the simple and the little who live the great drama and beauty of this story more deeply and more directly than anyone else.
When we come, therefore, to the last-mentioned form of making sense of reality, namely to faith and religion—or at least to the Jewish and Christian story, for there are many religions and not all express the same understanding of reality nor the same approach to the divine—we realize something profound and beautiful. We realize that this reality is most deeply grasped and lived, not when it is understood (as we so sadly tend to think of it today) as a set of dogmatic propositions nor as a long list of moral imperatives (“you musts” and “you must nots”), nor as a self-righteous striving to attain superiority or security, but rather as our being immersed in the beautiful story that unveils the true beginning, trajectory, and end of all things: a story that is nothing else but the Love for which our hearts long, and which cradles and affirms all stories, all desires, hopes, and aspirations, indeed even all pain and loss, within itself, carrying them to consummation in an everlasting embrace of infinite meaning, purpose, and joy.
This is the true understanding of faith, of the faith which is God’s work within us and our own response to his loving approach, a response which is itself awakened and sustained by his love. True faith and religion is a personal relationship saturated in love, born of love, sustained by love, and growing unto the fullness of love. This is the truth that is revealed to us in the fullness of time, when the story of history—and of every life—is carried to its highest climax, taken up as it is into the very heart and body of the Son of God, who is God himself, who took to himself our own humanity and wedded himself to the story of our world, so that he could carry it back, in all of its suffering and anguish as well as in all of its beauty and capacity, into the heart of the great Storyteller. Yes, he carries it back into the embrace of the One-in-Three who is himself the perfect eternal realization of what every story in this world seeks to express: the victory and triumph of beauty, goodness, truth, and love, the drawing-together of Lover and Beloved in a profound dance of mutual presence that makes them one in the single Love which they share.
This is the mystery of the Trinity, of the one, single, indivisible God who has created the world and ever sustains it in love, who in his inner being is not mere solitude but togetherness, not a static essence but a dynamic life, who is love and movement and richness and abundant communication and reciprocity and delight, in the eternal union of the Father and his beloved Son in the one Holy Spirit whom they share. Whenever a person accepts the approach of God revealed to them at the heart of history—in any of the manifold ways that he approaches us—and they accept being “baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” they enter fully into the very inner secret of God’s own life. They live with him his own eternal story, just as they allow him to realize his story within them. Indeed, this wedding of the story of God and the story of each one of us is the great drama and beauty of existence, for it is the blossoming of the loving intentions of the great Storytelling regarding those whom he has fashioned, whom he has written into the fabric of existence, for no other reason than that he loves them so deeply that he desires to give them life, to give them being and story and purpose, adventure and play and wonder and delight, and to welcome them into the reciprocity and joy of his own everlasting life, the happiness that knows no diminishing and the light that knows no darkness.
In this perspective, we come to see so much more deeply and expansively the true beauty of storytelling, of story-living, in its most profound perspective. True story is simultaneously wonder and play, the activity of a little child discovering and marveling at the beauty of the world, living this story for no other reason than that it is beautiful, and good, and also empathy and compassion, the activity of the mature heart that reads in all the lines of history the hearts of persons considered brothers and sisters, persons often afflicted by evil and suffering, and whose dignity, having its origin in infinite love, cries out to be lifted up, redeemed, and made capable of happiness again. The Storyteller in Pathfinder himself expresses this in the same conversation, when he says:
It’s about the stories I keep inside. There is so much suffering and sadness in this world. And in my stories too. I’ve lived every one of them. I’ve drunk this bitter experience and accepted it in my heart. It’s hard. The weight of all this suffering on my shoulders. But I wouldn’t trade my burden for any other.
In combining this quote and the previous one, we see very vividly that the Storyteller is in fact an image of God, his icon, the one who carries all stories, in both their joy and their pain, within his heart, and thus allows them to live forever, to participate through his abiding love in his own eternity. This is the heart of God toward us, the God of whom Bernard of Clairvaux once said, “God cannot suffer, but he can suffer-with.” In other words, the God who loves us is himself fullness of life and goodness, untouchable by evil and unlimited by anything: he is everlasting joy in the consummate union of love. His life is ceaseless play and wonder, the delight and ecstasy of mutual belonging at the heart of the Trinity, and yet this life is not self-enclosed in the sense of being impassive, of being far from our own stories, our own sufferings and pains, indeed even our most anguishing, torturous loss and questioning; rather, it is intimately close to us in each and every detail, in every chapter, every page, every word, syllable, and letter of our stories. Indeed, his very abundant perfection is what allows him to be so loving, so close, to intimately embrace and insinuate himself tenderly into all that is precious to us, not as a foreign entity but as the only thing that sustains everything we love, and thus the only thing that can protect it from dissolution and loss and carry it into the eternity for which we long.
After all, if God’s gaze were not directed lovingly upon me at every instant, I would cease to exist, for his very love is the foundation of my being, and in fact of the being of each and every thing. Thus, even if created things are not God—if they are what they are in their own right, finite created realities born of his love—nonetheless they precisely thus express God, reveal him, shine forth with his light and his goodness, and precisely thus attract and ravish my heart with longing for happiness. The God who cannot in himself suffering lack or imperfection, therefore, out of the abundance of his love for me, has chosen to become One who suffers, and this he does not only in the depth of his own divine compassion (com-passio means “to suffer with”) and in his heartfelt empathy, but also by becoming a human being like us and taking upon himself everything that is ours, to carry it into the very inner life and experience of the Trinity. This is the awesome God that we have, the wonderful Storyteller who is not content to remain merely an author outside of the story, but himself becomes a character in its midst, indeed the most tragic of its characters, thus opening up in his own triumph on our behalf the path toward the true “happily ever after” for all of us.
And thus he is close in every moment, supporting, affirming, and upholding us in each stage of the story of our life, our greatest companion and our surest support, our deepest inspiration and our dearest Friend, indeed the true Beloved of our heart who satisfies every longing and consummates every desire, and who is himself ardently in love with us and seeks us out first, yearning for us to know the joy and fulfillment for which we were made.