We are stimulated most by pictures and stories because we are imaginative beings; it is these that drive us and compel us to action. People are three-dimensional pictures, living stories, that evoke all sorts of emotions in us without saying a word. Our pity, disgust, awe, admiration, or any number of other emotions are provoked simply by seeing other people. Needless to say, even greater emotions are provoked by not only seeing people, but living with them, speaking with them, playing with them, and eating with them. That power lies not always in whether they agree with us in particular matters, nor whether they respond emotionally in the same way or to the same things as we do. Their power lies in the convergence of another story with our own and with the provocation of our imagination at a pictorial and story level. When we see someone else at a certain point in their story, whether happy or sad, a host of emotional engagements follow.
Two very essential parts of our makeup, community and imagination, are unified in relationship. We were made for story and we were made for community, and people to people relationships are the points at which these two essential traits conjoin. Here at the crux of our lives we find our desires moved, our longings redirected, and our vision colored by what our friends think. Why do I like that band? Why do I laugh at those jokes? Why do I sense euphoria or despair depending on whether that team wins or loses? The answer is simple, I usually like what my companions like. Quite honestly, many of my desires are not a matter of conscious, rational debate, but a matter of what people around me like or dislike; hence, the immeasurable power of converging stories.
God wired us to be moved by converging stories. My desires that evening in France were swayed and shaped by my companion; particularly by the singular and daring story of himself that he offered to my imagination. This propensity to be moved by the desires of those whose stories converge with our own was already there in the Garden of Eden. Eve was compelled by the snake’s swagger and the conceived story he offered her. Adam, for his part, was also compelled by Eve’s desire that he join her. Others hold great sway over us and this power is far too complex to address adequately in one chapter. It is worth addressing, however, the way in which the imagination is impacted by other people and why God uses people to speak into our lives.
Converging stories need not have a negative transformative impact on our own stories. The growing attention brought to servant leadership of late reflects a growing realization that converging stories also have tremendous positive power to transform not only individuals, but entire cultures. The face of western civilization, for example, is often shaped by the convergence of only a few stories into one location for the purpose of serving a greater story than their own. The Brethren of the Common Life were one such group. Although their order is remembered by very few, their impact on the west was immeasurable. Founded in the 14th century Netherlands by Gerard Groote, the brethren lived together in community, dedicated to a life of simplicity in the service of Jesus Christ. They took no vows and they asked for no alms; instead, they spent their days pursuing the inner life, working with their hands (I Thess. 4:11 and 12) so they might have their daily bread.
Gerard Groote was an educator before his conversion and so it was natural for him to make education of youth part of the order’s duties. Education at the time was terribly poor, so the brethren did whatever it took to hire the best school masters and train young men in the classics and in Scripture. The story of Gerard Groote and his small band of brothers is a powerful testimony to community, piety, and vision grounded in Christ. Some of their pupils moved the mountains and landmarks of western culture: Thomas a Kempis, Pope Adrian VI, Martin Luther, and Erasmus are among those whose life and thought was the fruit of Groote’s vision. He knew the power of converging stories. He knew the incredible need for servant leaders to raise up a generation of new servant leaders.
Servant leaders like Groote are living echoes of Christ, but their guiding principles are not limited to leadership. Every Christian’s mission is to further Christ’s mission. Christ’s mission was dedicated to converging stories. He spoke into the imagination, freeing people from their constricted worlds, and giving them God. The Gospels spill over with these encounters.
The man lowered through the ceiling in Luke, chapter 5, was living quite literally in a constricted world of self. He would have gone to Jesus, but he couldn’t. He was paralyzed. His friends were desperate. When they heard of this healer named Jesus, they knew that if they could just get him close enough, just nearby, then Jesus would do the rest. They tried to fight through the crowds of people and into the house by normal means, but the crowd wouldn’t give. Necessity is the mother of invention and the guys found a way. They climbed to the roof, jimmied a pulley system, and lowered him through the tiling. Their faith in Jesus, their imaginative capacity to see possibilities, resulted in a persistence that caught Christ’s attention. Imagine their surprise, then, when instead of healing their friend, Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven you.”
When Jesus heard the Pharisees whispering behind their hands about blasphemy and how only God can forgive sins, he said, “Is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk?’
“Here,” said Jesus, “let me show you that the Son of Man has the right on earth to forgive sins.” He turned to the paralyzed man and said, “Stand up, take your bed in your arms, and go home.” The man didn’t need to be asked twice. He got up, picked up the mat and went home praising God. This story portrays the convergence of Christ’s story with not only the paralyzed man, but the Pharisees and the man’s dedicated friends. We forget his friends, but I’m sure their faith, their imagination, was never the same.
In Luke chapter 18, we find a different young man constricted not by self, but by his possessions. The idea of eternal life sounded good and so he asked Jesus, “What must I do to win eternal life?”
“You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not give false evidence; honor your father and mother.”
This was good news for the young man and he said, “I have kept all these since I was a boy.”
Jesus looked straight at the young man. His heart warmed to the lad and so he said, “There is still one thing lacking: sell everything you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; and come, follow me.”
This was bad news for the young man and his heart sank. When eternal satisfaction was offered, he preferred temporary relief. He preferred his constriction of possessions to the expansion offered by Christ. The cost was too great. When Christ spoke into his life, he cut right to the sin that acted as a barrier between his imagination and God: his pleasure.
The woman at the well, narrated in John chapter 4, was constricted not by self, nor by possessions, but by her sexual sin. One day, Jesus was weary and so he sat by Jacob’s well. When a woman came to draw water, he asked her for a drink. When she hesitated, he told her that if she knew who he was, she would ask him for a drink and he would give her living water.
“If you drink of this water, you will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water that I shall give him will never suffer thirst any more. The water that I shall give him will be an inner spring always welling up for eternal life.”
Her imagination is mired in practicality and self-indulgence, so she cannot see far enough to understand. She would like to make her life easier by not having to walk all that way to the well so she could spend her time doing…other things. When Christ spoke into her life, he cut right to the sin that acted as a barrier between her imagination and God: her sexual license. The passage in the book of John shows a woman whose constrictions are expanding. This expansion is usually a painful process demanding self-denial. It is unmaking usually prompted by someone else.
C.S. Lewis provides another example of unmaking prompted by the encounter with someone else in That Hideous Strength.
Jane looked; and instantly her world was unmade.1
Jane Studdock was a level-headed, strong-willed, scholarly woman. Se was married to Mark, a college professor, and they were a modern pair. Their view of maleness and femaleness was modern, their view of marriage was modern, their view of mind and heart and imagination were all quite modern: refined, egalitarian, and dispassionate. In fact, just before she entered the Fisher-King’s2 room, she had told herself, “Be careful. Don’t get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you, if you don’t look out.”
But now she was unmade; her carefully crafted categories, her presuppositions, the entire life’s weaving she so fiercely guarded, and her conceived story were all unraveling in her mind. All the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man who sat on the sofa with a bandaged foot. At that moment, when her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely at a total stranger. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now.
She had meant to say, “Good morning, Mr. Fisher-King,” in an easy tone that would have counteracted the absurdity of her behavior on first entering the room; instead, she had said “Yes, sir,” with a soft and chastened voice when he asked her to forgive his not rising from the sofa. How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. She had (or so she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood—and the imagined Solomon—for the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power.
“And now,” thought Jane, “it’s coming—it’s coming—it’s coming now.” All the most intolerable questions he might ask, all the most extravagant things he might make her do, flashed through her mind in a fatuous medley.
“Don’t send me back,” she said, “I am all alone at home, with terrible dreams. It isn’t as if Mark and I saw much of one another at the best of times. I am so unhappy.”
“Are you unhappy, now?” asked the man. A dozen affirmatives died on Jane’s lips as she looked up in answer to his question. Then suddenly, in a kind of deep calm, like the stillness at the center of a whirlpool, she saw the truth, and ceased at last to think how her words might make him think of her, and answered, “No.”
Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the man the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even of pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problems was in fact involving her in new ones.
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The man said nothing.
“What would you say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said Mr. Fisher-King. “You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
We are often guarded, distrusting, and discontent just like Jane. We need people who will speak truth into our lives and tell us that we have lost love because we never attempted obedience. Like the man lowered through the ceiling, we are paralyzed, unable to heal ourselves and we need others to liberate us. Like the young man, we are constricted by our temporary comforts, preferring temporary relief to true satisfaction, and so we need someone to point us toward a better good life. Like the woman at the well, we wallow in our sin and cannot see living water even when it’s sitting right in front of our eyes. We need someone who will lead us to that living water and bid us drink.
Mr. Fisher-King moved Jane’s desires and he lead her into a deeper place of self-understanding. Like Jane, I need others to speak the truth into my life. People dedicated to the power of converging stories give us a taste of Christ’s direct, attentive, interaction with people and they have four particular qualities that reflect Christ: first, they move our desires; second, they lead us into deeper places of self-understanding; third, they lead us into deeper relationship with God; and fourth, they accomplish these three because they see us as God sees us.
I have been fortunate to have many people who lived out these principles when my story converged with theirs. I am most thankful for them because they spoke into my imagination and, therefore, moved me away from The Pinocchio Syndrome. They also saw me as God sees me. They saw with the eyes of faith. This ability to see beyond what is strictly before the eyes in regards to people is one of the most important gifts of a servant leader and anyone who wishes to imitate Christ.
A friend of mine works at a homeless shelter. He is a living volume of fantastic stories. One of my favorites goes something like this: it was his birthday and he was in a hurry to get home and celebrate with his family. He grabbed his keys, grabbed his coat, and headed out to his car. What should meet his eyes but a bum leaning against his back tire. Poor timing!
“Sir, you’ll need to move,” Bill said. I’m sure he spoke kindly and professionally, but the guy appeared deaf. Stooping down, Bill said it again, “Sir, I need you to move.” Still, the man was unmoved.
“If you’d like food or shelter, you can go inside and talk to the folks inside the mission. They can help you.”
The man looked up. Sunglasses, long matted hair, and a mopy sort of hat. “I’m coming home with you,” the man said quietly.
Bill was surprised. “I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.”
“I’m coming home with you,” the man said. He rose up from his sitting position.
Bill smelled hostility, but tried to stay calm. “Sir, I’m sorry…”
“I’m sorry too,” the man spoke with a raised voice and took his hat off in anger. “I’m coming home with you!”
Bill tried to stay unmoved. “I can’t let you do that, sir.”
The man stepped toward him and ripped his sunglasses off. “Yes, you will let me,” yelled the man.
“No, I won’t,” Bill replied.
The man took another step forward and said, “I’m coming home with you!” and promptly ripped off his wig. Standing before Bill was his younger brother who flew in from Colorado as a surprise gift for his older brother.
You can imagine Bill’s astonishment. It took him a moment to do the math before he realized that this transformed homeless man was actually flesh and blood. The tension and conflict suddenly vanished and relief struck home. Even after his brother removed the hat, Bill did not see him for who he was. Even after the sunglasses were removed, Bill did not recognize who stood before him. Even a moment after his brother stood clearly before his eyes, Bill had difficulty seeing the reality of things.
Because of various social and geographical obstructions, Bill couldn’t see beyond the veil. It beautifully illustrates the fact that we rarely see others as God sees them.Our imaginations strain to see beyond the veil. We are myopic in our relationships and forget that every encounter, no matter how passive, is an eternal encounter. Every relationship is the convergence of eternal souls and divine parables. How easily we pass over them, dismissively forgetting the actuality of things. How easily we forget that “there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory).
The gifts that God gives servant leaders are primarily imaginative in nature: they are often characterized by the ability to see what is not actually before their eyes and to hear what is not actually spoken. Their empathy, attentiveness, foresight, and ability to see possibility where others see only failure set them apart from other leaders who know only how to manipulate and maneuver. Servant leaders are persuasive precisely because they listen, build bridges over relational chasms, and conceptualize possibilities. We would do well to imitate them as they imitate Christ. We too can be healers and none of these activities require that we be perpetually solemn. These people lead us into deeper places because they have tasted those depths themselves and are, therefore, filled with a deeper Joy. Although there is no flippancy or presumption, there is a certain playfulness in those who are dedicated to the convergence of stories. They prompt painful change because they take our story seriously, but they do it with a certain merriment.
2Here Lewis avails himself of the Fisher-King legends found in the Grail stories of Arthur and his knights. The Fisher-King here is a Christ-figure, like that of Arthur, given charge “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). Both of whom are called “to fight not with the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (II Corinthians 10:4).
