“Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.”

-from “After Your Death” by Natasha Trethewey

The locus of glory within the Christian tradition is the incarnation of Christ who is the Word, or Logos, made flesh (John 1); therefore, Christians are essentially people of the Word. We find glorious meaning in the divine Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, which are one enormous story, that begins with the first Adam and culminates in the second Adam, Jesus Christ. Jesus was the Word of God, the logos made flesh, who strode the countryside with a mouth full of stories. Most of the stories he told were, strictly speaking, fictional stories, parables. His stories were not real, they were not grounded in a real place or time, but they were true.

The larger Christian community is fond of exhorting believers toward a greater imitation of Christ as seen by the proliferation of What Would Jesus Do bracelets a few years ago. An essential aspect of Christ’s ministry, however, the telling of stories has been strangely overlooked. To regain an appreciation for and appropriation of stories, is to recapture a rather neglected part of the Christo-centric theology.

If we love stories, we imitate Christ. Unfortunately, we have a difficult time imitating Christ in this respect because 1) we have forgotten that God is the Master story-teller and 2) we have forgotten that the imagination is intimately connected to morality.

At the most fundamental level, narrative is simply a story with a story teller. God is the master story-teller-the first story teller. The Christian tradition believes that the great saga of history is a story-the linear story of God working in the world-God’s story. God spoke the story of creation and continues to creatively speak existence into being. We are the realization of his creativity and we live and breathe within his larger story. I believe, ultimately, with Stanley Hauerwas, that “the narrative mode is neither incidental nor accidental to Christian belief. There is no more fundamental way to talk about God than in a story” (The Peaceable Kingdom).

Our lives, therefore, have the elements of narrative and our pursuit of meaning naturally gravitates toward a narrative grasp of existence. That is why Peter Leithart says that, “the stories we read provide metaphorical models for understanding the story that God is telling with us” (Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader). If the way we understand all of existence is narrative in nature, then there must be a master story and a master story teller who has placed that narrative sight in our DNA.

The most reasonable, though perhaps unnatural, response to this understanding is to align our perspective with God’s perspective-to see history and our lives as God sees them, to willingly live within the Master story-teller’s master narrative: the over-arching narrative which we might call the metanarrative.

A metanarrative is an assumed story of which we are a part and by which we interpret everything that happens. Some have fondly called such a vast interpretive and defining framework a worldview, but I think the word worldview, though a buzzword within evangelicalism is far too narrow and does not necessarily account for the narrative structure that God has woven into His creation.

The word “worldview” connotes something categorical, a convenient ideological container into which we might drop various folks depending on how they answer the seven key worldview questions: 1) what is ultimately real? 2) what is the meaning of history? 3) what is man? 4) how do we know what is right and wrong? 5) how do we know anything at all? 6) what happens at death? And 7) what is the nature of the outside world around us?

It all sounds all so very academically neat and that is why the term has become a bit misleading. After all, our worldview is a very complex and fluid thing; far more akin to a narrative than to clear lines of logic. Of course a narrative view of the world answers these seven questions, but our worldview is also full of contradictions, dichotomies, and various other inconsistencies. For these reasons, I believe the word metanarrative is a more accurate and useful term as we learn to see the world as God sees it.

The words narrative and metanarrative have a growing following amongst philosophers and others in circles of higher academia. They have embraced these terms for various reasons, some of them postmodern in nature, but perhaps the rising popularity of narrative in academia is more than a philosophical fetish. Perhaps it is an awakening, gradual and stiff, to actuality; namely, narrative is the very fabric of our lives and our day to day experience merely the individual threads of a much greater story.

The sooner we realize that reality is narrative in nature, the sooner we must conclude that there is a Master story-teller. It is a short step from that realization to the truth and beauty of the authorial Trinity.

Orthodox Christianity, therefore, has a deep respect for narrative, especially as it mirrors God’s metanarrative, and there are three key ways to foster this genuine respect for narrative: first, we must read Scripture more as a divine and cohesive story; second, we must read novels and short stories lovingly and critically, allowing them to nurture a deeper love for and awareness of narrative structures; and third, we must cultivate the imagination as an essential and motivating part of our moral being.

Every child is predisposed to love a good story and to see his or her world as part of a larger story. I was no different and in many ways I remain a child whose delight in stories has only increased with age. Wherever there is happiness and peace in the landscape of my memory, a book is there. Upon the timeline of my soul’s growth outward and upward, wherever it has blossomed with sudden spurts, there you will surely find a book that has nourished the soil of my soul. Even as a boy, I knew that Elie Wiesel was right: “story is the vessel for carrying meaning. It is the currency of human interchange, the net we cast to capture fugitive truths and the darting rabbits of emotion” (Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest).

If you are prone to need solutions, prone to leave blame at someone’s feet for the bibliophile that is me, then you need look no further than my mother and my father. They believed with Wiesel that “God made man because he loves stories” (ibid) and, therefore, when we love stories, we love God back. I was born into a land of books. They were piled high about me; sometimes on the floor, sometimes resting on old bits of wood held up on either side by even older bricks-the boards would bow at the middle under the burden. I could turn in no direction that did not have some vision of book-land. At least, that was how it appeared to me as a child. Now it is quite likely that my parents did not have as many books as I recall-that is the mystery of a child’s mind-but they had enough to sustain a lasting impression of books everywhere. Though I did not fall in love with the books till I was nearly nine years of age, they were always present, gradually working upon my affections like water upon stone.

My father’s voice, round and ripe with vowels, still resounds in my mind as I recall doodling on precious paper while sprawled out on the red dyed concrete floor of our home in Africa. He spoke into my life the stories of Narnia and of Middle Earth, the lamp post and The Shire, as the warm Africa nights settled outside. My little sister was usually nearby, also doodling, my little brother curled under the coffee table with the cat and her kittens-he fell asleep quickly. There was something mysterious and distant about the stories back then; perhaps it was Africa, perhaps it was simply the fruit of that potent age between five and ten when everything looms large. In either case, the flooring of my heart was books before the walls of my mind were ornamented by them.

Certainly, something in my mind ran parallel to Annie Dillard who asked, “Why are we reading, if not in the hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? …Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?” (Annie Dillard, The Writing Life). Indeed, we all long for meaningfulness the child no less than the adult. Stories are one conduit of meaningfulness. My love for stories was something visceral long before that love became intellectual and while I have gained some intellectual reference points in the past 30 years, books still have a very poignantly visceral hold on my heart.

I am a man cursed with the subversive and vague fear of every bibliophile who hopes his children will not sell all his books at a mindless garage sale. I am a man who, deep down in his being, takes great pride in being what Walter M. Miller, Jr. called a “booklegger”: a man who scurries into every garage sale where there might be some orphaned texts with ornate bindings and scuttles back home to hole them away for the day when the sun will finally peek out and the world will be filled with newly awakened young men and women who leave their shiny gadgets to desire something old again.

Let us jettison the glib in exchange for the glorious.

Thomas Friedman wrote a provocative book a few years back declaring that, largely due to the rapid growth of technology and the increasing connectivity of people worldwide, the world is now flat. I can find no reason to argue, but one of the natural bi-products of living in a flat world seems to be a more narrow perspective on life. No longer is our vision pointed upward and outward; we are too busy peering at our hand held doohickeys. Rather than a view of the world that is spiritually and intellectually round, our view is functionally limited to the here and now-to me and mine.

How do we overcome this myopia of the soul? One important and rather neglected solution is reading; in particular, the reading of stories. Books broaden the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual horizon. After all, Lewis Mumford wrote, “the printed book released people from the domination of the immediate and the local” (Technics and Civilization). I believe the world in which we live has found a whole new way to be dominated by the immediate and the local. Rather than being limited in space to one location, we are limited in time-quite disconnected from history and lacking any impetus to plan for the distant and unknown future. Print, by its nature, requires intellectual activity and those men and women of history who were readers were precisely the ones concerned with remembering the past and living in light of the future. Visual media has disengaged the anchor that was print, trading in the real for the virtual. We are now an untethered people, alone more than ever, not in spite of our technology, but perhaps because of our technology.

The point is this: when a people like the early Americans are awash in literature, they are given opportunity, whether poor or rich, mean or refined, to see the light more clearly. Visual media has, in many respects, robbed western civilization of this opportunity by feeding our insatiable lust for the immediate and the shallow, by perpetuating our propensity to chase every distraction.

This blog post is not a diatribe against visual media. I enjoy a good movie just like the next guy. I am suggesting, however, that our current struggles, both individually and socially, will be more substantively addressed by trading television shows as the common reference point of a people for the printed word; especially stories. When our communal words are grounded more in literature and less in the latest episode of ____________ (please fill in the currently popular television show for your demographic), then our intellectual and spiritual vision will be both clearer and see further. I am not calling for unbridled reading of any stories, but those stories that serve to nourish the whole imagination, nurture the whole person, and ennoble the whole world-3D reading in a flat world.

What if Christians more intentionally worked to sanctify the whole imagination and the whole person, in order to ennoble the whole world? I believe that our times are desperate for this higher vision. I also believe, however, that while three dimensional reading will help draw us out of the second Dark Age in which we live, it will not, of itself, complete the process. Jesus Christ called himself the Light of the world and his Light has spread through the world ever since the first century. I believe the world is, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame forth like shining from shook foil.” Anthony Esolen, in his book, Ironies of Faith, comments on Hopkin’s poetic vision of the world: “a real gleaning is going on, with the poet as gleaner, walking through the rows of grain: and his instruments are his heart and eyes. He is gleaning the savior.”

Our human calling in this flat world, is to play the poet with our heart and eyes. Stories are a proven training ground for such a high calling. When we read three dimensionally, we are better able to search for the savior’s likeness, to find all that points to him, and to glean it as a harvest that will feed the world into roundness and life.

May your reading (and writing) serve to unflatten the world and bring light where there is darkness.

I’ve heard the Easter story my whole life. I still remember my childhood impressions of the angry mob that lined the road to Calvary. I imagined their faces, red with wrath. I imagined their curled lips and shaking fists. I imagined their words, flung with spit and bile. I wanted to stop the whole thing, to free him of the beam, and liberate him from his impending death. I remember how Christ’s journey through Passion Week, as described in the Gospels and read to me by my parents, propelled me into a deep sympathy for The Lord.

I could see him trudging up the Via Dolorosa (The Way of Pain), his dragging footsteps made of blood, staggering under the beam of his own cross. The din of the crowd, their foul breath, and their pressing bodies were all quite real to me. I grew convinced that the mob’s frantic cry from only hours before, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Matthew 27:22), still rang in his ears. Many of them were likely chanting it still, and their chant was like the back of an iron shovel brought down on his head. He stooped lower and lower under the blows, and finally stumbled altogether. “Then they compelled a certain man, Simon a Cyrenian, the father of Alexander and Rufus, as he was coming out of the country and passing by, to bear His cross” (Mark 15:21).

Well, you know the rest of the story. He was crucified, just as they wished. Enormous nails were driven through his wrists and feet to keep him from slipping off the wood. Most of his blood was already trailed along the road, but it still dripped down his face and body. The crown of thorns dug their way into his head and his skin, pealed open from all the lashes, began to stick to the wood.

I have, nearly my whole life, felt deep hatred for that crowd. My imagination willingly caricatured them into brutes because I love The Lord, Jesus Christ.

He is the “man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3) and the Son of God (John 5:25-29), born of Mary. “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6). When John saw Jesus coming toward him, he said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17), “He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself” (Hebrews 7:27).

For whose sins did Christ sacrifice himself? He carried my sins on his back when he went to the cross. My sins were buried with him and his death cast them as far as the East is from the West (Psalm 103:12).

And that’s why, dear friends, it is essential to remember that if I was shoved into a time machine and sent back to the first Easter, you would find me worming my way through the crowd. I’d be rubbing shoulders with all those people on the Via Dolorosa, most of them knowing not what they did (Luke 23:34). I’d be remembering that I’m very much like them. After all, we share the human condition. The bloodlust, the spite, the need for a scape goat is ours to share. I would be right there with them…were it not for Christ.

But I wouldn’t join them this time. Though a part of me would rather stop the entirely brutal proceedings, I would likely be powerless to do so. I certainly would not offer to take Christ’s place (God forbid!). Only Christ, the Son of God, could save me from myself. No, I’d be working my way to the front until I could see Christ with my own eyes. Then (O Lord, give me courage!), I would throw myself into the street. While the others called out hatefully, my broken heart would swell with gratefulness. Buckled by grief, my hands smeared by the blood he left on the ground, even on my knees perhaps and all tied up with nausea, I would speak to him. “Behold, you are the man of sorrows, the Son of God, born to save us from our sins!” With tears of gratefulness streaming down my face, I would say, “Thank you. Thank you. O my dear Lord, thank you.” We would wind our way to Golgotha together; Christ, staggering under the weight of the world; me, weeping and whispering praise and honor and glory.

So when you read the story of Good Friday and Easter found in Luke 22-24, imagine me there. Imagine me fighting through the frothing crowd, raising my hands in praise, closing my eyes to the brutality, perhaps, but finally stumbling next to Jesus. I am not always so eager to be with him-often distracted, often selfish, often cynical-but I’d like to be more eager. This is who I would like to become. This is how I’d like to be remembered. To that end, I will spend this week imagining a time machine, the jostling crowd, and the Man of Sorrows staggering up the street.

Come. Find me there and, if you’d like, pick your way through the mass and take your place beside me. Bring your friends, your children, your parents and we will walk the Via Dolorosa together. He has paid the price for our sins. He died so that we might live. He has risen and we are risen with him. Let us walk the way of pain with him, therefore, on our way to death and to the glories of resurrection.

Praise be to the Son, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

A Brief Notice: I am taking next week off and invite you to do the same. Instead of reading my blog post on Saturday, spend some time meditating on the deep significance of Christ’s death. Walk that Via Dolorosa-that way of pain-in your heart. Marinate in that grief as preparation for the great getting up morning on Sunday.