Magical Realism in Ministry

By John Frye:

Self-Talk and Storytelling

Pastors, let’s discipline our inner conversations. In Psalm 42, the song-writer talks to himself, to his soul. “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God…” What we have here is an example of self talk. I googled ‘self talk’ and was stunned to see that there are over 8 million entries. I followed up by googling ‘self talk quotes’ and the number doubled to over 16 million entries. Self talk is an interest of motivational speakers, psychologists, athletes/achievers, doctors and psychiatrists. It is a phenomenon of the human condition. From the Bible, it is also an interest of our souls, our hearts, our inner selves.

I was stopped by this self talk quote. “You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend or not” (Isabel Allende). Not being familiar with Allende, I did a quick google search and came into orbit around a fascinating lady and a literary style known as magical realism. An example of magical realism in movies might be Sherlock Holmes appearing in today’s world to help detectives solve crimes in Chicago. It is about someone or something that breaks into reality that is strange, wonderful, magical.

David, king and song-writer, penned, “My heart said, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, LORD, I will seek” (Psalm 27:8). What do we have here? We’re peeking in on some highly significant self talk. God is the fascinating and controlling reality. On the other hand, a dangerous kind of self talk was mentioned by Jesus. “And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry”’(Luke 12:16-19). We can urge our souls to put their hope in God. Our hearts say, “Seek God’s face!” We, also, can orbit our own lives and comforts and say some very dangerous things to ourselves.

The momentum, content, and attitude of our self talk are, I imagine, what Isabel Allende describes as “the storytelling” of our own lives. Another self quote I came across was: Be sure your greatest enemy is not the one between your two ears. Steven Covey drove home the point years ago that we are the only ones at the keyboard that writes the script of our lives. What material are we using to frame the story and write it out?

Disciplined reading of the Psalms and praying the daily hours is a down-to-earth way to direct our self talk toward a life-bringing, hope-generating, others-blessing storyline.

Praying the Psalms expands the mental horizons as we pray things that don’t “speak to me” at the moment, but may literally be the heart cry of millions of others.

Praying the Psalms gives us an immense vocabulary for praying all of life and not just the spiritual/church aspects. We learn to pray our hate without it hurting us or others.

Praying the Psalms invites us into the perichoretic wonder of the Trinity. The Psalms were human and Holy s/Spirit born. God talking to God through us.

Pastors, we hear a lot of talk; talk that comes into us deeply and some of which can damage us greatly. We can mull over negative words and conflicting conversations. We can, then, sit at life’s keyboard and type out a dismally bleak story of our lives. Is it possible that in those very trying times when people were mob-like around Jesus, when the disciples were clueless (“Who brought the bread?!”), when the religious leaders were murderous, Jesus had this talk with himself, “I am his beloved Son. He is so thrilled with me. I bring delight to my Father.”

What Story did he tell? Let’s follow him, the Great, Good, and Chief Pastor. With Jesus before us and for us, around us and in us,

Let’s create a little magical realism in ministry.