For some reason, I thought that the celebration of MLK was in February, and was therefore surprised to wake up and find the X App telling me it’s this very day. My feed is full of both praise for and recrimination against that person, which must indicate that I am not living in a social media silo but am being exposed to the broad spectrum of available thoughts. Does this constitute winning? Is there a prize? Or a participation trophy?
I have never been able to get hotted up about the celebrating of Martin Luther King Junior either way. Some people I love think he is the best person who ever lived, others have offered evidence that he lacked essential charactersics, like the proper care of women, for example. It depends on which story you believe about America and what it means. Also, the human family needs both Saints and Villians and it is not surprising that as tastes and assumptions about good and evil change, someone who was once a Saint might become a Villian and vice versa. The particulars of someone’s character only matter depending on who is telling the story and why.
In these short weeks since Christmas–that exhuasting time when it was my job to organize the children of my church for our annual celebratory reenactment that Birth of Jesus, too long a way of saying the word “Pageant” which I’m liking less and less, maybe we could go back to calling it a Creche or a Tableau or something like that–I’ve been mulling over the human emotional and spiritual need for good stories. Luke 2 functions, by sheer repition of the verses with movement and song and exaspiration, as the substrata of thirty other smaller stories that play out in the lives of all the participants. Each child is planted into the text like a seed. The words of the Bible are tilled up and nourish the way they begin to explain their lives and consider the world.
My ruminations are also partly due to the many podcasts and articles I keep tripping over, about why Conservatives are so bad at making movies and producing art in general. Why does American Chrsitianity in particular–for it’s not just Evangelicals, many Catholic spaces are filled with sub-optimal aesthetic detritus–seem driven to produce kitch, propoganda, and bad VBS curricula? With the best story in the world at the heart of our religion–the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ–why do we have to have Lady Ballers?
On the other hand, while the stories the Left tells are strong enough to compell social dissolution, these narratives lead to grotesque and dark places. I’m not going to link any of them, but my X feed this morning was rife with young people displaying their sex-change scars, with explanations about how their pronouns are whatever they have decided today. You must understand the nature of my polycule, scolded one, and then there was a man in lipstick explaining that he was a woman. How do these stories have such power to cause people not only to carve up and deconstruct their relationships and families, but their very own bodies?
There are so many answers to these questions–all available on Google or DuckDuckGo, but I always retreat, at the end of all my scrolling, to the same answer. Christians do need to start telling better stories, and post haste, beacuse the hour is far spent and the enemies are hacking at the doors and windows, but they can’t because they don’t love the Scriptures, not really, not in that desperate way that a person who was once dead, but who has been made alive again does. The stories of Scripture have lost their charm for a lot of reasons, all of them tiresomely rehearsed (even by me). The fact that the two last great Christian story tellers–Tolkien and Lewis–have no one to stand in their place is that the modern/postmodern/post-enlightened mind cannot dig around in the text and discover any treasures. Those treasures are there to be taken. They have the power to shape and reintegrate the heart, mind and soul. But they would have to be believed and accepted. The reader would have to expect–and want–to find them.
That’s not how people have read the Bible for two generations now. Instead, Evangelicals have fallen into the strip mining for principles option. The Bible is a good place to go for advice, for finding hope or relief from anxiety when your therapist is on holiday. It’s not exactly the deconstructionist project, but it does leave all the stories dismantlled, strewn out across the fellowship hall in bits and pieces. It is not a text, anymore, that can undergird and shape the imagination, it can’t call the beleaguered sinner out of the darkness and into the light, it can’t catch the whole self up in some kind of vision that draws a person away from ugly desolation and into peace. And the reason it can’t is not because it lacks narrative power to transform people and families and churches into something intersting, it can’t because no one will read it.
If any true Christian had any inkling of trying to write a story that would compell other people away from faithless mediocrity, he, or she, would have to attend to the irksome and prosaic work of learning to read the Bible, of being shaped by the text personally, of letting the emotions and mind be re-made by the lines and stories and laws. The task would be broad, and deep. It would be about preaching and teaching and the daily office. It would take another two generations of digging and planting before any great story teller once again emerged. It would mean that a lot of ordinary Christians weren’t remembered for anything because they were concentrating on reconforming themselves and their children to the actual meaning of the actual text. And because that isn’t fun or lucritive, and so many other awful stories are sweeping people away, most people probably won’t bother.
Have a nice day! And check out my Substack for more discouraging predictions and commentary.
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