Tell Me a Story

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. – Hannah Arendt

I’ve come to love the often long, arduous narrative portions of the Bible, particularly those in the Old Testament. I love indulging in the imagination necessary to create that “movie in my head.” I blame this squarely on Tolkien. For some reason The Lord of the Rings trilogy fostered a respect and enjoyment of a lived in, deeply historical, acutely human, epic narrative. The first time I finished The Return of the King I found myself wanting to experience that disquieting epic urgency present in his story; that feeling of kairos, and inter-connectedness; the experience of the veil of divine meaning momentarily lifted so one might get a passing glimpse or scent or breezy touch of the divine mystery; the hint of holistic reality, the trace of divine condescension. For some reason, I found this experience often repeated when reading the epic tales recorded in the Old Testament.

This wasn’t always the case for me. I grew up with a strong preference for the enlightening pedagogy found in the Apostle’s letters. Meaning was much easier to find there. The writers came right out and told you what they meant. They explained those epic tales. They told you what was going on behind the scenes in heavenly places while folks slogged about trying to make sense of their lives down here. They gave you the moral of the story. They clarified the ambiguities of history... to a point, but as it turns out, not always to a particularly sharp point. This stood out to me as a Bible study I am involved in was trying to make sense of Romans 9 through 11.

Paul here is trying to reconcile God’s actions in the history of the life of Israel with God’s actions in the young history of the life of the Church. It may seem at first blush that God has abandoned Israel to engage the Church. Paul makes the historical case that this isn’t so. This is Paul doing his best to clear the muddy waters of history. Of course this clearing is necessary because history doesn’t interpret itself. Even when God acts to intervene in history, or perhaps especially when God acts to intervene in history, God’s motivations and intentions are often not entirely clear. Take as an example any narrative representation in scripture. When God extended daylight in the book of Joshua, what did God intend to communicate to humanity? When God allowed Job to suffer, what was really going on there? When God allows Jonah’s shade to be eaten by worms, what are we to take from that? Granted, we’re often given partial answers to these questions, but we are typically left with more questions than answers. Some might be uncomfortable with this predicament, which is why we may tend to embrace only the explanations in the New Testament, however I would suggest this ambiguity is one of the strengths of Biblical historical narratives. In the words of philosopher Hanna Arendt these narrative reveal meaning, I might add “experientially,” without defining it.

One of the most amazing outcomes of a good story, at least to me, is the wordless glimpse it provides into transcendence, into places where denotations and definitions are powerless to go. A good story allows one to experience something beyond the walls of the visible, and allows the unseen to be perceived, imagined and experienced. These experiences though are, again at least for me, often difficult to impossible to articulate. Words as human creations are often not capable of containing the descriptions or meaning of these kinds of experiences. The meaning simply overflows the words. This is part of the challenge I think Paul faces in Romans 9 through 11. He’s trying to condense a story God had been telling over thousands of years into a few paragraphs. He brings to light the key points he wants to highlight to boil the story down for his readers, but there is far more that God was and is doing in those relationships than can be contained in those few chapters, which I believe Paul himself would acknowledge.

This then I believe is part of the value of reading the narratives of the Old Testament on their own; that the reader gets to experience these glimpses first hand. They get to experience the wildness of a God who is good but not safe, to cite Lewis. They get to experience the meaning the Holy Spirit is intending to reveal to humanity, even while that meaning isn’t entirely defined, and in this case, I believe that lack of definition is a good thing.

Moses, Jesus and Superman

I’ve always felt that the origin of Superman is the story of Moses – the child sent on a ship to fulfill a destiny. And this [the 2006 film Superman Returns] was a story about Christ – it’s all about sacrifice: “The world, I hear their cries.” So what happens? He gets the knife in the side and later he falls to the earth in the shape of a crucifix. It was kind of nailing you on the head, but I enjoyed that, because I’ve always found the myth of Christ compelling and moving. – Bryan Singer

Many Christians who have an interest in the arts often look for God’s presence, or for at least some spiritual consciousness in film, music, television, and other pop culture texts. Given the vocabulary of the Bible and the church are still routinely drawn upon in our overarching cultural conversations, as artists, writers and filmmakers continue to draw on its narratives and images, it stands to reason that bits and pieces of those ideas would surface here and there floating around is in the cultural miasma. Furthermore, from the perspective of those who look to the Bible as a source of truth and an anchor for faith, those who create do so with the materials provided them by God, creating in the environment of a divinely created reality. So all that being said, I’m not surprised to see Christian images and narratives in films, even big budget Hollywood superhero movies. What I was both surprised by and pleased to see was one of those film’s directors discussing the manner in which he consciously and intentionally integrated those spiritual themes in his film. I’d like to make a few quick and dirty points that stick out in my mind after thinking about Mr. Singer’s comments.

First, there is a transcendent or spiritual component to storytelling. Given every writer or storyteller, whether they acknowledge it or not (even you Jean-Paul Sarte) is working within the created reality, which consists of both seen and unseen components, every story told, even those that only deal with physical reality, is still written in that physical/spiritual reality. As poet Gerard Manly Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Because the writer writes in the physical world and that world is charged with and points toward its creator, story will tend toward that as well. Of course I’m not suggesting Bryan Singer is approaching his storytelling from this perspective, but his intellectual and emotional interest in the myth of Christ speaks a bit to an awareness of the operation of some transcendence in story.

Second, some storytellers and stories are more successful at making visible the mystery of the unseen component of reality. According to novelist Flannery O’Connor a good story should show more than it tells. For example, in film if a voice over is employed to explain the action that has just occurred, the director may not have done a sufficient job “showing” the audience what he or she is now trying to communicate through telling them. The result when this occurs is a story that ends up feeling like a fable with a moral or a Sunday School lesson (see the end of Sam Raimi’s Spider Man 3). The best stories allow the reader or viewer to encounter the mystery behind the story, making it visible experientially, even if only briefly. The fact that Singer intended to “nail” his audience on the head with the myth of Christ tends to push him toward the didactic end of that spectrum, though the purpose here isn’t to make judgment on how successful he was in making visible that mystery.

Third, even if Christian narrative and symbology are employed in a utilitarian manner they may still succeed at making visible the mystery of the unseen. As far as I know, and I did a bit of reading on Bryan Singer (thank you Wikipedia), I don’t believe Mr. Singer identifies himself as a Christian in any way. Now, some Christians might recoil and the idea of the Christ-myth employed as a means to tell a super hero story in the hands of someone who has no recognizably orthodox faith in Christ. Some others might wince at the idea of “impurely” mining the Christ story as a cynical means for large movie studios to make huge profits. And there are good reasons to be cautious on both and many other fronts; however I would suggest that neither the faith, or lack thereof, of any of those involved in the production of a film, nor any less than pure intentions or motivations for a film’s production create any hindrance to the possibility of the audience’s encounter of the mystery of the unseen which exists simultaneously beneath both the surface of the film and the surface of reality. Any story or film in the hands of the Holy Spirit can pull back the veil on the unseen (which probably needs to be its own blog subject at some point). In other words the Holy Spirit is at work to make known the love of God the Father revealed through the Son’s death and resurrection using means that escape our detection and imagination. The Spirit is about this work everywhere, even as stories and films are written, produced and consumed.

Like I said, quick and dirty. I have to say, I’d love for more film makers to discuss the spiritual side of their film making process. Kudos to Bryan Singer for bringing it up