Why stories matter

‘Why do you care so much?’ I ask, closing the book and handing it back to him.
He looks at me. ‘Stories weave our lives together. Didn’t you know?’
‘I don’t know’ I mutter, thinking of The Island in the Mist. ‘Maybe they do. Maybe everything is a story.’
‘Everything,’ Corentin agrees, spreading his arms in a wide gesture. ‘This hall, this dust, the hands that carried the books down here; the Ark, you and me and the bog... We’re all a thread in the tapestry.’

- A (translated) fragment of my novel The Island in the Mist

I am fascinated by story, by what it wants to tell us and how we are affected by it. Truth, I’ve found, is mostly to be discovered in books. Most of the time not very factual books either– however well-researched they were, the author had always implemented elements of pure fiction and imagination. But truth all the same – like the undertow of a river. And they helped me realize, as a writer, why stories matter so much.  

About a year and a half ago, I went through a little crisis of faith. I wasn’t sure if I still liked studying theology, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to DO with it, because I wasn’t sure what I believed. I wasn’t the Christian that I was when I started, for sure. I probably wasn’t a Christian at all.

But lately, things have started to fall into place once again. Not saying that I’m there – wherever there is, but this is what I’ve figured. Why I do love theology (and yes, this is getting to the point of storytelling ;))

Theology will always be a living tradition, will always be liquid and in motion. Faith can’t be locked up into dogma’s…though, of course, we tried… :-) But I really think that trying to pin down something like religion, like God, is our biggest illusion. Faith, religion, has always changed and it will continue to change forever: from country to country, from era to era, from one period in your life to another. It’ll always reflect the Zeitgeist and the versatility of human lives.

Theology deals in a very special way with the condition humaine, the human condition. You don’t have to take the great (or small) religious stories as factually true – you’d rather be rating them too low if that’s all they had to be. No, religion (of whatever kind – from the animistic religion from an undiscovered tribe in the Amazone to the great East-Orthodox Churches) is about what Paul Tillich put as that which concerns us most fundamentally:

“The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means. And if that word has not much meaning for you, translate it, and speak of the depths of your life, of the source of your being, of your ultimate concern, of what you take seriously without any reservation.”

We do this through stories of faith, those ancient traditions that we have passed on and on. And we do it also through philosophy, ethics, art, music, even while narrating our history. Because, in the end, everything is story. The old, old history of our planet Earth – how it shaped and formed and changed and became a place where life could develop; first insignificantly small and always in danger of extinction, then grow, thrive, spread –beautiful, daring, braving, existing against all odds, against the laws of a turbulent and massive, uncaring universe – that is our story! Where we came from – from dead material to cells to algae to plants to tiny creatures to huge animals to people roaming the plains and the caves of Africa and Europe. Our story is one of tribes, of heroes with long-forgotten names and long-forgotten deeds, of discovery and failure, of birth and death, of continents shifting and changing and somehow, there we are, clinging on to the surface of this earth with every fiber of our beings. Our story is the story of the people in the old caves, painting animals and strange shamanistic rituals on the walls. Our story is the story of us, today, marveling at those signs of faith and lore from so long ago.

And our story is the story of where we think we are headed. Heaven. Nirvana. Ragnarok. High into the branches of the World Tree or low into the embracing roots of the Undeworld. Maybe we go up. Maybe we go down. Maybe we go in endless spirals, into life and afterlife, into centuries gone and yet to come. Maybe all lights go out and we are gone forever, with only our families to remember us, until they, too, disappear. But we still know the stories of entire peoples who have gone. The ancient Hittites. The Babylonians. The Celtic and Germanic tribes. The people from the plains and from the caves. We may not know a lot, but we still see glimmers – lost cities in the rainforests, faces of forgotten gods and kings, an inscription of a name here, a devotional stone for a local deity there. And the horses, aurochs, mammoths and men left inside the bellies of the earth.

It’s their stories and their possible-stories – the maybe-stories, the invented stories that dwell inside my mind when I think about these people – that fascinate me endlessly. That need to create myths, fantasies and epics around the deeds of people long gone. As Monique Wittig put it so beautifully:

"You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent."

-          

And I…I believe in stories. I believe in their power to heal. To teach about hope and bravery and purpose. To connect us with who we are, where we came from and where we might be headed. I believe in their power to rebel against the status quo of a society that is ruled with indifference or an abundance of law, lust, corruption, greed or death. Or against the status quo of our very existence: that we live, fragmentally, from coincidence to coincidence, until we die and disappear. I believe in the truth that they carry within themselves, even if that truth is not about facts.

Maybe this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But stories don’t have to make sense. They’re not about arguments, after all – they’re about that great, mind-boggling mystery of the entire existence, that none of us can ever proof or refute with arguments and logic.