The Stories We Tell

For most of my life I have been engaged in the work of interpreting religious stories.  As a priest and preacher my task each Sunday was to 'break open' the lectionary readings and interpret them in ways that helped my congregation 'live into' God's word in their own lives.  I place those two phrases in quotation marks to highlight their metaphorical nature - there is, of course, nothing physical to break when reading Scripture, and no literal way to enter the language of the Bible.  Interpretation of God's message to God's people depends entirely upon the ability, indeed, the willingness, to understand and embrace the metaphorical nature of the very idea that God 'speaks' to us in 'words.'

In my academic studies I have turned my attention to the lives of saints living in early medieval times in Celtic countries, saints like Patrick, Brigit, Columba, and Samson.  While historians wrestle with these texts seeking insight into the conditions of the sixth, seventh, or eighth centuries, I read these as deeply religious narratives. Pre-modern authors were less concerned with conveying factual data, and more concerned with presenting their protagonists as embodiments of Christian virtues and values.  Without necessarily copying Bible passages verbatim, or referencing a particular prophet or evangelist, hagiographers* would craft stories of food that appears from nowhere, or persons who were dead who are restored to life, or winds and rains and seas that are calmed by the prayers of a saint.  Anyone familiar with the Bible knows where these stories come from, and no one need argue whether they are historically accurate or 'merely' folklore.  They are parables.  

The stories in the lives of the saints, at least the ones I am attending to, are parables, symbolic stories intended to present a model of holiness, remind readers that God's immeasurable power has not disappeared from this world, and call them to devotion, even imitation, of the very human person of the saint.

Parables are powerful stories.  They take the stuff of everyday life -- food, family, weather -- and transmute the ordinary into fingerprints of the Divine.  Parables are defined as stories whose intention is not to illuminate the content of the story itself, but to point outward toward something larger, some idea that is significant to the community that hears the story.  What could be more important than stories about healing those who suffer, or feeding those who hunger and thirst, or bringing back from the dead those we love?  These are the essential stories of the Christian narrative, both in the Bible and in the lives of the saints.  These parables are meant to be a source of light and life and joy for the community that hears and cherishes them.  These are the stories we tell in the dark days, to remember that God's power did not leave us then, and will not leave us now.  

There is more to this understanding of the Christian story, which I will explore in another post.

*the technical term for those who write the lives of saints