A young man, Mario, was telling a class a story. Being a fellow guest presenter to a librarians’ class in Rome, I watched him tell the story of his upbringing, in a household where generations of fathers had abused their sons—including his grandfather and father.  From his father, Mario said, he’d learned from earliest days that he himself was no good and never would be any good.  Having learned the lesson well, he soon took up alcohol and drugs (another family favorite) and a life of despair.

One day he met a retired Christian journalist, who was unafraid to meet people in the kind of places Mario lived in.  He listened to the broken bits of Mario’s shattered life.  What purpose did it serve to listen to an unproductive, unimportant, broken man?  Was he merely helping Mario wallow? Stitching up the broken bits like Dr. Frankenstein and creating a monster? Wasting his time with a loser?  Why listen?  By listening, the journalist entered into and became part of Mario’s story.  

A person who’s been through such shattering experiences might well feel broken into unconnected bits and pieces.  Not having a narrative that brings the bits together is itself an anguish.  We need to know our story, even in an incomplete way; learning and telling that story helps brings beauty and meaning to our lives.  

Advertisement

Older people sometimes drive younger ones to distraction by telling the same stories over and over, but there’s a purpose here. We need to tell our story, in ever-fuller ways.  Those who tell their stories are helping not only themselves, but others too.  The listeners become part of the story.  They can do so in destructive ways, or in constructive, healing ways.  The journalist listening to Mario became not only part of the story, but part of the healing. Over two years, he listened and listened.  Now, telling the narrative to these students, Mario’s voice and eyes were full of tears, because he'd experienced love stronger than pain.

Jesus well knew the power of narrative.  The Scriptures, which tell his story, show him using narrative in a host of ways: parables, news, Scripture itself, description, dialogue, and more.  He knew when a harmful, false narrative was being constructed, and how to bring truth in.  He spoke, and he listened.  How could he do otherwise, being God’s Word?

Advertisement

We are narrative, and every story can open something.  Yet learning and telling ‘our’ narrative is not random, nor relativistic. In all our story-telling, we are seeking one story.  A renowned movie director observed that all the stories that can be told are really only two stories:  the Exodus and the Crucifixion—and even those two are really one. He grasped what’s within reach of us all. Scripture is the narrative that holds all our narratives. 

We seek the one story that Scripture tells—in which all of us are featured.  No narrative of ours can be properly told except within the Scriptural narrative.  Until we find, claim and commit to that narrative, we will feel, as Mario did, like disconnected bits and pieces.  A colleague describes the moment, as an adult raised outside any faith, she was first given the Gospels.  She couldn’t stop reading them because they were what she’d been looking for all her life.  “Our little systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be: they are but broken lights of thee” (from In Memoriam).  The one true story is the Word of God incarnate.

As we read the Scriptures, and move through them in the Church’s liturgical season, we meet the Christ whose story they are. But we also meet ourselves and learn our stories. Why do we read the same Christmas stories at Mass every year? Why do we read and share these narratives over and over?  We’re learning to hear and tell them as our stories, our nativity and exodus and crucifixion—and the life eternal those stories bear.

Advertisement

What happens when someone is told she’s a burden because she’s old, and therefore dispensable?  Or when someone hears he’s an inconvenience to the national lifestyle, and needs to be eliminated?  What happens when the narrative says only certain people should be allowed to be born?  The Scriptural narrative, where we all appear, gives us needed protection from the destructive narratives that swirl around us like vapour.  

Mario still hears from his father the same story about being no good and useless; but he no longer believes it. What changed?  The journalist told him, to his astonishment, that he was a beautiful person.  Spoken with a fatherly love he’d never imagined, this word reached Mario’s soul. It entered at first as a doubt, a crack, through which the love could touch him for the first time. Now he can tell his story, even to strangers, though with tears behind his eyes.  The old pain and suffering are still part of it, but are transfigured now.