Our Storied Lives

At an Episcopal church whose inter-service gathering hosted me the other week, I recalled an Hasadic parable that Elie Wiesel likes to tell. The moral of the tale, according to Wiesel, is that “God made humans because he likes stories.” As someone interested in narrative, and whose interest has led to his being in a position to hear many peoples’ stories, I have long hoped it were true, that somehow God’s continuing interest in us, even in our daily lives, has to do with God’s love of the stories of our lives. This is more than simply God’s love of his creation and the persons who compose humanity in general, the great Love that led to his giving of his only begotten Son, of which John the Evangelist speaks. More, God’s love of our stories is an indication of God’s continuing interest in and perhaps fascination with us. I mean, it is possible to love someone, I suppose, and still lose interest in them, perhaps because their lives are so dull… And it raises the question as to whether non-believer's lives are, for their part, not interesting enough to warrant the attention of God...

This in turn makes we wonder sometimes what our part is, whether we do not have a responsibility more or less to make our lives interesting enough as to be worthy of God’s attention. Are we so living that God is our audience? Or have we behaved so badly that God has simply got up and left the theater? Sometimes, on the grand scale of things, I fear that this has become true in its way for the whole human endeavor: our inhumanity to each other, our daily cruelty chronicled in our newspapers and in our other media, our penchant for violence and war—all of these things may have had their initial fascination for God, like the Sopranos or a Martin Scorcese or Jerry Bruckheimer film. But really, how much inexcusable horror can one stand to watch—even God, who has had to watch all too much of it over the millennia? I mean, I don't think God can bear to watch lives like the "Saw" or "Hostel" films. Bette Midler used to sing-song-edly reassure us that God is [still] watching us, but as we pursue our misguided purposes in every corner of God’s globe, it is easy for me to imagine that God has gone from being able to watch the whole picture to being able only to take in the lesser dramas of ordinary lives.

What makes humanity’s behavior “sinful” is that we repeat it. Sometimes I imagine God singing the 60’s song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” and asking plaintively, “When will they ever learn?” For learning it seems to me is what makes our stories interesting, especially for God, who sees so very little of it going on among us. God’s abiding faith in us, that we are still and evermore teachable is one of the meanings of the Incarnation (and thus, Christmas). So as we face the new year, what are we planning to do, how are we planning so to live as to justify God’s faith in us that we are indeed teachable and that we can break our own cycles of not learning (sin) and perhaps even accept God’s help in the breaking (redemption)?

For beyond our responsibility to our Audience to make our stories interesting, our living of these days involves, we have to know, Audience participation! Sometimes we even need Audience intervention, not just to hold a prop, but to remind us that we’ve come to a place in our plotting where we really could do something different, go off in a different direction, come to a different conclusion, make a different decision, see things in a different light. AND! It would be most interesting if we did!

My resolution for the coming year is so to live that I keep God’s attention and invite God’s participation and discover God’s interest in participating in this little Story of this Life that is mine. All the world’s a stage—even my little corner of it!