On Storytelling

I remember that when I was a young child, I would always ask my mom if she would tell me a story before I fell asleep. Without fail: "Mommy, will you tell me a story?" She wouldn't always comply, of course, at least not readily. Sometimes she would just mumble a lot of words really quickly as if she were telling a story at hyper speed and then add, "The end." This isn't to say, though, that my mom failed as a storyteller or a tucker-in, because I also remember that she read The Horse and His Boy to me, each time substituting my name for Shasta's as if it were my story that she were reading. I must have been four or five when she did this, and it still gets me. I think that it was this gracious act that instilled in me the idea that I was important enough to have a story written about me. I learned that stories are not just fictitious accounts of things that we wish were, nor are they a playground for some lesson about morality. The thing that makes stories important is that we live them. We are stories.

While in someway, I think I did learn to value my story above all others' (even if at times I find it pointless, hopeless, or altogether uninteresting), I did, also, begin to appreciate the stories of others, even the ones that I couldn't articulate as readily. This, perhaps, is the constant struggle of the storyteller - to consider all stories equally important. While we may find that the words of the story come to us a lot easier in some cases, and perhaps more eloquently as well, we can't dismiss the importance or latent intricacy of those that don't. Because I think that the more storytelling becomes an active part of our lives, the more we will realize that when we tell someone else's story, we are telling our own story as well. So great is the connection of people to one another.

One of my friends told me recently that her priest, when explaining what it means to "Love your neighbor as yourself," said that often the translation is lost, and what actually is written is along the lines of, "Love your neighbor who is yourself." This is the dramatic beauty of storytelling. As we learn to embrace and see the stories of others, we begin to understand ourselves more fully because we become reconciled to parts of ourselves that perhaps we couldn't otherwise. If we look at a murderer and only get that far, we have failed to truly hear his story. If we hear his story, we see that we too are murderers, we just haven't found the motivation yet (luckily). A great disservice is done to ourselves and others when we think of our stories as isolated. Life is not just a random, individual account of absurd events that occur in some sequence. Life is the coming together of all people who have shared existence until and including now, and how we respond to the world that surrounds us and how we try to change it in some way.

I mean it this way; if I were to suddenly break this computer over my knee, besides being a stupid impulse and pretty pointless, it would change the world forever. It wouldn't save or ruin the world, but it would change it nonetheless. There is one less functional computer in the world thanks to my work. That's something different and irreversible. That event has happened and will, for the rest of my life, be etched on the script of history. It has, in someway, changed the human experience forever. 

Not to draw too heavily on Dostoevsky's writings all the time, but I think he is right on when he writes, "All is like an ocean, all flows and is contiguous, and if you touch it in one place it will reverberate at the other end of the world." This is truly a beautiful and keen observation, and must remain in the heart of the storyteller, for the storyteller's calling is one of love. Whether they accept that calling or not, however, is up to them. We may either learn to love through these stories, or reject that calling and fall simply into entertainment or even cynicism. 

Storytelling is a lofty calling. It is a humble vocation, but a powerful thing. It unifies us. It brings people together and ultimately teaches us what it means to be human, hopefully with the end of learning to love our neighbor who is ourself.