I love a good tale, a yarn that stretches and threads, which connects and binds two dimensional text into vibrant friends, cherished antagonists and, ultimately, leaves you with a longing for more as the yarn ends. I have been reading a long time. I have sought places of intimacy in places in which people walked in vacuums or hiked the splendid Elven forests where magic remains, even in its waning years. I have felt Canadian literature flow from the dystopic imaginings of Atwood to the poetry of Bronwen Wallace, which makes clear that the mundane is extra-ordinary …
And yet, in these ongoing years, as the temptation of adult-cynicism is ever-present, I notice that stories seem to lose their hold on the mind’s eye. Whereas the rich depth of the Lord of the Rings, first read at age 12, once wove a world of good and evil, a place where melancholy of friendship inspired and loss was experienced with renewal, people now seem less inclined to imagination, less willing to imagine something new, and that makes me sad …
Stories are funny things: they inspire, comfort, challenge and allow the mind to create realities that are as different as they are well-known paths from here to there and back again.
Stories are funny things: when our own reality seems impossible, where people suffer in needless situations, they can shine a light through the darkness to possibility, if only we take the time to be enticed into the potential.
Stories are funny things: they mirror our mistakes and reflect back how we might learn from them. They help us to begin to integrate harms we have caused and lead us to places of forgiveness and healing.
Sacred Scriptures (the First Testament, Hebrew Scripture, the Old Testament) and Holy Tomes (The Second Testament, the New Testament) are, at their essential core, stories. They are tales of broken people doing unexpected and marvellous things. They are narratives of the powerful and wealthy oppressing and pillaging the least in their midst for short-sighted gain. These writings, millennia old, are inspired by people wrestling with the Holy, attempting to discern how to navigate potential in a human world of mottled greyness. They are the lingering whisper of a Creator essentially bound in History sharing a longing, a passion, a desire to see us awaken to the truth that we are Beloved, exceptional in our diversity and bound to the end from the beginning!
In reflecting about stories, their import, the power to break us open to possibility and potential, it seems to me that a blog may have a role to play. It can either harness the creativity of characters navigating their way through the plot or it can reinforce paralysis. In the face of a dominant message that would rather you and I acquiesce our own agency in the tale of our collective experience, perhaps this space might ask you which character you are?
I have been thinking a lot about stories and it’s just possible some new characters may be coming to a Musing soon …
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Stories
Your reflections are most welcome!