The truth about Story is really a fascinating adventure; it’s a grand scheme, testing the strength of our virtue and carrying us on – further up and further in.   

Humans are a storied people. For thousands of years, we’ve been telling stories to one another to teach, to guide, to make beautiful and to bring joy (the kind of Joy CS Lewis talked about in his spiritual biography Surprised by Joy, the kind that catches you for an instant and reminds you of heaven). One of the greatest and noblest things any one of us can do for another is to tell them a beautiful story. Not just for the sake of aesthetics or politics or persuasion, but for the sake of that Great Story we are all called to hear and partake of.  

As Tolkien wrote in his essay On Fairy Stories, the collective stories we’ve told over the centuries – all that narrative, that fable, myth and legend, the stuff that makes you squirm about and chuckle, the heroism, the despair, the delight – all the stories whether true or not, are reflections, ‘chasing-afters’, of the ultimate story of man’s redemption: the Gospel is the largest story of them all. It encompasses the entire essence of every story ever written; “this story begins and ends in joy. It has… the ‘inner consistence of reality’” (Tolkien, 1947, p. 15).   

I read The Hobbit for the first time about two years ago, when I was travelling around the Northern Hemisphere, adventuring through narrow streets, and dark afternoons, and ice. Reading about Bilbo’s adventure while undertaking my own was somewhat uncanny – the story came to be real in a way it wouldn’t have if I’d read it on a couch at home in the dry heat of an Australian summer. My imagination of an adventure met with the reality of it. Although my ‘adventure’ was somewhat subdued compared to Bilbo’s (the worst thing I had to endure was 15 hours in the Charles de Gaulle airport, whereas he had dragons and giant spiders to worry about) I still felt the close pull of his story.         

I remember my fascination with the abundance of European trees – huge beech forests and silver birches in the twilight, and high oaks, and not a gum to be seen anywhere. Not long into my trip, I was standing beneath a cluster of oaks and looking up at them when I realised it was all true – everything I’d ever read about oak trees came home in a new, profound way. Something in my being expanded past, above, and beyond those great dark oaks into a wider understanding of the world. My imagination of an oak tree met with the reality of it. My imagination came home. That is what Story does for us, and why the Greatest one of all – the Gospel – is so important.

The hero of this story bore a cross partly for the sake of the parables that he told, the words that he said. Certain people didn’t like them. And here we are, two thousand years later, still telling them, acting on them, loving them. Good stories are home to us. The moral redemption, the beauty, the virtue, the fight between good and evil are reminiscent of a far-off country. In hearing such stories, we realise we belong to this far-away place and our understanding of home centres around Something Else; the physical world becomes a place of exile. Our true homes are the places we can’t reach in body – they dwell Elsewhere. But when stories complete our understanding of reality, imagination compliments reason, and truth is realised (Searle 2007, p. 12). Wonderful!   

CS Lewis said, “Good images are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales” (Lewis quoted in Searle, 2007, p. 13).

Yes, remember your fairy tales! Because imagination – and yes, perhaps even the fantastic and Story itself – is a gift given to help us arrive at Truth. And I’d like to share this gift with anyone who’d have it! I suppose all this is just a long-winded way of saying why I decided to start this blog in the first place: to tell stories to anyone who’ll listen… And hopefully, in reading good stories and beautiful words, they’d come to a realisation of Truth itself.    

References:

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1947). On Fairy Stories. Calvary Georgetown Divide.   

 Searle, A. (2007). Fantastical Fact, Home, or Other? The Imagined ‘Medieval’ in C.S. Lewis. Mythlore, 5(3/4), 5-15.