Sermon Illustrations on Story
Background
The Dickensian Approach to Storytelling (Or, Rather, the Biblical Approach)
Sometimes great stories introduce the protagonist in the very first paragraph. In Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, for example, we are immediately introduced to Pip, the central figure of the novel, and we learn why he has such an odd name. Yet other stories wait for some time before the protagonist appears. In Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Jean Valjean does not show up until around page 50 (out of 1200). If you were not familiar with Hugo’s classic story, you might think while reading the first chapters that the Bishop of Digne is the main character. As it turns out, he plays a pivotal but relatively small role in the story of Les Misérables, in which Valjean is the main character.
The Bible takes a Dickensian approach to its protagonist. The leading figure appears in the very first verse: “In the beginning . . . God.” …today, I want to underline the centrality of God in the biblical story.
God is the protagonist. God is the main actor. God is the one who ties together all the pieces of the story. God is the one who orchestrates the events. Indeed, God is also the author of the biblical story. To be sure, the Bible tells a human story as well, with people playing an essential role from the first chapter of Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. The Bible also narrates the affairs of the nations, especially Israel. The Bible can be useful for philosophy, psychology, and a wide array of other disciplines. It provides the sure foundation for right theology. But, at its core, the Bible is a story, a story of God, the story of God.
The Difference Between Heroes and Saints
It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference between them matters: “Stories . . . told with . . . heroes at the center of them . . . are told to laud the virtues of the heroes—for if the hero failed, all would be lost.
By contrast, a saint can fail in a way that the hero can’t, because the failure of the saint reveals the forgiveness and the new possibilities made in God, and the saint is just a small character in a story that’s always fundamentally about God.”
Lauren Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, HarperOne, 2012.
The Fictions We Live
The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thoroughly ambiguous.
It is no wonder that we find the presence of most people so clouded as to be not worth noticing, and it is no wonder that a truly unclouded presence is so luminous and so compellingly noteworthy!
The Fire of Fairy Tales
This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived from this…. We all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door…. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1908)
Finding the Plots of our Own Lives
The same impulse that makes us want our books to have a plot makes us want our lives to have a plot. We need to feel that we are getting somewhere, making progress. There is something in us that is not satisfied with a merely psychological explanation of our lives. It doesn’t do justice to our conviction that we are on some kind of journey or quest, that there must be some deeper meaning to our lives than whether we feel good about ourselves.
Only people who have lost the sense of adventure, mystery, and romance worry about their self-esteem. And at that point what they need is not a good therapist, but a good story. Or more precisely, the central question for us should not be, ‘What personality dynamics explain my behavior?’ but rather, ‘What sort of story am I in?’
William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right from Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster.
How Stories are being used by Companies to Shape Character
Why a story? We all think of our lives as stories, each with a main character (us) theme, and plot (interesteing so far, but as yet unfinished). We also love to hear stories about others and even about things. Stories hook into our curiosity-what happens next?-and into our emotions: What would I do in that situation?
Stories have the unique power to engage and, if they engage enough, to trigger empathy, enchant. Designers, having tapped the potential of personalizing, socializing, and gamifying, can work to embed a drama in our heads. They can involve us in a story so the narrative gains a purchase on both our minds and [our hearts]. It becomes part of our heritage, our folklore, our mythology. We can feel as if we are part of the action, even a central character in the tale.
David Rose, Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things.
Metaphors, Parables and Dramatic Actions
The biblical writers and reciters make extensive use of metaphors, parables and dramatic actions. Jesus does not say, “God’s love is boundless.” Instead, he tells the story of the prodigal son. He does not say, “Your benevolence must reach beyond your own kith and kin.” Rather, he tells the story of the good Samaritan.
He does not say, “Try to influence the community around you for good.” But he does state, You are the light of the world. A city set (by men) on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do they (i.e., the women) light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a lamp stand, and it gives light to all in the house. (Mt 5:14-16; author’s translation)
Taken from Jacob & the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel’s Story by Kenneth E. Bailey Copyright (c) 2009 by Kenneth E. Bailey. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
No More “Been-To’s”
Several years ago I was conducting a seminar in the interpretation of Scripture in a theological seminary…Our topic that day was Jesus’ parables…One of the priests, Tony Byrnne, was a Jesuit missionary on sabbatical from twenty years at his post in Africa. As we discussed the biblical parables, Father Tony told us of his experience with his Africans, who loved storytelling, who loved parables. His Jesuit order didn’t have enough priests to handle all the conversions …and he was put in charge of recruiting lay-persons to carry out the basic teaching…
When we first began the work, whenever he would find men who were especially bright he would pull them out of their village and send them to Rome or Dublin or Boston or New York for training. After a couple of years they would return and take up their tasks. But the villagers hated them and would have nothing to do with them. They called the returnee a been-to Dublin, he been-to New York, he’s been-to Boston.”
They hated the bean-to because he no longer told stories. He gave explanations. He taught them doctrines. He gave them directions…The been-to left all his stories in the wastebaskets of the libraries and lecture halls of Europe and America. The intimate and dignifying process of telling a parable had been sold for a mess of academic pottage. So, Father Byrne told us, he quit the practice of sending the men off to those storyless schools.
Eugene Peterson, Tell it Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers.
Persuading Ourselves of the Truth
When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to significant lapses in moral behavior are quite different. Because most people want to see themselves generally as “good,” they engage in a complex game of rationalizing and self-deception that enables them to perform these sinful acts.
Over time, what starts as a set of questionable lies we tell ourselves becomes capital T “Truth.” An excellent example of this from history took place during the Watergate scandal. In an interview from 1975, the whistleblower of Watergate, John Dean, explains just how this worked with those involved in the scandal:
INTERVIEWER: You mean those who made up the stories were believing their own lies?
DEAN: That’s right. If you said it often enough, it would become true. When the press learned of the wire taps on newsmen and White House staffers, for example, and flat denials failed, it was claimed that this was a national-security matter. I’m sure many people believed that the taps were for national security; they weren’t. That was concocted as a justification after the fact. But when they said it, you understand, they really believed it.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Lyndon Johnson was known as a master at the game of self-justification. His biographer, Robert Caro, described what would happen when Johnson came to believe something to be true, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.”
George Reedy, an aide who witnessed the same behavior, described LBJ as having “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act … He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.”
Stuart Strachan Jr, with Source Material from John Dean, interview by Barbara Cady, January 1975; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2002), p.886.
Scripture Grounds our Story in Place
Our Scriptures that bring us the story of our salvation ground us in place. Everywhere they insist on this grounding. Everything that is critically important to us takes place on the ground. Mountains and valleys, towns and cities, regions and countries:
Haran, Ur, Canaan, Hebron, Sodom, Machpelah, Bethel, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Samaria, Tekoa, Nazareth, Capernaum, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Of Olives, Mt. Gilboah, Mt. Hermon, Ceasarea, Gath, Ashkelon, Michmash, Gibeon, Azekah, Jericho, Chorizan, Bethsaida Emmaus, the Valley of Jezreel, the Kidron Valley, the Brook of Besor, Anathoth.
Big cities and small towns. Famous landmarks and unvisited obscurities. People who want God or religion as an escape from their place because it is difficult (or maybe just mundane), don’t find this much to their liking. But there it is—there’s no getting around it. But to the man or woman wanting more reality, not less, this insistence that all genuine life, life that is embraced in God’s work of salvation, is grounded, is good news indeed.
Stories Expand our Lives
We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. . . . All living is interpreting; all action requires seeing the world as something.
So in this sense no life is “raw,” and . . . throughout our living we are, in a sense, makers of fictions. The point is that in the activity of literary imagining we are led to imagine and describe with greater precision, focusing our attention on each word, feeling each event more keenly—whereas much of actual life goes by without that heightened awareness, and is thus, in a certain sense, not fully or thoroughly lived.
Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford University Press.
Story as Worldview and the Example of Passover
Stories, after all, are one of the most basic modes of human life and are a characteristic expression of worldview. Human life is constituted by a series of stories, implicit and explicit, that makes sense of experiences, and allows us to describe them in a coherent manner.
Consider the story recited at every Passover:
My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labour. Then we cried out to the LORD, the God of our ancestors, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. So the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey . . .
This story is a summation of the events and experiences that define the Jewish people, which speaks to their beliefs, identity, and hopes. As historians, then, we are principally storytellers, trying to get inside the storied lives of ancient peoples—filled with diverse and often competing stories—and constructing our own successful explanatory story to account for theirs.
Stories Teach Us about How the World Works
A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happened yet. When Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth can’t stop washing her hands after killing King Duncan and cries, “Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!” we learn not only about the remorse of a single fictional character, but also about the emotional consequences of murder…A good story has a moral that applies not just to this world but also to other worlds that we might find ourselves in.
The reason we recount Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac on Mount Moriah is not just to add to our inventory of facts about Abraham and his family; it is surely to learn a lesson about loyalty to God in whatever situation we find ourselves. In that sense, storytelling requires that we do something that is way beyond the capabilities of any nonhuman animal. It requires that we use our understanding of our world’s causal mechanisms to build whole alternative worlds to think about.
Storytelling helps us to imagine how the world would be if something were different. This is clearest in science fiction: Authors help readers readers imagine alternative worlds with life on other planets or drugs that guarantee happiness or robots that take over the world. But many other kinds of stories also involve alternative worlds, especially stories we tell ourselves. You might imagine, for instance, that you’re a rock star. What would the consequences be? To find out, you can consult your understanding of how the world works and draw out the effects that being a rock star would cause. For one, you’d probably stay in fancier hotels, drive around in limousines, and spend a lot of time signing autographs…Thinking about alternative possible worlds is an important part of being human. It is called counterfactual thought, and you can see that it depends on our capacity to reason causally…Why do we so naturally tell stories that require reasoning about counterfactual worlds?
Perhaps the main motivation is that it allows us to consider alternative courses of action. We are very comfortable thinking about what the world would be like if we did something differently—if we changed our hairstyle, bought a new lawn mower, or sold our house and bought a yacht. And because we can think about such hypothetical actions, occasionally we actually pursue them. A thinker who can’t conceive of a new hairstyle is not going to go out and get one (at least not intentionally). And a thinker who can’t conceive of a bill of rights or a new kind of vacuum cleaner is not going to get one of those, either. The ability to think counterfactually makes it possible to take both extraordinary and ordinary action.
Steven Sloman, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Penguin Publishing Group.
Tolkien on Happy Endings
J. R. R. Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe” to refer to the unexpected happy ending at the end of a fairy tale, achieved by grace rather than effort.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn”… it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of… sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies… universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Tales,” Tolkien Reader (Ballantine, 1966).
Uncovering & Recovering
Famed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote in ‘The Art of Fiction No. 139’ for The Paris Review, ‘If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.’ I believe this is a call to uncover and recover from the words and wounds written on our hearts, minds, and bodies by someone else.
Adapted from Just Passion: A Six-Week Lenten Journey by Sheila Wise Rowe Copyright (c) 2022 by Sheila Wise Rowe. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Villians Over Heroes
In imaginary works it is difficult to make virtuous characters as believable and attractive as bad characters. The villains of literature and screen–Captain Ahab, the boys who go bad in Lord of the Flies, Darth Vader, Norman Bates, Hannibal the Cannibal—all are, as a rule, larger figures, more gripping and more memorable, than are the heroes and heroines of even the same authors and producers.
This is as true of religious literature as it is of secular literature. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan has all the good lines, but who remembers a word of his Christ? Dante’s The Divine Comedy is one of the great masterpieces of world literature, yet literary critics as well as college freshmen rarely read The Paradiso, and those who do usually judge its virtue and bliss flat and insipid compared to the gargoyled vices of The Inferno.
There is a good reason why this is so. Human nature stands closer to evil than to good. Intrigue, scheming, and deception are more instinctual to us than love, goodness, and forgiveness. The vices are “first nature,” so to speak, whereas virtue is “second nature,” either a learned response or no response at all.
It is easier to figure out ways to cheat the IRS than to solve the problems of hunger or violence. When we are wronged, we can hatch ten brilliant schemes of revenge; but try to devise even a paltry plan for redeeming a bad situation. Dostoevsky thus had an easier task in creating Raskolnikov, the brooding ax-killer of Crime and Punishment, than he did in creating Alyosha, the only virtuous figure in a family of miscreants in The Brothers Karamazov. This is not to diminish Raskolnikov, he is a powerful figure of darkness and depravity. It is simply to say that it is harder to make Alyosha as scintillatingly good as Raskolnikov is bad. And it is nearly impossible to conceive of a world in which the reverse would be true.
James R Edwards, The Divine Intruder, NavPress, 2000, pp.109-110.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared that experiencing a story—any story—requires the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In Coleridge’s view, a reader reasons thus: “Yes, I know Coleridge’s bit about the Ancient Mariner is bunk. But in order to enjoy myself, I have to silence my inner skeptic and temporarily believe that the Ancient Mariner is real.
Okay, there! Done!” But…will has so little do with it. We come in contact with a storyteller who utters a magical incantation (for instance, “once upon a time”) and seizes our attention. If the storyteller is skilled, he simply invades us and takes over. There is little we can do to resist, aside from abruptly clapping the book shut.
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, HMH Books.
Virtue as Part of Our Story
Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thought about the ethical life to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answer the question, “of which story am I a part?” According to MacIntyre, each life is a story, “specifically a play in [the] genre of tragedy, because each life ends in death.” We lose sight of this because we divide life into distinct spheres that hardly touch at all: work and leisure, private and public, corporate and personal. But virtue is excellence of the whole character and indivisible into watertight compartments.
To illustrate how the otherwise absurd components of a life story only have meaning as part of a story, MacIntyre asks us to imagine that while waiting for a bus, a young man next to us says “The name of the common wild duck is Histrionicus histrionicus histrionicus.” A perfectly intelligible sentence, but an absurd event, until it is integrated into a story.
The event loses its absurdity with a little context:
- “He has mistaken me for someone who yesterday had approached him in the library and asked: ‘Do you know the Latin name of the common wild duck?’”
- “He has just come from a session with his psychotherapist who has urged him to break down his shyness by talking to strangers. ‘But what shall I say?’ ‘Oh, anything at all.’”
- “He is a Soviet spy waiting at a prearranged rendez-vous and uttering the ill-chosen code sentence which will identify him to his contact.” (After Virtue, 210)
Though any of these would be unusual, they are no longer absurd, because they find their place in a story.
Stories
How Stories Move us to Action
When I was fifteen, I applied for my first job, at Eureka Baking Company, and ran into a complication. The job interview was a few miles from my high school, and I didn’t have a way to get there. I suggested to my dad that I might reschedule, but he immediately shot down the idea.
“When I moved to Oakland from Mississippi at nineteen, I heard General Motors was hiring,” he said. “The plant was in San Leandro [the next town over]. I wanted the job, so I woke up at five a.m. and walked the eight miles to the open job interview. I got the job. I didn’t ask them to reschedule, I made it work . . . so make it work!” Now this may sound like the classic “uphill both ways” story, but I remember it to this day, and it inspired me to find a way to the interview and get the job.
Why did my dad share this story? Because stories are the most effective way to convey information, teach, and to move people to action. He could have just told me it’s important to be adaptive and make an effort, but instead he showed me how those attributes served him in a very real way.
Heather Box and Julian Mocine-McQueen, How Your Story Sets You Free, Chronicle Books, 2019.
The Land of O-Z
The American writer and journalist Frank Lyman Baum found that his first book began when a band of children, including his own four sons, asked him to tell a story one night in their home in Chicago. The story began immediately with a farm girl from Kansas named Dorothy and the amazing journeys she went on. At one point, the children asked what country Dorothy had landed in, and Baum needed a little inspiration. The first thing his eyes landed upon was a filing cabinet, with the label O-Z. “The land of Oz!” he exclaimed!
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Persuading Ourselves of the Truth
When we observe evil, sinful behavior from a distance, the inclination is simply to see people as acting with malicious intent. We assume they are “bad people.” But often the motivations that lead to significant lapses in moral behavior are quite different. Because most people want to see themselves generally as “good,” they engage in a complex game of rationalizing and self-deception that enables them to perform these sinful acts.
Over time, what starts as a set of questionable lies we tell ourselves becomes capital T “Truth.” An excellent example of this from history took place during the Watergate scandal. In an interview from 1975, the whistleblower of Watergate, John Dean, explains just how this worked with those involved in the scandal:
INTERVIEWER: You mean those who made up the stories were believing their own lies?
DEAN: That’s right. If you said it often enough, it would become true. When the press learned of the wire taps on newsmen and White House staffers, for example, and flat denials failed, it was claimed that this was a national-security matter. I’m sure many people believed that the taps were for national security; they weren’t. That was concocted as a justification after the fact. But when they said it, you understand, they really believed it.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Lyndon Johnson was known as a master at the game of self-justification. His biographer, Robert Caro, described what would happen when Johnson came to believe something to be true, he would believe in it “totally, with absolute conviction, regardless of previous beliefs, or of the facts in the matter.”
George Reedy, an aide who witnessed the same behavior, described LBJ as having “had a remarkable capacity to convince himself that he held the principles he should hold at any given time, and there was something charming about the air of injured innocence with which he would treat anyone who brought forth evidence that he had held other views in the past. It was not an act … He had a fantastic capacity to persuade himself that the ‘truth’ which was convenient for the present was the truth and anything that conflicted with it was the prevarication of enemies. He literally willed what was in his mind to become reality.”
Stuart Strachan Jr, with Source Material from John Dean, interview by Barbara Cady, January 1975; Robert A. Caro, Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 2002), p.886.
Something Permanent
In his book Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth, Hugh Halter opens with an unlikely scenario: taking his teenage daughter to get her first tattoo.
While watching his daughter get “inked,” Halter asked the tattoo artist (named Sean) a very interesting question.
“So why do you think people tend to get so many tattoos Sean? And why is the art of tattooing growing exponentially around the world?” Sean responds with significant insight:
“Because it’s something permanent etched on someone’s flesh that can’t be stolen, taken away, or corrupted. It’s unique to them, deeply irrevocably theirs, and represents a story that has formed them or at least means something to them. When someone lets me etch something meaningful on their dermis, that means a lot to me and should mean even more to them. Skin matters a lot.”
Hugh Halter, Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth, David C. Cook, 2014, p.14.
Stories We Tell Ourselves
A man named Jack was driving on a dark country road one night when he got a flat tire. He saw a cabin in the woods and began to walk towards it. He told himself that the person who answered the door would be angry and irritated for the interruption. In fact, the person would probably harm him. He was probably a truly terrible person. Who else would live out in the woods away from people? Jack convinced himself that the person who lived in the cabin was a menace to society, so when the door opened, Jack punched the man in the nose and ran away.
What Sort of a Tale Have We Fallen Into?
“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose its often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually—their paths were laid that way, as you put it.
“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”
“I wonder,” replied Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, single-volume edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p.696).
Studies
Stories Synchronize our Brains
Groundbreaking work by Dr. Uri Hasson has shown that the brain of an individual listening to a story actually synchronizes with the brain of the individual telling the story—an event known as neural coupling. Working with functional MRI, which can measure brain activity in real time, Dr. Hasson demonstrated the power of stories. “By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts, and emotions into the listeners’ brains,” Hasson says.
“A story is the only way to activate parts in the brain so that a listener turns the story into their own idea and experience.” This has tremendous implications for the power of story. People adopt your experience as their own in the moment. This allows us to cultivate empathy in powerful ways. For example, when we hear the story of someone who was beaten as a child, we put ourselves in their place, feel their fear, and gain insight into the scary reality of their experience. Story expands our knowledge and our emotional connection to a topic.
Heather Box and Julian Mocine-McQueen, How Your Story Sets You Free, Chronicle Books, 2019.
Stories in Music
The musicologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin estimates that we hear about five hours of music per day. It sounds impossible, but Levitin is counting everything: elevator music, movie scores, commercial jingles, and all the stuff we mainline into our brains through earbuds. Of course, not all music tells a story.
There are also symphonies, fugues, and avant-garde soundscapes blending wind chimes and bunny screams. But the most popular brand of music tells stories about protagonists struggling to get what they want—most often a boy or a girl. Singers might work in meter and rhyme, and alongside guitarists and drummers, but that does not alter the fact that the singer is telling a story—it only disguises it.
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, HMH Books.
Surviving Navy Seals Training
And as difficult as most of their training is, nothing can compare to BUDS, which stands for Basic Underwater Demolition Seal Training. If it sounds intense, it’s actually worse. During BUDS, you have to survive “one-hundred-ten hours without sleep.” You have to carry a log over your head for hours. Countless swims, endless runs, jumping out of planes, and then there’s perhaps the hardest part of all, called “pool comp.”
In “pool comp” you are put underwater with all your scuba gear on, the instructor yanks your regulator out of your mouth, he ties your air hose in knots, he mocks you constantly as you struggle for air. What your mind is naturally telling you at this point is simple: You are going to die, but if you want to pass “pool comp,” you have to calmly follow all protocol to pass.
It’s not hard to see why there’s a 94 percent attrition rate. Now the question is, why do some pass, while most fail? This was a question the Navy wanted to find out, because after 9/11 they were in desperate need for more Seals, but didn’t want to water down the quality of their seals. So they began studying the data. And the results were quite surprising. The Navy didn’t need more macho guys or strong guys, they often were the first to ring the bell and give up. Nope, but they could use more used Car Salesman.
Why? Because Used Car Salesman have learned how to survive the seemingly never-ending amount of rejection they receive by changing their self-talk. That is, by changing the stories inside their heads.
The truth is, we aren’t like computers, going from place to place with mathematical computations inside our heads to make each decision. No, we are story-tellers. We tell stories because stories are how we make sense of the world around us. Scientists know this, Jesus knows this, and now even the Navy knows just how important stories are for our lives.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Humor
Stories We Tell Ourselves
A man named Jack was driving on a dark country road one night when he got a flat tire. He saw a cabin in the woods and began to walk towards it. He told himself that the person who answered the door would be angry and irritated for the interruption. In fact, the person would probably harm him. He was probably a truly terrible person. Who else would live out in the woods away from people? Jack convinced himself that the person who lived in the cabin was a menace to society, so when the door opened, Jack punched the man in the nose and ran away.
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