Do Narratives Have Meaning?

Andrew Wilson, in a blog post in Think Theology (Mon., April 20, 2020, “Does Life Have Meaning?  Four Possibilities”) refers to Steven D. Smith’s book Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac.  Wilson presents from Smith four possibilities about life’s meaning:

1. It might be that neither individual lives nor human activity and history as a whole have meaning in the narrative sense.

2. It might be that human history as a whole has no meaning, but individual lives do.

3. History as a whole might possess some kind of narrative sense, but individual lives might not.

4. It might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.

Wilson then writes:

Answer (4) is the answer of Christianity, an answer which it provides by grounding objective meaning in a transcendent reality and a world to come. In a sense, Christians agree with the absurdists that this world does not make sense in and of itself; Wittgenstein’s remark that “the sense of this world must lie outside the world” sounds theistic, if not explicitly Christian. As Chesterton’s Father Brown quips, “We are here on the wrong side of the tapestry … The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else.”

Wilson’s contention, regrettably, seems accurate enough for Christianity as it exists, and as it presents itself as a source of “answers.”  Like too much of Christianity, though, it does not comport with the teachings of Jesus.  I addressed, in an earlier post, the unfortunate business of Christian theology ostensibly supplying a narrative of salvation:

We can try to make ourselves “readied” for salvation.  We can maintain that we believe this or that, and we can work on our minds so as to bend them into the shape of our desired beliefs.  We might simultaneously think that we cannot ultimately control what we think, but it is only the experience of undershooting in that regard that we register; in the final accounting we may find that we have often overshot in self-indoctrination, to our detriment.  We have decided how we will be “readied.”  And here it will perhaps suffice to say, given the fantastic constellation of proffered religious “salvations,” that we have also decided how we will be “reaped.”

But the business of being “roused” cannot be so easily transacted.  We are roused at each instance of the story-arc—instances tumbling one upon the other—and in these moments of responding to moments before conceptual moments have passed—in those pre-moments, as it were—we have revealed to us the unyielding substance of our souls.  It is for the sake of that soul-substance, not the substance of our doctrines, or of our hopes in various salvation-plans, that we are right to beg mercy from God.

We must ask that our responses to the moments of life spill forth rightly from the seat of an inner being only God can know and only God can tend—as God  would will.  Nothing figures more prominently in the Gospels than the necessity of the inmost self—the primal self, the infra-cognitive self—being predisposed to lunge for the light rather than the dark.

I know that I must provide a distinction between my “story-arc” and the “narrative meaning” that Wilson quotes approvingly.  In full, the Answer (4) that Wilson ratifies is: “It might be that both individual lives and human activity as a whole have some sort of narrative meaning.”  He then contributes, “Answer (4) is the answer of Christianity, an answer which it provides by grounding objective meaning in a transcendent reality and a world to come.”  The word to note here is “provides.”

I say that the course of our salvation and of our strivings is woven within us as something that “only God can know and only God can tend”; Wilson tells us that Christianity “provides” an “answer”—though he is only too willing to admit that the answer can often seem absurd.  I suggest that the narrative provided by God is not an absurdity; it is really none of our business.  Sure, it would seem that God has a narrative for humanity and for each of us—but what is that to the believer?

To step through a brief passage from Matthew:

He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent me.

He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward (10:39-42, KJV).

What then does “narrative” mean to the believer?  Our lives—our imperfectly grasped pasts and presents, our still more cloudy futures—are all forfeit.  We must be willing to lose our futures at any moment, and as for our pasts and presents—who is to say that the parts we think are the least absurd are not in fact the parts we have most misjudged?

Does not the one who receives a prophet’s or righteous man’s reward receive a share of that person’s life by adoption?  In narrative—if not in more-or-less certain fact—our lives hinge on a single moment: the elusive “now” in which responding to our savior is all-important.  The fact that every moment qualifies as that “now” is just too bad for us.  We never know which cup of water or which thirsty—or hungry or frightened or endangered—child will be the one.  Are we to consider each such moment as part of a narrative?  Are we to imagine in such a moment that there really is such a thing as a past or a future?

In truth, the narratives of our lives hang by single moments, ever-changing.  We are never entitled to the two fixed points it would take to define a line, much less a straight one.  Our reluctance to accept this fact clouds our views of God and his relationship to us.  We worship an omnipotent and timeless God, a God who can bend space and time, a God who can will space and time out of existence—and yet we seek meaning in—of all things—stories.

This Christian fascination with narratives reaches its height, so to speak, with the Transfiguration.  It is incredible, the extent to which the appearance of Moses and Elijah is treated in itself as a moment of great portent.  Of course those two men figured mightily in the history of Israel, and Jesus as Messiah was a fulfillment of that history.  On the other hand, Peter, James, and John were surely versed in that history well enough to know what disreputable characters had managed to haul Samuel out of the ground.

What is more, on the way down the mountain Jesus treads on the narrative of Elijah’s return, relegating it to the symbolic.  The communal story element of the Transfiguration—centered on Jesus as prophesied Messiah—is not merely sidelined in the episode; it is shown as malleable and dispensable, as God might will.  It cannot be for nothing, then, that God unceremoniously obliterates the scene on the mountaintop and directs the disciples, on his authority, to listen to Jesus—inescapably, to focus their attention on him.

If a narrative is to be drawn from the Transfiguration, it must surely be a negative one—negative in the sense of a story referred to precisely so that it might be minimized.  A good analogy might be an exasperated high-school baseball coach, working mightily to get the potential out of one of his players.  The coach sees that batting practice has become a rote exercise, so he creates a setting to challenge his player’s capacities.  A practice it will be, but like no other.

The coach organizes a scrimmage game on a breezy, sunset-approaching afternoon, with a drafted contingent of students in the stands, and still others gathered around car stereos in the parking lot.  The coach says it is the bottom of the seventh, with two men on, and the score tied with one out.  He puts the player in question at the plate.

The coach himself then takes the mound, and tells the player that if he strikes out, the player will have to wait in the batter’s box and watch all his teammates be subjected to twenty laps around the park.

The coach standing in as pitcher then holds up the ball for the player to see and says, “Hit this.”  The player at the plate ought then to know upon what his attention should be focused.

God whisks away Moses and Elijah, leaving only Jesus.  God’s instruction to the disciples is “Hear him.”  Does that focus our attention?

Jesus drew our attention to mustard seeds, to mites, to moments—moments such as a person reflexively reaching for a sheep in a pit on the Sabbath, so that the entire history of Sabbath-keeping might be diverted in an instant.  Far too much of our attention to the Gospels is predicated on our expectation—our demand, really—that the Gospels tell us a story.

What the Gospels present to us are non-stories, like the sheep in the pit.  Or diverted stories, like the inexorable progression of Jesus’ “time” being deflected because Mary felt bad for a wedding party short of wine.  Or anti-stories, like John the Baptist saying, “He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me” (John 1:15).  Or Jesus: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).

Whether in John, as in the two verses just above, or in the Synoptics with the Transfiguration, there is ample evidence that the Gospels warn against the lure of any story more complicated than the heart’s yearning—no, a heartbeat’s yearning—for the dark or the light.  Any narrative beyond that is dangerous, and scarcely to be celebrated.

Narratives are enticing.  Narratives are traps.