God forbade...must reading!

Stories






  A story is a narrative arranged in time sequence, “the king died, then the queen died.” A plot is, also, a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “the king died, then the queen died of grief,” is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it. Aristotle called the plot the soul or breath (psyche) of the story because the plot is invisible, and, yet, animates and integrates the whole. A plot is something we either get or fail to get, like the point of a joke. This is one of the reasons stories are said to be mysterious, even sacred, and are often associated with religious experience. To get a story is a kind of revelation. Were it not for stories and myths, however, we would never know more than cats and dogs about the ‘river of life’. To eastern philosophizers Western obsession with beginnings, causes and ends seems like a child forever trying to tie his shoelaces. If we learn lightly to tell stories and gently to play with them in our mind, then, we may know how to read and hear them. We might then come to enjoy our theological stories, too, and not stone them to death with dogma.



A story’s details count for much more than narrative until quite late in life.



  Without a ‘moment of hesitance’ time ‘loops’ into the future and we go more crippled than before. Instead of learning something new from our emergencies, we unthinkingly relearn the bad lessons that got us into the jam in the first place, like an alcoholic who cures a hangover with another drink or pianist who gets worse because he reinforces awkward fingering.



  Good stories 1) take place in existential time, 2) their beginning is their end and 3) they float on the ‘river of life’ and not damn it up.



  The story becomes story in a transition between teller (or writer) and listener. Awareness of a story’s coming to be is what makes a good story alive. A concentration on the present means the story is or becomes a unity in which every part contains the whole. The story’s end is in its beginning, and vice-versa. If you have the beginning of your story, engendered by a sense of where its going or wants to go now, you have the whole.



   The best stories rise and fall ephemerally upon the waters of time. They are like waves of time making it into patterns to the delight of the imagination. We tell stories, not only to while away the time, but to shape it and render it meaningful, make it our own.



  Abstractly change and continuation seem to be opposites. In the growth process they come together as two aspects of the same reality.



Anticipation of the future is what gives urgency to the present.



Patterns of Grace- Tom Driver