“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
The instant we step out of our homes and put our feet down onto the sidewalk, we are swept up into a powerful and deep story. It is like stepping into the current of a mighty river. Our feet get pulled along by the undertow of a constantly moving, even if subconscious, narrative. And it is a complex, layered narrative: the narrative of our city or place, the narrative of our culture, the narrative of our family of origin, the narrative of our own personal struggles and triumphs. It is the narrative we have been using to make sense of our lives, especially in moments when we feel discouraged, defeated, or unsure.
Perhaps most importantly, this narrative often remains invisible to our conscious mind. This means that we can, for example, go to church or attend a Christian conference or participate in Bible study and give attention to, be moved by, and hold fervently to a particular set of conscious beliefs about our lives — yet those beliefs, however earnestly held, can leave the deep narrative river of our soul essentially unchanged. And so the moment we step back onto the flow of the sidewalk, we are pulled back into the striving energy of our default story. Genuine Christian discipleship is essentially seeking to reshape the narrative of this deep story – redirecting the undertow of our souls — with the story of the gospel. To do so, we need to start by excavating our deep stories.
So what are some of the deep stories we tell ourselves? What is that subterranean river, relentlessly powerful yet often unseen? For some, that story might be a version of the American Dream story. It goes something like this: “I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot. But through hard work, grit, and resilience, I’ve been able to work my way up in the world, and now I’ve become relatively successful and satisfied.” Some version of that story may well be the one we tell ourselves when we’re discouraged, overwhelmed, or self-doubting. We most often pull out these scripts when we need to reassure ourselves that we are going to be okay. But whether in times of vulnerability or times of great triumph, this might be the story we are using to make sense of our lives.
For others, that story does not quite ring true. You might be more of a creative type and your story might sound something more like this: “I grew up in a very conservative home with a lot of traditional values and expectations. I was always a bit of an oddball in my family, and I felt very confined and even a little suppressed. I never really felt I could fully be myself. So I left my home, and I came to the city to discover who I am, to tap into the creativity and uniqueness that is inside there somewhere and offer it to the world.”
Or, you might be more like me and tell more of an underdog or outsider’s story: “I’ve always felt like the deck has been stacked against me. There have always been all kinds of forces set against me. I’ve had to overcome obstacles that others never had to deal with. I have always felt like I’m on the outside looking in. But I worked harder, I sacrificed more, I had to be twice as good as my peers just to get noticed, and I’ve been able to make my own way where there was no way.”
It would be a powerful exercise to pause right now and to try to excavate even just a part of the story that each of us tells ourselves. It may not be one of the stories shared here, but there is some story in there that is quietly pulling each of us along through life. Remember that sometimes the edges of our story become most visible to us in times of deep discouragement and disorientation – the moments when we feel like we have lost the plot in the story of our life. Excavating is hard, backbreaking work, but if we are not at least growing in our awareness of these deep, controlling scripts, Christian faith and belief will never really be more than just flotsam and jetsam – fragments of conscious belief, floating on the surface, carried along by the driving currents of our deeper idolatries.
So, once we identify that subterranean river, how do we redirect it? The Austrian philosopher and educator Ivan Illich was once asked what the best way was to change a society. Was it through gradual reform? Violent revolution? His answer was “Neither.” The best way to change the world, Illich said, is to tell a truer and more beautiful story, “one so persuasive that it sweeps away the old myths and becomes the preferred story, one so inclusive that it gathers all the bits of our past and our present into a coherent whole, one that even shines some light into the future so that we can take the next step… If you want to change a society, then you have to tell an alternative story.”
The same holds true for how to change a life. The way to experience genuine change in life is not to try to combat the deep scripts of our souls with a set of moral rules, with an airtight, rational argument, or with a set of comprehensive beliefs. Such attempts are like trying to redirect a river with a makeshift dam constructed from flotsam and jetsam. We effectively redirect the river by re-narrating our lives, by reprogramming that inner narrator of our souls with the alternate story of the gospel, the story that is far truer and far more beautiful than the performance-driven scripts that currently flood and rage within us.
Yet, for so many Christians, the Christian faith is more a set of reference books than a story. It may be by far our favorite reference series; we may have given it pride of place in our homes; it may be displayed proudly on the mantel in our living room so every guest can see and admire it. And far from merely collecting dust, this reference series may be lovingly worn, every one of the sixty-six books within it. Each may bear all the marks of being regularly read and studied. The edges are worn, the bindings strained, the pages marked up. We look at our faith extensively; we refer to it frequently and naturally in everyday conversation, but our beliefs are still things we take out and look at, not the story that we live.
At some point, the Christian’s faith must move from a set of reference books that we look at (however regularly) to a storybook that we step into. That is to say, once we have done the good and necessary work of taking the Christian faith and analyzing, dissecting, and cataloging it, we must do the work of putting it all back together again so that it begins to whir and spin and come back to life. We need to bend our theology back into the shape of a story that is so real and beautiful to us that it can redirect the deep river in our souls. That is, after all, how we got it in the first place – in the shape of a story.
One of my favorite authors is the great science fiction novelist Kurt Vonnegut. He has a wonderful little lecture one can find on YouTube, a lecture filled with all his characteristic wit and humor (and a little bit of colorful language). Vonnegut titled his lecture The Shapes of Stories, and his premise is that every story any human being has ever told always has had the same exact shape. We tell it to ourselves over and over and over again, and we love it every time.
This singular story that we tell ourselves is what Vonnegut calls “Man in Hole.” But the story, as he says, need not be about a man and need not involve a hole. Vonnegut starts by drawing a graph with an x- and y-axis on an old chalkboard. The horizontal x-axis is labeled “time” and starts at “The Beginning” and ends at “The End.” The vertical y-axis is the axis of what he calls “Fortune,” with “Ill Fortune” at the bottom and “Good Fortune” at the top. Every story, Vonnegut says, begins with a protagonist who starts at a place of relative good fortune. He plots this protagonist somewhere slightly above halfway on the “Fortune” axis. He might be a little bit dissatisfied or bored or naive, but he typically begins in relative good fortune. But then something befalls the protagonist, often outside of his control, that knocks him down from that place of relative good fortune. So as the story moves along the time axis, the protagonist finds himself falling down the vertical y-axis into a pit of ill fortune until he hits a bottom. It is here that every good story forges a connection between the reader and the protagonist. We know what it’s like to be the “man in hole.”
But just then, something unexpected happens, something every bit as unexpected as the initial catastrophe. He meets someone or discovers something or achieves some insight at the bottom of the hole that ultimately rescues him. Something befalls him in a moment where all hope is lost that lifts him out of the hole and places him upon a higher position on the fortune axis than when he started. That last turn, by the way, is what J.R.R. Tolkien calls the eu-catastrophe (that is “the good catastrophe”). If the fall into the pit was the original catastrophe – the ill fortune that befalls the protagonist outside of his control – then the redeeming turn that changes him is the eu-catastrophe, one that in the most satisfying of stories, also befalls him outside of his control. It is a catastrophe of grace. The narrative tension is suddenly resolved, leaving the protagonist in a place of better fortune than where he started.
Vonnegut notes that there are variations on this plot. So, he goes on to graph Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood and even a Kafka novel where it is just chaos and despair all the way down. But even all of these variations, according to Vonnegut, are shifts or wrinkles or segments within the same overall shape.
It probably is not hard to guess where we are heading with this insight. If we look at this graph of a story, we will notice that the story of the Bible maps pretty cleanly onto it. The classic biblical-theological categories of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration find their place pretty quickly at every major turn on the graph. In creation, we are told that all things were “very good.” Under that divine benediction, we were living in a creation that was latent with endless possibility, waiting to yield its riches under the cultivating hand of the image bearers of its creator. We begin in a place of pristine good fortune.
But then the catastrophe of the Fall occurs, and now we find ourselves in the pit of exile and under the just wrath and displeasure of God. The story of the people of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is one of twists and variations and wrinkles and wanderings in search of a path out of the hole of sin back into the garden of good fortune. But this story of exile leaves God’s people despairing of their ability to find a way out in their own strength. It only leaves them at the bottom of the hole, with no way out. But then, suddenly, those who were walking in darkness see a great light. Redemption dawns suddenly and unexpectedly upon the people of God, and the greatest and truest and most beautiful eu-catastrophe befalls them, a redemption that they never could have imagined, much less orchestrated in their own strength. It is the gracious gift of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, his substitutionary death on a cross, salvation offered as an act of pure, unmixed grace. And this death and resurrection mean that the victory over sin and death has been accomplished once and for all, that a process of applying that salvation to the world, where “death begins to work backward,” as C.S. Lewis so beautifully put it, begins to unfold. It promises an end to the story where we end up not back in the original garden of God but now in the beautified garden-city of God – a place far better than where we began.
Part of the power of this four-chapter storyline of Scripture is that it takes the reference books off of our shelves and re-enchants them to become the one true faerie story (as Tolkien would call it). And it is the story that has the power to out-narrate the deep scripts of our hearts, to redirect the subterranean river that shapes and carves the bedrock of our lives. But it takes time to get the well-loved reference books off of our mantles, to rework them back into their original shape as story, and to re-enchant them so that they again animate our lives. This process requires new habits of mind, a rewiring from our predominantly left brain analytic mind to include our right brain intuitive mind. It requires a transposing of the gospel back into the shape of story – not only a story that we look at, but a story that we step into and live out.
Even that is still not quite enough because one can still pick up a storybook and put it back down, say, “Well, that was nice,” and then step back into that other story that sweeps us up as we step and stumble along the sidewalk. It is not enough simply to take our theology off the bookshelf and to transpose it back into the true faerie story, as great an effort as that requires. What we need is for the Bible to move from a reference book on a mantle, to a storybook on a nightstand, to ultimately an alternate set of lenses and garments – glasses we use to see and garments we put on as transformed characters, those of an alternate story in the world. When the Christian gets up to put on her work clothes on Monday morning, she does not put on the character garments for a story of achievement, ambition, or success. She instead puts on the lenses and the garments of a vastly different story from the one the world is telling itself, a story wildly different from all the submerged stories and scripts that drive the restless undertow of our hearts, a story not of human striving but of supernatural grace.
Our family has come to love a Nicholas Cage movie. It still feels new-ish to me, but my kids remind me that it was made barely after the year 2000. So, it is basically a silent film to them. The movie is called National Treasure, and in it, Nicholas Cage’s character and a group of colleagues discover that on the back of the Declaration of Independence is an invisible treasure map that reveals the location of the national treasures of some of the greatest human civilizations of the world. As they follow these clues to find this buried treasure, they discover that the map they saw was incomplete. They learn that in order to see the entire map, they need to find a special pair of glasses made by Benjamin Franklin, a pair of glasses that has four sets of lenses on them such that one can look at the map with various combinations of lenses to reveal different information and different parts of the map. But, in order to see everything and fully read the map, all four lenses need to be in place. Only then can they see exactly where the “national treasure” is hidden.
The creation-fall-redemption-restoration framework gives us the four lenses that enable us to see the fullness of God’s creation as well as the hidden treasure of the kingdom of heaven within it. I was raised in a Christian tradition that was deeply biblical and warmly evangelical, but the habits of mind I learned within it were to look out at the world and first see the Fall (the second lens). So, for example, to me the finance industry was, at the end of the day, all about greed and hoarding wealth. Fashion was materialistic and vain. Movies and the arts were romanticizing the worldly and the vulgar. The first and primary lens I had to look out onto the world with was the lens of the Fall. The world was, first and foremost, a place of darkness and rebellion, the realm of the Prince of the Air.
But I was equipped with a second set of lenses, too: the lens of redemption. Yet, that redemption was too often understood as staying separate and pure from the world. Our goal, as I understood it, was to wait uncontaminated until we would be rescued from this material existence into a place of non-material, disembodied bliss. Those were lenses — the Fall and Redemption – the only two lenses with which I had been equipped to look out at the world.
As a result, I was unable to see the full depth of what God is up to in this world. I was living a two-chapter gospel – a story that bookended my beginning and my end but was unable to re-narrate the middle pages on which my life was lived. So, when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I thought that as long as I did nothing immoral, I could simply go about my life. That, of course, meant that the actual substance of my life was left to be narrated by the deep scripts that formed me, but of which I was unaware. I was left alone, swept along by the dark undertow of my soul, holding on to the occasional flotsam and jetsam as it floated by.
When I discovered the full “creation, fall, redemption, restoration” framework, it forced me to retrain this habit of mind. Rather than starting instinctively with the fall, with critique, it invited me to pause, to flip up the lens of the fall for just a moment and to first flip down the lens of creation. I began to ask, “What is good about this? What is very good about it?” This is my Father’s world, first and foremost. The fall is pervasive, but it is not strong enough to obliterate the creational intentions of the Father. The fall twists and perverts everything, but it can only twist the good that is already there. Sin is, as one author put it, parasitic on the good. Only then is it right and good – or even accurate! – for me to overlay the second lens, the lens of total depravity. The Fall is a crucial lens that we must not lose. Without it, we lose our ability to see the world biblically, yet it is a lens that helps us see rightly only when it is overlaid on top of the first lens, that of Creation.
Even more, that first lens shifts not only how we understand the Fall but also how we understand redemption. When Jesus dies on the cross as the substitute for my sin, when he gives me his righteousness in exchange for my guilt, and when he rises again to new life with a new physical body, it shows me that this redemption by grace through faith alone is not only for individual souls but also for the entire material creation. Our forgiveness and adoption as sons and daughters of God is what all of creation longs for because in our adoption is the renewal of all things (Romans 8).
For me, appreciating creation suddenly meant that with redemption a material creation that had once been evacuated of all eternal significance was all at once given back to me as a pure gift of God’s grace. The universe was reconstituted before my very eyes not merely as the world – the realm of sin and rebellion – but as the promised new creation. Further, dropping down the third lens over the first two immediately brought down the fourth lens, restoration. God’s object of concern was the restoration of his entire creation in Christ, by grace through faith. This was now more than a bookend story for my beginning and my end. It was a four-chapter gospel that swept up every day of my life into a new, more beautiful, more comprehensive story. Christ and his grace became more and more the narrator of my soul.
But this creation-fall-redemption-restoration framework is far from a silver bullet. It is a habit of mind that must be cultivated repeatedly over time, the muscle memory of the soul. The task of spiritual formation – becoming more and more in our sanctification whom we have already been declared to be in our justification – is an arduous, lifelong process. Yet I have come to believe that in Romans 12, where the Apostle Paul commands us to be transformed nonconformists in the world, the “renewing of the mind” he refers to is something like this: as we view God’s mercy in Christ again and again and again, we are swept up into an alternate story of God’s grace, and we find that the Bible we hold in our hands is not just a reference book, not just a storybook, but the living Word of God that gives us new lenses to see and clothes us in new garments to wear.
The narrative of the Scriptures rewrites our biographies. So, when we step out onto the sidewalk, step into our cars, or put on our office clothes, we no longer put on the garments of these other stories. We no longer put on the character costumes of the striving hero in an American Dream story or the self-made success of an underdog story. Instead, we put on the lenses and the garments of Christ himself. Indeed, we remember that by grace we have already been clothed in him (Galatians 3:27) once and for all, in the moment we put our faith in him.
This is the ultimate truer and more beautiful story, the story in which we want to be swept up. This is the river of life, the true story that rushes through all creation. It is the story of God’s infinite grace that can redirect the river of our souls and carry us along finally to Him who alone is the fountain of eternal life.