Blessed Are the Storytellers

Blessed are the storytellers, for they shall… 
… make an incredible sum of money to sustain them and their descendants. (uncommon)
… know fame and notoriety for the rest of their days. (uncommon)
… impact the hearts and minds of so many who are privileged to engage with them. (all around us)

We feel seen.

The most beautiful thing bubbled in our classroom at the end of the semester. A student couldn’t land on a writing idea for her side project (a work of writing to build when you finish other work early or need to work your brain in a different way), and with probing questions from individuals in our class, she landed on an idea that includes all of her classmates as characters. 

“That sounds just like me!” one student said when he heard himself complain about being hungry and wanting a second lunch in her story. “Yep! I definitely don’t love skiing,” another student commented after reading her part in the story. These children are feeling seen. 

One thing that stories do is they help us feel seen. Even if it’s not explicitly us in a story, when there is a character we can relate to, we feel less alone in the world. 

We connect ideas.

We were reading The Polar Express in class just before the holiday break, and one person noticed that “the first gift of Christmas” could also be Jesus. And that maybe, as humans get older, grown-ups lose the faith of childhood. 

Both Lessons & Carols and Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God tell the story of the coming of Christ, embedded in a musical narrative that connects heartstrings to the knowledge we have of stories from the Bible and pulls together dispersed stories to a more coherent and complete narrative. 

What a gift to hear these familiar stories in a different way. 

We grow our understanding.

I had the opportunity to sit in Dallas traffic for about two hours with my dad recently. On our drive, I asked about all the stories I knew from his life. You see, I knew a lot of the pieces, but I wasn’t clear on the order in which they happened. Hearing him tell these stories—of his childhood, of the military, of college, of professional travel and relocations, of loves, and of life—I understand him even more. I feel more connected to him by virtue of knowing where he’s been, how, and why. 

Similarly, I learned a lot more about my mom after she died. I didn’t connect a lot of the stories until she was almost gone. And when I was writing a eulogy for her funeral, I saw her in a whole new light. I was preparing to tell her story, and that led to my own increased understanding of the beautiful person she was in the world.

Saint John’s example

Saint John is credited with writing the fourth Gospel, a couple of epistles, and the book of Revelation. Even if we discover that he had some help in the authorship of those tomes, we know him to be a storyteller. We can see the breadth of his craft in the reporting of the Gospel events, the connection of his ideas in the epistles, and his vision in Revelation. 

As a result of all this authorship, he is considered the patron saint of writers and booksellers. He is one of many throughout the historical record who have paved the way for those who are eager to share their experiences and those who profit by the proliferation of storytelling. 

Perpetuating the art and gift of storytelling

And it’s so important that our stories go on. That we share our ideas that reflect the diversity of human experience. As parents, we have the opportunity to control the stories our children hear: at bedtime, around the table, on road trips, and sometimes in school. For a precious period of time, we are their most-favored resource for questions and more stories. We can model reading and listening to the voices of others’ experiences. 

Later, we are able to monitor and suggest the stories they consume – in books, in music, in reels, and in snaps, from those we spend time with as a family. And we continue to model for them in our readership habits, even in the social media posts we choose to share between our accounts.

And then, just like that, our children are off on their own. We can tell them stories. We can invite them to share theirs. We get to model listening. 

On this holy day honoring an author, an attentive disciple who listened and watched, who shared his ideas and visions with vulnerability, let us pause long enough to listen to a story, to share one of ours. May we all be so lucky as to be traveling little libraries of God’s love in the world.