Stories of Desire and Narratives of Faith

From Neanderthals to the Postmodern Era

Victor Hunter, Lanny Hunter

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532662270
  9781532662287
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532662294
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Stories are the foundation for identity and the ground of understanding. Stories of Desire and Narratives of Faith addresses humankind's search for identity and meaning through the stories of science and religion. Both arose in the mists of history. Both are awe inspiring. Both beggar the imagination. Both have always competed for authority. Science gained preeminence in our postmodern, pluralistic, globalized world as evidenced based, while religion (for many reasons) lost credibility. Yet religion has not disappeared. Stories is a concise, engaging, inspiring accessible account of the history of science (geological and biological evolution perceived through increasingly sophisticated technology) and the history of nine text-based world religions of antiquity. Stories avoids insider language, democratizing both God talk and scientific jargon without patronizing either. There is no attempt to identify the best or truest religion, and Stories disavows dogmatic religious triumphalism. The authors do follow the tradition of giving an account of their Christian faith, the only religious story with which they have experience. They invite others to do the same, paying attention to their own stories as they grapple with modern science, do theology, and engage faith. Stories proposes how and in what manner these disciplines can meaningfully converse in today's world.

PART ONE

WHAT?

The Evolution of Practically Everything

“The time has come, the Walrus said,

To talk of many things:

Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—

Of cabbages and kings—

And why the sea is boiling hot—

And whether pigs have wings.”

—Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll)Author, Mathematician, and Anglican Cleric

1

Mommy, Tell Me a Story

“In my world, history comes down to language

and art. No one cares much about what battles

were fought, who won them and who lost them—

unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem

that speaks of the event.”

—Theodore Bikel

The fountainhead of meaning-making and socialization is the mother’s first story to her child. We meet that head-on every time we converse with a child who asks a question and responds to our every answer with a repetitive series of, “Why?” Their “Whys?” never stop. Erudition is stymied by the inquisitive mind of a child. The child’s “Why?” is only satisfied by, “Mommy, tell me a story.”

Stories address the abiding curiosity that is fundamental to being human. Stories express the facts, imaginings, hopes, fears, dreams, and beliefs of the human race. Stories pose a problem and set out to find a solution—or bear witness to its failure to do so. The tension created in the search for answers is what makes stories compelling. The story’s solution, or resolution, advances understanding and provides insight and satisfaction. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Stories may be short or long, and may be plain-spoken or grandiloquent, intimate or epochal. Stories are also infused with an elixir of unspoken or unwritten insights that evoke intensity and emotion.

Stories may express truth and beauty, be whole and sound, false and distorted, warped and twisted, healing or wounding, uplifting or dehumanizing. A story may be too small or too inflated. It may claim too little or too much. Sometimes stories are perverse and intended to deceive. We may judge—our prerogative—some stories to be flawed. The antidote to flawed stories is more stories, contingent, of course, upon accurate listening and thoughtful discernment.

Stories aren’t spoken into a void, but into a world of stories where they intersect, embrace, repel, fuse, fade away or disintegrate, but in any case are altered forever. Avoiding insular stories is the best corrective to exclusive claims of truth. Sometimes we find our most cherished beliefs are ill-conceived, reinforced prejudice or refined ignorance. Telling stories in community, where stories are reassessed, challenged, broadened or abridged, is invaluable for appraisal and analysis. An unexamined life, Socrates said 2,500 years ago, isn’t worth living. Unexamined living can only be remediated by paying attention to one’s personal story within the world of stories. Reflective living is essential because the limits of our meaning-making story determines the limits of our world.

Ultimately, personal identity is a constructed narrative drawn from the many narratives in which we live—gender, racial, ethnic, personal, familial, economic, educational, scientific, religious, national, political, global . . . and more. We sift through events, places, persons, and things. We make judgements, we interpret, and we choose, consciously and unconsciously. Not every aspect of our narratives are necessarily true or truthful, nor healthy, congruent, edifying, or liberating. We must come to terms with the fact that self-deception lurks in the shadows to hoodwink us. Furthermore, life is a continual encounter of our narratives with other narratives and others’ narratives, which are also constructed narratives, possibly flawed, and marked with the same potential for self-deception. The raw data of experience is filtered through selective memory, interpreted, reappraised, and charged with purpose according to a complex matrix of personal, emotional, and social needs. All data, even raw data, is interpreted data. There is no such thing as pure objectivity—there is only perception. Henry Ward Beecher reminds us: “We not only perceive things as they are, we perceive things as we are.” Stories are necessarily an interpreted muddle of facts, distortions, self-deceptions, yearnings, illusions, visions, dreams, fabrications, fallacies, lies and damned lies. Pure objectivity is a fetish left over from the heady days of modern natural science.

Nearly all human conceptualizations—creeds, morality, ethics, dogma, and law, as well as evidenced-based realities—hold within them a smidgen of truth. All are also infused with subtlety, nuance, and a whiff of mystery. Absolute truth is no doubt abroad in the cosmos—and in our personal worlds—but most human understandings are true contextually. Many avowed claims have historical settings and aren’t necessarily universally valid. Each person brings the formative and deformative influence of his or her own life history to everything they encounter. But abandoning the effort of rational discourse and evidentiary facts relinquishes the field of meaning-making to liars, cheats, and demagogues. Our plural, global, transnational world has taught us that humankind’s fundamental efforts and institutions are naturally directed toward consolidating their own power. Goals may be accomplished through claims of closely held, personal truths, but absolutism and exclusivity fuels self-deception and leads to fanaticism. It necessarily follows that most activities and proceedings operate, to some degree, at the expense of other humans and institutions.

Paradigm shifts of what constitutes reality have been the by-product of all social and cultural change, from the Neanderthals to the twitter twits. Each shift might be considered a betrayal of the previous “givens,” but should be construed as a time where understanding is broadened and refined. Still, we need not be left to a universal sectarianism in which each person has their own truth, and one truth is as good as any other. We can recognize that pure, ideological neutrality is rare to the point of nonexistence, and still strive for rational discussion of evidence-based realities as foundational to meaning-making. Distillation of knowledge from all credible persons, disciplines, philosophies and religions is required to approximate the whole of consequential subjects. Even so, we are left, in most cases, with the partial, the fragmentary, and the mysterious. That doesn’t mean humankind is adrift in the cosmos with no compass. Our ever-enlarging data pool has been perceived and refined through language, the arts, signs, symbols, and rituals, and cast in meaning-making stories.

Stories are composed of what we have absorbed from personal experience, but also drawn from the tales we have been told. Education (book learning) adds to our storehouse of narratives. Stories can also be an invention of the mind—a feat of imagination—which raises the question, “Are they true?” Or, “In what way are they true?” Stories are accessed by memory, a mystifying feat of the brain. Memory is capricious. It ambushes us when we least expect it and deserts us when we most need it. Memory is subjective, selective, sanitizing, self-protective, and self-serving. Stories are assessed by rational thought and measured against knowledge, experience, imagination, and common sense. Stories are imprinted by feelings—one means of “knowing.” We feel things in our bones and in our gut. Germans have a word for this—gestalt. This is disquieting because gestalt is not a magnetic compass, but a profound inkling. Gestalt is more than a hunch and less than a fact, but looms large in comprehension. And yet, we also know that feelings can mislead us.

Credible stories acquire an all-consuming wholeness that goes beyond a summation of individual details. Stories that are confused, compartmentalized, counterfeit, or incoherent impede meaning-making. We must each decide which of our stories, or parts thereof, are true. Which, or what parts, are flawed? And which, or what parts, are indispensable? We can remain stuck in a misconceived story and spend our lives trying to shoehorn the actual world into it. Reflective, intuitive people engage in the process of revision, recasting, and reconstruction of their stories. Reappraisal of story is not a one-time thing—although epiphanies may occur—but a lifelong process. From the beginning, humankind has searched among the fossils, funerals, fables, fairy tales, flannel graphs, files, foot lockers, fights, fornication, foolishness, facts, fiction, footnotes, foxholes, fantasies, and follies in hopes of garnering a few meaning-making stories. Humankind had no way to pass along their stories for thousands of years except language—a complex, intricate, incredible artifice that set our genus apart from all other creatures in our family tree. Language is the beast of burden for meaning-making narrative and must be addressed at our beginning.

2

Language

“What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions,

a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.”

—Jane Goodall Primatologist and Anthropologist

Language is a device of both mechanics and mentation. The mechanics of speech were initiated eons ago when a pair of pouches budded from the upper end of the primitive alimentary canal and developed into a respiratory tract. This allowed some aquatic creatures access to an existence on land and creatureliness took a whole ‘nother track. In addition, the lungs worked as a bellows, forcing exhaled air between a paired band of throat muscles that vibrated and made noise. Ungoverned noises, however, are not language. Coincident with the evolution of the anatomy of vocalization, the human brain evolved distinct neural structures to govern speech. Different anatomical sites developed for speech and music and neuroanatomy included connections to create a continuum. These higher centers worked in concert with vocal anatomy and muscles to make distinctive sounds. Sounds stuttered along in a babel of noise, influenced by isolation, ethnicity, and culture. Over an incalculable period of time words were conceived. Words became culture bound and emotionally loaded. Vocabulary was expanded and grammar was refined. Metaphor, simile, allegory, analogy, idiom, dialect, slang, patois, and other constructs were devised. Rapid, versatile, verbal bursts of cognitive speech were strung together in evermore complex fragments. Communication settled into varied patterns and rhythms. Speech manifested itself as different languages.

Human speech, as we might recognize it, began about 200,000 years ago. Humankind gained a tremendous communication advantage over other noise-making creatures. There is no doubt that other creatures communicate with the sounds they make. Walt Disney’s imagination may correctly portray the speech of Bambi and Thumper, but Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomical modern humans) outdistanced all other species in linguistic sophistication. Language satisfied humankind’s gabby instincts, but more than that, empowered eloquence through labyrinthine, expressive vocalization enhanced by volume, pitch, tone, inflection, shading, precision, and emphasis. Concepts could be rhapsodized and infused with emotional intensity.

Incrementally, chatter became conversation, notions became ideas, and talk was surpassed by disquisition and oration. Information was expanded into tutorial. Rumination became elevated to theory. Enlightened discourse evolved into scholarly disciplines. The universes of discourse began to assemble around a common table for the cross-fertilization of thought and universities were established. Time passed . . . Oxford University Press published the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the main historical dictionary of the English language, as recently as 1928. Speech soared to the heights of rhetoric on the wings of vocabulary, elocution, and imagination. Winston Churchill spun them into language that inspired a nation and held it together in a time of catastrophic crisis. Humankind, with brain, larynx, lungs, and air (breath) acquired a voice. Creativity and diligence forged an instrument. It seems both prophetic and poetic that humankind’s crucial gift of producing audible sound was a medium wafted on the breath of life. Breath gave us both life and language. Humans came to ask not only, “What is the breath that gives words?” but, “What is the word that gives life?”

Humans, from the beginning, were both telling and listening to stories. We told stories about ourselves because of narcissism, stories about others because of connections, stories about events because of their import, stories of explanation for justification, stories of clarification to elucidate, beguiling stories for enchantment, and speculative stories about the wonder of the cosmos. Storytelling made meaning and was the foundation for the cooperative venture of socialization, culture, and civilization. Narration was loosed upon the earth. Yet, humankind did not abandon its earlier forms of communication—mimicry and ritual.

Narrative, mimicry, and ritual were forged into a powerful, persuasive trinity. Narrative provides content and context for storytelling. Mimicry enacts the story and the body language adds power ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Prologue
• Part One: What? The Evolution of Practically Everything
• Part Two: So What? Religion: A Christian Perspective on the Dynamic of Faith
• Epilogue
• Bibliography