Winter has returned to the city of brotherly love, after about a month’s hiatus. Temperatures have been steadily dropping from mild and spring-like to chilly again and today we have some lovely, swirling falling snow. After a lazy morning we are now established in our friendly neighborhood Panera for our Saturday ritual of studying and sipping coffee until our growling tummies tell us that it is dinner time.
Today I’m reading about the history of psychology and the history of Biblical counseling. I like this quote about the complicated nature of trying to do history - it is a reminder that story telling is always subjective; there is always an interpretive stance, a perspective to how history is told:
It is mere narrative convenience to organize a historical stance around the questions Where did x come from? or What were the results of x? We know that the further we go up or down a geneaological treee, the wider the tree gets. This doesn’t mean that the whole human race of twenty generations ago was directed towards producing some one individual, any more than it means that one individual twenty generations ago produced all those progeny of today. Rather, each full generation produced all those progeny of today. Reproduction is a woven net, not a tree.
As with people, so with events. To search for all the causal ancestors, or causal descendants, of a given event is merely a rhetorical convenience. Since history interweaves sequences of events, the combination of two stories with one result prevents their combination with other results. Openings created by one sequence of events may or may not be taken advantage of by another; structural necessities constrain, but sufficient actions determine the outcomes of situations. An analytic rhetoric of narration must preserve this adventitious but structured character. Such a rhetoric must leave events in their immediate temporal context. It must follow the blind alleys as well as the thoroughfares by which history produced the present. [“The Construction of the Personal Problems Jurisdiction” by Andrew Abbott (in The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 280-1]
It is important to recognize that history is always told from a certain perspective, one which chooses to highlight particular antecedents and events rather than others. I have been ruminating for a few months about the power of story-telling, particularly in connection with my chosen profession of counseling.
What is counseling but story-telling? The person seeking counsel comes and tells his or her story, and the counselor tries to listen, understand it, and re-frame that story in a way that helps or heals what ails. The biblical counselor is always seeking to find the points at which a person’s story coincides with the story of God’s grace: “here is where God has been and is being gracious to you; here is hope for you; here is life for you in Christ.” I think it is part of our created nature to be receptive to narrative - think how Jesus always taught his disciples in stories. And God’s revelation to us in Scripture is one grand story in which we are a part. He is the Master Storyteller. His perspective on history is alone comprehensive, complete, and true. I want to learn to listen to his voice and know so well the story he has told, that I can help others to discover how they are part of that grand narrative. When our paths are beyond tracing out, and the way seems dark, it is comforting to know that the Author of our faith has planned the beginning and the end. He is Alpha and Omega.
“All the days ordained for me were written in [his] book before one of them came to be.” –Psalm 139.16
I can remember stories I heard from the pulpit over ten years ago, even though the text and main points of the sermon have been gone for just as long. Why is that, especially when I wasn’t trying any harder to remember the one part rather than the other? I think it suggests that that narratives appeal to something deeply human inside us, that we have a certain natural tendency toward them. Why else would children be so receptive to them? And that’s to say nothing of the fact that Scripture is story, and that Jesus so often taught through stories.