Story Island

Story Island
Why are you listening to this? Probably because you have come to place like I have. Maybe you’re in crisis. Maybe there is a nagging sense of meaninglessness or despair that you can’t shake.

Mostly, people go through their day without thinking about big, existential issues. We’re like water skiers. We remain on the surface by going fast. If we slow down, we sink. Depth scares us. So the moment our eyes open each morning, we’re off and running. Hit it! But sometimes, life throws a curveball that makes the big questions impossible to evade. Maybe you’re there.

Last week, I described your birth and arrival on the island of Desire. You are a creature of desire. You move instinctively away from pain and toward pleasure, the same way a plant turns to face the sun or a cat curls up by the fire. Life on the island of desire is simple. It can be represented by a single box labeled “desire.”

But you didn’t stay there. You kept growing. You became aware of the three dimensional world, along with a mysterious fourth dimension called time. You learned to represent this world with language. You became self-aware. Now, you could step out of the simple box labeled desire and look back at yourself. This is what we mean by the word consciousness.

As you observe yourself and the world around you, you notice that everything moves. Where there is motion, there is before-and-after. Where there is before-and-after, there is story. A story may be as short and simple as the one about the ant who crawled across the window sill or as long and complex as Homer’s Odyssey.

The point is that humans live and move and have their being in the the realm of story. We don’t just ask people how they are. We ask them how it’s going. Because it’s always going. It never stops.

Life on Story Island is not as simple as whether you feel pain or pleasure, the way it was on the Island of Desire. On Story Island you can’t help but wonder what will happen next. You recognize other characters in your story and discover they have the ability to alter your story—for good or evil.

Just as you were evicted from the safety and comfort of your mother’s womb, so your expanded consciousness forces an eviction from the Island of Pure Desire. Human beings are apes who tell stories. Welcome to Fantasy Island.

Stories can be captured with the words faith, hope, and love. Faith is the story you tell about your life and your world, all the stuff you believe. Your faith determines what you hope for and who and what you love. For example, if you have faith in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, you hope he will become President and you love people who share your beliefs. Faith, hope and love.

We are so deeply immersed in story that we usually don’t think of it as story. To us, it’s just life. But if we look more closely at how story functions, we will see why it always lets us down.

Family story
You began in the story of your family. It was a story created by your parents but that’s not how you thought of it. You accepted your family story as Reality, as much as the sky over your head and the ground beneath your feet.

Maybe you were born into a happy story where you were welcome and wanted. Your world was safe and filled with love. Maybe you weren’t so lucky and were born into a story where life was unpredictable and dangerous. Maybe you weren’t wanted, even abused. This first story, your birth story, has a shaping effect on every story you will ever tell. It is hard to shake your initial impression of the way the world is.

As you grew, you made friends. One day they invited you to their house. But it wasn’t just another house. It was another universe. They had strange furniture and pictures on the wall. It smelled different. “Mom,” “Dad,” “Lunch,” “God.” These all meant different things over there.

Your family story was not the only story. In fact, there were as many stories are there were families. Your mother came from a different story than your father. “Grandma and Grandpa” meant different things depending on whether you were at your dad’s parents or your mom’s.

And it didn’t stop with family. You were born into a country too. Your national story defined how you were expected to behave as a citizen, which side of the road to drive on, who you were supposed to love and hate, even what was possible. Just as you learned that there were many family stories you also learned there were many national stories. There was Mexico and Canada and Russia and China and Europe and hundreds more, speaking different languages, telling different stories, living in different worlds.

Even God wasn’t above story. You may not have been religious but you had some sort of belief about how you got here, where you were headed, and what the point of life was. But here again, people told different stories, bowed to different Gods. Whose God was real? Or maybe there wasn’t a God. It was a heated subject so you kept your mouth shut.

Personal story
As early as grade school grown-ups began to ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The implication was clear: You were expected to come up with a story of your own. You needed a life story to define you.

In high school, you set about the task. Maybe you tried to be a sports hero. Maybe you were the smart kid. Maybe you were a stoner. Maybe you were the class clown. Your friends told stories too. You labeled each other: nerd, jock, cheerleader, brainiac. As you looked forward, to the years after high school, you worried. Where would you live? How would you pay? Who would you marry? What if your story fell apart? What if you turned out to be a nobody?

Conflict
Adolescence taught you that whatever story you chose you would have to fight for. You had to earn for your place on the basketball team or at the head of the class. If you were the class clown, your jokes had better be funny. Even the stoners expected you to strike a certain pose, dress a certain way, maintain a certain attitude. If you didn’t, you were out.

Most people survive high school and go on to establish their own story. They to college, get a job, find a wife, have kids, get divorced, become a drug addict, declare bankruptcy, start a business, find a new wife, became rich and famous, buy a Maserati, build a house… ‘Round and ‘round the story goes. Where it stops, nobody knows. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.”

No matter what you believe and what story you tell, it is a fight. Do you believe in God? You will have to defend yourself from the atheists. Do you believe in money? You will have to do beat the competition. Do you believe in family? You will have to make peace with your wife and patch up conflict with the kids. Do you believe in being physically attractive? You will have to do fight wrinkles.

End of Story
At some point, it hits you: The problem is not your story. The problem is story itself. Every story is passing and ephemeral. Stories don’t work as a foundations for your life. You’re Wile. E. Coyote. The Roadrunner tricked you into jumping off a cliff and you are falling through the air, trying to build a house as you fall. It may be a lovely home. You’re still falling through the air.

In my 50’s I came face-to-face with the fact that my Christian story, to which I had devoted my life, was not the firm foundation I preached about each Sunday. To say this was traumatic is a massive understatement. If you want to hear more about this, you can listen to The Story of My Fall. (https://youtu.be/f0g3UaM1gMQ?si=IgbUyQ-d_0i5IOoc) 

But the breakdown of story doesn’t just happen to religious people. It happens to everyone. Story is a rotten foundation because three dark forces undermine story’s three essential components. As I went through my dark night, I grew sick of these forces. They beat me at every turn. I hated them. They were terrifying and ghastly. I called them Specters, terrifying ghosts. They were such frequent visitors that I learned the shapes of their faces and gave them names.

Ignarus (ignorance) made a mockery of faith and cast me into nihilism. Vanitas (vanity) erased all hope of a happy ending and left me in despair. Rapax (rape, or predation) exposed love to be selfish and left me alienated.

In the next chapter, we will look the Specters square in the eye. This is not for the faint of heart but it is absolutely necessary. Facing the darkness is the only way to find your way out of it.