Finding Your Life Story

“I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales,” says Samwise Gamgee on his way to Mordor. He adds:

We're in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: "Let's hear about Frodo and the Ring!" And they'll say: "Yes, that's one of my favourite stories. Frodo was very brave, wasn't he, dad?" "Yes, my boy, the famousest of the hobbits, and that's saying a lot."

In this moment, Samwise reflects on his life as someone else looking in. And what that person sees is a story, unfolding as he lives it. How interesting that this is Sam’s encouragement to Frodo, and that it works: The hobbits gain strength by getting their narratives in view.

We, too, may gain strength by getting our narratives in view. Few of us will write autobiographies. But most of us have, or seek, some sense of our life’s story. And there is good reason for this. For a life to have meaning, it can’t be a random series of things, even if the things themselves are good—a sea voyage here, a marriage there, a year in Paris, a day in Rome. The events of our lives must hang together in a certain way. We must be able to see ourselves as living out a coherent narrative. When we cannot, when our days cannot be related to any overarching story, the center is lost. The hobbits abandon their quest. And if we are at all reflective, we shall lament, like MacBeth, that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I want to show that Christianity can help us get our narratives in view. If Christianity is true (as opposed to naturalism), we are far better positioned to grasp our lives as stories. I have lain out some of this in a previous lecture, but here I will approach the matter from a different angle.

Narrative selection

Your autobiography can’t include everything. The reader doesn’t need to know about your neighbor’s cat, or your list of baby names, or your forty-seventh haircut. But even if you never had any readers, even if your story remained private, these things would still get ejected (I presume).

It is well-known that narratives don’t merely report the facts; they select and arrange them as well. As William Gass puts it, "The bits which constitute the story have to be fastened together in some way; they cannot merely sit in a line like a bunch of birds" (2002, p. 14). Homer does not tell us of Achilles’ second birthday, favorite food, or first kiss. These are facts about Achilles—or they could be, had the bard bothered to create them—but they are not relevant to the story of The Iliad.

Real-life stories are no less selective. Any biography leaves out a heap of things for every one it includes. And your own sense of your life’s story is sure to do the same.

What guides this process of selection? After all, we may imagine two different biographers writing about your life. They may both agree on the facts, yet select and interpret them rather differently, the resulting narratives diverging in the extreme. Is one of them right and the other wrong? Are there rational standards that guide the process of selection?

Selection is arbitrary on naturalism

Many secular theorists think there are not. Narrative selection is, in the end, a deeply arbitrary affair. And that goes for our life stories as well. As Joan Didion puts it, “We live entirely ... by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” (1979, p. 11). Iris Murdoch agrees, remarking that life narration “consoles us since it imposes pattern on something which might otherwise be intolerably chancy and incomplete” (2000, p. 87).

Notice this language of “imposition.” The thought seems to be that making stories out of lives always falsifies them on some level. It presents them as having an orderliness which they do not possess. Thus, the historian Hayden White tells us:

Stories are not lived; there is no such thing as a real story. Stories are told or written, not found. And as for the notion of a true story, it is virtually a contradiction in terms. All stories are fictions. Which means of course that they can be true only in a metaphorical sense and in the sense in which a figure of speech can be true. (1999, p. 9)

Reality itself has no narrative form. It is something we project.

To be clear, this is not my view. But this does seem to follow from a purely naturalistic outlook. And here is another way to see this. Stories are always told from a point of view. There is no narrative without a narrator. And it is the narrator who selects and arranges the facts into a story. And the point from Didion, Murdoch, and White is just that no narrator has a privileged point of view. There is no ultimate authoritative perspective from which your life, or any life, can be given a narrative shape.

Objection: What about your own perspective?

Here’s an objection. It would seem there is at least one authoritative perspective on the story of your life: you. You are the one living it, after all. Who better than you to decide on the story?

However, this won’t withstand scrutiny. Consider that a biographer writing after your death may have much greater access to all the pertinent facts, things you couldn’t have known. Morevoer, he sees your life as a whole. You will not. You will spend the first half of your life guessing at the second half, and while you may be there for the ending, I’m afraid you’re not invited to the denouement. So, your perspective doesn’t seem all that privileged in the end. And neither is the biographer’s. For even two fully informed biographers may disagree on which facts matter and why, let alone their proper configuration.

Why this matters

Now this is a real problem. We need to grasp our lives as narratives, or at least be able to when journeying to Mordor. Yet on a purely naturalistic worldview, your life itself has no narrative form. You are projecting onto it an order it lacks. But in that case, how could you take seriously the business of articulating your life’s story? For any way you narrate it, some totally different narration would have been just as correct.

Narrating your life is thus like gazing at clouds—is it a ship? a dragon? a pair of frogs? There is no right answer, because the figures are not in the clouds themselves. They are shapes we create in highlighting—by whim—certain features over others. Cloud gazing is thus a sort of play. It is how we pass a summer afternoon, laying about in the fields. And if narrating our lives is as arbitrary as this, it too is no more than play. And to commit to one way of narrating your life would be like committing to one way of seeing the clouds. Vanitas Vanitatum. And if we cannot feel any sense of commitment to our life narratives, they can never answer our deepest questions about who we are and why we are here. They can never get us through Mordor.

“I wonder,” says Samwise, “if we shall ever be put into songs or tales.” And just imagine Frodo responds, “Well, Sam, if we are, remember it won’t be the story; for our journey could have been narrated in a thousand other ways just as faithful to the facts. And which facts are selected is arbitrary anyways.”

If Frodo is right, life is worse than a tale told by an idiot. It is no tale at all.

The Christian difference

That is what we get on naturalism. But if Christianity is true, everything changes. For Christians, there is an authoritative narrator. There is a Great Author. And by His design, a narrative of redemption is unfolding in your midst. And thus there exists a true story of your life, the story He is telling. His point of view counts as the final authority by which the text shall be selected and arranged.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have no role in crafting your life’s story. You craft it by living it. But in this, we collaborate with God. The narrative vision belongs to Him in the end. Still, there is a narrative vision. And thus we can ask in full earnest, What is the story of my life? On Christianity, we may trust an answer awaits, even if in hiding. On naturalism, all we hear is the echo of the question.

So what is the story?

But the Christian view raises a puzzle. It creates a gulf between our minds and our stories. For we cannot presume to grasp the story God is telling through us. So doesn’t this defeat the whole point? If we need to get our narratives in view, this seems to throw up an insurmountable barrier. Only God has our narratives in view.

However, Christians shouldn’t see their stories as so hopelessly out of reach. We must remember the ancient tradition of sharing one’s testimony, dating back to the Apostle Paul, and finding expression in such luminaries as Augustine, Theresa of Avila, and John Bunyan. Each of these authors wrote down the narrative of God’s work in their lives. And while we may not write ours down, we may follow their example in other ways—through sharing or reflection. “I will give thanks to the LORD with my whole heart,” cries the Psalmist, “I will recount all of your wonderful deeds” (Psalm 9:1). Since this is held up as a value, we should think it is a value we can attain, at least in part.

Yet in full we know the story shall elude us. But far from being a discouragement, this is in fact a blessing. From within, our lives often appear to make no sense, to be headed nowhere, to be spinning in circles or blowing in the wind. And there Christianity offers us assurance. Though you do not see the story of redemption, such a story is being wrought. Even now the Great Author is gathering the frayed ends and weaving them into His tapestry. For we are promised that God will restore the years the locusts have eaten, that He works all things out for our good, that there is no note so hideous He cannot build His theme around it and make noise into beauty.

If Christianity is true, to narrate our lives is not to impose order onto unstoried chaos. It is to seek the story that is really there. And while the narrative threads may prove too fine to grasp, we may trust the Great Author has them in hand, weaving the story of our redemption and indeed the redemption of the world.

The upshot

How is this relevant to Christian apologetics? None of this shows Christianity is true. But it does show that we should want it to be. All else being equal, given a choice between Christianity and naturalism, we should hope for Christianity. Only then may we get our narrative in view. And this forms therefore a powerful addition to the existential case for faith.

References

Didion, Joan. 1979. The White Album. Macmillan.

Gass, William H. 2002. Tests of Time: Essays. University of Chicago Press.

Murdoch, Iris. 2000. The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge.

White, Hayden. 1999. Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.