The Story We’re Living
Earlier this week I was out on a run, finishing up a podcast episode I had started the night before, a conversation about the promises and perils of modern AI and technology. The discussion circled around questions many are asking right now. Can technology outpace wisdom? What becomes of attention? Of truth? Of being human? One person brought excitement to the topic, but the other a quiet warning and hesitation.
That episode ended and then the next episode in my queue started automatically.
It was a conversation with Martin Shaw on myth and storytelling.
I chuckled at the timing.
The shift felt abrupt enough to be symbolic. One conversation about machines growing increasingly capable of producing information, assistance, prediction, efficiency. The next about ancient stories, forests, memory, mystery, and the kinds of truths that refuse the reduction to data.
Since my episodic whiplash I’ve wondered if those conversations were asking the same question from different directions:
What story do we think we’re living in?
Not just the stories we tell ourselves, but whether we believe there is a story at all.
I wonder if many of us know something about this feeling. We live in a moment crowded with information, opinions, misinformation, and urgency, yet we also may carry a quiet sense of dislocation. We know how to move from one thing to another, but sometimes struggle to know where we are, or who we are becoming, or how all the pieces fit together. There can be a feeling of being carried by events without quite knowing toward what we are being carried.
Years ago the theologian Robert Jenson suggested that one of the deep crises of our age is not first political or technological or even moral. He suggested that we have become people who have forgotten how to inhabit a story. [1]
Jenson argues that for generations, people assumed life had a shape. That history was going somewhere. That our lives belonged to something larger than ourselves. Even if someone was not a Christian, there remained some shared sense that human life had meaning, direction, and purpose.
But he wonders, in 1993, if many of us feel that confidence fading.
And into that kind of world, the Church has something strange to offer.
Not merely ideas. Not inspirational slogans. Not a list of beliefs to agree with.
A people.
A table.
A story.
Week after week we gather and tell a story older than ourselves. We confess our sins and the sins of our world. We hear Scripture. We pray. We bring bread and wine. We proclaim Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. We come to a table where the world, for a moment, becomes more itself.
One of the reasons we return to these practices again and again is because we forget.
We forget that our lives are not random. We forget that history is not simply spinning in circles. We forget that our truest identity was spoken over us long before achievement or failure or anxiety had anything to say.
And so the Church, at her best, becomes a place where we learn again how to live inside reality. A people practicing together the strange claim that love has entered history in Jesus, that death does not get the final word, and that all things are moving toward their fulfillment in Him.
I think that may be part of what we are doing each time we gather around the table where Christ has made Himself present in a mysterious and unique way.
Not escaping the world.
Learning how to see it.
Peace and all goodness to you this Thursday,
Bliss+
[1] From Jenson’s October 1993 article titled “How the World Lost Its Story”