Quotes About Meaning

I am more one for the story, I think, than the action.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

And when you spoke to me, I did not know That to my life's high altar came its priest.

And I don't just mean that they change you. A lot of people can change you—the first kid who called you a name, the first teacher who said you were smart, the first person who crowned you best friend. It's the change you remember, the firsts and what they meant, not really the people.

Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning.

Rarely are youth challenged to take up their cross and follow Jesus down the narrow road called faith—but even when they are, they can't imagine what that really means unless someone famous makes a movie out of it. Without

Story is one of the most powerful ways we pattern our world and discover its meaningfulness. It goes beyond mere embellishment of a spiritual point to providing a nurturing form or substance for the God-hungry imagination, one that helps young people inhabit a narratable world.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."16

imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.

Are we genuinely prepared to say that working in an office building or shopping in a mall is real, while reading Tolstoy is not?

Somehow the church has forgotten what it knew for so long: story goes beyond simply illustrating some spiritual point or other; it gives form to content; it incarnates meaning.

let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All

Story affirms that not everything in the universe can or must be explained propositionally; the loose ends of story aren't always neatly tied together, because neither are the loose ends of our lives. "Life can bear only so much reality," says poet and pastor Calvin Miller.

How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. —FREDERICK BUECHNER

Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically. —MADELEINE L'ENGLE It's

every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.

Something more is going on with Jesus' storytelling than clarification or embellishment: he's out to rock our world.

Catechesis means impressing upon youth a Life, not a religion. —KENDA DEAN AND RON FOSTER

as Flannery O'Connor put it, "In the act of writing, one sees that the way a thing is made, controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change."6

To use C. S. Lewis's distinction, perhaps we could even say that for the evangelistic youth minister, it's about truth; for the bardic youth minister, it's about meaning. Both approaches are necessary and appropriate. But they are different and depend on the context.

Postmoderns must have the opportunity to experience the story as a story without the gospel being continually reduced to mere message.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O'CONNOR9

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Walking on Water

In partnership with playfulness, the imagination gives us the ability to find and make purposeful patterns and even plotlines: in other words, the ability to find and make meaning.