Quotes About Story

If imagination, as we've said, is the "region of discovery," story is the wardrobe door, sending our young people "further in" and "still further in" to possibilities and ideas they've never dreamed.

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.

Story has staying power. We remember the illustrations from Sunday's sermon for months afterward, but by coffee hour we're already struggling to recite the pastor's three main points, despite various acronyms meant to help us.

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.

Truth is the aim of story. And though we must take into account the human author's subjectivity and personal slant, the best authors are those who tap universal longings and make connections to our real, lived humanity.

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

The cure for competing narratives is nothing more or less than the Apostles' Creed. Yes, I'll say that again: the creed is our story, succinctly stated.

a story's plot has a beginning, middle, and end consisting of a sequence of events developed around a particular conflict or gradual unveiling. As far as worship-as-story is concerned, this guiding story arc has already been provided for us in the church calendar or liturgical year. It's not a plot we're creating from scratch.

When it all comes down, the church is the living story we're inviting young people to participate in. Again, to quote Robert Jenson: "If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.

if there is no light by which we see, no Great Story that illumines our days—and no Storyteller—then we have no source by which to enchant the young people in our charge.

in a world threatened by the loss of story, the task of Christian discipleship—specifically, catechesis or baptismal training—becomes a matter of life and death.

In the end, there is a normative story that we live into as a church: the story God is telling through scripture, as summarized in the words of the creed. And

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

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

The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn't even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.

Stephen King, The Gunslinger

Anyone can have a once-upon-a-time or a happily-ever-after, but it's the journey between that makes the story worth telling.

Remember: a story is not a vignette. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It is not merely a snapshot in time.

Each time there is a news story, sometimes that gives ideas to people who then turn into criminals.

We cannot be present and run our story-line at the same time.

Once upon a time' lasts forever.

The best time to write a story is yesterday. The next best time is today.

Some people call Police Story the greatest action film of all time, and while I have to be humble and say that I disagree, it's definitely the favorite action film I've ever made.