Throughout our whole lives, we tell stories, and we listen to them. We tell stories about where we are from, about things that have happened to us and choices we have made, and even stories about what the rest of our lives might be like. The stories we choose to tell form the grand narratives of our lives through which we define who we are. And we listen to the stories that our friends tell us about their lives in order to understand them, to find the moments where our stories intersect.

We also spend a lot of time reading stories. We read stories in books, quite simply, because we enjoy them, but we also read these stories because they help us understand our own better. In his essay, “Why Do We Read Fiction?” (1962), Robert Penn Warren wrote that our lives are shaped by their most problematic moments, situations of conflict that generate both energy and meaning, and we read fiction because the conflicts we experience in fiction can shape us in the same way. “We are in suspense about the story in fiction because we in suspense about another story far closer and more important to us—the story of our own life as we live it.” When we read fiction, we can test our own stories and experiment with new ones; fiction offers us “a heightened sense of being” from which we gain insight about our life as it is or hints about how our life story might turn out.

Many of the contributions to this Michaelmas issue of The Cresset address story and stories and how they shape our lives. In “Not Just Whistling ‘Dixie,’” Martha Greene Eads finds in Ron Rash’s 2006 novel The World Made Straight an account of how events of conflict and violence not only traumatize the immediate survivors, but also have lasting consequences on communities for generations. In Rash’s sometimes disturbing story about the legacy of Civil War violence in present-day Appalachia, Eads finds a glimmer of hope for trauma survivors, a hope that is revealed through the story of the Gospel.

Fredrick Barton’s essay, “Still a Work in Progress,” reviews the recently-released Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman, a book that retells the story of Lee’s famous To Kill a Mockingbird. While many readers will be frustrated, or even shocked, by the differences between the two books, Barton finds the story of Go Set a Watchman to be a more authentic portrait of race relations in the late-twentieth-century South.

In “Stories for a Post-Christian Age,” David K. Weber reflects on the story that Yuval Noah Harari tells in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari argues that the species Homo sapiens has come to dominate the world precisely because of its ability to create and tell the kinds of stories that convince large groups of people to cooperate and work together. Although Weber finds Harari’s account “morally incoherent,” he recognizes the power that new kinds of stories will have in a world where the story of the Bible seems to be losing its cultural relevance.

Lorraine Brugh’s essay “For Such a Time as This” is about a different form of human expression; instead of story, the focus is on music. Brugh considers how distinctions between sacred and secular forms of music have blurred in recent decades, and she suggests that Lutherans, with their appreciation for the role of music in liturgy, are poised to lead the way as Christians explore robust and vibrant forms of worship appropriate to the diverse and ecumenical church of the twenty-first century.

Our lives might sometimes seem like an endless string of random events, most of them beyond our control. But through storytelling—by finding the narrative and choosing the words with which we tell our own story—we create meaning in our lives. Yet these stories are never finished; we rewrite them, and we retell them, and we search for the place they might have in the story that makes all others true, the story of the redemption and restoration of a fallen creation.

                                                —JPO