Does Life Make Narrative Sense?
These are half-formed thoughts; I suppose that if life did make narrative sense, at least if each of us is a protagonist, then I really ought to have invested the wherewithal to make sense of my thoughts, rather than leaving it as an afterthought. But perhaps I can cheat and turn sloth into a starting point. Right here we have an example of how life obviously does not make narrative sense – it does not progress in a satisfying way, it does not even proceed through katabasis and anabasis or even catharsis – I have seen people who lived well for seventy years go off the rails at the end in ways both painful and nonsensical to watch. People say that one takes one step back for every two forward, thus preserving even in retreat the overall hope of progression; but I have often felt that life just as easily moves two steps back between every one step forward – and where does that lead?
I have always drawn reassurance from story itself as a structure, because it grants one an external perspective on characters who, like oneself, invariably struggle and see no sense in the struggle, no way out, and yet then there is always some kind of turn – just as Elijah is despairing in the Negev, God encourages him by rebuking him; the same story, intensified, plays out with Job; and then of course there are the handful of resurrections. I like to take the idea that we need things to make narrative sense, even though they obviously do not from our lived perspective, as evidence that ultimately God will structure life in hindsight in a way that does satisfy that need. But I have also often wondered if that is too good to be true, simply because it is what I want to believe – that alone is enough for some skepticism.
Still, the expectation that things will ultimately resolve in a satisfying manner is always a kind of foolishness to the characters within a story. We put endings on our novels that tie them together in retrospect, and recognize there is no such ending for most lives. But that is because we cannot actually see the end, or read a life back in hindsight from an omniscient perspective. The fact that we need stories to make sense of life, and we need those stories to make narrative sense, to give meaning to the suffering within them and redeem it into something worthwhile, is an indication of the way in which we need the world to be – it is human nature reflecting the obscured form of the reality we are made for, which we cannot now see directly. And this ought to give us hope.
Even the children’s fairy tales which seem so tied to the pettiness of human history and status seem true in the right light. These tales often begin with an orphaned child who is discovered to have secretly been a prince or princess all along. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of fantasy played out entirely within an uncritiqued feudal world – but that is no different from us trying to make sense of what to hope for in eternity, and running up against the limits of our own imagination and experience – what really is the best we can bring ourselves to hope for? There is a very real sense in which the silliest and most fantastical – and I mean in the sense of being a wish-fulfillment fantasy – are true, not because you are secretly the protagonist of the universe, but because God writes us into His universe as protagonists all. I even have hope for the villains.
I come back again to sloth – I’m making myself sit down and post today because it is Easter, and I try to check in on my faith on Easter. But in setting a deadline, I also create the opportunity to write quickly and imperfectly and not bother with editing, because I have to go to bed – which is perhaps all down to my desire to do less work and somehow justify it. And perhaps I am simply making excuses for myself, and imposing a kind of narrative sense onto my life that shapes it in the way I want to see it, rather than how it is. Still I have to hope that in spite of this, the need to make sense of it implies that it does make sense, even if not how I intended. And I do think there is value in resting and not even attempting to test the limits of one’s ambition – though perhaps I am not the person who needs that lesson, having already elevated rest to an art form displacing so much of life.
All these thoughts that break upon my inability to rightly characterize the story of my life with any degree of confidence ultimately redound to make the point that the need for sense must be satisfied by another Author, and that even the solution to the things I feel I am doing wrong is not primarily action – not at first – but simply to be still and know that I am God. This injunction has taken on a different hue as I get older. I used to see it as merely a command to reverence, but now that I always feel I must be racing to do something useful, now that I am always tapping my foot, unable to focus on one thing over the stressful cognizance of fifty other things, God’s “be still” echoes externally what I am already trying to convincingly say to myself, and supplies the need that was not earlier apparent. And none of that means that the things I drop in being still will work out well for me in life, or make what appears to be narrative sense – and there is the fear that this reassurance is all a counterfeit permit to do what one will and expect God to pick up the pieces. But I don’t think the reason to do what one should is the fear that otherwise things will go badly, or else we would not already know the end. It is in choosing to believe in the narrative, that all shall be well, that we come to actually do what we should even in our inability to know it, out of the confidence that whatever we do, God will have already made sense of it in the end.
