http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14938876/christian-love-is-sacrificial-love

The walk to school from our back door takes 195 seconds, give or take. This means our morning story has to hit its narrative climax somewhere around two minutes, leaving a solid minute for the dénouement, or a minute to set up for the next installment of the escapades of George, the renegade alley cat, and Mrs. CluckCluck, our neighbor’s hen.

Our walk-to-school micro stories, though hardly long enough for the dignifying label of story, are the most anticipated part of our morning routine. My daughters are drawn to these scrappy sidewalk episodes both because of their own nature as story-formed beings and because of the nature of stories to delight and direct us. But the compelling power of stories is double edged: that stories draw us in should give us pause as parents to take care with the models we offer our children.

Story-Formed Beings

In an attempt to get at the essence of our love for stories, we could begin with the sweeping narrative model that teaches us who we are and that forms our expectations for what is and what might be. We can root our love of story in what Kevin DeYoung has called the “biggest story,” or Scripture’s archetypal story.

What we call “redemptive history” is, at its essence, a narrative arc from creation through the fall, through covenants and disobediences and exiles, to Christ’s incarnation, his atoning death and triumphant resurrection, his ascension, the launch of the early church and its growth with the spread of the gospel — all of which look forward to the consummation of time in Christ’s return, his final judgment, and the creation of a new heavens and earth. Because redemptive history’s claims encompass all of reality — and give reality a beginning, middle, and ever-after end — Scripture sets expectations for what it means for a story to be a story. It offers a framework for plot itself by establishing a setting, introducing a problem, and developing the rising tension into a climax from which all possible resolution follows.

Scripture’s redemptive story arc hardly means that all stories ought to end or develop the same way, but the storied-ness of redemptive history provides an explanation for what we could call “narrative hunger” — a deep suspicion that nothing in this world is static and a hopeful anticipation that anything and everything might move along such an arc.

Because the Bible’s redemptive narrative encompasses all of human history, we know we can find ourselves somewhere along its immense story arc — somewhere deep in the growth of the global church. And our placement within this larger story teaches us, in part, to make sense of who we are. This expansive narrative, however, also echoes in each individual experience of turning from sin toward God in a life transformed by the gospel. Thus, while we encounter redemption as one massive story, we also experience it as countless little stories of justification, sanctification, and glorification.

Making Like Our Maker

The shape and significance of redemptive history is but one way to explain how we are story-formed. We could also probe the doctrine of creation, for example, to connect our status as creatures to our capacity and desire to create stories. God authors reality as its Creator. In an analogous way, J.R.R. Tolkien argues, we as sub-creators make worlds out of words. Although fictional worlds display massive creativity, they cannot free themselves from the ethical and even theological logic of the world God has made since, at a minimum, they are authored and read by humans who live in God’s world. In other words, whether authors choose to embrace or defy the moral underpinning of reality, that foundation is always there like an open question in any work: How does this story stand against reality?

Instead, if stories are made by humans who are made by God, who, in turn, frames reality, then authors can offer beauty, goodness, and truth in a host of invented worlds — and readers, in turn, will be able to recognize and be surprised by the familiar good, even if the encounter looks wildly different. Thomas Austin captures the deep moral transfer from God’s created world to fictional worlds in his song lyric, “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” While places or characters might be “invented” as opposed to “historical,” the significance or meaning of actions, motives, and events are not “made up” but rather carried over from our world to another world.

Moral and theological truths are not, meanwhile, merely politely present in fictional worlds; they tend to leap out and trounce us. In his recent Rabbit Room newsletter, Andrew Peterson recalls in stories a “great power to tell the truth beautifully.” It is perhaps no surprise that we tend to use violent verbs to describe the experience of reading such literature: “That last chapter really got me.” “It arrested my attention.” “I was seized by that scene.” “Her sacrifice struck me.” The violent language is not merely hyperbole; metaphors acknowledge the great power in stories to compel our hearts and minds to behold truth.

Powerful Models

But stories’ great power is not limited to making us feel deep in our bones only what is good, lovely, right, pure, excellent, admirable, praiseworthy. Stories tend to make compelling whatever they present. Much of the power of stories comes from their ability to help us see, in magnified terms, what had become small and commonplace to us. Stories linger and extrapolate. And that act of taking time creates and stages compelling models for us, training our desires.

“Stories tend to make compelling whatever they present.”

While I argued earlier that stories cannot “free” themselves from God’s moral universe as creations of God’s creation (humans), stories (and the worlds they offer) absolutely can war against God’s moral framing of the world or proliferate seductive alternatives, much in the way God’s creatures can rebel against him, suppress his truth in unrighteousness, and cast about for anything else to satisfy.

So yes, Thomas Austin is delightfully right: “Just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” But buyer beware: just because it didn’t happen doesn’t mean it is true. And all those marvelous, sympathetic things that didn’t happen tend to compel us both when they are morally true and when they are not. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is a sustained defense of the positive moral and theologically formative power of stories, but Spenser is all too aware of stories’ power as “painted forgeries”: his villain in book 1 is a powerful artificer — a “maker-upper” — named Archimago, and he is out to destroy Redcrosse, the knight of holiness, with every compelling fiction he can conjure.

Hold Fast Through Fiction

As parents, it can often feel overwhelming to meet the basic needs of our children. If children are so drawn to stories and if stories are so formative, the risks feel considerably higher as we gather stories to feed their hearts and minds. And our expectations are high; we care not only about the vitality of our children’s moral imagination (what is good in the world and how to order our lives in the pursuit of it), but we also care for their theological imaginations (God as the greatest good to pursue). So, how might we as parents eager to give good gifts to our children distinguish between the less-than-obvious scorpion-versus-eggs stories?

One of my go-to questions is to ask, “What does this story want me to want?” Stories appeal to our imitative natures as humans made in the image of God by offering us all kinds of models, and these models are often sympathetic and deeply knowable. When fictional characters offer us their interior monologues and very thoughts through an omniscient narrator, such access gives us a profound opportunity to see the world through their eyes: an Anne of Green Gables and her quest for bosom friends, for example, or Robin Hood and his ethics of theft from noble Norman thieves.

This intimacy with characters, in turn, raises the question, “What kind of a world does this character offer me, and how does the story as a whole react to the desires of any given character?” For example, Kenneth Grahame’s Mr. Toad has an inexhaustibly high opinion of himself, but the rest of the woodland creatures (and the narrator) reject it, and when they can’t reform it, they reprove it, often by a humor that judges it.

With our children, we can take a story as a whole or characters one by one to weigh what kinds of actions, motives, and events are held up to be good, lovely, right, pure, excellent, or admirable. Practice fitting names to their reactions to the logic and lore of fictional worlds. My parents used to pray nightly over my siblings and me that the Lord would give us the grace to hate what is evil and cling to what is good (Romans 12:9), and then they gave us ten thousand fictional friends to love and with whom to explore what it might mean to hold fast.

Do you ever feel that you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders? That the responsibilities, duties, and burdens of life press upon you with their almost intolerable reality?

“The weight of the world” might refer to your vocation, to the calling that you have in life. The pressure of a calling can feel crushing. There aren’t enough hours in the day. There aren’t enough resources available. The possibility of failure is real; it looms on the horizon. You feel pulled in too many directions, and at some point you’re going to break.

“The weight of the world” might refer to the burdens in your family. Parents feel the enormous gravity of raising children, of having the responsibility to shape and mold the souls of our kids. We want so much good for them. We long to give them everything they need. And again, we feel our limits. We can’t change hearts. We can’t protect them from everything. We are neither omniscient nor infallible.

Sometimes “the weight of the world” is simply the sheer gravity of existence, of reality. We are mortal. We live in a world where death is certain until Jesus returns. More than that, we live in a world where eternity hangs in the balance. Heaven and hell are real, and everyone we know is journeying toward one or the other, toward eternal joy or eternal misery. In his inimitable way, C.S. Lewis expressed this kind of existential burden in his sermon “The Weight of Glory”:

It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. (45)

A load so heavy that only humility can carry it — what does this mean? And how can we grow in the humility necessary to carry the vocational, familial, and existential burdens that we face?

Heavy and Growing Burden

In my own life, especially in those moments where the burden feels greatest, I find myself returning to a few sentences in Lewis’s novel Perelandra. It may be odd to find solace in a science-fiction novel, but Lewis is a master of embedding truth and comfort in stories.

The novel is the second in Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, in which the hero, Elwin Ransom, journeys to the planet Perelandra in order to stave off disaster. The novel is Lewis’s variation on the temptation narrative of Genesis 3. The Queen of Perelandra is tempted by the Unman, a human from earth who has been possessed by a demonic power. The Unman attempts to draw the Queen into disobedience to Christ (called Maleldil in the novels), appealing to her imagination to elicit a tragic act of rebellion to Maleldil’s law.

The variation on the temptation narrative is the presence of Ransom. He is on Perelandra not merely as a witness, but as a participant. He is an intrusive third party, and he feels the burden of preserving the innocence and righteousness of the Queen in the face of the Unman’s lies and deception. For days he attempts to argue with the Unman, countering his lies with truth, only to see the truth twisted to serve the Lie again. His burden grows as he sees the Queen’s imagination clouded by the lies and her resolve weakening.

Then, one night, Ransom encounters Maleldil himself and comes to realize that he is not there to argue the Unman into submission, but to engage him in physical combat — to fight him and kill the body that the devil has possessed and is his only anchor to Perelandra.

‘Be Comforted, Small One’

With the burden of Perelandra’s future resting on his middle-aged shoulders, Ransom submits. He attacks the Unman, wounding him, and then pursuing him across the oceans, until the two are pulled beneath the waves and cast ashore in a cavern beneath a mountain. In the end, Ransom kills the Unman, but only after enduring a tremendous crucible — the combat itself (in which his heel is wounded), the descent beneath the mountain, and then the long, arduous ascent out into the light.

After his journey, Ransom finds himself in a great mountain hall, speaking with two eldila, angelic powers who serve Maleldil. In the course of their conversation, Malacandra, the eldil who rules Mars, informs Ransom that “the world is born to-day.” The Queen has passed the test, and the King of Perelandra has passed his own as well. As a result, “To-day for the first time two creatures of the low worlds, two images of Maleldil that breathe and breed like the beasts, step up that step at which your parents fell, and sit in the throne of what they were meant to be” (169).

Hearing this, Ransom falls to the ground. The weight that he has borne is too much, and he is overwhelmed by the burden. And the burden not just of the responsibility but, apparently, of his own success. It is at this point that the angelic power speaks the words that have been such an encouragement to me when I feel the weight of the world.

“Be comforted,” said Malacandra. “It is no doing of yours. You are not great, though you could have prevented a thing so great that Deep Heaven sees it with amazement. Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. Have no fear, lest your shoulders be bearing this world. Look! It is beneath your head and carries you.” (169)

Great Comfort of Smallness

Here is the paradox of comfort that Lewis offers. On the one hand, Ransom really did have a responsibility. The burden of fighting the Unman rested squarely upon him. It lay within his power to embrace his calling, or to shrink back. And yet, after completing his task, at the moment of triumph, the words are clear: “It is no doing of yours. . . . He lays no merit on you.”

“Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world.”

The comfort offered here is the comfort of smallness. And Lewis offers it not only to Ransom, but to the reader. Ransom is not great. Neither are we. Everything we have is gift, and therefore we ought to receive and be glad. Resting in our smallness, we are delivered from fear, lest our shoulders should bear the weight of the world. This is the humility that keeps our backs from being broken by the weight of glory.

Bear Your Load with Hope

Lewis is not the only one to comfort us in our smallness. King David too offers this comfort in Psalm 131. David’s heart is not lifted up, he says; his eyes are not raised too high. His mind is not occupied by realities above his station (Psalm 131:1). In humility, David refuses to carry the weight of the world. Instead, he comforts himself in his smallness.

I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 131:2)

“Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.”

A weaned child does not attempt to bear the weight of the world. A weaned child is content in the arms of his mother. He seeks no merit; he labors under no delusions of grandeur. He simply embraces his smallness with gladness.

And so, when I feel the weight of leadership, or teaching, or pastoring, or parenting, or the sheer weight of existence pressing upon me, like David, I seek to calm and quiet my soul. In the face of lofty thoughts that are too high for me, in the teeth of turbulent passions and emotions, under the weight of reality, I say to myself,

Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit upon you. The weight of the world is not yours. It was borne by another, by one whose bloody shoulders were able to bear it — up to Golgotha, into the tomb, down to Sheol, and then out, out again into the light of resurrection. Have no fear, small one. Bear the load that is yours with humility, like a weaned child, as one who hopes in the Lord forevermore.