Telling Our Story

 "Every Christian, great and small, across two millennia, in every tribe and nation, has heard the worn-out taunt about believing in fairy tales."

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Every Christian, great and small, across two millennia, in every tribe and nation, has heard the worn-out taunt about believing in fairy tales.

“The madman is not the man who lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
G.K. Chesterton

In Wake Up Dead Man, the current installment of an ongoing murder mystery series called Knives Out, starring Daniel Craig as the cynical Inspector Benoit Blanc, the body of a murdered monsignor turns up in a parish church in upstate New York.  Suspicion soon falls upon the young curate, Fr. Jud, who, it turns out, is entirely innocent and, in fact, later asked to assist in the investigation. 

I have not seen the episode, nor either of the two previous installments, but I did catch an exchange early on in a preview of the movie between the priest and the detective that leaves me less than eager to find out what happens next. Asked whether he’s Catholic or not, the detective replies, “No, very much not, no. Proud heretic. I kneel at the altar of the rational.”

Having thus established his bona fide as the only honest skeptic in the room, which happens to be the sacristy of the church where the body of the murdered monsignor lies, he feels it necessary to embroider at length upon the matter, explaining to the young priest why he remains immune to the blandishments of religious belief. “Well, the architecture,” he concedes, 

that interests me. I feel the grandeur, the mystery, the intended emotional effect…But it’s like someone has shown a story to me that I do not believe. It’s built upon the empty promise of a child’s fairytale filled with malevolence and misogyny and homophobia and its justified untold acts of violence and cruelty…So, like an ornery mule kicking back, I want to pick it apart and pop its perfidious bubble of belief and get to a truth I can swallow without choking.

Now there’s a rare mule for you. And while he’s at it, why stop there? Can he think of no other examples of malevolence with which to pop so perfidious a bubble? What about all that alleged hatred and violence directed at Jews and Muslims? Still, it’s a fairly comprehensive set of grievances he’s put together. 

Actually, it’s the same old dreary catalogue we’ve been hearing so often over the years. Which becomes a bit tiresome, come to think of it, when it’s thrown up in our faces in the middle of a TV crime scene. But, then, in the minds of far too many these days, the Church is the crime scene; so what better place for launching an attack than in a setting perceived by Catholics as somehow sacred? 

“You’re right,” says the young priest. “It’s storytelling…” And then, rather disarmingly, he asks, “do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside us that’s profoundly true? That we can’t express any other way…except by storytelling?”

“Touché, Padre,” the detective replies, still smugly unconvinced. 

All right. So, everyone’s got a story to tell. Nor can anyone long survive without some story, on the truth of which their lives depend. I mean, who doesn’t need a narrative to tell us where we came from and where we’re going? 

So, what’s the story we tell? Is it the one our parents told us long ago, perhaps reinforced by the priests and nuns who taught us our catechism along the way? Spectators, as it were, before Chesterton’s “Christ Child,” who “stood at Mary’s knee / His hair was like a crown, / And all the flowers looked up at Him, / And all the stars looked down.”

Are we still willing to tell that story? Will the resonance of the story prove persuasive enough to overcome such “malevolence and misogyny and homophobia” as our enemies routinely add up as the cost of being Catholic? In other words, is there enough saving truth in the story we tell for the Benoit Blancs of this world that they needn’t choke on it if and when they finally get around to swallowing the story? 

And what is the story but that of a God who makes Himself so small that He can become one of us without ceasing to be mighty and majestic; who then chooses to suffer and die for us upon a Cross. Nothing particularly malevolent in that, is there? It reads just like a fairy tale, only with an outcome wholly beyond this world. Or, as C.S. Lewis once put it in one of his Narnia tales, striking the exact swashbuckling note that might appeal to Inspector Blanc, “the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in His great campaign of sabotage.” 

Show that to the skeptics who run the world, and they will very likely laugh you right off the stage. Maybe it’s the disguise that gets them. And yet, quoting the most memorable line I ever heard J.R.R. Tolkien speak, “Never was a tale told that men would rather find true.”   

Quoting the most memorable line I ever heard J.R.R. Tolkien speak, “Never was a tale told that men would rather find true.”   Tweet This

How many are there who, like the poet Hardy, having first heard the story steeped in the joy and innocence of an almost forgotten childhood, secretly nourished all his life long the wish that it really were true? The poem is called “The Oxen,” which he wrote in 1915, amid the senseless slaughter of the Great War; and the setting is Christmas Eve at the hour of midnight. 

“Now they are all on their knees,” says one of the elders of the village as they watch the animals fall down in worship before the Child freshly born into a world crying out for relief from countless “untold acts of violence and cruelty.” The poet’s reverie goes on, as he and the others recall the scene:

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then. 

Years later, a great deal of cynicism and doubt will have set in to snap the spell. “So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years!” he exclaims. Still, he is not quite finished telling the story. “Yet, I feel,” he tells us in the final lines of the poem, 

If someone said on Christmas Eve, 
“Come; see the oxen kneel,
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

It’s a lovely poem, to be sure. Is it compelling enough to move the needle past the nihilism that enshrouds so many of us in this increasingly secularized—indeed, desacralized—world? We won’t know, will we?—unless we tell the story. 

We must all become storytellers now.