Life as Narrative

[Edited from my reply to Mie in her blog yesterday, this could be a good sequel to my previous blog.]

History is a record of the past, but history is NOT the past. We cannot change history, but we can change the way how history is recorded.

Ruth Finnegan, Graham Swift and Jerome Bruner all wrote about human beings being the only kind of animal which tell stories. As we grow, we experience more about life, good and bad, joy and pain... and we'll need to and try to re-construct our past through telling stories (to both ourselves and other people) of our lives, trying to make sense of everything out of it (one way of "making sense" is to link up all these past experience of ours to make them a continuity) -- because we cannot accept our lives as fragments of just-some-other-events or making no sense at all. (A man who thinks his life making no sense will either go mad or kill himself.) This is human nature.

During this story-telling process, or personal history-making process, we will see ourselves differently from time to time. Everyday we experience something new and we have new stories to tell (to both ourselves and other people), then we got updated history of ourselves. But because they are stories, we need to make sense of the cause and consequences -- every story has some background causes and then they lead to different consequences, e.g. because I've been hurt in the past, that's why I'm afraid to disclose my real self. We can't justify our present self if we can't find a good past experience to be the cause of it. And like any other knowledge recorded (e.g. social science, history, psychology, natural sciences...), these are basically stories repeatedly retold and re-interpreted, over and over again. It changes (or is distorted) according to when we're re-telling these stories, who we're re-telling these stories to, and on what occasion we're re-telling these stories. (One obvious example is how people explain things happened in the office to their bosses, trying to avoid being responsible of everything...)

We need to be alert that our "made-up" stories sometimes distorted the "real" history of ourselves, because our way of telling stories about ourselves are inevitably influenced and distorted by our past experience, our family and education backgrounds, our peer groups, and the cultural communities we belong (e.g. the bombs in London are narrated as terrorists' devilish plans by the West, but Al-Quaeda followers would glorified them as heroic stories!). So in a way, these stories or history about ourselves DO NOT actually reflect our real past, but only re-interpretations of the story-teller himself and his way of seeing things. This is a very important way of understanding how we see ourselves and how our self-identity and image are constructed.

So how do we understand ourselves? Our understanding of ourselves is always changing due to these constantly changing criteria:
1. everytime the story is re-told, a new interpretation is made based on the additional personal experience added (when compared to the time that same story was last told). In other words, every time it is a new "me" telling the same story with a new interpretation.
2. the way stories "should be" told as influenced by common/social/culturall conventions.
So judge carefully about this narrative of our past, be aware of its strength and problem and apply it to your own analysis of everyday life.

"Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2)

So how do we let ourselves change and let the Holy Spirit renew our lives so that we can live ourselves as a re-born person in Jesus Christ? How this could be done? Re-telling, re-interpreting your past will make "you" change. But if we're to stick to the old ways of understanding our stories, the cause and consequences, this old "us" will only be strengthened by the re-telling of the stories, and don't we ever think of freeing ourselves from the past wounds and living our life differently. The old way of telling stories about ourselves explains how I understand myself as myself today. But I need to be very self-aware that this understanding is only a "worldly" understanding and construction of myself, but not according to what the Bible told me -- my life is re-born and totally new in Jesus Christ, and I'm precious as He sees me for He sacrificed His life for me. With the love He gave me, I am now able to see my past in a totally new perspective, and perhaps with this love I can also love all the people around me, for they could be loved, and worth loving is not according to their past stories anymore (although some of them have hurt us in the past), but because the Lord also sacrificed His life for them too. My life transformed because of this.

This does not mean that we should abandon all our past, or not telling stories to anybody including ourselves about the past again. The conventional term is "to face your past, deal with it." The practical way is to share with somebody you trust, take the incident apart, analyse the hurt it did to you, pray to God for a cure and help you to forgive and forget. Keeping it in your heart and not mentioning it will only leave the transformation of the re-born self not fully completed. The old self is still holding strong.

Forgiven. Reconciled. This is the secret. Forgiveness is unlocking the door to set free both someone and yourself! Forgive the one who caused you the wound. Forgive yourself for not dealing with it appropriately. Accept and admit your past as a matter of fact for you cannot doing anything to change it. But do reconcile with this wounded past, reconcile with this person who caused the wound, and reconcile with your sinful past, for you're a new child in Him, and nothing can change this too -- this is the framework of re-telling that same old story, then you're truly free from your past, and the transformation is complete!