Let Me Tell You a Story: Preface

“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?”

“Mr. Patel–”

“Don’t you bully me with your politeness! Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

“We’re just being reasonable.”

“So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

I have hesitated at doing what I want to do in this “story” that I’m going to tell. I wanted to bring some of the Theology of books like “On the Incarnation”, while retelling the stories and traditions that we have received from the Holy Bible. In doing this there was a great fear that using the word ‘story’ might reduce the Truths that these stories hold to being mere tale-telling, fiction. That somehow the “story” would become less believable because it’s a ‘story’.

Yet, to borrow again a concept from Yann Martel, it’s like what I am trying to say is, “let me tell you a story that even though it is not true, it is true”. What I mean here, is that while I might give characters life or create a dialogue between them, give them new names or new looks, the story underneath it is a true story. Stories are valuable for us to understand truths. This has been the tradition of humanity since we were capable of communication.

The mere recounting of an experience is the telling of a story, and consequently, we ought not to look at story-telling with contempt. Story-telling does not make belief laughable, as story-telling is what all humans are doing all over the world, all the time. That does not make their stories false.