Stories, not atoms

My tagline is a line from Muriel Rukeyser: “The world is made up of stories, not atoms.” I just finished a book about how our lives follow a narrative, and it made me think about what kind of trajectory my life is following. This morning began with Bible reading, which reminds me continually of how important words and stories are to God. And I blog, which is in a sense a gathering of my stories, however incomplete, into an ongoing narrative thread.

I always read Frederick Buechner in the spring; I don’t know why. But here is an excerpt of what he has to say about stories in Listening to Your Life:

I talk about my life anyway because if, on the one hand, hardly anything could be less important, on the other hand, hardly anything could be more important. My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes Himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually.