This past Saturday, I missed Stuart. I was just a bit too late leaving the house, and all I heard was the final song of his story-and-song show. That made me especially sad because this last Saturday was Stuart McLean's last show. He's leaving The Vinyl Cafe in order to fight cancer - melanoma. The airwaves next Saturday will be lonely without that slightly raspy voice that always sounds like it's smiling. I will miss his stories.
I have often marvelled at the genius that is Stuart McLean. He tells simple stories - stories about ordinary folk, absurd folk - in a simple way. He read his manuscripts straight up, no extemporaneous speaking, no stand-up comedy, just a well-written story read well, and people flocked to listen. I wonder sometimes if we have a bit of a snobbish attitude toward stories. We adults listen to propositions, lectures, sermons, speeches, and TED Talks, but stories? Stories are for children. And yet . . . here was a guy who read stories in halls around the country, and people bought tickets to hear him, and they tuned in to listen to him on the air. Nothing high-tech. No computer-generated imagery, no special effects, no 3-D, immersive, large-screen glitz. Just a voice. A quiet, wry, raspy voice. And we listened and laughed and cried and thought and laughed and cried some more. Dave and Morley became friends. We cried when their dog died. We laughed when Dave got himself into his endless scrapes; he was so much like all of us. We were glad when the two of them, even when it was really tough to do so, made choices for love and loyalty and kindness and decency and courage and neighbourliness. Just a story, but it made our lives richer.
That's the beauty of story. It disarms the hearer. It draws him in and gets him invested and then it turns and prods and convicts.
God knew that. I think that's why so much of Scripture is written as a story. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," and we immediately recognise the opening lines of a story. Oh sure, there are laws and psalms and letters and sermons, but underlying all of them is a story. Think of how many psalms are embedded in story, just as an example. Because while we are taught by law and psalm and letter and sermon, we connect most deeply, I think, with story.
Jesus knew that. I think that's why he told so many parables. Oh sure, he gave instructions and teachings, but so many times he answered with a story. The story has a way of getting in behind defenses and presuppositions and forces us to look at things through new eyes. Instructions and teachings are important, but they engage the head. Sometimes it is the heart that must be turned, and the heart is most easily turned, I think, by story.
But we are a society that has lost our story. There was a time, not so many years ago, that most people shared a story. The fancy word is "metanarrative". Most people knew and believed the biblical master-story, at least at some level. That is no longer the case. We no longer know the story. And, I think even as a church, we have lost our sense of story. We have relegated the story to Sunday school, considering the story to be the "milk" from which we must grow up so that we can eat the "meat" of theology (or something), forgetting that story is also theology. We no longer trust story.
But the really awful kicker is that we no longer trust proposition, either. Information and mis-information is so easily obtained. "Fake news" has become a thing. Pictures lie all the time. We live in a "post-truth" society that is suspicious of all proposition, lecture, sermon, speech, and TED Talk. We don't know what or who to trust anymore.
I wonder if the two are connected. Perhaps when we cast off story as something childish and silly, something from which we grow up, our theology loses its moorings and is cast adrift into "post-truth". I wonder if, in our quest for solid proposition and sound theology, we have forgotten the power of the good story well told. Of course, the solid proposition and sound theology are important, but so is the story.
Stuart McLean knew the power of story. For 20 years he wrote and read stories for and to adults. People didn't come to his shows to hear propositions about Dave and Morley. They came to hear stories.
Perhaps we should take a page out of his book. Perhaps we should return to the story. Perhaps we should tell more stories. Perhaps we need to remember that the story is theology, too.
"Tell me the old, old story of unseen things above,
Of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love."
