STORIES

I am a runner. As a runner, I know other runners, whether I have ever met them or not. We who run are part of a community of like-minded souls. We understand one another. I stand with the runners of Boston in defiance of the attack on an event that has long shown the world all the very best things about running. If ever a wrong event was chosen to terrorize, however, it was a marathon. We runners are a gritty, never-say-die lot. We are determined. We persevere. We endure. Our spirit can be bruised, but it will never be broken. We know what it means to travel to the outer limits of pain and then to return. Again and again. If weather and aches and pains and blisters and heat and cold and sweat and all the people who are always asking if we are crazy and who flip us off and play chicken with us in their cars will not stop us, then neither will your careless violence or anything else. So, just understand. This is the way it is.

As we try and process yet another horrific and senseless and violent tragedy that has seized our attention and our collective grief, I am taken by the fact that as these kinds of events unfold we are drawn, with seeming helplessness, to the unceasing coverage of them. Whether it be through social media or online news or television news, we find ourselves transfixed for a time as the same few facts and images are presented over and over. We become immobilized. We stand with open mouths and shaking heads and muttered curses while the business of our daily lives comes to a quick halt.

Part of it, I might suppose, is our need to feel some sense of the immense grief of our fellow humans, to act upon our basic connection to them in the only way we can -- by paying attention -- and perhaps also, in a small way, to be reminded that our own lives were spared from something that cannot be predicted. In our sorrow for those we do not know, we are a little more grateful for our own lives and the people in it.

I might suggest that what we are also drawn to the stories. Stories of survivors, of heroism, of those who faced the unimaginable, and of tragic and needless carnage. I think often of how important stories are to us, even the stories of true horror. It seems to me such a basic human thing to tell stories, and I cannot help but be amazed at how long we have been doing it. Imagine how telling stories has shaped us as a species, how it has moved us along and civilized us, how telling stories has taught us elemental things like where the food is or how we will catch it or how to heat it up. And think, too, of how telling stories has given meaning to the things we cannot fathom or explain, how it has spread ideas and questions and how it has bound cultures and nations. The stories we have told and will tell to one another help us to see the beauty in the world and also all that makes it ugly and nasty and that makes living in it wondrous and glorious and so difficult that we must make up other realities sometimes to try and understand our own.

I have been wanting to share with you for a while now a piece by Bruce Feiler published in the New York Times last month. In The Stories That Bind Us, Feiler discusses psychological research that showed that the biggest predictor of the emotional health and happiness of children was a clear and strong family narrative. A story of us, in other words. Imagine it, time around the dinner table or simply a few minutes here and there spent talking and sharing stories of how we came to be might just, as Feiler contends, be "the single most important thing you can do for your family." Children who had the most self-confidence and who were most resilient were the ones who heard and came to know a family narrative along the lines of we have had ups and downs, there have been good times and tough times, but we have hung in there and we have seen one another through. Such a story allows children to see that they belong to something larger than themselves, just like stories do for each of us. They help us make sense of things that otherwise we cannot.

GOSPEL

It was not purposeful, but maybe appropriate somehow, that I finished on Sunday Naomi Alderman's exceptional novel, The Liars' Gospel. It is not a book I had known about, but one of those treasures I happened to have noticed on a shelf in the library and ended up enjoying immensely. Her first novel, Disobedience, also one with which I was not familiar, was recognized with an Orange Award for New Writers in 2006 and now finds the latest spot on the to-be-read list. Gospel is told from the imagined perspectives of four individuals who share their story of knowing or having met a man called Yehoshuah who raised a small ruckus in Roman-occupied Judea some seven decades before the great siege of Jerusalem and the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple: Miryam, his mother, Iehuda of Qeriot, a favorite among his followers, Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and Bar-Avo, a leader of fighters against the Romans whose own life was spared in exchange for the execution of Yehoshuah.

What this book is not is a retelling of the story you know from the four canonical gospels of the Christian Bible. It is, on the other hand, a book that might engage you in a deeper conversation about your thoughts on that story. So often, people forget that the Bible did not fall from the sky one day, fully complete in the form and structure that we recognize. (Leather-bound, of course, King James Version. But, pardon my cheekiness.) The definitive Bible as we know it, in fact, only really came into being as late as the sixteenth century. Ignoring this not only fails to recognize the humanity of the decisions that resulted in the Bible we know today, but it also comes dangerously close to idolatry in my opinion. More importantly, though, it negates the full complexity of all the stories told within, and thus, their full effect.

I have thought for a very long time that the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Romanized name more familiar to us than the Hebrew Yehoshuah that Alderman rightfully uses in her novel, would be a far more powerful one if readers and believers kept sight of its historical and social and political contexts. And, it is a political story, like it or not. Judea, in the time of this man Jesus, was a place near bursting with political tension. Jerusalem in particular threatened to boil over each day with a simmering rage and the country was rife with preachers and teachers and healers and rebels bent on shucking off the heavy rule of Rome and proclaiming a new kingdom for the chosen people of Yahaveh. The savior and messiah for whom the Jewish people were waiting was especially central to their collective story at a time when they felt most neglected by God. If you are a believer that Jesus existed and walked the earth, then you cannot ignore him as an historical figure whose message was a direct response to this crisis. To do so would be to deny the essential tenet of his humanity, a very necessary component of Christian doctrine.

Forgotten as well is that over the centuries the Jesus story was, and is still today, co-opted and used for all manner of agendas, both the well-intentioned and the dangerous. Even the four gospel writers that we know of had their own specific audiences. They used deliberate language and intentional imagery and they tweaked their version of the story to drive home their own individual points of view. They were storytellers, after all. Even the most unsophisticated reading of the New Testament gospels cannot avoid noticing the clear differences and distinctions between them.

Alderman's imagining of these characters and their roles in the story reminds us that it is a human story. And what sets this man Yehoshuah of Natzaret apart in her story, what made him different and unique from all others claiming to be the messiah, the savior of the Jewish people, and what made his message truly profound was this particular notion: Love your enemy. This teaching was not only new and dynamic, it was a provocative and radical kind of worldview for a people long-suffering under a brutal and tyrannical enemy.

"It is a dreamer's doctrine. Visionary, astonishing. And a hard road, in times of war and occupation. If all involved had listened to those words, matters would have fallen out quite differently . . . But perhaps the idea was too difficult, for it is not much observed . . . Easier to prefer one's friend to one's enemy. Easier to destroy than to build or to keep a thing standing . . . This was how it ended. And all the sorrow that came after followed from this."