Telling Tales
Aug. 11th, 2004 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseI'm going through one of my "My journal is so boring" frets. But rather than posting desperate naked pictures of myself, I will just perservere.
I've now gone through Yann Martel's incredible novel The Life of Pi twice: once on paper and again listening to the unabridged audio CDs as I was colouring the Passover book. This amazing book just gets richer and richer the more you think about it. Not only is it astonishingly inventive and entertaining, but it carries one of the most profound messages I've ever heard. for me, the book is ultimately saying that the shape of our life is the shape of the stories we tell about ourselves and about the world around us.
Faith, too, the novel says, is about stories we tell ourselves. Moses received the Torah, Jesus died on the cross, Buddah received enlightenment because we tell those stories and find riches in them. If the Torah is given by God, we are motivated to dig deeply and interpret it afresh constantly. If it's a book written by Joe Israelite and company, maybe we don't give it another look. If we accept that there is a soul, then we treasure the unseen beauty and potential of the individual and look for the soul's light peeping through the cracks of his chipped armour.
Storytelling is conscious. Faith is a decision we make. I get unbelievably bored with fundamentalists of either religious or secular philosophies demanding that they have found THE TRUTH. Philosophy and religion are only as good as they are useful to an individual on his or her journey. That's why we change philosophies as we move through life -- we have different needs at different life stages.
"Which is the better story," Pi asks the Japanese investigators. That is the most important question.
I've now gone through Yann Martel's incredible novel The Life of Pi twice: once on paper and again listening to the unabridged audio CDs as I was colouring the Passover book. This amazing book just gets richer and richer the more you think about it. Not only is it astonishingly inventive and entertaining, but it carries one of the most profound messages I've ever heard. for me, the book is ultimately saying that the shape of our life is the shape of the stories we tell about ourselves and about the world around us.
Faith, too, the novel says, is about stories we tell ourselves. Moses received the Torah, Jesus died on the cross, Buddah received enlightenment because we tell those stories and find riches in them. If the Torah is given by God, we are motivated to dig deeply and interpret it afresh constantly. If it's a book written by Joe Israelite and company, maybe we don't give it another look. If we accept that there is a soul, then we treasure the unseen beauty and potential of the individual and look for the soul's light peeping through the cracks of his chipped armour.
Storytelling is conscious. Faith is a decision we make. I get unbelievably bored with fundamentalists of either religious or secular philosophies demanding that they have found THE TRUTH. Philosophy and religion are only as good as they are useful to an individual on his or her journey. That's why we change philosophies as we move through life -- we have different needs at different life stages.
"Which is the better story," Pi asks the Japanese investigators. That is the most important question.
