Every Thursday in term-time I take my youngest granddaughter to the Lil’ Beatz dance class run by the Clayton School Of Dance & Performing Art’s at The Play House & Cafe Thurnscoe. Music and movement are so important to children’s development, and she is now beginning to join in all the actions and understand the songs that are sung to her.
One song tells the story of various nursery rhymes and the chorus starts, ‘I’ll tell you a story’, promising to take us on adventures to new worlds. That is what stories do. At this age, we go to the Caribbean car wash with pompoms to clean our imaginary cars and we swim like fish in our imaginary ocean. We row our imaginary boats past crocodiles and beep the horn on our imaginary buses. I don’t know about my granddaughter, but it’s welcome therapy for me!
This is because we all need stories in our lives. We need daily reminders that story is at the heart of life. Somehow we adults believe that stories are just for children and that we have outgrown them. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I relish my weekly dose of reality framed in the medium of dancing story.
The Bible is a large, sprawling story made up of 66 books. Northrop Frye comments that ‘the entrie Bible is enclosed in a narrative framework’, and I agree. It can be easy to forget that when bogged down in Levitical laws or genealogies of unprounouncable names in Chronicles, but the Bible contains the basic elements of all good stories:
1. a beginning and an ending
2. a catastrophe that has marred the original design and separates us from our good end
3. a plot of salvation, of rescue
4. developing characters who reflect our human nature and show us what God can do with people
5. meaning, significance (life is not simply random.)
This brings not only reassurance but reality to our everyday lives. We know all about beginnings and endings (we celebrate births and remember deaths). We know all about the messy middle (sorrow, pain, tragedy). We yearn for the happy endings and daily watch growth and development around us. Deep down, we love the personal touch.
The Bible tells us the whole story of humanity, which can’t be told, it declares, without reference to God. Let the Bible’s story bring as much joy to you as my weekly foray into Lil’Beatz’s world does. Let story shape your week.