There’s something compelling about a good story, isn’t there? Who’d have thought that a good story could come out of a 50 second video about a goldfish? I’ve been thinking about story this week, and spent some time looking at short stories, and I mean really short stories. There are a number of 1 minute stories on Youtube like the goldfish one. But there are even shorter stories. Carrie clued me in to two sentence horror stories. Like this one:
I begin tucking Johnny into bed and he tells me, “Daddy check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another Johnny, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy there’s somebody on my bed.”
That’s pretty good for two sentences. But when I think of compelling and engaging short stories, one that I think of is from the Pixar movie Up. In the first ten minutes of the film the story is told of Carl and Ellie, who meet as kids and grow old together as husband and wife. The power of their story brings you from laughter to tears in mere breaths.
There are things that get communicated through story that can only be communicated through story. I think this is why the central book of our faith is primarily a book of stories. The Bible begins with a story of how God created the world, in Christianity our two holiest days are Christmas and Easter, the story of Jesus coming into the world and of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Stories abound in scripture.
Today for our NT passage, we are reading another story, and this is a story about a man who tells a story. We’re going to read from Acts 6:8-7:1 and it picks up with a dispute among Jews, between Jesus’ followers and mainstream Jewish authorities.
6:8 Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people. 9Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called), Cyrenians, Alexandrians, and others of those from Cilicia and Asia, stood up and argued with Stephen. 10But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit* with which he spoke. 11Then they secretly instigated some men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.’
12They stirred up the people as well as the elders and the scribes; then they suddenly confronted him, seized him, and brought him before the council. 13They set up false witnesses who said, ‘This man never stops saying things against this holy place and the law; 14for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth* will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses handed on to us.’ 15And all who sat in the council looked intently at him, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.
7:1 Then the high priest asked him, ‘Are these things so?’
I ended the passage here because what happens next is Stephen begins to tell a long story of the Jewish people, starting with Abraham, the Isaac and Jacob, Joseph and his journey to Egypt, the Hebrew people’s slavery in Egypt, Moses, the Exodus, through Joshua and through David. It’s a long story, an entire chapter of the Bible, a long chapter, 60 verses.
And what happens when Stephen gets to the end of his story? The Jewish authorities are outraged with what Stephen has said, and they kill him. What’s going on here? Let me suggest that if Stephen wasn’t such a good storyteller, they may not have killed him. There was a power in Stephen’s story that moved the people who was telling it to to violence.
Stories are powerful. Story can communicate in ways that explaining cannot. I can tell you to give to help people in need, but if I tell you the story of someone who is struggling it’s going to register with you more. We’ve all experienced this, but it’s been studied as well. Let’s just say your listening to a me explain scientific facts about storytelling, or to a PowerPoint presentation about it, bullet points and all. There are parts of the brain that get activated at moments like that – parts that process language, where we decode words, but there’s not a lot else going on in the brain when someone is simply explaining facts to us.
But if we are listening to someone tell a story…the language processing part of our brain is active, and so are other areas depending on what’s happening in the story. If someone is describing a wonderful meal that they ate, then our sensory cortex is active. This is the part of the brain that is active when we eat. It activates when we eat or when we hear someone sharing a story about eating.
Similar things happen if someone tells us about a dog’s soft fur, or the warmth of the summer sun. Or if someone is telling the story about skydiving, the feeling of jumping out of the moving plane, suddenly falling at great speed towards the earth, then in our brain our motor cortex lights up. Story engages more of our brain than simply explaining or lecturing.
This is why story can be so powerful – when you tell a story to a group of people, you are syncing their brains in a real way. You mention the smell of fresh baked chocolate cookies, and you are engaging the sensory cortex of every person listening. Often when people are engaged in listening to the same story they will even begin syncing their breathing with the story teller and consequently with other listeners.
And when we hear a story, we instinctively want to make connections, when we hear someone tell us about a time they were really scared, we being scanning our mental files for stories about when we were scared, when we hear a story about a great trip someone took, it’s likely that we will share a story about one of our trips. We want to connect with one another, and we get that stories of our experiences do that on multiple levels.
