Telling Chewy Stories
Something About God? Or a Story About God?
The other night over family dinner, Stephanie and I were discussing some events that we should not have been discussing in front of Henry and Addie. Suffice it to say it was a grown-up story, in which the grownups involved were doing grown-up bad things.
I won’t go into further detail about those specific events here, because like “my kids,” “the Internet” is another group in front of which I do not need to be discussing these events.
But as I said, we exercised no such good judgment over dinner. Also, we were having steak, an inexpensive one, which would be an extraneous detail except that it was hard to chew. And because it was hard to chew, we were not overly concerned with the quietness of our children at the dinner table. Surely they were just busy chewing.
We were not overly concerned until we came to a natural lull in our discussion and noticed Henry staring off into space over Stephanie’s left shoulder.
“Henry,” we asked “what are you looking at?”
“I’m not looking,” he replied. “I’m thinking.”
“Well, what are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about all the different pieces of the story and how they go together.” Deep breath. Maybe he’s thinking of a story about dinosaurs…
“What’s one of the pieces of the story, Henry?”
And here he proceeded to give a quite clear and accurate account, complete with names, motivations, and consequences, of one piece of the story Stephanie and I had been discussing.
At this point we shifted to a new dinner table discussion about why we aren’t going to talk about this story with anyone else.
Every parent I know has some version of this tale, often with some extreme social awkwardness resulting when the child repeats what they have heard at an inopportune time. Kids are sponges at soaking up information, they’re just terribly leaky containers of it. We all know this, and yet we all make the mistake anyway.
But that’s not where I want to take this. It wasn’t just the talking in front of him that got us in trouble, but the nature of our talking. Look, Henry is bright enough, but he’s only five and a half. We could have gotten away with this if we’d discussed the events abstractly using moral principles and legal terms. He might have even known the vocabulary, but he wouldn’t have been interested. I’m sure of this because we’d done it successfully several times that week already.
Stephanie and I could have safely told each other something about these events over dinner. What we couldn’t do was tell the story. The thing that left him staring off into space, chewing on what it all meant rather than on his steak, was the narrative.
We human beings have brains that are wired to consume and make meaning out of stories. There’s an enormous amount of modern research on this, but it’s not a new discovery. Jesus didn’t walk around teaching in parables, i.e. short stories, because he got bored with logical argument. He taught with stories because stories work. But actually, the most remarkable thing about Jesus isn’t that he came to teach us with stories. It’s that he came to live a story, the one that includes the cross but ends with empty tomb.
Our brains swallow stories up, chew them, digest them — and then turn around and use them to understand the world as we encounter it.
The question I left dinner with that night was simply, “What stories to my kids hear from me?” (ok, ok, there were two questions — the other was: “Can Henry keep his mouth shut?”)
When it comes to raising our children in the faith, do we do enough to tell them the stories of God? I don’t know about you, but I find myself telling my kids something about God, more often I tell them a story about God. But if we want to leave our kids staring off into space, chewing on what it all means, we need to give them a narrative. And if we need help, there’s this book called the Bible that’s full of them.
Kids, and adults, are really good at listening to stories. They really can think about all the different pieces of the stories and how they go together. So let’s tell some good stories until we know them by heart.
We will recount to generations to come the praiseworthy deeds and the power of the LORD, and the wonderful works he has done.
That the generations to come might know, and the children yet unborn; that they in their turn might tell it to their children;
So that they might put their trust in God, and not forget the deeds of God, but keep his commandments.
(Psalm 78:4, 6–7)
— Fr. Dad
