Once, while haunting a used book store (as is my habit), I came upon a beautifully illustrated volume of Aesop’s Fables. In “Hercules and the Waggoneer,” a man whose wagon wheel was stuck in the mud cries out to Hercules for help. Hercules refuses, telling the man to get out and do some of his own lifting. The moral below the illustration read, “The gods help those who help themselves.” This startled me. Though I had never read it in the Bible, I had heard it quoted often as a Christian maxim.
According to the dictionary, a fable is "a short story conveying a moral." A narrative, on the other hand, is "a spoken or written account of connected events." Narratives recount events. Fables coat moral lessons with stories.
I fear that we have failed to distinguish between the two when it comes to bearing witness to truth. As humans, are we living fables, short stories that convey morals? Or are we living narratives, a series of connected events that have an end?
When descriptions in narratives mutate into prescriptions for life, we risk treating narratives like fables and the people who tell them like demi-gods who know a little more than the rest of us. We do this with biblical narrative all the time. It’s easy to do, and it’s not always incorrect, but let’s say you read the part in Nehemiah where he addresses the leaders who have married foreign women. He says, “I contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair…” (Nehemiah 13). In another event, David made the Moabites lie down so he could measure out and kill two-thirds of them (2 Samuel 8). These descriptions weren’t meant to be prescriptions for how to deal with covenant-breakers or enemies. In reading biblical narrative like this, we risk making the grave mistake of justifying sinful actions.
There are so many ways to spin a story, which makes for a treacherous path when it comes to understanding narratives. The factual events that make up narratives can get misused and abused and morph into fables pre-spun by the teller. It’s easy to reorder facts or discriminately emphasize them to build proofs that exalt our agendas; or worse, to uphold what we assume to be God's agenda.
I think we all want our stories to carry meaning. If my story of success or failure serves to help someone else make sense of their own, then my own experience has meaning for me. I hear this sentiment behind the words of those who suffer when they say, “God had me go through this so I could help others.” I also hear this sentiment as others recount their failures and say, “Don’t make the same mistakes I did.” What I think most dangerous is the sentiment couched in stories of success, “You, too, could have what I have if you just do what I did.” When we spin our narratives into fables, we also end up erecting caricatures of our real selves.
When we use our own stories or those of others to prove points, we run the risk of turning lives into a series of lessons to be learned instead of real flesh and blood people to be known. The characters in our fabled worlds slip into two dimensions, either good or bad. Fables can set lives up like standards. When we moralize our narratives, we run the risk of “demoralizing” people. But if we’re honest, none of us live up to the moral maxims we try to derive from our stories.
Narratives are made to be entered into, not just “learned from.”
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