I've been reading this book now for a couple of weeks, slowly...it is very good. It is kind of like eating a really delicious food. You want to read it in small pieces to really take in it's full flavor.
Anyway, here is an excerpt from it:
"A friend of mine, a fine storyteller, remarked to me, 'Jesus was not a theologian. He was a God who told stories.'
Yes. A God who told stories.
St. Matthew says, 'And he spake many things unto them in parables...and without a parable spake he not unto them.'
When the powers of this world denigrate and deny the value of story, life loses much of its meaning; and for many people in the world today, life has no meaning, one reason why every other hospital bed is for someone with mental, not a physical, illness.
Clyde Kilby writes, "Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable---perhaps everything....It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.'...
When I was a child, reading Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, reading about Joseph and his coat of many colours and his infuriating bragging about his dreams, reading The Selfish Giant and The Book of Jonah, these diverse stories spoke to me in the same language, and I knew intuitively that they belonged to the same world. For the world of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, is the world of story, story which may be able to speak to us as a Word of God.
The artist who is Christian, like any other Christian, is required to be in this world, but not of it. We are to be in this world as healers, as listeners, and as servants.
In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars."
-pp.56-57
Anyone want to share their thoughts on this?
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