Aly Hawkins

Here is Part 2 of my seminary application “essay.” Part 1 here.

There came an age when many Storytellers had less room for mystery in their hearts than in ages past. The paradox of the Story that is also the Way weighed heavy upon them, and they came to believe that the Tribe should choose one above the other. The Way, they said, could be distilled and delivered at once, while the Story could only be told over a very long time, around ceremonial fires and on feast days and in high places and low places. The Way, they said, could answer all a person’s most urgent questions about how to live, while the Story could only inflame her thirst for life. The Way, they said, could overcome and abolish the native tribes’ destructive stories with systems and facts and lists, while the Story could only invite them to imagine better characters and quests and consummations.

In each successive generation, greater numbers of Singers and Storytellers were persuaded by these arguments. Fewer Storytellers told stories and the Story; more distributed data. Fewer Singers learnt singing; more recited slogans.

And it came to pass, in this age of information, that a girl was born to an ancient line of Singers. She was taught the Way and tried her best to live according to its statutes, for she loved the Voice and longed to please it. Yet from her first day, she hummed along with the Story when snatches of its melody sneaked into the air. As she grew, she asked many Singers about the bits and pieces of the Story she had overheard, hoping that one might invite her first to a ceremonial fire and then to a feast day and thence to high places and low places so that she might hear it and learn it and, perhaps, sing it. But all they could tell the girl were excerpts of the Story used to illustrate their teachings of the Way.

Just before the girl was of an age to become a Singer herself, she discovered the stories of the native tribes. And while she still loved the Voice and longed to please it, the stories moved her in mind and heart as the Way never had. She heard in the native tribes’ stories echoes of the Story she had overheard from her first day. Their discordant, unfinished tales of sacrifice, betrayal, violence, hope, grief and devotion were true, even when they were not.

The girl came to believe that telling stories could be for her an alternative to the Way. And so she snubbed the Voice’s call to sing, for she had no desire to instruct and instructing was the only song she had learnt. She left her training to swap tales around ceremonial fires and on feast days and in high places and low places. She no longer gathered with the Storytellers. She wandered, listening to stories and composing her own.

Part 3 (the last) tomorrow, and then the for-real essay that explains the story, for the story-impaired.

Filed under: church, theology, writing Tagged: | allegory, seminary, storytelling