Everyone loves a story

.......and everyone thinks of their lives in narrative terms (whether it's the romantic "three-act resolution" form of western cinema, or not, it's still some kind of narrative). No one pops from their mother's womb knowing how to read and write (much less 'figure'). Everyone who has these skills and their inherent perspectives had to work to learn them. Thus, humankind is naturally "oral" and "literacy" is an acquired blessing. Humanity's relentless orality may help explain why wordy movies starring Meryl Streep don't translate so well across the globe while those of Stallone, Schwartzennegger, and Chan do; why Gilgamesh, The Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf are the earliest 'great literature' and contemporary surviving texts are laws and economic record keeping; why a centuries long tradition of lecture-oriented education so easily falls before the depredations of narrative-based media (TV, cinema, MTV, YouTube).

 
- So, if someone, or some ethnicity, has not passed through the transforming portals of literacy, what do they do? More to the point, what do "we" do? Answer: we do whatever they do, re. communication, learning, and perceiving. By in large, that means storying, presenting a persuasive counter-narrative and calling for a "new birth" from one to the other, to adapt their lives and lifestyles to its parameters, to shift their identity from one basin of (narrative) attraction to another, the gospel. Every new-born baby lacks a narrative with which to locate itself under-stably in the world. They receive this from their Father, perhaps an older brother and certainly a community, all of whom have a work or mission, and share a defining tradition. This is as true for those born of the flesh as of the Spirit, with the difference being that adults of the former chose to shift (by grace through faith, within the sovereign election of the loving Creator) to the latter and start again.