Cultural Encounters: A Journal For The Theology Of Culture Volume 14 Number 1 | Page 14

MEETING HAGAR
-Haught
high school or college days. And even if the writing seems dated or the
plot isn’t as magnificent as we remembered, most of those favorite stories
keep their place on the shelves of our hearts. Because they were im-
portant to us once. Revisiting them allows us to think about the differ-
ences between what we were like when we first read them, and what
we’re like now, and whether or not there’s anything we ought to be doing
about those differences. Of course, stories aren’t always written for read-
ers’ consumption. These days, we stream old school television shows or
movies from our own private lists of “classics” because we remember the
laughter or the shivers or the sorrow, even, that they invoked in us the
first time around. And we can’t help but compare notes with who we are
now.
Good stories stand up to repetition and, with each retelling or rereading,
they have the power to teach us something about ourselves and the world
in which we live. We almost can’t help it. Human beings are wired for
stories. Our brains feast on them as their messages shape our identities,
behavior, and our morals. There is emerging science to back me up on
this point. In his book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us
Human, Jonathan Gottschall describes the transformative effects of good
stories, “from TV shows to fairy tales,” arguing that they “steep us all in
the same powerful norms and values. They relentlessly stigmatize antiso-
cial behavior and just as relentlessly celebrate prosocial behavior.” 2
This is possible because of chemical reactions in our brains, what one
writer called “the roots of our story-telling instinct.” 3 For example, re-
searchers have discovered that stories that inspire us to feel close to an-
other release a neuropeptide called oxytocin 4 present in nursing mothers,
which mixes with other brain chemicals to allow us to feel “transporta-
tion,” or the experience of feeling empathy for another person or group. 5
But really, this isn’t rocket science. As a grandmother, a former newspa-
per reporter, and a Bible reader, I know the power of stories, and I sus-
pect that God has known it all along. Many of us think of the Bible as a
collection of stories, many of them really good ones and worthy
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2012), 134.
2
Jeremy Adam Smith, “The Science of the Story,” Greater Good Magazine, June 8, 2016,
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/science_of_the_story.
3
Paul J. Zak, “Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative,” Cerebrum,
February 2, 2015, http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2015/Why_Inspiring_Stories_Make_Us_Re-
act__The_Neuroscience_of_Narrative/.
4
Ibid. See also Paul Zak, “How Stories Change the Brain,” Greater Good Magazine, December 17,
2013, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_stories_change_brain.
5
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