I've Often Not Been on Boats

One of our favorite movies is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - a very clever Tom Stoppard 1990 movie based on his equally clever 1966 stage play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are bit characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet, who appear in just few scenes of Shakespeare, but are the main characters of this story.

In R&GAD, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or is it Guildenstern and Rosencrantz?) travel through the parts of Hamlet that their characters appear in, all the time trying to determine what the rest of Hamlet is about. They appear in only a few scenes of Hamlet, but from just those scenes as "real characters" caught in the story, they are trying to determine the full story of Hamlet. What they end up with is convoluted and inaccurate, because their characters are never exposed to key parts of the story.

The dialog is clever and quick, including a verbal tennis match. The comedy ranges from simple slapstick to deep irony. They ponder the meaning of life, death, time, and even boats. At one point, there's a play within a play within a play within a play. It's a movie worth seeing several times, because you don't catch every joke, gag, and line the first time around.

Sometimes we do the same thing with life as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. We look at only the scenes in which we appear, and then try to figure out the overall narrative, the "big picture" of life. Based on just the tidbits we personally experience, we try to reconstruct an intelligent play written by a gifted author. And we rarely do a good job of it. We ponder the meaning of life, death, time, and even boats, and conclude something far more convoluted than the actual narrative, because we've not been exposed to key parts of the story.

Rather, we should just read the full play that the author wrote. Only then does the whole story make sense. And only then do our few scenes make sense. The story is not about us, and so we cannot reconstruct the story based only on the scenes that do happen to be about us.

Rosencrantz says,

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don't go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one's memory. And yet, I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

This unalterable progression of time is a storyline greater than our own, approaching long before we are born and advancing long after we die. Our lives are but one brief paragraph of a great play by a gifted author, rendered overly complex when we try to understand it from the inside out.

With deep grief I have watched the events surrounding the Ferguson, MO, case and the Eric Garner case. I grieve over the loss of life, regardless of circumstance. I grieve over those who responded with violence, regardless of reason. I grieve over the angry divisiveness, heartlessness, and bitter words exchanged in the streets and online. I grieve that, no matter how you look at these stories, race is still an open-wound issue in our time.

I'm not going to tell you who I think is right or wrong, and I won't tell you who you should think is right or wrong, because that would reduce what you should think down to a single idea. The issues are complex, and I would hope that every one of us has a complex, even conflicting set of thoughts about them.

In all this, I have observed that people responded to the same set of facts based on how they were already bent. In other words, if I knew your socio-political leanings before these events occurred, I could have quite accurately predicted your responses to them. The facts of the case are the facts of the case, but how people responded to those facts was overwhelmingly conditioned by what they already believed before the facts were presented.

In other words, the facts matter less than our preconceived narratives. We all have agendas - things we want to happen, ways we want to be followed, structures we want in place. We have a narrative in our minds of how things have been and ought to be. Sadly, the real lives of the real people involved in real events are merely props to affirm the narratives in our minds. We're using them ... and their tragedies ... to affirm what we already believe. It doesn't matter which side of these issues people are on; I observe the same phenomenon in both directions.

Facts should change us, not vice versa. But we're letting it happen. How else could our differing responses be so easily predictable before the facts even came to light? The facts could have been different, but our respective conclusions would have been the same! And we're pretty angry about these "facts" - even though they don't really matter.

It's not just these two events. The same thing happens daily with politics, religion, international relations, and of course sports. It's not just them who do this; it's us. No sense in pointing fingers - both sides of every issue are filled with rhetoric that could be scripted without looking at a single fact.

Jesus once said that even if a man rose from the dead and warned people, they wouldn't listen. Facts don't matter - they just get repurposed. Therefore, the facts of your life don't matter, either, because my narrative is already set. I'll twist your story to fit my narrative, so you don't really matter.

The only way I can be different than this is to allow people to mess up my narrative.

When I was a young kid, we didn't have any pets. Somehow, I had it in my mind that dogs and cats were the same animal, but that dogs were the boys and cats were the girls. (To save my own life, I will not explain how that conclusion actually makes made some sense.) Our neighbors had a cat and a dog ... but the cat was male and the dog was female! That totally messed up my young narrative! I fought it, but eventually I allowed reality to change my narrative. The only way I could retain my narrative would have been to slander the reputations those two animals. (Sound familiar?)

Allowing your narrative to be changed doesn't mean you have to put your core beliefs on the chopping block. Whatever core beliefs are true need not change, even when the narratives must. Even though I have discovered halfway decent people who graduated from KU, I don't have to abandon my core belief in the absolute superiority of Mizzou. They changed my narrative, but not my core belief!

This is especially crucial when we consider our kids, who encounter narrative-busting people every day. If our narrative fails to accommodate the variety of lifestories they eat lunch with and study algebra together with, they will abandon the narrative - they will not abandon the busters. And if they abandon the narrative, they are far more likely to abandon the core beliefs you want to pass on.