Awhile back I posted a couple of quotes from the book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. In the sequel, Where Residence Aliens Live: Exercises for Christian Practice, they make the following point that further bolsters my conviction of the importance of stories in the life of the church and the life of faith.
“We will tell even more stories, give more instances of fidelity, offer more examples of a church in which ordinary people are called to be saints. We have been blessed with much mail, wonderful testimonials and stories from those who have actually seen what we professors only describe. We offer these examples because we believe that the contemporary church suffers from a lack of political imagination. One reason why the church always focused upon the stories of the saints and the martyrs was to enlarge our imagination. No conversion or growth is possible without imagination” (20).
To illustrate this further, it is one thing to tell your sons to be courageous. It is another to echo the words of Bayard the Truthspeaker to Aidan Errolson in The Bark of the Bog Owl, when he instructs young Aidan, “Love goodness more than you fear evil.”