The story is not optional

The nature of my work means I spend concentrated portions of time working with children in primary schools. On a recent occasion while working with a class of 6 year olds I was struck once again on how important their story was. We had considered a biblical story in many clever and inventive ways. My goal was to drill down into some of the emotions that might have been felt by the main character and then allow the children time to consider whether they could relate to those feelings.

What does it feel like to lose something or have you ever been lost and if so, what did it feel like, were the questions that I wanted to work on. I unwittingly wanted to abandon the story itself and get to these core sentiments.

Each child keenly responded having lapped up the story and the characters in it. However to my surprise and slight frustration, they expressed the pure essence of their feelings in a long story, full of detail, about how they had lost their hamster, and who had helped look for it, and what had happened when it couldn’t be found, and who else had become involved.

I repeated my question about how they felt desiring a word or short sentence answer.

Once again I was taken through another story by another child of how they lost their mum in a supermarket because they had stopped to look at the comics, and she had moved to the next aisle but that they had gone around the corner and seen her and it was all okay.

Suddenly the penny dropped. I had fallen into the trap of reducing the text to simple one word statements and had lost the story as a whole. The emotions couldn’t be detached and examined in isolation they were an intrinsic part of the story we had looked at in the Bible as well as their own personal accounts. My desire to deconstruct and analyse one aspect couldn’t be done for these youngsters, as the whole story would no longer have meaning or validity.

For them the emotions were very important but could only be talked about in the context of a story and not as abstract ideas. This isn’t unusual for this age group who are often seen as literal thinkers.

Following this session I Once again reflected on Jesus’ parables and the accounts of some of the biblical giants of the Old Testament and considered how easily I can fall onto the well worn track of unpacking the meaning, leaving the story deconstructed and abandoned on the side.

I think there is something we can learn again from these 6 year olds who see the whole event and simply ‘know’ how all the elements make up the story. It is the story that has meaning and value and it’s not an optional extra.