Editorial
Storytelling is a way of creating community. As I sit chatting with two friends at lunch, someone else approaches that table. There are two ways of responding to the newcomer. Either grow silent politely and thus exclude him, or welcome the newcomer by telling him briefly what we have been so far chatting about. He then becomes part of the group. Stories bind us together. Human community depends on stories. This maxim is true in all cultures. Rituals may vary from people to people, but the act of inclusion by recounting the drama of life shapes the history in every land.
Why did the two of you choose to marry one another? Why did you choose to live in this city? The answer to such questions is best rendered in story form rather than a rational analysis of pros and cons. Without the story our life events lack context and remain disconnected happenings. (J. M. Staudenmaier)
We are all engaged in the continual process of telling our own stories and making them the same as the story of our people. Loneliness dissolves in the discovery that one’s story can never be told adequately, unless someone else’s story is told as well.
To tell a story, whether of past in the form of memory or of the future in the form of dream, is to assert power. Storytelling is a human being’s way of asserting himself personally and politically. That is why the most powerful people in any community are its storytellers, its mythmakers. (James Carroll: A Terrible Beauty)
Revolution is not so much a change in one’s environment as a change in the stories told about it. The key problem of our age is ‘how to love people who have no use.’ So we need to be converted to a story way of life in which we are able to love what is useless, as stories do. Every one has a story and therefore a right to interest, time, love and careful listening.
Imagination is the faculty which opens us to the divine; more important, it enables us to be human. An imaginative act is an act of hope. That is why Kafka could claim that “all art is a form of prayer.” It keeps us from breaking down. William Lynch suggests in his book Images of Hope that a person will not despair as long as he can imagine a way out of his or her dilemma.
Imagination is its own healing. It is our own way of caring for ourselves when we need it most. If we cannot imagine, we cannot commune; we cannot identify in any full way with other people near or far. When a group of people loses touch with their common imagination, they cannot long live in community together. It is the useless activity of art and ritual that makes us friends, as it was the time the Little Prince wasted on his rose that made it important to him.
In this issue, first, the creation myth of the Tamils is traced to Harappan culture with archeological evidence. Then the Storytelling theme unfolds itself in its various dimensions — community building, its therapeutic role, its religious vibrations etc. I am grateful to all scholars of international repute who enhance this theme enriching the vision of our readers.
Anand Amaladass S.J.
