we talk ABOUT stories instead of LIVING them

Sometimes you do things to save yourself from being surprised. A little something to take the edge off.

And that’s what this cigarette is.

A drag to forget. Time burned up on purpose.

This is one of those Christian Creative Conferences.

“A Weekend of Storytelling.”

The reason for delaying, for staying outside, is because that’s where all the real stories are. Tucked into a neon city, waiting to be heard.

But not tonight, not behind the green wooden doors on the old church. Those doors, those greeters, they’re the point of no return. Inside there will be no stories.

That’s really not what these things are about.

You go to enough of them and you figure that out; you learn they’re about something else entirely.

Ease.

To come clean up front, here’s my main point:

It’s easy to talk about the beauty of stories while abandoning everything that creates them.

Stories are real.

They’re flesh and blood, sort of things. You have to live them, and you receive them. And that means stories happen at the pace of life. Real life.

Your life and mine.

Slow and momentary and vital.

When we talk about stories, instead of living in them, when we teach instead of tell, what we’re doing is signalling a system of virtue. That we can offer meaning without the slow formation it requires.

You can see it everywhere, once you know what to look for.

Flicking the burnt end away, into the dirt, and walking inside, you see it. About half of the people in a kind of costume. They’re wearing the things a storyteller is supposed to wear. And you can hear it, too, bouncing off the tweed vests and beards:

The age of the storyteller is upon us.

They’re saying the things they’re supposed to say.

This is what the gathered groups in the foyer are mulling over; the analysis of stories. The decoding and dissection of them. Their interpretation.

We’re waiting for new doors to be opened, into the sanctuary, and swimming through the crowd to grab a coffee, there’s these echoes of symbolic structures, and meta-something-or-other, and what you really start thinking about is:

Has anyone here just enjoyed a story?

Encountered one. Like, lived in it, I mean.

Let their hearts be broken and not try to fix themselves with thinking.

And sipping the coffee in a white paper cup, my mind says:

Before examining you have to experience. You have to undergo the story. Heart work before head work. The secrets of the soul.

When those doors open, when we’re ushered in to have a seat, the notebooks come out, and the pens, and there’s this expectation that the Master will teach us something. Lullaby us with beautiful thoughts. So we don’t have to live the story ourselves.

And maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t do what I need it to.

Break my heart and then put it back together.

It doesn’t transform me.

Sure, it’s great, ornamental language, the kind of stuff the teach you at the schools with capital O’s or C’s. But what it feels like is decoration; a mental aesthetic. The world of ideas.

It feels detached.

Like a ghost.

The people beside me are giving their mmhmm’s and their oh yes’s. And they’re scribbling down parallels between this-and-that tale and something of epic, biblical proportions.

But it feels weightless.

Like it didn’t take on flesh. Like all Words need to.

When that talk is done, and when you do your mixing and mingling, when you’re supposed to take those jagged and unanswered edges of your soul and share them with someone else, what you get is:

Flat.

Stories steamrolled into opinions.

Instead of that secret work, the indirect revelation of a story, what you get is forced, extracted messaging.

In the industry, we call this: propaganda.

And you do what you can.

But there’s no real surprise. It’s easier to talk about a story, to comment on it, than it is to let it do a mystical work in you.

Why?

Because ease asks nothing of you, and stories demand it all.

There’s this other time, too.

Special invite only. And lucky me, I’m on the short list.

This one is a dress up affair, and the people who come are all the beautiful up-and-comers. They are pristine. Curated.

It’s hot, hot, hot that night. The sticky kind of hot that normally melts all pretence. I mean, how cool can you be when you have sweat stains in the armpits of your linen shirt?

Very cool, it turns out. Advertisement kind of sweat. For some people, I mean.

Before dinner is served, you have your moment with a few other honoured guests. They tell you what they’re all about; singer-songwriters, poets, modern day storytellers. It all sounds good. But something isn’t clicking in me. And, I mean, I don’t really know them, so who the hell am I to judge.

But it’s the eyes.

In them you can see the truth. Reality.

You can tell when someone lives the life being a storyteller demands.

The real storytellers, they have the silence of eternity in their eyes. And they don’t blink when life hurts, lest they miss what really matters. And if you look at their sleeves, even in the hot hot hot summer sweat, you can see their hearts.

The real ones know that most things in life are interruptions, and they need to be felt slowly. Intentionally.

And then, in their eyes, you can see something untamed. Something wild and alive. It’s the risk of telling the truth. The way deep down, kind of truth. The embarrass you so bad you want to run away forever kind of thing.

The real, god-awful moment of being seen, naked, after the bite of Eden.

Some people have it.

Some people don’t.

They have a curated image. A look.

And, man, is it close. Filters these days.

When we sit down at the table, when the night is introduced, and the Pinot is poured, all you can really think of is walking the path you think makes sense. Because when one of the singers gets up, when the modern bard takes the mic, they preach.

And don’t get me wrong, I love a homily.

But there is a difference between a sermon and a story; and I think it’s in the eyes, and I think it’s in the heart, and I think it’s in all the naked truth.

That’s what you think about. If your path makes sense here.

My taxi comes a few hours later, and as we drive across the bridge to my apartment, as a million lives reflect back in me in the window, I’m wondering if we have missed the identity of the artist.

Church world tells us what a spiritual leader is; but can they tell you much about the person who builds a solace in the wilderness?

I guess what I am trying to say is, the job description for the storyteller of our age, is pretty nebulous. And you can’t pretend your way into it. You just have to live an mostly unexplained life, and you have to say, Sorry Socrates, my life needs to be experienced, not examined.

And against such things, the feral wild of life, there is no law.

When my taxi drops me off, when I see the people standing outside my building smoking, and when I ask for a light, and when we swap stories, I think:

What do I know?

At another one of these events I get put up in this really nice place.

When you walk in the front door, someone opens it for you, and they remember you name. Very Dale Carnegie kinda joint. Very win friends and influence paying customers.

They check you in and Enjoy your stay with us, Mr Nadeau, and someone carries your leather duffel bag for you. You’re both in the elevator, and the bellhop, well, he must be used to the fat-cats, because he stands in front of me, looking right at the closed silver doors.

It’s supposed to be polite; let the big wigs have a bit of peace and quiet, even on the 45 second ride to the second highest floor.

Right this way, he says.

Tonight we are serving a five course dining experience in the restaurant downstairs.

And that does sound nice.

After a shower, rinsing off all the residue of seat 28A, putting on some dress pants and a button up, I head on down to see what the chefs have cooked up.

Pleasure to see you, Mr Nadeau. And they bring me to a corner booth. Leather and wooden. The right kind of dark, the right kind of light.

Would you like to hear the special?

A nod.

The first course is some french stuff I can’t remember; and the second is pan fried scallops and some kind of reduction.

Third, he says, are heritage greens, from a local farm, garnished with a truffle parmesan and a house blended vinaigrette.

My hand is spinning my cocktail glass of club soda, for the gentlemen.

He goes on.

Fourth, an aged prime rib, served with potatoes three ways, this, that, and the other, and alongside is a fried egg sauce, golden and emulsified.

And at the last, a deconstructed Red Velvet Cake.

He asks if I would be interested.

Not tonight, thanks. Just some wings for me.

They come out crispy and gold blistered; drowning in hot sauce. And it’s what I want.

And you look at some of the other tables, with their fifteen plates and their jus reductions and their smoked foam and whatever else, and you think, seems a bit much for 11pm on a Thursday.

It’s too much to digest.

Too varied to really sit and enjoy.

Sure, it’s sold nice. But hot wings are the same time after time, and they sit with you. They live on your fingers and your lips.

And it’s sort of like a story. That’s what’s on my mind.

Kitschy, I know. Forced metaphor, much. But, I’m thinking people have lost their appetite for good stories because they can buffet on everything all at once.

Multiple screens, multiple courses, overloaded with sensations so your tongue, or your soul, doesn’t ever really have to taste a damn thing.

And you know, I was starving.

Long flights and delays, and in 28A, they had run out of snacks.

But what I wanted was soul food.

Something messy and alive and something I’ve had a thousand times before.

And I guess what my mind was on that night, washing the hot sauce off my fingers in a ceramic bowl of warm lemon water, is that nothing was wrong with the wings I wanted. And nothing is wrong with the stories I want, either.

I love the classics; love the lingering heat, love the nothing special.

Love the local, and ordinary, and human, and alive.

And in an age of excess indulgence, I think, maybe, we’ve just lost the taste for them.

Forgotten the appetite.

Maybe I am wrong, and maybe you can close this and forget it all.

But to me, it seems like we have forgotten stories. We exchanged them for commentary, for meta-level-Jungian-analysis that’s about a thing that’s about something lived. A story, two steps removed.

And in this new digital marketplace we have created a persona. The look of the modern storyteller. You know what I mean. Close your eyes and imagine them. Their uniform.

And it happens the same as everything else in social spaces: pretending our way into identities and ways of life we haven’t lived and could never earn ( at least, if we’re faking it ).

And when even these got exhausting, the explaining and curating, we go on a bender. Off the rails, bacchanal style.

Movies or shows on TV, doomscrolling, music playing. We indulge in stories that use every trick in the book to manipulate us. No slow. No build. No subtext. Just that kind of grandiose indulgence that’s a lot more like masturbation than sex.

And maybe you have seen it. Like me.

This kind of stuff is everywhere.

Because it is easy.

It’s hard as hell to tell a story.

And I mean that literally. Telling the stories that break a heart and heal it, well, those ones mean you have be broken and healed yourself. You have to face all the Hell in you and you have to win.

And you do it in your own little world.

Just you and the dragon.

No meta level decoding. No cameras or choreography.

Just the secret war.

And man does that take time. And it costs. And it’ll break you. Like Hemingway said. And some of us will remain, and be strong in those broken places.

Some of us.

I don’t know.

Maybe I’m just angry, and bitter, and so wrong. Maybe I’m trying to justify a life lived on the knife edge; so slow and honest, so hopeful to receive and to give.

And if that’s you, well, party on.

Because there are real storytellers around. And they don’t look like what you expect, or talk how you’d like. And they’re jagged and rough in the places that you’d rather fit soft.

But you know, they tell the stories that heal the soul.

My new book is available for pre-order here. If you made it this far, you saw my oh-so-special in-line ad.

Is that selling out?

Not sure. But I’d love if you grabbed a copy.

Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.