Our March-April Sunday Series is Here!
Across cultures and centuries, human beings have told the same kinds of stories over and over again. We’re compelled by the very act of story telling because stories – and particular kinds of stories – name something true about being human. They tell of certain human patterns we recognize, patterns we return to, patterns we live inside.
The writer Christopher Booker spent more than thirty years studying these patterns, and he suggests, as others have done through the years, that there are a few basic plots that show up everywhere – across cultures and time. In myth, in novels, in movies, and in the quiet, ordinary stories of our own lives. The names he gives to these 7 archetypal plots are:
– Overcoming the Monster
– Rags to Riches
– The Quest
– Voyage and Return
– Comedy
– Tragedy
– Rebirth
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore each one of these kinds of stories as ways to help us understand ourselves: our courage, our fears, our relationships, our longings, our becoming, using them as a lens for our own lives.
Week 1: Comedy-The Story of Coming Together
(View a video of this reflection here)
When we hear the word “comedy,” we think of humour, or jokes, or sitcoms. But in Booker’s sense, comedy is something deeper and older. Comedy is the story where things that have fallen apart come back together. It’s the movement from confusion to understanding, unknowing to recognition, separation to reconciliation, hardship to communal joy.
Within comedy, sometimes the plot is moving toward a resolution of the status quo, or perhaps forward to a new state: a new, more aware place of contentment and understanding – a new path!
What about us? How do we live out the comedic arc in our lives? Surely, we each have or are creating tension and distance, telling ourselves stories about why connection is no longer possible. But just as surely, we open ourselves to recognition, to something shifting to where we see differently and realize the story we’ve been living inside our heads isn’t the whole story.
Each week and with each arc, we’ll have time to ponder some questions of where we might find ourselves in these story arcs.
Questions for Pondering:
- What story have I been telling myself about a relationship or situation that might not be the whole story?
- Where might I be ready to soften a certainty, loosen a judgment, or see someone with new eyes?
- What small gesture of repair feels possible for me right now — even if it’s only in my imagination?
- What would it feel like in my body to pursue a different avenue toward connection — lighter, freer, more at ease? What avenue calls to you?
- Who has shown me unexpected kindness or curiosity when I was stuck or closed off?
- Where do I sense joy trying to return — even quietly — in my relationships or in myself?
Be Part of the Conversation
Feel free to leave a comment about whether these questions were helpful or any of your thoughts as you reflected.