I.
My papa told me bedtime stories. They were nitrogen to the growing stalk of my imagination. My brain was full of adventurous thoughts, and the plant (which I like to think of looking like a bean bush), grew with me through the years. Each little bean shot out from the main stalk when it was fed the stories of Frodo, or Shasta, or Corrie Ten Boom. But the roots of the plant are the stories which I was the sole audience of. The ones my papa told me. They were the adventures of his life which were like compost to my own life. They were the stories that brought Adventure into the world of Possibility.
Perhaps papa's stories were made better by his career as a storyteller (that is, a preacher). Yet the stories he told to me while I was cozied under my blankets were a better fit for an action movie than the average pulpit. They were stories that were not told for their moral implications, but for their imaginative stirring. The imagination took charge and I learned more about living well. That's its own kind of theology: a practical kind.
To believe that a real person may get lost in the dry Grand Canyon, and become so thirsty that this person's saliva turns to the consistency of bubble gum, and then for this person to shuffle along death-defying ledges, and then camp in the canyon under the stars and to be awakened by the yowl of a distant mountain lion, was enough to make a 10 year old boy believe that adventure is noble. And then to know that these things have happened not just to some person, but one's own papa, makes one believe that one's own life may be a part of this noble adventure. It makes one hungry to live adventurously.
An appetite for living is born.
II.
Boyhood stories didn't ignite just my personal drive in life. The indefatigable Teddy Roosevelt was once bookish and sickly. He grew up reading adventure stories, though. And that meant he developed a strong appetite for living. He had the kind of character drawn to the dramatic: he was a city slicker from New York who went out west on long hunting trips. The guides he hired thought he'd give up, but he had more thumos burning in his chest than they. He had drive to hunt every kind of animal in the west, including the buffalo, even though the buffalo were nearly impossible to find by the late 1800s. Incidentally, he also played a key role in buffalo preservation when he went on another adventure, this time into the Oval Office. He established Wind Cave National Park in 1903 as a bison refuge. And need I even mention that on top all that, he was a war hero too?
Roosevelt had a colossal imagination. His descriptions of his journeys through Yellowstone are stunning and eloquent. If he had a weak imagination, it seems unlikely he could have done any of those things.
So that's my argument: if you have a strong imagination, you will have a strong appetite for life.
III.
If an appetite for life leads to living a better story, and that appetite is fed by bedtime stories, then bedtime stories may be responsible for some of the great moments in history, and in your own life. They have fostered desire and an understanding of what is worthy. This hidden instigator moves beneath the surface. It might never be consciously considered. Yet it can give language to ideals, emotions, aims. Or, more latent, it may adorn the landscape painting of the mind, illustrating a far off horizon which allows one to orient oneself in a vast land of possible futures. Bedtime stories plant a seed of direction.
A starved imagination sees small people. It cannot believe the best in t hem until it is proven. It sees a squinty-eyed world full of the shadows of its own eyelids. It cannot envision a better career (or finding joy in the career one already has).
A rich imagination makes the path before one treads it. It dwells on noble thoughts. It holds to hope. And rich imaginations need good soil to grow into whatever kind of thing they are: fruit, flower, or beans.
So I say stories give us some place to grow in. And when we have grown up with a good appetite for life, we live better stories. And when we live better stories, we are becoming better compost for the lives of those that will come after our own.
