stories to live by

On the subway today, I read a review of the book Nothing to Be Frightened Of in which an atheist turned agnostic tries to make sense of his fear of death.

For the author Julian Barnes, "religious faith is not an option" but this other kind of faith is:


"We are all dying. Even the sun is dying. Homo sapiens is evolving toward some species that won't care about us whatsoever and our art and literature and scholarship will fall into utter oblivion. Every author will eventually become an unread author. And then humanity will die out and beetles will rule the world. A man can fear his own death but what is he anyway? Simply a mass of neurons. The brain is a lump of meat and the soul is merely 'a story the brain tells itself'.

It's hard to say whether this kind of thinking makes me more angry or sad. Especially because Barnes ultimately acknowledges that:

"Stripped of the Christian narrative, we gaze out on a landscape that, while fascinating, offers nothing that one could call Hope."

Is it not disturbing that people would rather choose to believe that the soul is "a story the brain tells itself" rather than the story that we are fearfully and wonderfully made in God's image? That people would rather believe that life is basically meaningless, that nothing we devote our time and creativity now matters?

For me, this is such an incredible reminder of the power of the Christian story and that I have to keep finding ways to tell that story often, and out loud!