My two year old daughter believes in the power of stories – even when there’s no explicit story to be found. At home we have an alphabet book, each page showing a single letter of the alphabet, surrounded by objects related to each other only by the accident of English spelling, each object sharing the same first letter. Nevertheless, my daughter weaves narratives. “Maybe,” she suggests, “the duck was wearing the dress and playing the drum, while the dragon picked daisies.” I point out the duck is no longer wearing the dress. “Well,” she informs me, “they got tired and stopped.”

In recent years many philosophers and theologians have reminded us how important narrative can be (and always has been), not only for recounting the history of past events or passing along powerful myths, but also for understanding who we are, for situating ourselves in relation to a larger community and its story, for transmitting our values and customs, for finding our place in the world, and indeed for discerning the meaning of the world itself. Whatever else it might mean to be human, it means at least to be the sort of animal that understands the world by telling stories about itself.

Sometimes those stories are what we’ve come to call “fictional,” that is, stories whose truth lies not in narrating a sequence of actual events and characters, but in creating a world of events and characters that, for all their artifice, nevertheless reveal the actual world to us and us to ourselves. Fiction conveys these revelations in much the same way that bits of pigment on canvas, while never reproducing the world in all it three-dimensional entirety, nonetheless disclose features of the world to us that otherwise might have remained unnoticed in their familiarity or our disregard.

Such fictional narrative, however, will not be my primary focus here, except insofar as the customary patterns of literature help illuminate the patterns of life. Rather, I want to look at how each of our lives function for us as a sort of narrative, intertwined with the stories of others and the larger communities and histories of which we are a part and only within which our own stories operate. That is to say, my focus will be more upon life itself as literature.

Many postmodern theorists – and Lyotard comes particularly to mind – have incisively critiqued the hubris and pretence of some of the narratives we have told, especially those narratives of modernity that sought to legitimate the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, these theorists present their critiques only within the context of their own stories about how and where things went wrong, where we find ourselves now, and what we might do, having arrived here. The force of their argument, therefore, is not against grand narratives as such, but rather only against certain narratives of the sort that seek to legitimate rational autonomy and totalizing projects.

Narrative then – whether ancient, modern, or postmodern, whether fictional, mythic, or actual – such narrative seems unavoidable.

Fictional narratives have traditionally been divided into tragedy and comedy, all the more so when those narratives make their way onto the stage as drama with the immediacy of a present and attentive audience. The distinctions between tragedy and comedy, stretching back to Plato and Aristotle, are well known and often recounted. Thus, despite some difficulties with those traditional explanations, I won’t take the time to recount those distinctions at present.

The question I want to address concerns the nature of our own personal stories, as well as the larger human narrative, that story within which each of our various and diverse stories crisscross and weave together – assuming there is such an overarching story. I wish to examine the possibility that our stories might, in fact, be yet transformed into comedy despite their appearance often as tragedy.

Such a question is fraught with difficulties, however. If we each personally inhabit such stories from within larger communities – and perhaps as part of the human community and human story as such – then traditional categories of author, characters, and audience become problematic. After all, though we may feature most prominently as the characters of our own personal dramas, as modern westerners we likely also think of ourselves as the ultimate authors of our own fate.

We may, nevertheless, suddenly find ourselves carried along in our narrative as if there were an author who transcends our choices, so that not only do our choices and actions perpetuate our own stories, but often enough they also run away from us, escape our grasp, and only become apparent and meaningful to us after we have already undertaken or completed them. Then, in moments of self-reflection, we may discover ourselves in the odd position of spectator, as audience to our own stories, wondering what twist of plot our narrative may next take.

And it is in these moments that our stories most evidently become, by turns, either tragic or comic.

Our lives, of course, are often palpably and numbingly tragic: a sought-for goal snatched away like a gift torn from the outstretched hands of an eager child, the bud of romantic love snipped off by the cold shears of rejection, a good intention turned back against us, the loved one overtaken by serious illness, a child born dead.

If tragedy involves the fall of a hero, as it seems to have for Aristotle, then we are in the curious position of being the heroes of our own tragedies, envisioning for ourselves a good fortune and greatness that we do not in fact yet possess and from which we fall. When the initial dread passes, we arrive at a distance from our former selves, able to look back, perhaps with pity, moving us towards a kind of catharsis.

Such catharsis, nevertheless, cannot help but suggest to us, and perhaps even plague us with the thought that the individuals we were prior to the tragedy have been shown to be, in fact, persons of hubris, flawed characters, justly rebuked by the vicissitudes of fate. When we speak of “fate” or “misfortune” we are not speaking of an author, a personal and intentional narrator, but of something more remote and blind.

If there is an author, he remains hidden, as distant from us as we are from our former selves, leaving us plunged into the depths of our misfortune. And the hiddenness of that author is among the conditions under which we experience and accept the tragedy that befell us as something inevitable.

Our lives, however, are just as often comic as they are tragic: a joke about a rabbi and a minister and a priest who went into a bar, the feasting of wedding guests dancing together in the joy of a new marriage, our well-meant efforts turning out better than we dared hope, a new and unexpected opportunity to mature and grow, the birth of a happy and healthy child.

If comedy involves a modest hero overtaken by a happy and unanticipated turn of events, then again we are in the curious position of being the heroes of our own comedies, regarding ourselves with a humility that knows we do not deserve the good that arrives for us. When the initial surprise passes, we suspend disbelief allowing ourselves to delight in the sudden arrival of happiness that fulfills what we then realize we desired all along, even if that comes in an unforeseen way.

Such recognition cannot help but remind us, and perhaps even charm us with the thought that the individuals we were prior to the comic turn were in fact flawed, though not fatally it seems, and that we have now been somehow elevated by a smiling providence. When the thought of “providence” occurs to us, we half-suspect that perhaps, after all, there is personal and gracious narrator, who has organized the whole to our undeserved benefit.

If there is such an author, we have caught a glimpse of him, a knowing nod and a wink from his overseeing eye. And this collusion between author and ourselves, as we become audience to our own fortuity, is among the conditions under which we experience and revel in the comedy by which we were overtaken.

But here we return to our primary question: is it possible that our lives and personal narratives are, in the end, truly comic – that it all will finally come out alright? Or is it, instead, the case that our momentary laughter and joys inexorably sink into tragedy?

If life as literature means anything, it means an encounter with time, the joining and interpretation of past, present, and possible futures into a narrative whole so that we can make sense of ourselves and of ourselves to others, who in turn also narrate us.

But it is here where difficulties array themselves most profoundly against the possibility that life is comedy. At least two difficulties arise.

The first difficulty is the onward march of time. If I am swept over by tragedy, then that is forever part of my story, even if I can experience a kind of catharsis and even if later joys can dull the pain of earlier loss. After all, the tragic presupposes that my fate is just and has been measured out to me in proportion to my flaws and misdeeds. What is done, then, cannot be undone and its consequences are felt.

The second difficulty is that I feature not only as a character in my own personal story, but also in the stories of others. And it may be that my comic joys come sometimes only at the expense of others for whom they remain tragic, even if only in a minor way. Moreover, I would seem to appear at times in the role of villain, so that as others narrate their own lives, only a reversal of my own fortunes will enable them to experience their lives as comic. Yet such a reversal cannot appear to me but as tragic.

If these two difficulties remain, then it would seem that no matter how great our joys and happiness sometimes seem, life is ineradicably marked by the sorrows of tragedy – sorrows that threaten to overwhelm the story.

One might, of course, hold out the possibility of redemption, of forgiveness and reconciliation. Past wrongs might somehow be overcome, their sorrows turned to joys, so that enemies embrace and even onetime villains are redeemed.

Yet, the possibility of forgiveness simply repeats, all the more profoundly, the difficulties we have just seen. John Milbank rehearses some of these difficulties:

The first difficulty, again, is the onward march of time.

Since the passage of time prevents us from ever truly changing any wrong we or others have done, how can we forgive? This is all the more problematic when those who have been wronged in the past no longer remain victims and those who did wrong have themselves changed (Being Reconciled 51-52). The narrative does not remain motionless.

And furthermore, if forgiveness were to simply obliterate the past in forgetfulness, then isn’t the continuity of our own stories suspended, a past chapter now edited away? But without narrative continuity how can we grow as persons, strengthen our relationships, and test the bonds of community? (59-60)

This returns us to the second difficulty, how each of our stories thread together with the stories of others.

As Milbank points out, the extent our wrongdoing affects others in ways for which the story can never be fully told and those who are most wronged are those who have died, dropping from the narrative altogether. Who then can truly offer forgiveness? (50-51).

Moreover, how can we keep reconciliation from becoming contrived – a plot turn pulled out of thin air? If forgiveness must instead be earned, however, then won’t the story demand that forgiveness be offered? But a forgiveness made compulsory, it seems, is not true forgiveness. And yet, a forgiveness extended in an entirely disinterested manner, excludes the happiness of reconciliation. (57-58)

Nevertheless, as Christians, we are called to forgive, to the ministry of reconciliation.

Therefore, from the standpoint of faith, meditating upon the biblical narrative, we must begin to rethink the very nature of time as the fabric from which our stories are woven, a rethinking that will unravel self-enclosed cycles of time, of pagan tragedy and nihilistic flux and so, we may hope, undo the necessity of final tragedy itself. Augustine undertakes just such a revision in his great work, the Confessions.

The meditation on time that comes late in the Confessions is not simply a philosophical add-on, but a reflection that emerges from Augustine’s extended prayer in which he re-narrates his own life story, placing God among the characters of that story, and offering it up to the God of all time and to his healing grace. In this action, Augustine succeeds in negotiating a new understanding of time itself, suggesting that the past is what it is only by its relation to the present and its anticipation of the future.

We can find an analogy here perhaps in the role of memory, experience, and anticipation in music, where a musical note or chord only exists as music within a sequence of tensions, where what comes next may change the very nature of what has gone before. Or we might think of how the final pages of a book determine the reality of the earlier chapters.

On such a view of time, as events slip into the past, they do not remain wholly irretrievable, but grace and forgiveness can actually transform the past through re-narration. Wrongs are not forgiven by tearing pages from past episodes, but by preserving the past – even past evils – while at the same time developing and modifying that past by how we narrate it in the present through our remembrances and actions.

The victims of wrongdoing never forget and, indeed, even now accept their own former hatred both as a failure of love and as a partially correct repudiation of sin. This same re-narration enables the victim also to begin to understand the mystery of iniquity in the falsely conceived motives of the wrongdoer. In this way the cycle of tragedy begins to be transformed by forgiveness, without at all denying the tragedy of the tragic.

Such transformations of the past through the present and in anticipation of the future have their limits, so they are evidently possible. But this vision of redemptive re-narration seems, in the end to fail, for no matter how many times we tell a story and how many new loving acts we introduce to its plot, some events appear to be engulfed by time as absolutely irrecoverable. In particular, we are left with the limiting tragedy of death.

If death is allowed the final word, then every story ultimately does end in tragedy. Whatever comedy we can muster remains a cold comfort, a momentary distraction, or a frivolous escape – all laughter eventually swallowed up by life-destroying chaos or by the joyless silence of the grave.

If the Christian story is true, however, death is not permitted that final word. The dark shadow of the cross and the harsh stillness of the tomb remain, but on the first day of the week, the women arrive to find the tomb empty.

Resurrection – not just Jesus’ resurrection, but the resurrection of us all – is the necessary condition for the possibility that life is ultimately comic. Only with resurrection does the story end with a new beginning. Only with resurrection will all our tragedies finally be recounted and redeemed. Only with resurrection can the future embody the comic ending a renewed and unending feast.

But this is possible only if there is a divine Author of the grand narrative who is more than a benign providence, who is, in fact, the creator and redeemer. In light of this Author, we can trust that when we find ourselves carried along in our narrative, as our actions transcend our intentions, so that our choices only become meaningfully ours after they are already embarked upon – in those moments we can trust that “everything is grace” flowing from the pen of the divine Author. His story will come to a fulfilling and fitting end, even if it will be more than we could ask or imagine.

In the Scriptures we find a history that re-narrates every other story, a narrative that centers upon the events of the sacred story – events of incarnation, atonement, and resurrection – a story that we encounter and are caught up into through Scripture and the church, through liturgy and the sacraments. Then, by grace, our own stories are each coordinated together as unique contributions to that greater human story, which will be forever played out in resurrection life.

If that is the comedy of which we are a part, it is anything but cold comfort or frivolous escape. And only in light of this ultimate comedy can our small comic turns be taken at all sincerely, with a laughter that does not ring hollow. From within this story, we know humor, joy, and delight to be unforeseen anticipations in the present of what will come at the end in its own unexpected way. We interpret them, moreover, in relation to the event of Jesus’ own resurrection as the definitive anticipation in the middle of the story of where that story will end.

Of course, there are those who “don’t get it,” who are unable to suspend disbelief and allow themselves to revel in the always surprising promise of a beatitude that fulfills every human desire. What gives rise to this humorless refusal of joy? Is the reality of the tragic too much? Is the only comedy possible in a culture of unbelief one that remains insincere and finally tragic? Does sentimentality trivialize grace?

And even we ourselves who, by faith, believe the Story and delight in its promise, still find often that it is difficult to believe. This is why, I think, that in addition to all other joys, God has given us the Lord’s Supper or eucharist as an action by which each plot line it intersects is, time and again, nudged back to its proper course.

In this regard we can consider the perspective of the French Christian phenomenologist, Jean Luc Marion. For Marion the eucharist reveals and reinforces the comic nature of God’s great narrative, particularly as the sacrament disrupts and subverts time, offering a real presence that is more a matter of crossing time than space. In the eucharist, after all, the present moment is no longer privileged as determinative of time’s significance, but reveals the giftedness and redemption of all time.

The “present” in the eucharist is determined by the past of which it is a memorial and that memorial, in turn, is a pledge “of an advent completed from the future” (God without Being, 135). Christ subverted the notion of the past as something dead and gone, unchanging and inviolable, by his rising from death and thereby becoming for us also our future. The eucharist, therefore, “anticipates what we will be, will see, will love” (174). That final resurrection will succeed in re-narrating every present moment and this, Marion insists, must inform our understanding of all of time. In light of resurrection, every present moment, no matter how tragic, is revealed as “present,” that is a “gift” of grace, and is thus able to be redeemed.

Marion suggests that Jesus’ resurrection life discloses to us the life of God himself as Trinity – what Marion calls the “Trinitarian game” – a circulation of love and delight that is the life among the three divine Persons, in which each Person gives himself over to the others, only to receive back again, a return that is both free and fitting, ever new and yet eternal. This divine ecstasis, I would suggest, remains the ultimate root of all comedy. Marion writes,

The Son took on the body of humanity only in order to play humanly the Trinitarian game of love; for this reason also, he loved “to the end,” that is, to the Cross; in order that the irrefutable demonstration of the death and resurrection not cease to provoke us, he gives himself with insistence in a body and a blood that persist in each day that time imparts to us. (177)

The sacramental body of Jesus shared among his gathered Body, thereby, completes this Trinitarian game lived out humanly, catching us up into Jesus’ story and thereby into the eternal story, so that its narrative redemptively re-narrates our own (178).

It is not merely our ritual actions, then, that proclaim the Lord’s death, but our very “eating and drinking” together as a community of reconciled and reconciling people. In our feasting together the death of Christ is made present in the power of his resurrection. Even in the face of doubt and in moments of tragedy, the eucharist reminds us of who we are, of the story of which we are a part, and in doing so, fashions us into a people who will enjoy the happiest of happy endings: the wedding Supper of the Lamb.