Reality and Other Stories: Exploring the life we long for through the tales we tell

By Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap

The only way to make sense of our lives is to tell stories. So is it coincidence that we see the same seven basic plot points repeated over time and across cultures? What if the stories we tell give us clues to our deepest desires, and to the meaning of the reality we live in?

In Reality and Other Stories, Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap explore how seven story archetypes - Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth - are not only universal, but also found in the story of Christ. As they unpack each example, they demonstrate how our deepest longing find fulfilment in Jesus' story.

This is not just another Christian apologetics book. Reality and Other Stories is an ideal gift to give to new Christians and those just beginning to explore faith. The authors show the power of storytelling to affect our lives, and through examples of story archetypes demonstrates that the life of Jesus truly is the story at the heart of reality.

Reality and Other Stories will help you explore Jesus’ story for yourself and better understand how through Jesus, we can discover the true story of reality that gives ultimate purpose to our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789743968

Peter Dray

Peter Dray is Director for Creative Evangelism with UCCF and writes video scripts and supporting materials for CU Impact Groups.

Book preview

Cover: Reality and Other Stories, Exploring the life we long for through the tales we tell by Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap

This is an imaginative, thought-provoking exploration of the power of story in our lives – and how the tales that we tell might point to a greater Story that encompasses us all. There is challenge here, some of it stirring, some of it prompting me to challenge the authors right back! But there’s also deep grace and wisdom; I was moved to tears by the chapter on Rebirth, with its beautiful depiction of the love and reconciliation that God offers us. It’s a book that reminds me just why I adore stories so much – and it’s a book that inspires me to pursue the Story that Peter and Matt suggest is the key to life, the universe and everything.

Vicki Sparks, Commentator of the Year 2021, Sports Journalism Awards

Reading Reality and Other Stories is like discovering the entrance to a cave. Once you’re inside you’ll find the tunnels through which all the great stories of the past are brought up to the earth. The greater discovery is that these many tunnels meet in a single great hall of treasure. Without erasing the distinctions between the different stories we love – or embracing Christopher Booker’s seven plots theory too readily – Matt and Peter show how our thirst for great myths is quenched by what C.S. Lewis called the Myth become Fact, the gospel of Jesus. This book not only gathers together some of the best material on story and storytelling but arranges it to show us that the best story is the truth. Matt and Peter have made this storehouse of storytelling riches so accessible that I will be putting Reality and Other Stories into the hands of every person we teach in the Speak Life Foundry.

Nate Morgan Locke, Creative Director, Speak Life

I could almost hear this book as the banter of storytellers lingering around a dinner table as Peter and Matt regale us with their shared delight in the power of story. I have long been encouraging filmmakers to make adaptations of the stories and themes of scripture and found this approach of looking through Christopher Booker’s ‘seven basic plots’ genuinely inspiring.

Luke Walton, Producer, Reel Issues Films

REALITY AND OTHER STORIES

Exploring the life we long for through the tales we tell

Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap

INTER-VARSITY PRESS

36 Causton Street, London SW1P 4ST, England

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.ivpbooks.com

© Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap, 2022

Peter Dray and Matt Lillicrap have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as Authors of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version (Anglicized edition). Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved. ‘NIV’ is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790

First published 2022

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978–1–78974–395–1

e-Book ISBN: 978-1-78974-396-8

Set in Minion Pro 10.25/13.5 pt

Typeset by Westchester Publishing Services

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Produced on paper from sustainable forests

Inter-Varsity Press publishes Christian books that are true to the Bible and that communicate the gospel, develop discipleship and strengthen the church for its mission in the world.

IVP originated within the Inter-Varsity Fellowship, now the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship, a student movement connecting Christian Unions in universities and colleges throughout Great Britain, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. Website: www.uccf.org.uk. That historic association is maintained, and all senior IVP staff and committee members subscribe to the UCCF Basis of Faith.

For our children, who helped us grow old enough for fairy tales again.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: reality’s story

Plotline 1:Overcoming the monster

Plotline 2:Rags to riches

Plotline 3:The quest

Plotline 4:Voyage and return

Plotline 5:Tragedy

Plotline 6:Comedy

Plotline 7:Rebirth

Conclusion: story’s reality

Further reading

Notes

Acknowledgments

The premise for this book came from a series of online events hosted by the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU) in February 2021 at which Peter was speaking. CICCU’s student leaders (especially Tabby Dickson and Dan Chapman) exemplified courage, agility and general unflappability. It was Christian Union leadership at its best!

Mike Hood, Michael Ots and Zac Powell gave valuable feedback on Peter’s original talks. Little did Peter know, but Matt was listening in excitedly as he supported CICCU in Cambridge. A few years earlier Dan Strange at Oak Hill College had pointed Matt towards Booker’s work on the seven basic plots and Matt had outlined a similar series of talks to those he was now listening to Peter give! Mike Hood deserves double thanks for subsequently planting the idea for a book.

Peter’s wife Linda and children, Samuel and Toby, put up with hearing endless iterations of his talks and the chapters they evolved into read aloud. Matt’s wife Anika and children, Charis, Thea, Tobias, Micah, Eirene and Ezra, did similar work and have endured endless discussions of all kinds of stories, helping Matt’s thinking.

We are thankful for Tom Creedy’s editorial reassurance. Thanks to Peter’s colleagues in the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) who continually strengthen his faith in Jesus and provide such a wonderful example of faithful boldness in Christ to Matt as he watches on. We are also grateful for our church families at the Redeemer Church in Leeds, and the Eden Baptist Church and now Hope Community Church in Cambridge.

We should also thank one another. It has been a joy to write together!

Most of all, thanks be to God, the Almighty Author and centre of the life we long for echoed in the tales we tell.

Introduction: reality’s story

Once upon a time there were two young boys. From different families, living in different places, they each liked nothing better than holidays with their grandparents. It meant trips out and delicious food. But most of all, it meant story-times.

Peter wakes up excitedly in the morning. He races siblings and cousins to grandpa’s room, vying to get the best spot on the bed. The rush over, hush descends as the latest instalment from a master storyteller begins. Every child on the bed is both enthralled and terrified by the story of the Tall Tailor coming to snip off the thumb that little Conrad wouldn’t stop sucking. More stories are made up on the spot, delighting each listener as they recognize their friends and family forming the cast.

That evening, at the other end of the country, Matt and his brothers are competing for space on their grandma’s lap as she settles (somewhat uncomfortably) into her chair and picks up a book. After a day of constant noise, silence falls. Her voice magically transforms the room into an ocean-going pirate ship, a desert island, a prehistoric jungle, an enchanted forest filled with mystical creatures.

Perhaps you have similar memories, or perhaps this sounds like a fairy-tale, far removed from your own reality. Our children are forming their own, right now. Peter’s sons (currently aged seven and eleven) and Matt’s six children (aged between six and twelve) all spend much of their lives in thought-worlds influenced by books, films, gaming and their own imaginations.

And, of course, stories aren’t just enjoyed by children. Each year, £600m is spent in the UK on fiction books alone.¹ The most popular TV programmes are usually dramas, often themselves adaptations of novels. Movies and computer games also draw us into their own stories.

The only way to make sense of our lives is to tell stories.

I know a story about that …

Try explaining happiness.

How would you begin? Or what about courage? Or even bitterness and vengeance?

Descriptions and dictionary definitions only take us so far. Neuroscientific approaches add a little more, but keep going and you’ll soon start telling a story.

Perhaps you’ll talk about the big bowl of ice cream in front of a movie at the end of a hard week. Maybe you’ll describe the soaring happiness you felt as you watched the sun rise. You might remind us of Marlin’s relentless courage as he searched for his son in Finding Nemo. You could tell us of Captain Ahab’s bitter, all-consuming pursuit of the White Whale in Moby-Dick.

As we listen to these stories, we may not be able to pin down happiness, courage or bitterness any more effectively than you, but somehow we understand one another.

C.S. Lewis, best known today as author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was a professor of literature at both Oxford and Cambridge universities. He also wrote a science fiction trilogy² and more than thirty other books. He knew a lot about stories and wrote much about their power to capture our imagination and stoke our desires. He suggests that one reason why stories have such power is that human thinking is ‘incurably abstract’. When we try to understand the world, we tend to reach for abstract ideas and definitions. But this is problematic, because the world of our experience isn’t abstract at all. As Lewis puts it,

The only realities we experience are concrete—this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality.³

This captures why it’s hard to ‘explain happiness’. We can enter it, or we can place ourselves outside it to offer explanation. We cannot do both simultaneously. We’re caught between two ways of knowing happiness: experiencing it or studying and defining it.

So, what do we do?

We tell a story. When you tell us about the happiness the sunrise kindled in you, the two ways of knowing converge. We see happiness ‘from the outside’