Human beings have been creating stories since ancient times, whether by drawings on cave walls or shaped in wood or through the oral tradition – stories have always been around.

They’re part of who we are and where we come from. They’ve been passed on from one generation to the next by rhythm and drums and through the written word. They connect us to one another.

We live from within our own stories and people read us by the things we do, the words we utter, the legacies we leave behind. To exist at the surface of them is to be out of touch with others, and ourselves. It is to be unreal.

So how do we get in touch with the depth of our own story?

In his book Silence, David Runcorn says that the desert “is a place that simplifies us, down to our true selves, until we are ready to meet the God of life and death”.

We can’t all go wandering off into the wild and remote desert, but we can set aside times in our daily life to listen to God in quiet prayer.

If we persevere we may find ourselves passing into our own symbolic desert, where fixed boundaries begin to unfreeze and existing beliefs are challenged.

We discover that everything we’ve previously thought important isn’t important and all the things we’ve considered unimportant are vital.

It feels like a kind of death, but this is a journey where the Spirit hovers, where ‘deep calls to deep’ (psalm 49) and in time, we find ourselves moving to another drumbeat.

Life becomes strangely different. We come to understand that we’re part of a much larger and infinitely mysterious story.

At this time of Advent we think about the coming of the Messiah. We hear again the story of the birth of Christ and try to be open to that mystery in our lives.

Jesus lived a good story, one of justice and compassion. He reached out to those on the edge of society, the lost and rejected.

He stood at the threshold of their lives, welcomed them into his freedom – and they were healed. His truth took him to the darkness of the cross. His story left something real and permanent behind.

Penny Johnson