I just finished the first draft of the introduction to my book. I’m overall quite pleased with it. I want it to act as sort of a “call to arms” for everything else that is to come after it. I’d be delighted to hear peoples’ reactions to this, even if they are just as simple as “You rock!” Or whether or not it piques your interest enough to possibly want to read more. At this point, I’m trying to write it for a broad audience with pretty diverse backgrounds and interests, and that’s possibly the hardest part. But anyway, without further ado…

Note: The ending has been slightly revised.

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I have always been totally immersed in stories. Two great streams of narrative converged in my parents’ house growing up: Roman Catholicism and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Each week we religiously tuned in to both the adventures of Captain Picard and the crew of the Starship Enterprise, and to the adventures of Jesus and his merry band of disciples. Unless I was sick, my parents made sure I never missed a week of church. But it was me who made sure I never missed Star Trek. Sometimes these two universes clashed vibrantly in a flurry of photon torpedoes and heavenly power. But more often than not, their themes and messages overlapped and built on each other.

The side-by-side experience of these two great systems of myth impressed on my mind from an early age the importance of stories and imagination. I saw firsthand how we can use stories to dream about the past, the future, and alternate universes. And I saw how whatever is mysterious and sacred in the universe can assume as many forms as the human imagination is able to conceive.

My quest through these realms has never been a strictly academic one. Stories demand much more than the dry heat of the intellect, lest they become merely arid analytical treatises. Neither should we abandon the immense insight available to our minds, though. Stories also require equal measures of heart and imagination. Only then will they have sunlight, soil in which to take root, and the delight and sustenance of rain. Stories challenge us by demanding engagement on many levels simultaneously. And in that complexity lies their ultimate power. They resist simplistic interpretation and transcend mere fact by pointing to truths which are inexpressible to us by any other means.

What would any of our lives be like without stories? We can’t even begin to imagine this possibility without first constructing a story, based around a narrative device, a “what if.” And in the end, it’s very difficult to conceive of ourselves as anything but walking collections of stories. We live our lives in the space where all our stories, our dreams, hopes and memories overlap. Who we are is both the story we tell ourselves and in which we find ourselves. We are both author and hero.

I’ve heard people say my generation defines itself according to media affiliations: what music, movies & tv shows we love, even what brands of clothes, computers, or cars we buy. But I would say it’s not the media or the brand names we love but the stories which flow through them. These are the stories which we ourselves take up residence inside of, and which take up residence inside us. I think a culture consists of nothing more and nothing less than a group of people who’ve been fed on the same stories, and who somehow have been molded in their image.

I’m always thrilled to find fellow travelers who know the back-roads connecting the stories and characters which have so informed my life. But I don’t think this is anything unique to my generation. We simply have more stories now as more people and cultures come together. And with this vast array of stories at our fingertips, the challenge we face is in choosing which to align ourselves with. The word heresy, commonly used to brand outlaws, comes to us from the Greek haeresis, for “a choosing.” And this is exactly what we face today. As authors, as a heretics, which stories should we let into the one most sacred story of our life?

The same threat exists today that has always plagued us: that somebody else will do our choosing for us. One authority or another will try to tell us which stories we may love, and in what officially approved ways we may interact with them. But stories don’t belong to them. In fact, stories don’t belong to any one person or group – not even to their creators. They belong instead to anyone who feels them course through their veins, and to anyone who will live them from the inside out.

I have been Batman. I have wrapped myself in my cape and perched among the gargoyles of Gotham. I have looked down on the crime ridden streets of my city, and felt the lust for vengeance eat away at me. I have been Jesus, scared to death in the Garden of Gethsemane as my friends fall asleep one by one, knowing the worst betrayal is yet to come. I have stood at the Crack of Doom, clutching the One Ring. I’ve been Tangled Up in Blue; I’ve Let it Bleed. I’ve played guitar with the Spiders from Mars. I’ve even shimmied down green sewage pipes as a pair of plump Italian plumbers on a race against time to rescue the Princess and restore peace to our weird little Mushroom Kingdom.

I’ve lived what seems like lifetimes as each of these characters and felt what they felt, or as close as I could come. I’ve gone right down to the wire with each of them hundreds, thousands of times over, as their experiences are echoed and mirrored through the hallways of who I am. Their stories fuse with my story, and the two have become all but indistinguishable.

The goal of this book is to give people tools to tell themselves better stories. Toward that end, we will examine how religions and contemporary pop culture function as complex interlocking groups of stories, or story-systems. My intention is not to reduce religion to the level of “mere story,” but rather to celebrate equally the multitude of stories which make us who we are, in whatever form they come.