We know who we are by the stories we tell

 actionable self-knowledge

We know who we are by the stories we tell. In the economic realm, Robert J. Shiller says that there are ‘perennial narratives’ which ‘affect economic behavior by changing the popular understanding of the economy, by altering public perceptions of economic reality, by creating new ideas about what is meaningful and important and moral, or by suggesting new scripts for individual behavior.’ 

Change “economic’ to ‘political’ and you have a whole new set of experiences to distill.

To theologians we define what we believe by the stories we tell about experiencing God. 

To combine the insights of two of my teachers, narratives teach us what we believe, and our stories of experiencing God tell us what we believe about God - and what to do about it.

Indeed, the story telling itself may become an experience of God. To read or hear a narrative of a conversion experience may itself become a conversion experience. And of course the primary stories we tell, the references for our being, come from the common shared stories of Scripture. 

(To readers of the Hebrew Scripture this is basic and the insights are of long-ago date.)

But what stories do we tell each other as a community and as encountering strangers? Who are we? We tell you by what we do and by how we tell the stories - the ones that really matter to us most of all may be the last we tell...

(Robert J. Shiller, “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events”. Princeton UPr. Quoted by Cass R. Sunstein in the New York Review of Books.January 14, 2021. 32.)