What Happens When Our Stories Fail?

The Neo Axial Age, Part 1

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, Autumn 2019. Copyright © Michael D. Warden. All Rights Reserved.

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, is what’s known in spiritual circles as a “thin place” — a lovely old Celtic notion that the material world and the spiritual world coexist together within the same spaces, and that in some places the veil between the two is especially thin, recognized by the unmistakable gravity of presence they carry, as if the spiritual realm in that place is somehow spilling over into the material one. 

Devil’s Tower is a place just like that.

When I rounded the final hillock and saw it for the first time, it took my breath away. Rising 867 feet out of the red earth, it stands out like an alien invader, beautiful, and brazen in its demand for my attention. On the day I arrived, clouds brooded over the hillocks and vales for miles in every direction, content to hold their rain but veiling the landscape in a feathery mist. The tower rose like a sentinel in the distance, shrouded yet unavoidable, clearly not belonging in the landscape it inhabits, yet insisting on its right to be there all the same. 

It’s still a bit of a mystery how it got there. In geologic terms, the tower is an igneous intrusion—meaning, at some point in the distant past a column of magma shot up through a thin place in the earth’s crust, forming a massive body of molten stone. But just how it shot up, and what form its structure originally took, remains a topic of debate among geologists. What is agreed is that as it cooled it condensed into massive columns—a process called “columnar joining”—producing the largest geometric structures of their kind in the world.

Climbers on Devil’s Tower, Autumn 2019. Copyright © Michael D. Warden. All Rights Reserved.

My initial fascination with this amazing thin place, however, began neither with mysticism nor science, but with science fiction.

It was a characteristically warm and sticky Texas winter in 1977. I was 13 years old, still soaring high off the extraordinary thrill of experiencing “Star Wars” that summer, when Steven Spielberg released his own seminal science fiction masterpiece, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I went to see it in late December, my heart literally racing as I took my seat in the theater. I was as excited and primed for wonder as any boy has ever been. 

For those who weren’t there to experience it, it’s hard to describe the heightened aliveness that permeated the air in those latter years of the 1970s. Everything, it seemed to me, was charged with a kind of electric possibility. I was young and full of hope. And while I could not have explained it then, much of my exuberant optimism was entirely due to storytellers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Their other-worldly tales gave me, and millions of others like me, stories to believe in at a time when we desperately needed them.

Just four years earlier, the United States had finally managed to extricate its forces from a 19-year war in Vietnam that had drained not only our blood but also our collective confidence in the rightness of our cause as a nation. Our warriors returned home not to the praise and support of a grateful people, but as scapegoats for our collective shame for our nation’s part in that tragic enterprise, and, perhaps ironically, for our failure to decisively win it. 

Just one scant year after that, on August 8th, 1974, we watched as our president, Richard Nixon, tendered his resignation to the American people on live television, his corruption having been exposed through the Watergate scandal for the whole world to see. It was the first time in the history of the United States that a president had been forced to resign in disgrace. 

I am a child of those years, among the first modern generation to be raised in the shadow of failed authority, and faltering institutions. I implicitly understood that not all my elders were wise, or good, or could be trusted to act in my best interest. I was one of the latchkey kids, and I liked it that way. Unsure of the systems of authority into which we’d been born, my generation opted instead to think for ourselves, to find our own sources of truth and inspiration. Our elders called us Generation X, not knowing what else to call us. We were a mystery to them. We liked it that way, too.

We were a generation in search of a story. Something to believe in. A better narrative than the one into which we’d been born. Great artists like Lucas and Spielberg, their stories helped a lot. They carried us through many hard years. But, as we grew up and faced down the increasingly complex challenges of life on earth, we realized, much to our sorrow, that even those epic tales from the stars were not enough — are not enough — to hold us together, or make sense of the wider world.

I have climbed the highest mountains …
run through the fields … 
scaled these city walls …
I have kissed honey lips …
spoke with the tongue of angels …
held the hand of a devil …
But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

— U2, excerpted from “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” 1987

My generation is still searching for that better story we need. Only now, all the other generations have joined in. We are all desperately looking for a new story to believe in, not because we want to, but because have to. The world has changed so quickly and so dramatically over the last 100 years that the cultural, religious, and scientific narratives we’ve long depended on to explain our reality can no longer hold it. The first major shift happened in the early years of the 20th Century with the discovery of relativity, and the pace of change has been accelerating faster and faster every year since.

We all feel it—this curious and unsettling sensation that we are speeding up, drawn by a kind of increase in the gravity of the future, hurtling toward an unknown destiny. We're in the middle of a cliff hanger, and the tension is terrifying us, so it's as if we are reading faster and faster, trying to get to the resolution, whatever that might be…

• Ecological disaster

• Economic collapse

• An A.I. apocalypse

• Another world war

• A new Renaissance

• A spiritual awakening

• A new, better way to be human

• An encounter with E.T.

Whether our resolution is tragic or sublime, we seem unconsciously driven to get there as quickly as possible. Anything, we think, is better than lingering in the disorientation of this liminal unknown. Why?

Because we don't know how to live without a story.

“We don’t how to live without a story.”

We humans are narrative by nature. We craft stories to explain the world to ourselves, whether we’re talking about our relational world, our societal world, our spiritual world, our physical world, or any other world we might imagine. We storycraft every aspect of the universe we inhabit the same way we breathe — automatically, but also with conscious intent at times — not only to help us organize and navigate complexity more easily, but also, and much more importantly, to protect ourselves from the existential panic that can so easily arise when living at the mercy of overwhelming forces we do not understand and cannot control.

We don’t just love storycrafting. We need it. Our stories keep us sane. They give us a navigable framework for making sense of ourselves, our lives, and the universe we inhabit. They provide us a way to feel safe. They tell us what life is for, and therefore, how to live it properly.

More than that, our stories, when shared with others, give us a deep sense of belonging. They are powerful enough to create worldwide societies, and hold them together. Without a common story, we remain alien to one another, like actors in different dramas that don't fit together. If our stories are different enough, we become threatening to each other, because we recognize that “your story” and “my story” cannot both be true, and the fact that your story exists threatens the veracity of mine. We call this having enemies, and it is the primary reason we go to war.

It's all a complicated mess, as one might imagine, because even though it hasn't mattered much historically whether our stories are true — only that we believe in them — it is clear that some of our stories are more humane than others. Some stories bring more dignity to human existence. Others bring more suffering. Some promote a reciprocal, sustainable relationship with the Earth. Others rape it, to the point of bringing on our own self-destruction. We live in a world of competing stories, each with their peculiar pros and cons, and all of them are fighting for dominance.

The issue in the West, and in the East, and in the Middle East, is that the dominant narratives we have historically relied on have collapsed under the weight of new discoveries about the universe, and new awareness of the implications of these discoveries. Our theology, our philosophy, and our social agreements as a species are all in dire need of an upgrade. But while some of us recognize this and are willing, even eager, to make it happen, most of us are terrified at the prospect of losing the story we have known. We’re unwilling to let go of our foundational understanding of who we are and what life is all about, and we are reacting to this change as we would any external threat—with defiance and violence.

The problem is, this change has already happened. We already crossed that threshold, and have been pressing farther and deeper into this new, unmapped wilderness for the past 100 years. For better or worse, there is no going back again. We cannot unsee what we have seen. We have no choice but to rewrite our stories in a way that integrates this new awareness. We must craft a better story, a bigger and more comprehensive story, one that can hold all we now know, yet still leave room for all we’ve yet to discover.

We need a new, deeper, truer story that can effectively redefine…

• our relationship with mystery and the unknown,

• our relationship with safety and risk,

• our relationship with difference,

• our relationship with evil,

• our relationship with ourselves as a species (including our collective shadow),

• our relationship with the earth,

• our relationship with all that awaits us in the universe,

• our relationship with technology, and

• our relationship with each other.

I believe we’ve already entered a new age, what I will call, for reasons I’ll explain later, the Neo Axial Age, and it is calling on us all to help write this new story about who we are, what all this is, and what’s really going on here. We need this new story to be made of sturdier stuff, more robust and resilient than any story that’s come before. We need it to be big enough to hold the ever-expanding oceans of all we know and all we don't, and compellingly beautiful enough to hold us all together as one, human race.

In the series of posts that will follow — all tagged, like this one, with “Neo Axial Age” — I mean to explore these ideas at greater depth, and the many questions that inevitably follow along with them — questions regarding the future of humankind, of society, of the planet we all share, of religion and spirituality, of technology, and of science. All of these questions have a part to play in answering what I believe is the most essential question of our times: 

What is the deeper, truer Story of Everything that can carry us forward together from here?

Obviously, I don’t have answers for all the questions confronting us in this liminal wilderness we now share. I intend this exploration as an invitation to a larger conversation with you, my fellow sojourners of this new Age. It’s on all of us to find our way forward, and we need to pool our collective wisdom if we’re to have any hope of making it through these challenging times without self destructing. 

I invite you to join in. Subscribe if you haven’t. Share this post with others who will want to be a part of this conversation. Add your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. Let’s build a community of hope and curiosity around these shared questions we’re all asking, and see what we can discover together. 

(Note: This is the 1st installment in a series of essays. You can find all the entries by following these links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, and Part 8.)