In the poem The Sycamore, Wendell Berry straddles some no man’s land between metaphysics and theology and poetry to give an interestingly aslant and insightful definition of narrative:
It [the sycamore] has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
As characters in the narratives which are our individual lives, we should gather all accidents into our purpose. We should respect and try to understand as others are gathering in accidents into the various purposes in the many stories inside this world. If others seem to be merely befuddled, if there is no such gathering and seems to be no intention to a purpose, we can only be sad for those others. If some are gathering the accidents of others toward an exploitive purpose, we should be angry but also should wonder how God might be gathering even the accidents of His evil creatures into His purposes.
We who are Christians, believers in an all-powerful and all-knowing Creator, should realize this narrative understanding of reality allows a harmonization between Moses and Darwin. Darwin describes the processes by which the accidents are generated to be gathered into the purposes prophesied by Moses.
God is even now gathering all accidents into the overarching purpose for which this story, our world, is being told: the birth and development of the Body of Christ, born in the cave in which the crucified Jesus Christ was buried and from which He emerged. This Body is growing yet through time as its various parts evolve and develop. The Almighty gathers all of our accidents and our purposes into that greater purpose. Even our purposes are but accidents within that greater narrative.
From the same poem, on a related topic, the very next line reads:
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
This seems to beg for a Thomistic understanding of ‘intention’ as a growth process of an organism rather than a subjective thing which overlaps with desire and motivation.
Because of centuries of neglect of Western Civilization — no, the ‘pagans’ didn’t take it away from us, we just abandoned it — we have a paucity of ways of speaking the Christian truth. I’ve claimed before that poets and novelists and artists and musicians have to give us a new vocabulary to speak of the new concepts which are just on the other side of our cognitive reach. Perhaps there is at least a part of such a vocabulary already existing in the works of some of our modern poets, such as Wendell Berry.