It’s one of those episodes this week, where we talk about everything from the ethics of slug control, to the 1700th anniversary the council of Nicea, to Ezekiel’s advice on how to live during times of exile (basically Keep Holy and Carry On).
In one, apparently random bit I talked about how the big story of the Bible is made up of loads of little stories of exactly the same shape. Although I couldn’t remember it during recording, I had in mind the weird, alien-looking Romanesco Cauliflower. aka a Romanesco Broccoli It’s a kind of fractal vegetable, where the whole is made of little versions of itself.
In mathematics, this principle is called self-similarity. It’s where an object is exactly or approximately similar to a part of itself.
Last week I talked about a classic ‘shape’ of a story which I term, Call, Rise, Fall, Surprise. The hero is called into action, at first things go well and you have the rise; then there is the inevitable crisis point, either a failure or what seems an insurmountable setback – this is the fall. Finally, there is a twist, our hero escapes and achieves an unlikely victory, this is the surprise.
It’s possible to see the whole of the Bible story in the shape of Call, Rise, Fall Surprise. But within the Bible itself, in the individual stories, the same shape is found over and over again. It’s there in the lives of Jacob and Joseph. It’s in the life of Peter. And, of course, in the narrative about Jesus. (Let’s face it, what’s more of a twist ending than resurrection?)
In that sense, the Bible is a self-similar story. It’s one big story made up of loads of little stories of the same shape.
I wonder if it also the shape of our lives as well. I wrote about this in my book The Dark Night of the Shed, where I looked at the classic mid-life crisis as the fall part of this framework. But I’m reading William Bridges book, Transformations at the moment, and he points out that transformations like this occur throughout our lives, if we are attentive to them. His pattern of transformation is in three parts: an ending, a period of confusion or distress, and a new beginning.
Our lives, our stories, have self-similarity. Like a cauliflower. Well, one kind of cauliflower, anyway.