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Good Morning, I have recently had four storylines running simultaneously in my head. There is one involving a Dystopian future in which women are only permitted contact with men in order to conceive children, then there’s a scenario where a black man is attacked by his own white girlfriend’s family, another where someone’s been murdered at a school fundraiser in Monterrey, and one where the anti-corruption police have just discovered the truth about the death of a forensic officer. There was a point during the Bank Holiday - whilst devouring novel, TV box set, play and film - where I wondered if my appetite for stories had got out of control. But it seems I’m not alone in my hunger. Seven and a half million people watched the series finale of Line of Duty on Sunday. Television drama is enjoying a new golden age. Last year over 4 billion pounds-worth of books were sold in the UK; and stories are being shared and consumed every minute through social media, blogs and news. While formats come and go, stories - old and new – are here to stay. At least until the end of time – and maybe after that. Humans are the story telling creatures. Not one society – even when prohibited – has ever stopped telling them. They are as inevitable as gravity and almost as necessary to our existence as food. Even at night, when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays awake telling itself tales. This appetite must reside, in part, in our story-shaped existence: we love narrative because our lives are narratives. People are stories – her-stories and his-stories. As the Roman poet Horace observed: change the names in a tale for your own and you become its subject. Our lives may not seem as neatly plotted as a box set, as clever and lyrical as a novel, or as beautifully lit as a movie, but in the best of them we recognise something of ourselves; they invite us to enter in and take us with them. They allow us to be a part of the story. In this sense, faith and narrative share the same page. My own faith is less about accepting a set of maxims and rules; than about believing a story. The gospel narrative is a story before it’s a creed – and even the creed is a story. It’s one about a particular God in a particular time and place, who enters into this concrete but temporal life in all its messy contingency. I’d even go as far to say that story is the form in and through which this particular God chooses to speak to people. As the words become flesh, mundanity and transcendence mix. And we are taken from the mud to the manger, from the dust to the stars. From the beginning to the end.