I loved the comments at yesterday’s post “What are YOU grateful for?” On Sunday I was thinking about how many things I have to be grateful for, and wondering which I would choose to mention if I wrote a gratitude post every day until Thanksgiving. Tony Roeber’s “I am grateful just for being alive and breathing…” has it all in a sentence. Jason Hamza van Boom’s items are wonderfully eclectic and specific. Today I want to mention story.

People say a picture is worth a thousand words. There isn’t such a pithy saying — but there should be — about story: a good story is worth a thousand pages of conceptual analysis. The Bible is mostly stories, and how much analysis and interpretation has that provoked, without ever running out of more possibilities and depths. Most ancient holy texts are stories, aren’t they?

As the Library Journal wrote: "Cunningham weaves Hebrew scripture, Celtic and Egyptian mythology, and early Christian legend into a nearly seamless whole, creating an unforgettable fifth gospel story in which the women most involved in Jesus's ministry are given far more representation."

Not every book of fiction or history is or has to be a story. But when I am in a mood for story, rather than conceptual analysis and complex evocation, the first thing I want is authority in the storytellers’ voice: the tone that says, sit down, get comfy, I’m going to enthrall you. I had an art critic friend who hated Speilberg’s movies, because he found them so manipulative. But I thought of a bard at an ancient campfire, spinning tales to wrap her listeners up in other worlds, and thought, wasn’t she manipulating them and isn’t that the essence of a good storyteller? We give ourselves over, uncritically, to be drawn in. Later, we can do the analysis.

So I have my favorites, as you do, but I thought that I would mention one storyteller who fills me with wonder and amazement, whom you may well not have read. This bard, a singer of the blues and a writer of realistic fantasy, is right on the mark for any spiritual progressives who wonder how Jesus would have reacted to a female equal or, if you never wondered about that, who is building a religion that fully celebrates the female as well as the male and all variations of such.

Imagine placing a fully autonomous, free woman into the Jesus story, as his peer: in some way immortal, divine, able to perform miracles, hold her own and become his lover and partner without becoming his disciple. Historically absurd, right?

But — if the storyteller is good enough that you can suspend your disbelief for the duration — then it’s not absurd as a thought experiment for us today. Especially not for those of us who might want to love Jesus but never become Christians, or for those who might want to generate for our times a religion (that is, a spiritual community with shared rituals and organization) that celebrates male and female power, love, sexuality, miracle, equality, healing from pain and suffering, community, nature, hope, and, in a word, life.

So just suppose that the beat-up traveler whom the Good Samaritan rescued in that famous story was Jesus himself, and that the inn he took him to was a holy whorehouse in Magdala, Palestine. Imagine it was run by a priestess of Isis, who happened to be one of those displaced persons the Roman Empire scooped up from far away. In this case she’s a red-headed Celt named Maeve, translated into the local lingo as Mariam or in our language, Mary. She was born of goddesses on a holy isle in the Atlantic and fetched up in Magdala and the worship of Isis through miseries of slavery and other eventualities told in gripping narrative.

What if this woman became Jesus’s healer, lover, wife and mother of his child, but never his disciple, always a gentile, always her own person, and never fitting into the early Christian church after his death because she told a different story about him than his followers did? In that case she would have been left out of their stories altogether, except for some undeveloped references to Mary Magdalene, the woman from Magdala.

This is the thought experiment that poet, pagan priestess and descendant of a long line of Episcopal priests, Elizabeth Cunningham, is painting in a series of novels that this year reached its third volume, Bright Dark Madonna.

I love these books! Their humor, bawdiness, holiness, irreverent reverence, mix of theological fantasy with historical detail, and their strong narrative pull delight me. I have given them away as presents and found they are not to some people’s taste. Others adore them as I do.

But I am confident that the religions we are creating now — post-creedal, drawing eclectically from traditional religions, infused with feminism and queer love and biophilia (the love of all living beings), embracing atheists and believers together in shared community — will be nourished by these books. Go check them out at the library, or buy them at Powells (people who know tell me it’s less toxic to independent bookstores than Amazon).