"True storytellers do not know their own story," observes author James Carse in his Finite and Infinite Games, a curious and likeable meditation about, broadly speaking, how we see the world.  Otherwise, he opines, our lives cease to be tales and are reduced to mere explanations.
     Carse's observation reminds me of a line from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2005, that, "Explanation, not meaning is what is important."  Carse and Rorty could not be further apart.  As Rorty sees it, it is foolish to seek meaning in our lives; far more critical is that we learn how to live, to cope with this present reality.  Carse would say that although learning how to live is important, if that is all we do, we miss the most crucial point of existence:  the mystery of meaning that is always waiting for us to unfold as we wind our way through the pathways of our lives.  As he sees it, if we can explain all of our lives, we have not really lived; all we have done is exist.  The fullest life is the life whose end and meaning lie ever before the one who lives it, the life whose purpose is the reason we live it, the life whose story we will never know fully until it ends--and maybe not even then.
     Our lives are stories that we do not fully know, but they are stories that we tell.  We live best when we recognize that we are narratives, critically important narratives, but narratives all the same, working themselves out in an infinite story (metanarrative) of experience before an infinite God.  Our time is more than a measure of passage; it is a story with form, import, and purpose.  We mean far more than the dust to which we will one day go.