There is no question that we live in a conflict-torn world. A quick trip through the headlines leaves no question about the brokenness of this world. The Biden administration plans a billion dollar arms shipment to Israel. Hundreds of French police officers are deployed in the search for an escaped prisoner and those who attacked a police van and freed him, killing and injuring officers. Lawyers for a former president attacked the credibility of a lawyer who once represented that same man in a criminal trial in which the candidate leading in the polls is the defendant. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing may face criminal prosecution over 737 max crashes. Fourteen people were killed, dozens injured and more may still be trapped because a billboard collapsed in Mumbai. Illegal shipments of rosewood to China fuels an insurgency in Mozambique. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing Rafah with nowhere to go and almost no food to eat. An Australian who exposed war crimes is in jail for stealing military secrets. A cyber attack caused the famous art auction website of Christie’s to go down as it seeks to sell high art and rare wine. The Scottish government has declared a national housing emergency.

In the midst of all of this and so much more, yesterday in what I am sure was a moment of perfect peace, a 92-year-old woman suffering from heart disease and cancer took her leave from this life. Alice Munro was widely acclaimed and given award after award for her mastery of the short story. She quietly slipped from this life leaving behind a literary legacy that will go on for generations. It was just a decade after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

She will be missed, but I can’t help but feel that the time for her death was right and we have no reason to ask her for another story. What she has written is sufficient.

There are other authors and other stories, but Alice Munro had the capacity to tell a story that makes you want to inhabit it not so much to find out what happens or how it ends, but rather to simply see the world from the perspective of one of her characters. It is worth reading her story just to know that such characters exist.

I one heard an interview with Munro in which she said she wrote short stories because she had no other choice. She was a young mother with three young daughters who didn’t have time to devote to a novel. She wrote stories sandwiched between the washing machine and the dryer because she could take a brief moment there to think without losing her focus on her life as a homemaker. I think that the story, while true, is only part of the story because by the time she published her first book, a collection of short stories, in her thirties, she had been publishing short stories since she was an 18-year-old student. She had more rejection letters than published stories, but she was a writer before she became a mother. But her life, like her stories, doesn’t require her stories to cover every possible truth or every possible angle. I love the image of a harried young woman, trying to live up to society’s often unfair expectations of women, while refusing to allow her creativity to be stifled by the responsibilities of home and the demands of raising children. Knowing that story is enough for me to believe in the creativity potential of every woman regardless of her circumstances or the judgment of the world.

I do not believe that Munro’s stories are scripture, but they do help me understand why sacred stories are so important in this life. We treasure stories that invite us to inhabit them without assurance of their endings, but rather because of the value of the stories themselves. I am a Christian not because of some preacher’s description of heavenly glory - of gold-paved streets, endless choirs of angels, instant ability to tune and play a harp, or face-to-face encounters with those who died before I was born. I am a Christian because I have been invited into the story in which the awesome power of empire, capable of judging and destroying humans by nailing them to a cross, is not the end of the story. I want to live in a story where justice comes to the dispossessed, the widows and orphans, those forgotten by society. I want to live in a story where the powers and principalities of this world do not get the final word on the beauty, the meaning, and the worth of human life. I want to live in a world where faith, hope, and love abide and the greatest of these is love. For that world, I need more than the headlines and the awesome communication powers of contemporary media. For that world, I need sacred story. For that world, I choose to inhabit stories that our people have been telling for millennia. For that world I choose to tell those stories to my children and grandchildren.

I choose to meet with the survivors of suicide and sit with them as they tell the stories of their trauma and loss not because I want to know the end of the story, but because I want to see the world from their perspective. I want to live in a world where the human spirit is capable of meeting the overwhelming power of that tragedy and not only surviving, but thriving and inspiring others to live.

I think Alice Munro understood that world enough to know, even in the face of debilitating illness and the realities of the frailness of the human body as it approaches a century of living, that the story does not end when the last breath comes. We can love her stories and accept her death.

I invite you to read a story by Alice Munro. Pick up Who Do You Think You are? or Boys and Girls or How I met My Husband. Read through a list of her stories or pick up one of her collections. Find about gutting turkeys and fox faming, of felling trees and harsh country schools, of lingering illness and obscure shame, of the lives of girls and women. Start reading wherever you choose and stop wherever it strikes you. Don’t focus on reading them all or knowing all about her as a writer. Take a moment to simply look at time and life and relationships from a new perspective.

The story goes on.