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(Note: This review consists of three distinct parts: first, a personal reflection on what this book has meant to me over a period of thirty years; secondly, a review of the book itself; and, thirdly, a selection of favorite stories from the anthology.)

When I was a young college professor, I would receive review copies of recent books. The publishers hoped I would order them in bulk as classroom textbooks. I was happy to line my empty shelves with the beginnings of a library. But one book that did not make it to the shelves was Imperial Messages: One Hundred Modern Parables by Howard Schwartz.

I could not put the book down, and in a few days I had read all the tales. The finished book was dog-eared throughout, and I was soon tearing out sheet after sheet and tucking them in my classnotes for the variety of classes I was to teach that year.

In the next few years, the stories migrated from one class to another. I already had a large collection of folktales and myths that I was using in my teaching, but now these were supplemented by an area I was less familiar with: modern storytelling. Over the years, these stories, like autumn leaves blown about by the wind, found their rest in my various archives: boxes, filing cabinets, loose-leaf binders. I had absorbed them into my reportory of stories, and -- in my mind -- they became indistinguishable from the traditional folktales.

That was in 1977. In the years since, individual stories have surfaced at unexpected times and places. These literary tales have entered into my dreamworld, they have merged with ancient myths, they have enriched oral foktales that I have shaped and told.

A few days ago I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop when I saw Imperial Messages. It had been reissued as a hardcover reprint. I bought it, took it home, and stepped back into the many stories that had shaped my early telling years ago.

In thirty years I had seemlingly re-enacted the theme in the title story, Franz Kafka's An Imperial Message. The message that had originally been sent to me thirty years ago was arriving again. Reading the stories together again reminded an older scholar of their original impact on a younger scholar many years ago.

Take the story, Fable of the Goat, by the modern Israeli writer, S. Y. Agnon. I have been telling a story I call The Goat for some fifteen years or more. I have always assumed that I first read it in some collection of Jewish folktales or Biblical midrash. And in my telling and retelling it, the tale has taken on all the characteristics of an oral tale. But as I sit and reread Agnon's tale, I wonder...

Did I first learn the tale in Imperial Messages, or had I first read it in a collection of folklore? If I read his version, how did I choose to make all the changes in my version? For my telling is greatly "like and unlike" his. Did I recast his story as an oral tale, or did his story transform an oral tale I already knew?

I feel like the reader in the first tale of this Anthology, the one that gave its name to the title: Franz Kafka's An Imperial Message. It is a story of a message from an emperor sent to me, the reader, through a messenger who must overcome great obstacles. In the story, he never quite arrives: he is always coming, I am always waiting. The story is of a slow journey; the story never reaches its destination.

Imperial Messages was a great gift sent to me thirty years ago. Its binding broke, and it dissolved into loose sheets were carried by the wind to the most remote parts of my psyche. In the intervening years, I have found pieces of the parchments, fragments of the scrolls, in the many places of my life.

And today, I have heard the message coming towards me again: Coming as if it were the first time; Arriving as fragments of a dream; and Promising to reveal a secret message that I was once too young to understand.

Howard Schwartz' introductory essay, "Kafka and the Modern Parable" is must reading for anyone serious about using storytelling as a form of sacred communication today. He begins by identifying his use of the word "Parable". It will challenge most religious storytellers who associate that word with Jesus in a narrower definition of "Parable."

Jesus' & the Evangelists' Parables are unique applications of a broader genre. And the uniqueness of their "Gospel Storytelling-Parable Style" has profound implications for contemporary religious artists, preachers, and teachers.

More important than the literal recital of Gospel Parables is the creative process of Parablemaking. Schwartz reminds us that (1) The heart of parables is not the morality lesson attached to the end of them, (2) Parables are not rooted in logical thinking but in the inspiration of dreams and visions, and (3) The subject matter of parables is not the outer world but the life of the soul.

Parablemaking, in either its modern form illustrated by Imperial Messages, or in its ancient form illustrated by the Gospels, is a process of letting stories open new doors for soul journeys. Schwartz writes about the modern parable:

"It has long been understood that any true symbol can never be fully comprehended. That the circle of its meaning continues to expand. And this is equally true for a cluster of symbols around a central metaphor, as is so often found in the modern parable. Because the truths it describes are complex and not full accessible to consciousness, the message of the modern parable never fully arrives, though the emotional response it evokes makes it clear that the message has been sent, and the longer thje reader contemplates its meaning the more certain he becomes that the messenger and his message are coming closer all the time."

This is also true of Gospel Parables, and it can be true of our storytelling when we preach or teach: the message never fully arrives in such a way that the listener fully understands it -- or that we fully understand our telling of it! But when any of us preaches, or teaches, or hears the Gospel again and again, the emotional response it evokes in us is that Jesus -- the messenger -- and the Good News -- his message -- are coming closer and closer to us all the time.

And so we wait. And we listen. Again and again. We listen with hope, and we hear with joy.

Everyone will like some of Schwartz's collected parables and dislike others. The ones that have stayed with me for thirty years now are:

Perhaps this list reveals more about me than the stories themselves. And so it always is, when we identify the stories whose messages continue to arrive.

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		Robert Béla Wilhelm's Storyfest Review of Books & Audio-Tapes on Storytelling & Spirituality - 9