My colleague Christine Parton Burkett reminds preachers that children, after hearing a well-told story, never respond, "What does it mean?" Instead, with glee and abandon, they exclaim, "Oh, tell it again!" She reminds preachers that, as human beings, we never really outgrow our love of a story well-told; there is a part of each of us that wants to cheer, "Oh, tell it again!"

Several years ago in The New York Times Sunday Review, the Swedish writer Henning Mankell wrote that "a truer nomination for our species than Homo sapiens might be Homo narrans, the storytelling person." Mankell's argument was not that the biologists are wrong or that we are not thinking creatures but rather that we are also -- and maybe even primarily -- storytelling creatures.

We make sense of the world and our place in it through story. Story is how we create meaning, how we interpret reality, and how we come to know who we are and why we are. That is why when we hear a story that we know is good and true, we say, "Oh, tell it again."

Literature professor John Niles, in a book called "Homo Narrans," puts it this way: "It is chiefly through storytelling that people possess a past." But it works the other way as well. Through storytelling we possess a past -- but that past possesses us, too. It's through storytelling that we find our identity.

I belong to a tradition in which the climax and culmination of Holy Week's liturgies is the Easter Vigil, when we gather in the darkness of Holy Saturday's night and proclaim the story of God's saving work, from the creation of the world to the resurrection of Jesus. We retell the scriptural stories to remind us of who we are, whose we are and how we have come to be. Each story is a reminder of the identity of God's people. Each story is a testament to the enduring and faithful love of God.