Awhile
back I lost a friend I first came to know back in the early 1980’s. We met at a
small local retreat house and came together regularly for workshops, retreat,
spiritual direction, and occasional dinners as well as outings together to SF,
etc. Years later, when she developed Alzheimer’s, Margaret continued to
remember those times at the center as a watershed period of her life. It was a
complete joy for both of us to step back into that time and share our memories. It was
the retelling of these stories especially that allowed her to remain hopeful
and faithful in the face of continuing loss and increasing limitation. She
rested in these stories and retained a sense of the meaning of her life in this
way. Stories can do this. During Advent, as we begin retelling our faith’s
foundational cycle of stories once again, is a good time to reflect on the
importance and power of story in our lives.
It wouldn’t be
too strong an assertion to say that we are made for story. Weaving stories and
allowing others to weave us into their stories is not just a significant need,
but a profound drive within us affecting everything we are and do. Everything that
is meaningful in our lives is mediated by story – so much so that scientists
have concluded we are hard-wired for story. Neuroscientists have even located a
part of the brain which is dedicated to spinning stories. It is linked to our
ability to imagine ourselves in relation to the world around us, but it also
functions to “console” us, to make sense of reality and to compensate us for
the loss of personal story in some brain disorders, for instance. Sometimes I
heard this at work in my friend as she filled in holes in her own memory so her
own story could move forward.
Evidence that
we are made for story is everywhere. Whenever we run into something we don’t
understand or cannot control, something we need to hold together in a way which
makes sense, we invariably weave a story around it. Whenever we yearn to move
into a larger world, whenever we imagine and anticipate such a move, again we
weave a story around it.
Children do it with their dolls, stuffed
animals, crayons, and toys of all sorts. Imagine a child explaining what has
happened and whispering reassurance to her doll or stuffed animal after a natural
disaster puts the whole family in an arena shelter. Watch too as she listens as
that special friend cuddles her back and rehearses bits of the story the child
needs to hear as it reminds her, “you are not alone, and you will not be alone”.
Such stories help this child to negotiate the challenges and uncertainties of
the present and move into a more viable future.
Fiction authors
weave stories that change our lives in a similar way. We love to dwell in the
worlds they create, especially when our everyday lives are stressful, but in entering
these stories psychologists note that we also grow in real world abilities:
empathy, the skills we need to tolerate being alone, and we become better at
relationships and dealing with uncertainty as well. Such stories help widen our
own sense of self and let us confront the “real world” with a sense of
confidence and even adventure. Physicians weave stories more subtly, maybe, when they use a
patient’s symptoms to determine diagnoses, treatment plans, and
prognoses. Historians use story to explain the significance of events and allow
us to engage with the past, present and future when they do this well.
Scientists and theologians do something similar when they spin very different
but complementary and deeply true stories to explain the nature of reality.
At their very best, hearing and telling
stories helps create a sacred space and healing dynamic where we can truly be
ourselves and stand authentically with others in the present. When someone we
love dies it is natural that we come together to tell stories, including those
of Christ and the way he lived, died, and was raised. Doing so helps to knit
the broken threads of our stories into something new and promising --- a new
and hopeful narrative which eases grief and leads to a future marked by promise
and hard-won wisdom. Couples deciding to have a new baby, families who choose
to adopt are making the tremendous choice to allow the breaking open and
reshaping of their stories as they give these children a name and place to
stand in their lives and even in the greater world. Therapists, priests, and
spiritual directors help us to hear, claim, and tell our truest stories,
especially when they are difficult or overwhelming, unworthy of us, or (at
least so far) unable to have been fully processed. Especially healing is the way these
“pastoral ministers of personal story” allow us to be deeply heard and to find rest in
acceptance, forgiveness, and new beginnings.
So profoundly
human and humanizing is our capacity and need for story that the Church’s
greatest acts of worship take the form of story. Our liturgy of the Word is, of
course, made up of stories that challenge, console, and inspire us as only the
Word of God can do. And listen today as we recite the Creed together. It is not
composed of a series of disparate beliefs or dogmas but is a coherent story in
which we find meaning, hope, and peace together as a single People of God. Even
the act of Consecration is accomplished by the recounting of a story we embrace
and let embrace us in our great Amen of faith: “On the night before he died,
Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it saying, ‘This is my body. . .’ Then he
took the cup, blessed it saying, this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the
new and everlasting covenant. . .’” We are asked then to reenact or retell this
story with our lives, and to do so in memory of Him. In these mysterious and sacred acts of
storytelling and our reception of them, the most profound potential of story is
made real among us: viz., our deepest hungers and needs are met and we are made
truly human as we accept a central place in God’s own life and allow God a
place in ours. In so many ways our capacity for story is a blessing.
But not
always! Sometimes we do
get caught up in or substitute stories that are unworthy of us and therefore of
God as well. When we do, we are deeply diminished. For instance, when young
people opt to join a gang, they are telling themselves and their world a story
of status, power, community and belonging rather than the story of relative
powerlessness and emptiness they feel caught in. Or consider the kinds of
stories adults who choose to have affairs tell themselves --- stories our world
colludes in in every way possible, stories about a selfish notion of “Freedom”
and love, eternal youth, the importance of physical attractiveness and
immediate gratification.
It
shouldn’t surprise us then that the Genesis account of humanity’s “fall from
Grace” centers around the fact that, at evil’s urging, Adam and Eve swap the
story they experience as they walk intimately with God --- the story about
themselves, their world, and God’s place in it with them -- for another view of
reality they prefer to believe. In THIS story eating from the tree of knowledge
of good and evil (rather than knowing just the truly Good) will supposedly not
bring death. In THIS story God is portrayed as petty and a liar. In this story human
maturity and responsibility is exchanged for self-consciousness, fear, and a
blame game that we recognize replaying in one form and another every evening on
some versions of the “news.” To choose a false narrative or to be caught up by
such a story in this way is the very essence of sin. It separates us from the
very source of life and light, it cripples our relationships, and it weakens
and even destroys our capacity for truth. Sometimes the stories we embrace and
hand on as truth are a curse.
If the fact
that we are hard-wired for story is both blessing and curse, then it is also
the way home. You see, it is not just that we are hard-wired for story; it is that we are made, hard-wired even, for God's own story. The cycle of
stories we began just 4 weeks ago says that in our lostness, God comes to us in
Christ and in Christ, God works to free us from sin – the state where we miss
the mark of our true humanity --- and gives us a new home – a new narrative in
which we can be our real selves. Jesus frees us from the distorted, inadequate,
and unworthy scripts and stories we live by. One of the ways he does this is
with the powerful and uniquely engaging stories we call parables. In telling us
these stories he offers us a place to stand in God’s own story, God’s own
reign, as he makes our own stories his.
What Jesus
typically does in his parables is to throw down one set of values, a single
perspective, one story or situation his hearers know well and identify with personally.
They will begin spinning the story as soon as Jesus, speaking with a wholly unique
authority, says The Kingdom of God is like, and follows it with something even
as brief as “A man had two sons” or “Ten lepers were coming along the road”. In
this way the story (and its storyteller!) draws us in and engages our hearts
and minds (and so, probably some prejudices as well!). And then, just as his
hearers have settled down comfortably in this well-known story Jesus throws
down a second perspective or set of values (viz., those of the Kingdom of God) which clearly clashes with the first. Because we are firmly planted in the first set of values, the first script
or story, the resulting clash disorients us and throws us off balance. Being
off-footed in this way means Jesus’ parables help free us from our embeddedness
or enmeshment in other narratives; it creates a moment of “KRISIS” (crisis) or
decision; it summons us to choose in which reality we will stand firmly, which story
we will make our own. This is what Advent asks us to consider, the question
that stands behind Isaiah’s invitation that we Prepare the way of the Lord
In
today’s Gospel, two women, one only 12 yo and on the cusp of marriage and motherhood -- and the other beyond childbearing age and barren, have allowed their own
stories to be broken open by the unfathomable mercy of God. In a culture where especially
the most “pious” or religious will ostracize, ridicule, and disbelieve them,
they were thrown off balance by their unexpected experience of a God who ALWAYS
surprises and have regained a new balance by saying yes to allowing (him) to do
something qualitatively new in and for our world. Their courage – and God-given
fruitfulness makes our world resonate with a new hope and promise. Like Mary
and Elizabeth, and like my friend Margaret (even in her limitations and loss)
-- none of us is too young
nor do we ever need to be too old to
similarly accept a new and deeper place in God’s story. After all, it is the
story we are made and most hunger for, the story which makes us true and whole,
the Divine and ultimately, the truest Human Story we are hard-wired for --- the
story
in which nothing is ever lost or forgotten. This is the great
conversion Advent prepares the way for – if only we can bring ourselves to say
a whole-hearted "
yes!" to making God’s story our own. What greater gift can we imagine
or be given?
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