Keeping Listening to the Story
My colleague, friend, role model, Mike Mather signs his correspondence “keep tellin’ the story.” Since he always writes “the story” not “a story” I think he must have a particular story in mind, though I’ve never known him to specify one. Based on what I know of him and his ministry, the work we did together when we both served churches in South Bend, IN, the Facebook-based conversations we’ve had in subsequent years, and the book he wrote a few years back—based on all this I feel pretty confident guessing what story he wants the person or persons on the other end of his correspondence to keep on telling. It’s either
The story of the teller’s own life and community—the true story of their life and community, they one only they can tell, or
The story of the paradoxical power that is released when self-appointed helpers with means and mainstream power get out the way so that ordinary folks existing (and often thriving) at the margins of society, have space and resources to bring about justice for themselves and birth their own liberation, or
The story of the good news Jesus taught as it shows up in neighborhoods today, or, probably
All three of these stories simultaneously–because really, though the settings, characters, and a few of the details are different, really these three stories are one story.
As someone who makes my living telling stories I always appreciate Mike’s closing admonition as an affirmation of what I do. But there’s always a small, timid part of me that asks, “really? What story do I have worth telling?”
Yet, in his casual but insistent invitation to cast the significant events of our lives in narrative form, Mike assures his friends, colleagues, parishioners, co-conspirators that we are the authors of our existence and that the stories of our existence deserve telling. No. More than that, he assures us that as the authors of our own existence, we have an obligation to tell our stories, our way.
Telling our stories, the true and often beautiful, sometimes painful or distasteful stories of our lives and our communities, the stories of folks whose stories are habitually ignored, and the stories of how we see faith transforming lives—telling our stories is our most powerful tool for building the country, the world, we wish to inhabit. A powerful tool, as near at hand as our keyboard, our pen, our breath.
The power of story to effect change is why media exists (the old kinds like newspapers and radio and television and the new kinds like social media and digital media) , why film exists, why libraries exist. It is the reason for signs and bullhorns at rallies and protests and demonstrations—so the people can tell their stories—even if only in a handful of carefully chosen words. It is also why powerful people want to control the media and libraries, and suppress rallies, protests and demonstrations.
Telling our stories is a means of survival, and I can’t wait for January when our Soul Matters theme will be the Practice of Story, because I have so much more to say about telling stories. But in this month of the Practice of Deep Listening, I am reminded that so too is listening to stories a means of survival. Listening not just to our own stories. Not just the familiar ones. Not just the ones we’ve heard a hundred times or the ones that are easy to hear because they have plots and themes and characters that might have been copied from our own life stories–even if they are set in space or the Wild West, in a time long ago or far in the future.
In the pre-Apple Music days, pre-cd player in the car days, and largely pre-radio conglomerate days, I’d tune in local Christian radio stations as I drove cross country. I liked to check in on the competition, to argue with the preaching and occasionally, to agree in surprise with the preaching. These days I much prefer to remain in my chosen echo chamber—NPR, our own WRUU when I’m in the broadcast area, and the playlists I tell my phone to play through my car’s speakers. I’ve traded in local flavor and insight into the faith of large swaths of US society for the predictability and slightly less alarming and less anxiety-provoking news and commentary that I know I agree with. Perhaps some of you do the same—though I know some of you deliberately tune in to other sources to keep informed about other views and other slants.
It’s tempting, it’s understandable, it’s soothing. But it’s dangerous, too. Choosing to consume only religious news that doesn’t clash with our progressive faith, choosing to consume national news that only interprets events from the perspective we share, choosing to seek out stories that don’t much challenge our sense of right and wrong, choosing to listen only to music that suits my white, middle class, middle American of a certain age tastes.
The dangers of not listening deeply to all the stories—or at least a wide selection of stories from outside our echo chamber–is at least three fold:
One is ignorance of what others believe; what they fear; what they love so deeply they will do anything to protect; and what actions their beliefs, their fears, their loves call them to.
Two is earning the resentment and ire of those who are not listened to, whose stories are routinely dismissed or disbelieved or simply not heard.
Three is depriving ourselves of learning about and understanding and coming to see the truth and beauty in the other.
The practice of listening deeply–and as I did last week, I define listening broadly, expanding it to include reading and observing as well as the active, silent portion of a conversation and active, silent aural intake of a story being told, read, spoken aloud by another–the practice of listening deeply to those outside of the bubble of ourselves, our family, our closest friends, guards against those dangers.
There is danger in not knowing what others–anyone who is not in our kinship or friendship bubble–believe, love, fear because without knowing these things we, especially if we have power and privilege, are apt to deprive them of the things they need to feel safe and secure. Not always intentionally, in fact, probably mostly unintentionally. But intentional or unintentional, through malice or misunderstanding, or carelessness born of ignorance, the effect is the same: person, a family, a community, a segment of society left without not only safety and security but probably also without the things that make life meaningful and joyful. And our part in causing that situation brings us out of alignment with our values of interdependence, equity, generosity and especially, love. In this regard, failing to listen deeply endangers those we don’t listen to and endangers us by eroding our integrity.
The second danger–earning the resentment and ire of those we fail to listen deeply to, the other, those outside our bubble–is obviously closely related to the first. If a person’s or group’s beliefs, values and fears are unknown, they are likely to feel unsafe, and if they feel unheard and unsafe long enough, resentment and ire are sure to build. We see it in family life. We see it on the international stage. We see it at every level in between. We remember it happening throughout history. When pleas of hunger, exhaustion, or frustration fall on unhearing ears long enough, a child will meltdown, a people will strike or loot. It was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself who said, in 1966, that “a riot is the language of the unheard”.
The third danger of failing to listen deeply to those others outside our bubble of selfness–that we deprive ourselves of learning about and understanding and coming to see the truth and beauty in the their stories–is, of course, the flip side of a rich and wonderful benefit of deeply listening to the other, whoever they may be. Not listening removes dimension and nuance, wonder and discovery and some many elements of truth from our own experience of the world and life writ large, while listening (and remember I include reading and watching and observing through any of our senses in my definition of listening for today), listening deeply and well to the stories of others often brings us great satisfaction and even joy.
I first learned about Judaism, not from Sunday School, but from stories. The All-of-a-Kind Family books by Sydney Taylor, written in the 1950s but set in the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1910s. It wasn’t a scholarly introduction and it didn’t touch on contemporary Jewish life but when I did learn about Judaism in Sunday School, and later took classes on it in college, I already had some familiarity with practices and holiday– through those All-of-a-Kind Family books. For example, yesterday was Sukkot and I could still describe to you the sukkah that family built outside their tenement house and how they passed food for their meal through the kitchen window. I didn’t understand the nuances and the full significance of the holiday rituals but I began to that those five little girls who loved their local library as much as I loved mine, had a faith life that was not at all like mine.
As a kid I also adored a series of juvenile non-fiction books, mostly written by Sonia Bleeker, about different Native American tribes. I can still see them on the shelf of the library branch in the basement of city hall, across the corridor from the police station. Each started with a chapter about two representative children, and subsequent chapters imparted information about the geographic location of the tribe, about food, clothing, shelter, about agriculture or hunting and gathering, about settlements or more nomadic way of life. I suspect those books would hold up poorly today, in scholarship, in the characterization of Native Americans as exotic peoples who lived in the past but not the present, and in their lack (as far as I recall) of information about the impact of white interlopers upon their land. Yet the influence of encountering different cultures, through story and fact, remains with me all these years later. And for all the shortcomings of those books, they didn’t lump all Indigenous American people into one generalized group–a significant honoring of the reality of Native diversity that shaped my consistent recoil to this day, when I see songs, poems, stories, artifacts genetically attributed to “Native America” or “American Indian.”
Do you remember when you were a kid and read about a different culture for the first time? Or spent hours paging through National Geographic magazine at your grandparents’ house? Perhaps, like my siblings and me, you watched the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday evenings, and always hoped it would be a cartoon that week, or a short entertaining movie, but sometimes it was a short form documentary about the hibernation cycle of a bear or the varied ecosystems in a prairie. I was always disappointed those Sundays, but now more than fifty years laters, as I alluded to last week, I love a good science story on NPR. I love almost all the long form stories I hear on the radio–about individuals, about communities, about economics and science–the heartbreaking ones, the uplifting ones.
Listening to Mom read stories about Ella, Henny, Sarah, Gertrude and Charlotte growing up Jewish in early 20th century New York City, listening to my inner voice read Sonia Bleeker’s stories about Native American peoples, listening to and watching the nature documentaries on Disney opened both my intellectual curiosity and my empathy far beyond my middle-class suburb world. Entertaining me, and training me to try to feel life as another might experience it.
There are lots of different ways to define the purpose and role of a church. One of them is as a center for the telling of stories. For telling the stories I think my friend encourages us to tell–the stories of our lives, the stories of the lives of people living in the margins, the stories of the good news of faith, the stories that seldom get told other places. But equally important the church must be a center for listening to stories. For, while telling the stories is powerful and important, even sacred much of the time, it is not enough to avert danger or carry us through times of peril, though the story about the Baal Shem Tov suggests it may be. We must keep telling our stories and we must also keep listening to our stories, our collective stories, and the stories of those who through our listening are transformed from other into friend, into neighbor, into family. Listening to stories is an act as important, as powerful, perhaps more sacred than telling them.
The same is true of the role and purpose of ministry. My most visible role is that of a storyteller. That’s what I do on Sunday mornings and in memorial services and in my newsletter column. But my baby book said “Lisa loves stories and will sit for hours listening to them.” That hasn’t changed. That’s why I host Lisa on the Loose must every Thursday, because I want to hear your stories. I mean, I like drinking all that good coffee and eating all those good pastries and sandwiches, but I love listening to you tell your stories.
These two years just passed when I was your contract minister were a time of getting to know one another, a time of my telling my story and you telling your individual stories and the congregational stories. That they were, of course, a time of listening to the stories of the other party. That round of storytelling and listening to stories brought us to the time when you were ready to vote to call me as your minister and I was ready to accept that call. Now, another round of storytelling and listening to stories begins. Because, as Megan reminded us in her beautiful opening words at our installation service yesterday, we have arrived at the pages that connect the beginning of our shared story with the eventual, years distant, end of our shared story. The pages as yet uncounted and unwritten, of the story of our time as congregation and settled minister. The pages of stories of laughter and hard work, of tears and learning, of justice seeking and playing, of apologies and forgiveness, of discovery and creation and becoming. The pages of stories we will listen into being. Amen.
