Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine

Preaching.

I

Of Stories and Rituals

1

The Power of Storytelling

The stories we tell, whether human or divine, mythic or parabolic, order

experience, construct meaning, and build community.

In the aftermath of the massacres that occurred in Rwanda in the early 1990s, a woman psychologist was asked to visit one of the many refugee camps of Rwandans in Tanzania. It seemed that the women of that camp, though safe from the slaughter, were not sleeping. During her visit to the refugees, the psychologist learned that the women, who had witnessed the murder of family and friends, had been told by camp officials not to speak of such atrocities in the camp. The women followed this instruction, but the memories of the carnage haunted them, and they could not sleep.

The psychologist decided that in response to this situation she would set up a story tree: a safe place for the women to speak of their experiences. Every morning she went out to the edge of the camp and waited under the canopy of a huge shade tree. The first day no one came. On the second day one woman appeared, told her story, and left. Another showed up the following day, then another and another. Within the span of a few days, scores of women were gathering under the tree each morning to listen and to share their tales of loss, fear, and death. Finally, after weeks of listening, the psychologist knew that the story tree was working. Reports confirmed that the women in the camp were now sleeping.

This story of Rwandan women is difficult to forget. Although most of us have never witnessed the horrors of civil war nor experienced the aftermath of genocide, we can visualize women gathering under a tree to remember. We may not understand the specter of family slaughter nor comprehend thousands of refugees living in squalor, but we do know about fear and sleeplessness. Part of the power of narrative is that it enables us to make deep human connections that transcend unfamiliarity in locale and experience. Stories transport us to times and places we do not know. Through narrative, we become spiritual travelers undaunted by time, distance, or new landscapes. It is as if stories have mystical power to invite us, willingly or unwillingly, to enter unknown worlds.

The Power of Story

Stories make claims on our minds and hearts, often before we know why or how. We may be reading a magazine or listening to the news when suddenly, without warning, some tale of heroism or tragedy grabs our attention. We had no intention of being emotionally hijacked during the news. Nor was there any expectation that empathy was required for reading a magazine. We simply happened to watch the news one night or randomly page through a magazine at the dentist’s office, when suddenly we were hooked. We were drawn into a tale without permission, forethought, or desire to be involved. Stories, such as that of Rwandan women refugees, claim us with their power and sometimes carry us to remote places where we never intended to go.

The most compelling reason why stories have such power to engage us is the narrative form of human existence itself. Human experience is structured in time and narrative. We comprehend our lives not as disconnected actions or isolated events but in terms of a narrative. We conceive of our lives as a web of stories—a historical novel or a miniseries in the making. We think in stories in order to weave together into a coherent whole the unending succession of people, dates, and facts that fill our lives. The narrative mode, more than other forms of self-reporting, serves to foster the sense of movement and process in individual and communal life. In that sense, the narrative framework is a human necessity. Stories hold us together and keep us apart. We tell stories in order to live.

Stories are not simply heard or read or told; they are created. We use stories to construct meaning and communicate ourselves to another. Stories help us organize and make sense of the experiences of a life. Sometimes, however, we use stories to fashion a view of life for ourselves that avoids reality. We may also tell stories to reveal ourselves or conceal ourselves from others. Whatever the purpose, we construct stories to integrate the disparate elements of our lives. Family therapists Joy Friedman and Gene Combs (1996, 32) conclude that each remembered event constitutes a story, which together with our other stories constitutes a life narrative, and, experientially speaking, our life narrative is our life. For that reason, it is not exaggerating to say we are our stories.

Storytelling, as Dan McAdams (1993, 27) has observed, also appears to be a fundamental way of expressing ourselves and our world to others. Some of the stories we tell are passed down to us in our families or in the culture or in our religious traditions. Because of these stories, we ascribe certain meanings to particular life events and regard others as without significance. Other stories are our own creation. Still others are told about us after we die.

Because narrative is so essential for constructing the worlds we inhabit, sustaining the communities that hold us, and enlivening the rituals that shape us, we begin with a general discussion of the place and power of narrative in human life.

Constructing Meaning through Story

Stories are privileged and imaginative acts of self-interpretation. We tell stories of a life in order to establish meaning and to integrate our remembered past with what we perceive to be happening in the present and what we anticipate for the future. We weave many stories together into a life narrative that conveys what we believe to be essential truths about ourselves and the world. Each story, as a fragment in the narrative, is not so much an exercise in objectivity or a reporting of events as it is an interpretation of them. Stories do not simply recount what happened but what happened from our perspective.

This self-interpreting function is readily apparent in the daily rehearsal of stories or story fragments. It may appear that we are offering a commentary on the world, relating some interchange with a coworker, or trying to let our children know what childhood or family life was like thirty years ago. The primary, unspoken objective of our storytelling, however, is to provide an appropriate interpretation of our own life. The goal is not just to discover a world or provide an interpretation of the world that allows us to live in it but rather to discover and interpret a world that allows us to live with ourselves. We retell incidents, relate occurrences, and spin tales in order to learn what occurred, especially to me. Such an interpretive process makes the world more hospitable. By telling what had happened to them, for example, the Rwandan women were able to fashion a world that included their experience.

The creative and interpretative nature of the human narration is revealed in every story moment, but it becomes especially apparent in situations of disagreement or conflict. Although we may insist that we are arguing about the facts in the situation, the fundamental differences are often around the interpretation of the data or shared experience. Imagine seeing a Woody Allen movie with friends. In the conversation that follows, one friend may have been deeply moved, while another regarded the movie as mildly entertaining. Another friend may have experienced the movie as a mindless exercise in self-indulgence by the screenwriter-director-producer-star, while still another may have thought it to be profound. Although everyone saw the same movie, and although everyone may argue about which interpretation is more accurate or appropriate, from a narrative perspective, all views are correct. Each interpretation of the story achieves its purpose—an authentic report of the experience of the movie from the viewpoint of the participant.

Suppose, however, one of the participants in the Woody Allen movie experience felt isolated by the conversation because no one seemed to share her point of view on the film’s offensiveness. And when she returned home, she sent the following email message to a friend in Spain:

Sandy,

I have just had another lonely experience being with people. I am better off staying home. We saw a stupid Woody Allen film, and nobody else was offended by his sexism. I am tired of always being an outsider. I cannot remember the last time being with people made me feel less alone.

Janet

Janet’s effort to make sense of her experience at the movies with her friends was shaped by previous moments in her life narrative in which having a different perspective intensified her loneliness. Others might interpret that same experience of having a differing point of view as confirmation of personal uniqueness or as demonstration that most people are not autonomous thinkers. The meaning Janet found in this experience reinforced similar stories and was reinforced by similar stories from her narrative. We create stories and live according to their narrative assumptions.

Stories are mighty, however, not only because we shape our lives through them but also because they have the power to unsettle the lives we have comfortably shaped by them. In that sense, the narrative mode itself subverts our settled social realities. Our self-interpretation is not the last word, because our stories are not just our stories. When we weave together the human and the divine, we are attentive to another story that is not completely our own, a narrative that has the power to transform. When we are fully attentive to the stories of God, Brueggemann adds, it becomes clear that we are in the midst of stories—valuing our own past, pushed by ruthless force, oddly visited by the one whom we dare to call God (1990, 22). Weaving together the human and the divine enables us to hear our own stories retold with clarity and new possibility. And when our own stories are retold, our lives are transformed in the telling.

Because we live in the stories we create, we need to be sure that the stories we live are shaped, in large measure, by our own vision of life. Trying to live according to someone else’s story is like wearing hand-me-down clothes all the time. Therefore, the life narrative we compose should be significantly shaped by the choices we make and the actions we take.

Communicating through Story

Beyond being simply a character conveyed in the stories of others, each of us is the primary author of our own life narrative. We continuously and actively author and reauthor our lives through story, articulating for ourselves and others the choices we make and the things we have done. For this reason, it is important to understand a story from inside the author. When the stories we tell conceal rather than reveal our understanding of ourselves and our world, they isolate us from others. When, however, the aim of storytelling is to interact with others and identify common ground, stories have the potential to build authentic communities of shared meaning and values.

We interpret ourselves to others through story more often than we are aware and maybe even more often than we intend. Communicating through story frequently occurs when we attempt to teach a lesson or make a new friend or explain our behavior to someone in a narrative way. While the intention might be to impart a lesson to our children, we do so by compressing a series of tales from our childhood and shifting into storytelling mode. Along the way we reveal something of ourselves to our children. For example:

I don’t know what the matter is with you kids. You are always in front of that tube. When I was your age, we didn’t have a color television in our bedroom. There was only a black-and-white set in the living room, and we were only allowed to watch it at night. We spent much more time outside, playing ball or riding our bikes. Turn that thing off, and find some other way to occupy your time.

The social ritual arranged for meeting new neighbors or introducing ourselves to recently hired coworkers will often be filled with stories, some of which might be very revealing. Although the aim of telling the story is not personal sharing, we tell our story, or at least a part of it, to strangers. When we are looking for points of identification with someone we hardly know, we will tell a story. Sometimes we tell stories about ourselves because it is easier to talk than to listen:

I’m originally from San Jose, but I moved away for college. My first job took me to Dallas, but I always wanted to return to the Bay Area. My wife is from Dallas and always wanted to move up north. We came to San Jose in 1988.

In attempting to offer some cogent explanation to our daughter’s sixth-grade teacher why our offspring is so giddy in the classroom or uninterested in learning anything that is not featured in her favorite teen magazine, we may shift into narrative mode. Before we know it, we have conveyed a great deal of information about ourselves through the stories in this process:

I had the same problem when I was in school. My friends and I pored over every page of Tiger-Beat magazine. It was the center of our life for a few months. It was just a phase that didn’t last very long. . . . I was doing fine by the seventh grade. Kathy will get over it, too.

Telling a story from our experience is a common but often unhelpful response to a crisis. It is often more comforting to the teller than the person to whom the story is told. Simply telling our story may even be problematic, however, if it shifts the focus from the person in crisis to ourselves. Because of our anxiety or awkwardness or both, we try to comfort a friend whose mother has just been admitted to a hospital emergency room after an apparent heart attack by recalling a similar situation in our own family history:

It’s going to be okay. Remember when this same thing happened to my dad a few years ago? He gave us quite a scare, but he pulled through just fine. You’ve seen him recently—healthy as a bear, and as ornery as ever. Don’t worry. I’m sure your mom is going to be fine, too.

As the previous examples show, the external reason for telling a story may be to motivate our progeny, break the ice with a new acquaintance, resolve a family conflict, or maintain our equilibrium during a crisis situation. During the storytelling process, however, we externalize our internal interpretation of ourselves and the world. As a form of indirect speech, story reveals as much as it conceals even when self-revelation is not the intent. We may recount selected episodes, compress many stories into one, or sprinkle our speech with story fragments. Storytelling is so much a part of everyday speech that we are seldom aware of communicating in the narrative mode.

When Stories Conceal

Stories, as such, are not fundamentally designed to provide essential facts or data about ourselves or our world, although that may sometimes be a purpose. Even so, it is important that our stories fit the understanding and interpretation of our life by others. Sometimes our storytelling is used only as a tool to develop an identity and offer a respectable self-interpretation of ourselves for ourselves. Thus we shape the events and circumstances of our lives into a story that reinforces our self-identity and worldview without attention to the interpretation of others. When our narrative does not square with the stories that others tell of us, we isolate ourselves.

Consider the following narrative as an exercise in self-deception. Chris believes that life owes him much more than he has thus far received. At thirty-two, he is likable and seemingly well-motivated but always in trouble financially or relationally. When confronted with one more loss of a job, end of a relationship, or arrest for public intoxication, Chris will explain his situation by reminiscing about his wonderful childhood.

The way he remembers it, Chris was raised in an idyllic family setting with indulgent parents, who gave him and his siblings whatever they wanted. His childhood home in rural Ohio was spacious and well-appointed on the inside and crowned outside with a huge swimming pool. Because his parents entertained a lot, there was always a party on the horizon, with more than adequate amounts of food, recreational drugs, and liquor. Chris began drinking in his early teens, about the same time he began smoking marijuana. Things began to fall apart when Chris was in his early twenties. The family business failed, the homestead was sold, the money disappeared, and the good life came to an end. After a falling out with his parents, Chris moved to Texas and took a job waiting tables. Now he is stuck in a trade that he