The stories we tell–about ourselves, and the world–have the potential to trap or to liberate us. How do we change the narrative when it sometimes feels impossible? How do we make transformation?
Who doesn’t love a good story?
After all, it’s one of our most defining human characteristics.
Our early ancestors sat around in firelight, a storyteller holding forth.
For you, it might have been the epics of Lord of the Rings. The saga of Star Wars. For my childhood, certainly, it was the adventures of the Harry Potter books.
Perhaps you recently sat enthralled through a certain Game of Thrones finale. Or stayed up late finishing a particularly good book. Or went to the movies, to cry or to laugh or to scream.
We humans love stories.
We tell them about our communities, our societies, our nations. We tell them about ourselves. We tell them to try to answer those questions we sang at the very beginning of this service: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”
And the telling? It matters. Our narratives form us, influence us, shape what is possible.
I think a lot about the stories we tell, in my work as a chaplain. It is, after all, a ministry of listening. Of being with. Of exploring the stories of my patients alongside them–the good and the bad, the beautiful and the broken.
It is sitting with the dying person, as they reflect on their life and what their legacy will be.
It is supporting the patient who has just gotten a cancer diagnosis and cannot ask anything but, “Why?”
It is being with someone in the midst of a mental health crisis, as they tell me how badly they want to end their life.
It is journeying with a person hospitalized for an overdose, sobbing in shame for this latest relapse.
It is holding all their stories.
And I’ve come to understand that–there are stories we begin to tell about ourselves, over and over again, until they become so entrenched that it feels that they can never change.
Those become our sacred texts, our ten commandments forever writ in stone, our doctrines. (And, yes, even we doctrine-free Unitarian Universalists have them). The story of “who I am,” set in immoveable granite rock. Holy and untouchable, even when the story has become one that does us harm.
I had a mentor in chaplaincy who once said, “We chaplains should take off our shoes every time we enter a patient’s room–for we are walking on holy ground.”
I feel that way about entering into that sacred space with my patients–the holy ground of their stories.
And one of the things I feel most privileged to do in chaplaincy, one of the most delicate and difficult and life-giving journeys that I get to travel on with people, is exploring how our stories, those sacred stories that feel set in stone, can move, can change, can be transformed.
In Unitarian Universalism, we believe that revelation is not sealed. The sacred continues to be a work in progress. And as a chaplain, I would say that this is true for ourselves, as well.
Sometimes those concrete narratives about ourselves can flex, can soften, can open up to change. And sometimes I get the immense privilege of being a part of that.
When I studied narrative therapy, they called this “reframing.” I had a professor describe it like a trajectory plotted on an x-y axis. If you change the angle, the slope, of a line (even ever so slightly), it may not look like much of a change at the time. But as the lines go on, the difference between the original trajectory and the one with the slight adjustment gets greater and greater.
As it is with math, so it is with stories. A small change in the way we tell the story of our self can have huge long-term effects. A reframe. A perspective-shifting question like:
Did I spend years struggling with addiction because I’m a moral failure, or because I experienced childhood trauma that put me at a higher risk?
Do I have depression because I’m weak, or because I have a chronic illness that shouldn’t be stigmatized, any more than other chronic illnesses like heart disease are?
Was I homeless because I didn’t work hard enough, or because systemic racism and poverty was designed to keep people like me from having opportunity?
Am I sick because God is punishing me, or do I believe God loves me and is here with me right now?
Am I a victim, or a survivor?
When we start to question the stories we’ve internalized about ourselves, we can sometimes open up room for new possibilities. Greater imagination. More love and compassion for ourselves.
But it’s hard to do that alone. And so it’s my great honor, as a chaplain, to be invited into that work with people.
But the more chaplaincy I do (exploring stories, changing trajectories), the more I find myself thinking about how this applies not just to our individual stories (the ones I listen to at the bedside), but to our collective ones.
The stories of our society, our world. The stories that, too, feel set in stone. Just how things are. How they must always be. The systems of power that we are powerless against.
I know you must feel it, too. The sense that so much of our world seems set on its course, too impossible to change, too overwhelming. Rising fascism worldwide. The threat of war and nuclear weapons. Concentration camps and children in cages and more, more refugees fleeing bloodshed only to find fear and violence where they hoped for respite. A system where healthcare and healing is treated like a commodity, not a human right. A society that places value on how much profit you can produce, rather than your inherent worth and dignity as a human being.
It all seems so much, too much, a gargantuan looming reality too heavy to be able to break apart. Something we can never be free of.
Something that wants us to give in, give up, accept and concede to.
A story too iron-bound for us to ever break through.
And that’s why I brought Ursula Le Guin to this service. Ursula Le Guin, masterful speculative fiction writer. Ursula, Portland’s own beloved storyteller. Ursula, who wrote stories of anarchist planets, and genderless worlds, and aliens who know ways to dream realities into being.
Ursula, who gave us that powerful statement Reverend Mira shared before: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
And then…I remember. We are not the first ones to feel this way. The world has been changed in ways that felt impossible before. We have spiritual ancestors who challenged the narratives of ruling kings, of slavery, of Jim Crow and apartheid.
adrienne maree brown, a Black social justice activist, writer, and scholar of science fiction, talks about how Black folk have always been engaging in science fiction–that enslaved people teaching their children how to read in the dirt of slave cabins, risking all to run away toward freedom, creating underground railroads…were all helping to imagine and create a future they had no proof would ever exist. She says this work that they did, “this changing the world willfully, is science fictional behavior.”[1]
The song we sang earlier in this service, “Come and go with me,” is part of this science fictional Black tradition, an African American spiritual that envisions a land of justice, freedom, and singing that those who created the song never got to experience–yet believed in and worked toward anyway.
The power of American slavery seemed inescapable—and yet those ancestors resisted and changed it.
Science fictional behavior.
And we need it today, this imagining. This dreaming of what might be, that never has been yet. This changing the trajectory of our collective stories.
We have not dreamed enough, the Reverend Theresa Inés Soto reminds us. “We have not dreamed that the systems that target us have no authority, have no right.”
What would such dreams look like? What would it be like, this world where new dreams, new stories might take us? Where the systems that target us, that target the most vulnerable among us, have no authority, no right?
What would it be like? To not live under capitalism? To live in a place where the sick are cared for? Where children are not in cages and millions of human beings are not incarcerated? Where all have clean drinking water and the planet’s ecosystems thrive? Where we honor elders and ancestors? Where we celebrate gender beyond binaries and love the neurodiversity of the human mind? Where we make art and dance and laugh and heal?
I often think of something my friend and UU minister colleague, the Reverend KC Slack once said: “Here’s the summary of my big dream for our collective future: What if we all had a nice time. What if we were concerned with not making life harder than the ordinary chaos of the universe makes it? What if it mattered to us that folks got to enjoy being alive?”
What if?
What if the world that we dreamed of building, what if the stories we told about it, was the world our Universalist ancestors dreamed of–one that said everyone is saved, no one is damned, and we will all end up together in the beloved community that awaits us, if we can create it. That our fates, our liberation, are all bound up together.
It’s a tall order. No small amount of dreaming. Might feel a little bit intimidating. Or a lot.
Which is why we cannot do it alone.
That is what Ursula Le Guin reminds us in her novel, The Lathe of Heaven, that we heard about (in brief) during the Story for All Ages. We get by with a little help from our friends. We dream together, because it is too much for any one of us to do alone. And because when we do try to go it alone, it can go all wrong.
So we need each other, in this work of dreaming. In this science fictional behavior.
And–it’s not going to happen all at once. It’s like those personal stories I spoke about–the adjustments in the trajectory that may look miniscule in the moment. But the change gets bigger and bigger over time.
So we must start here. Now. In ways that might feel small. In our own communities, with each other. In this church. In this movement of Unitarian Universalism.
Indeed, it’s fitting for this story-changing, this science fictional behavior, to happen in spiritual community.
Religions are, after all, all about story. About answering those questions of “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” About sacred texts that tell stories of genesis, of apocalypse, of hope. About what our shared identities, our shared commitments are.
And it matters who tells those stories.
For when only certain people, certain groups are permitted to tell our collective stories, it affects the stories themselves. And when the circle is drawn wider, and more voices are able to engage in story-telling, it changes things. Wildly. Earth-shaking-ly. Scarily, even, for some people.
That is what was so radical, so “threatening” about Ursula Le Guin when she came onto the science fiction scene (and why she faced so much pushback from the publishing industry): she was a woman writer in a genre dominated by men. She was telling a different story than what had so long been established.
And as in the fields of fiction, so also in the lands of religious community: who is telling the story changes what kind of tale is told.
We love our stories of Unitarian Universalism. The scrappy heretics who challenged doctrinal requirements, who rejected fire and brimstone for love and reconciliation, who were abolitionists and activists and Civil Rights Movement marchers.
And. So much of our Unitarian Universalist history, that we have named our churches after, and written down in books, and preached sermons about, has centered on the stories of “great white men.”
We love to talk about Unitarians Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, our Transcendentalist heroes–but not about Egbert Ethelred Brown, the Black Jamaican Unitarian minister in 1920s Harlem who preached a radical socialist gospel even under the threat of deportation.
We fill the air with names like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, William Ellery Channing, but not the Iowa Sisterhood of Unitarian women ministers formed in the 1800s, or Universalist woman minister Olympia Brown, ordained in 1863.
We treasure the European roots that gave us organ music and stained glass and structured liturgy, but are not always so open to music and styles of worship that our siblings of color (who are also part of our “we”) bring to the table.
And yet. Those overlooked stories have always been a part of us. And, right now, there are other voices, from among us, aching to be heard. To have a chance to be the story-tellers, too. Non-white and queer and trans and youth voices, to name a few.
Voices longing to invite us all into science fictional behavior. Into dreaming together.
If just one person, one group, gets to do the dreaming, it can go all wrong, like in that Story for All Ages today.
Instead, all of us need all of us. We get by with a little (or a lot!) of help from our friends.
We can start small. With ourselves. With this congregation. With this city. We can begin to practice the world that we dream about here, with each other. We can tell new stories and reframe old ones.
We may not know completely what the end of the story will look like—a world without racism, poverty, inequality…
After all, the systems we live under now feel as inescapable as the divine right of kings once did. It is hard to dream of a land where those systems (the prisons, and detention centers, and weapons manufacturers, and fossil fuel industries, and builders of walls) would have no authority, no right.
A land, where, as Reverend KC suggests to us, people get to Enjoy Being Alive, without “making life harder than the ordinary chaos of the universe makes it.”
We may not ever know what it will look like. Perhaps that is not our task. Perhaps what we are called to do is to open up the space for dreaming. For change. For possibility.
To begin healing ourselves, reframing our stories of our own personal brokenness and failure, and finding hope in the possibility life still holds open for us.
To care for each other, to listen to each other, to hold each other’s stories.
To read Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler and a thousand other story-tellers of speculative fiction (that any library staff or Powell’s employee would be happy to help you find!), to give us a taste of what another world could look like.
To begin inviting each other, in the words of that old, old song: “Come and go with me to that land, where I’m bound.”
A land still a mystery to us. A land we begin dreaming of now, so that future generations can have the space, the possibility, to begin building it. A land we plant seeds for now, not knowing how long they will take to germinate, not knowing what they will look like when they bloom–but trusting those who come after us to water and nurture them into being.
It takes faith, to do this kind of work. To act, not knowing how the story will end. To do, without knowing all the answers.
But if there’s anything being a chaplain has taught me, it’s that life is about being part of stories we don’t know the end to. It’s about not having all the answers.
It’s about not knowing what happens after you die. Guessing and hoping and wondering about an afterlife. Trying to figure out what the legacy of your lifetime might be, and realizing that you may never know how many lives you touched, or how you changed them.
It’s about understanding that so much of life and existence is still a mystery to us, and yet somehow holding onto the idea that it all matters.
That our own finite story is part of a greater story that goes on, before us and after us, stretching out into the universe, made up of all our stories.
That our stories could be threads in that larger story which could someday include a child (a long, long time from now) who learns about our portion of history and asks:
How did they keep on going? When the very climate was collapsing, and people were locked in (what’s that word they used back then?) cages, and people slept on the streets and drowned in rivers and died in wars because the powerful did not care enough to stop it? How did they not give up?
And the answer will be: We dreamed. We dreamed of you. We dreamed of liberation. We dreamed of thriving, not just surviving. We dreamed together, a dream of many voices that started in each heart.
We dreamed without knowing you would happen. We dreamed in science fiction, like ancestors have always dreamed. And then we did.
Friends, spiritual companions, beloveds–we will only get by with some help from each other. We will only get by if we ask each other: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” We will only get by if we dream, if we resist, if we change, if we rise.
So, I ask–will you “come and go with me to that land” where we are bound?
Let us join in the spirit of prayer.
Spirit of life, of love,
Of revolution and change,
Spirit which connects us,
which we call by many names and none at all,
We pray that you help us find our courage.
Our imagination.
Our dreaming.
We pray that you fill our nights
With visions
And our waking days with fierce love.
That you teach us how to let go
Of the stories that keep us small
And widen our hearts
To hold new stories
From many voices.
We pray for patience
With not knowing the answers,
And for hope and faith
To keep on, in the mystery that surrounds us.
May we remember our connection
To one another,
To the larger story that continues,
And to the love that holds it all.
May it be so.
Amen and blessed be.
BENEDICTION:
Friends, spiritual companions on this journey–as we just sang, we are now upon the threshold, facing futures yet unknown. May we find the courage to go into that unknown, that possibility, together. May we learn which stories we need to reshape, and which new ones to begin telling.
We humans, after all, love stories. Let us create this one–of more love, more liberation, more joy, more voices, together. It can start right now, right here.
This
is the day we have been given. Let us rejoice in it and be glad. Go in peace.
Practice love. Amen.
[1] http://adriennemareebrown.net/2015/05/02/afrofuturism-and-blackspring-new-school-afroturismtns/
Topics: Story