Each of us has a story. About how we came to be. About who our family is. About how we see ourselves and the world.
But how do we tell that story? What are the parts we include but also the parts we don’t choose to include? Who are the people we include and who do we leave out? And how, if at all, does that story change over time?
One of the privileges I have as a minister is that I officiate at memorial services. And more often than not as people talk after the service you’ll hear something to the effect of “I had no idea…. Fill in the blank here.” I had no idea they did this. Or that. I had no idea that was part of their story.
Yes, each of us has a story. It is a narrative that begins early on, in the things we are told about ourselves. Our story is shaped even before we’re the ones telling it. For some of us that narrative might be that we are, in essence, the center of the universe. We may be the hero of the story. For others it might be something closer to the opposite. We see our own stories as anything but precious and we may not see that story as being worthy at all. We may see our lives by the parts that are broken and hidden from sight, that we may want to forget. Maybe the best way to survive is to try to forget.
What we say and don’t say can tell a lot about how we see ourselves in relation to the world. How we see possibility or maybe the lack of possibility for ourselves. How we see ourselves as whole or not so whole. And seeing with much perspective can be hard because, well, what’s closer to us than our very own stories?
Truth is how we tell our stories is very personal and very close and all that can make it hard to imagine ourselves telling our story in a different way. Truth is sometimes we may get kind of stuck in the story we tell—how it is we see our lives. But sometimes it may be that the version we have really isn’t serving us all that well. Sometimes we may need a new version of the story we tell. But sometimes imagining that story may be harder than we think.
Let me tell you an example from my own life. A defining event in my life was my father’s death when I was seven years old. He died suddenly and it pretty much turned my world upside down. And the story that I came to have from that time was not necessarily helpful at all. Lots of well-intentioned people talked about how good it was that I was there to take care of my mother and that I was now the man of the house. And in the midst of that loss, at the tender age of seven, all of that was pretty confusing, if I’m honest. And for many years my own narrative of that time and that event was that I just really hadn’t handled it all that well—that somehow I should have managed it all better. What happened for me was the story kind of froze there. It would be a long time before I was able to really grieve that loss.
So years go by. Life goes on. I’m in my early 30s and my mother dies. And all of a sudden I find myself grieving not only her but somehow my father as well. Suddenly all that old grief starts coming to the surface for me.
Well it happened that it was around that time that I was teaching 1st and 2nd graders in Sunday school at my local church. Kids who were 7 and 8 years old, the same age I was when my father died. And one Sunday a proverbial light bulb went off. Suddenly I saw my younger self in these kids in my class. And suddenly seeing them in their own innocence I had a whole new perspective on that loss of my own father all those years before. That I was a child when that loss happened and not somehow an adult child who should have handled the whole situation better. It was that perspective that helped me get to a place of acceptance and forgiveness that I hadn’t been able to find before. Suddenly I found myself telling a very different version of my own story.
Sometimes life, and in my own case a good therapist, offers us an opportunity to change our story—or at least to enlarge it. It may be about time, or maybe perspective. Or maybe intention. Or perhaps grace.
But the good news is that sometimes we can find a different or more expansive story that can offer us healing and maybe even hope. Sometimes it may be the need to reclaim a part of or maybe all of our story that has been taken from us. Sometimes it may be that we need to reclaim some of the parts of our story that have been hidden in the shadows and need to come out.
It is a kind of bearing witness to ourselves and to those around us. A kind of reimagining and retelling that may offer new perspectives and new insights. It may be telling the story from mostly something that’s one dimensional and making it multi-dimensional. It is being able to see the stories of our lives as living things that can change and grow. Stories that can be seen through wholly different lenses.
Sometimes those stories are about families. Sometimes they are about communities. And sometimes it is important to look past just the single dimension that any story can be.
In a popular TED Talk, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about the dangers of limiting our stories too much. The talk is entitled “The Danger of the Single Story.”[1]
She says the single story is what you get when you compress all the complex stories of individuals or groups of individuals to a single, often oversimplified narrative. Told enough times, such stories get internalized, and we forget they are merely stories. She talks about growing up in Nigeria and how the books she would read were all by English and American writers and how when she started writing her characters and stories were a lot like those characters and places, how all her characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples. Years later she was able to read African writers and she talks about how the door that was opened for her by those stories. Her words, “I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.”
But still she talks about just how easy it is for us to have a single story about someone. Her words again:
“I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fid-e. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, “Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing.” So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.”
Adichie eventually came to school here in America and in the talk, she gives several examples where she — an African woman living in America — became the pitiable object of the single story. She talks about her American roommate shocked by her. How she asked where Adichie had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when Adichie said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. The roommate asked if she could listen to what she called Adichie’s “tribal music,” and was consequently very disappointed when Adichie produced her tape of Mariah Carey.
Adichie’s words: “What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.
I was struck listening to her talk just how easy it is to tell a single story. It is easier than having to listen to something more complex.
And I have to note, perhaps especially in the polarizing times we are in how much easier that single story can be. How it can be hard to see the humanity in others amid all the rancor and division. All too often the single story we default to isn’t helpful and may well be harmful. How life is so much more beautiful and complex than we would first want to believe.
As I find myself saying a lot these days, we live in complicated times. That complication has plenty of faces but it includes how difficult it can be to get to some sense of what’s real. Too often in these days of fake news and alternate narratives we can be left feeling isolated and alone. Perhaps it is in that very moment that asks of us a degree of humility about the stories we are telling, the stories we are assuming, the stories that perpetuate the narratives we come to hold.
The poem that Kathryn read earlier (“Candles” by Carl Dennis), about the imagined other path the writer’s life and the lives of their parents may have taken, every time I read that poem I find myself weeping. And I think that may be because it gets to some deeper truth. And that is the knowing that there is so much we can know but so much we cannot know. Like all the ways that life for us or for our ancestors could have been different, for good or for ill. How this life we know is about us but also so much about something larger. Some mystery we can only know so much about. How inherent in it all is so much that we may never fully know.
How we recognize over and over again that we are not our own as the hymn we sang earlier says: We are not our own, earth forms us, human leaves on nature’s growing vine. Fruit of many generations, seeds of life divine.[2]
Our spiritual theme this month is commitment. One of those big spiritual words. But what are the commitments we make to ourselves and to others? To the communities of which we are a part? What are the commitments we make to the larger world? How is it we tell our stories, who’s in and who’s out? What might our new or larger story be?
Perhaps in the midst of this complex world we are asked to first make a commitment to live with open hearts and minds about how the stories we come to tell or hear or believe are living, breathing, multi-dimensional stories. That might be a commitment to ourselves when it comes to our own stories. It may be the stories of our families. It may be the stories of our communities. How we shape the stories and how the stories shape us.
How we are asked to imagine how there might be a different story or at least another version of the story that helps us see and know the world through a wider lens, one that takes in or at least tries to take in this wonderful and complicated and confusing world. For those of us who have known places of privilege that includes a willingness to get out of our comfort zones and at least be willing to name and recognize them as a starting point. That alone, I think, may be an important step in the process.
Perhaps the spiritual task is making a practice of noticing not only the story and who’s in it but to also recognize, or at least imagine, who’s not in it and why. Or to pay attention to what larger story is there in front of us but we just were paying attention to. To imagine how our lives might be different. To imagine some new version of the stories we tell. Of the stories we embody.
Words of Jane Hirshfield:
Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.
Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.
There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.
Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.
Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off—
the immeasurable’s continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.
In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.
I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.
I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further.[3]
As our stories unfold, day by day, season by season, may we tell them with open hearts, with open minds, with all of their power, with all of their promise. And may they help us to imagine a world where transformation is possible. Amen.
Prayer:
Spirit of life, god of many names and of no name, hear our prayers, hear our stories. Help us to imagine. Help us to envision. Help us to live in such a way that we might stay present to this beautiful and complex and unfolding world. In our living, in our telling, may we make it so. Amen.
Benediction
In our living may we tell the story of how love—and hope—are possible. And may those stories carry us to places we can’t even imagine.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
[2] “We Are Not Our Own,” #317, Singing the Living Tradition, Unitarian Universalist Association hymnbook.
[3] https://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/Poets/H/HirshfieldJa/Metempsychos/index.html
Topics: Commitment