This is what I shared in church on May 19 of this year. I'm posting it here in its original form, rather than going through and giving it another edit and polish. Which is why, at the bottom, you'll find a bunch of questions; I wrote this to be a kind of extended lead-in to a group discussion (which turned out to be a productive and thought-provoking one, and that's one reason I love my church).
My dad is a great story-teller. I grew up around thosestories and didn't realize until adulthood, I think, what a gift it is to be able to tell a story: you have to have just the right amount of detail, you have to have sufficient conviction to sound authoritative to your audience, and you have to have perfect timing with your punchline.
I took for granted that my dad's stories emerged from his mind fully formed and polished, ready for the telling. Then I went on a long backpacking trip with him. When we came home, we had lots and lots of stories. Wherever we went, family friends wanted to hear stories, and I heard my dad tell a handful of the best stories dozens of times. I began to notice that my dad would alter each story, just slightly, the first 4 or 5 times he told it. It was as though the story were going through a series of drafts until it was finally right – eliciting the response he wanted from his audience: laughter, amazement, warmth, awe – he was like a chef creating a meal to have the right balance of salty and sour and sweet and bitter. Finally the story would reach its final draft, and he would tell it almost the exact same way every time after that.
Telling stories is natural, which is not to say simple or easy. My experience listening to my dad's stories, and trying to tell stories myself, underscored this truth for me: I'm not the born story-teller he is, but in another sense, every human being is a born story-teller. Even Greta, now just shy of 2 years old, has a story of her own to tell: she scraped her knee two weeks ago, and multiple times a day, every day since, she's told us about what happened – how she fell down on campus and got a boo-boo on her knee, how Mama put special goopies on it, how it's feeling all better now, and how it's almost all gone. Story-telling is a way we connect with one another, make sense of things, and figure out our identities and our roles.
A few months ago I came across a study done by psychologists at Emory on adolescents and family stories. The researchers were looking at the relationship between adolescents' knowledge about their family history and those adolescents' well-being. They came up with a tool called the “Do You Know” test, which asked yes/no questions about “such things as how their parents met, or where they grew up and went to school.” The researchers also recorded dinnertime conversations in the adolescents' homes, and found that the “children that scored higher on the DYK scale were from families that told more familystories over a typical dinnertime conversation.” The paper, titled “Of Ketchup and Kin,” concludes that, essentially, when families tell stories, it's really good for the kids. Children in story-telling families absorb their family's unique history in bits and pieces, and it all adds up to a sense of belonging and helps in identity formation. Stories tell us where we fit in the grand scheme of things.
We just read from the book of Joshua. Usually the part of this passage that gets quoted is “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” But what I want to focus on is thestory Joshua tells, and the people's response, which echoes that same story. They say, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods” because “it was the Lord who brought us up from Egypt, performed great signs, protected us, gave us the Promised land.” Israel sees where it fits in the grand scheme of things because of thestories of God's faithfulness. The story of the whole family of Israel is integral to their identity, and God is integral to the story. Festivals and ceremonies ritualized the story-telling and eventually the written record set it down in a fixed vocabulary and order of events for future generations to reference and memorize and make meaningful to one another.
Over and over again the word “remember” is used in the Old Testament. God remembers covenants with human beings, remembers Noah and the animals in the ark and preserves them, remembers Rachel and Hannah and blesses them with children, remembers the promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Israelites are called upon to likewise remember their deliverance from Egypt and remember the gift of the Promised Land, full of “flourishing cities they did not build, wells they did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves they did not plant.” They are called upon to remember that it was God who delivered and God who provided.
But they don't remember, they don't tell the stories, and that's a large part of what the Old Testament is about: Israel's forgetfulness, waywardness, and the resulting violence, bondage, and desolation.
Yet the story doesn't end there, as we know. In fact, one of our purposes in gathering together each week is to tell the rest of the story, together, and to talk about how our own smaller stories fit into the larger whole.
I want to return to the Emory study for a moment. Because the researchers discovered something particularly interesting: the family stories that benefit adolescents are not just stories about success or happiness. The storiesfamilies tell about failures and disappointments also correlate with positive outcomes in the children, such as resilience and sense of well-being. The researchers speculate that these kinds of stories of hardship help adolescents deal with their own struggles, and provide them with a sense of connectedness because of shared experiences with difficulty.
For those of us on the academic calendar (which is most – all? – of us), I think that late spring is a natural time for reflection. It's a time when Marc and I talk about the past year, which is another way of saying it's a time when we tell stories. In the Hopi language, one is thought to face the past, and walk backwards into the future. It makes sense: what we usually think of as “ahead” of us is the stuff we can't see, and what we think of as being “behind” us is what we can see. I think it's another way of saying, the stories are what we have: to see, to know, to examine, and to help us move into the next season, semester, year, or stage of life.
So I want to gather up these disparate strands: the Emory study, the act of communal remembering in the Old Testament, the way the story of deliverance was revised and recreated in Jesus, and the way we narrate our lives as individuals, households, extended families, a church, a community, and whatever large- or small-scale groups we can name. I want us to hear each other's thoughts about how we can be good story-tellers. Here are some questions I've come up with, but feel free to go in other directions, as well:
How do we tell stories well, not only in the sense of being factually accurate (and we could talk about the role of facts in stories, too) but also in the sense of capturing the truth of God's presence? How we tell stories redemptively? How do we tell stories of difficulty or sorrow without glossing over the hardship or succumbing to despair? How do we fit our stories into God's larger story without using scripture as a cliché or platitude (“everything works together for the good of those that love God”)? How are we Christlike in our story-telling, especially considering that Jesus used stories in so much of his teaching? Again, don't let these questions I've just asked limit you.
