The Story Ministry

by Beth Adams

        "We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it." (Patricia Hampi)

I never thought of myself as a storyteller. Finding that I am one has been quite a revelation and it has changed the way I go about my daily life. I have become, to some extent, a "fisher of stories," observing my life with a net in one hand. Often I don't know that a story has happened until much later, when, emptying that net, something gleams: something I saw someone do, an exchange of looks, a conversation overheard. It can be very small. Surprised, I realize that's it, that's the story, or at least where a story begins, because that little thing suddenly makes a connection to something else which it illustrates or illuminates in a wholly new way.

Some of this is merely a description of the work of a writer: that's what we do. But for me, still rather startled to find myself, at 47, developing my apparent vocation as a spiritual writer, the telling of stories takes on a deeper significance. What I have discovered in writing regularly for a parish newsletter is that my job is not simply to find and tell stories, but to share stories as if we are all sitting in a circle, and I gently toss a brightly colored ball into the center. What amazes me is what happens next.

It may come in the form of a note in my mailbox, or a phone call. Most often, someone simply takes me aside and says, "You know that story you wrote about the tree? It reminded me of something that happened once..." and off we go into that person's world, where I am given --- blessed with --- a personal revelation from someone else's life.

These encounters have taught me many things. One is that we are all meant to be storytellers. Everyone's life is rich and filled with significance and meaning -- meaning that is often only fully grasped when it is shared. I firmly believe that part of what we are doing together, as a Christian community, is to provide both an ear and a voice for one another's stories. We need to reclaim the oral heritage which is so often lost today, with our habit of passive absorption of input from various media, our reliance on skilled "specialists" to speak, write and interpret life for us, and the resulting lack of confidence in ourselves as inheritors of the great human tradition of spoken language. Human beings are social creatures. For millennia, our way of dealing with life, handing wisdom down through the generations, solving problems, and learning who we are has been by speaking together, often in the form of stories.

There's another reason for sharing our stories. A writer friend of mine lost her house and nearly all of her family's possessions in a fire. Before sharing a poem about that event at a recent reading, she said, "The fire burned up through the three floors of our house. My office and my books and my papers, including all my work, fell through all the floors and ended up in the basement, burned or damaged beyond recognition by water. I searched and searched but couldn't recover anything."

"But do you know what happened? The poems I had been afraid to send to people, afraid to share, were lost. But all the poems I had shared came back to me. People brought them back, on little pieces of paper." By telling our stories we give them an opportunity to live, and deny time its capacity to corrode and erase.

I have been continually surprised at who is touched by what, and by the depth of memory and feeling stirred by a small drop of my own words. Not only does this encourage me to continue, but it makes ever more clear to me that we are meant to talk to one another, that one life is meant to illuminate another.

The real gift of language in general, and story-telling in particular, is its capacity to touch universal truths about human experience. "You never know when one word of yours may become a ferry-boat for someone," goes a Buddhist saying. When you realize that has happened, it is impossible to take credit or cling to it in pride: another hand is at work, and it is our job to see this and say thank you.

When I think of story-telling, I recall curling up in my great-aunt Inez's lap to listen to tales of the Knights of the Round Table, or the Greek myths. I think of my father-in-law's memories of hot summer nights in Damascus, where families gathered on the rooftops to eat grapes and figs and tell stories, accompanied by the burbling of the men's water pipes. There are the women of my family, around a table after a holiday meal, knitting and sharing intimacies about their lives. I remember how I was encouraged by personal stories warmly shared with me by older women of this parish, during a year of Thursday morning Eucharists, as I slowly made my way back to the Church. I also think back to the Israelites gathered around desert campfires, and early Christians huddled in cellars, and of Bonhoeffer telling stories in a concentration camp cell of condemned men.

This is our human legacy. As Christians, we are following in the Master's example when we, with courage in ourselves and trust in one another, share our stories. We need to make more opportunities for listening and for telling, whether it is between friends over coffee, at a bedside, or during the gathering of small groups, both organized or informal.

The Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak labored under Stalin's oppressive persecution of the intelligentsia and the Church, yet his writing and thinking always bore the imprint of Christianity. He wrote: