It’s dangerous to tell yourself stories are tame. To treat them as something that lives only between the covers of
a book. As something that can be easily kept on a shelf, taken down and put back up as we see fit. Stories are
wilder than that. And more powerful.
This month is all about remembering that power.
Indeed, who of us hasn’t felt controlled by a story? Stuck in a story? Hopeless about the way our story will end
up? Simply put, our stories often write us as much as we write them.
For instance, the author Rachel Naomi Remen talks about how her family clings to the childhood story of her
being the clumsy one of the family. Ask her adult friends and colleagues and they will describe her as graceful.
They’ve never once seen her trip over her own feet or drop something. And yet, somehow, when Rachel goes
back to her parents’ house or attends a family reunion, she spills coffee on at least one outfit, stubs more than
one toe and trips on more steps than she can count. By trying so hard to escape her family’s narrative about
clumsy little Rachel, she inevitably slips into it anew. Talk about the power of story!
That power plays out on a social level as well. Just think about our cultural struggles with economic or racial
justice. The unconscionable income gap is often described as “natural” or “the result of complex global dynamics
over which we have little control.” Similarly, the story of race in our country is too often told as an “entrenched”
story or minimized with a story about “how far we have come.” The aim of all these cultural narratives is the
same: to undermine action, and worse, to undermine our belief that things can change.
Which is why it’s so important to remember that the ability to tell a new story has been at the center of our faith
from the beginning. We rarely think of our UU history this way, but one of the beliefs that gave birth to our
religion was the belief that human beings are authors of their stories, not passive characters in them.
It all goes back to that old theological debate for which our UU forebearers gave their lives. All around them
people were saying that God had “predestined” not just the big story of humanity, but our smaller individual
stories too. Supposedly, the argument went, some of us were slotted for heaven and others for hell. And God
had written this list of sinners and saints in ink before the beginning of time. So there was nothing any of us
could do about it.
“Well,” said our spiritual ancestors, “that’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?!” And from there, they argued for a
different way of seeing things. “Forget this extreme fate-driven story,” they said. “Freedom has a much bigger
role than you’ve been told. God is not so much the all-controlling author of the world’s story as she is the
magical muse that lovingly lures us to make our narratives our own.” Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage.”
Our spiritual ancestors basically said the same thing but with a friendly amendment added. And it went
something like this: “All the world is an improv performance! Our job is to hop on the stage, pick up the storyline
handed to us, and then put our own stamp on it!”
So fate and freedom. This month is much more about the tension between these two than one might have
thought, leaving us with questions like: Are you an actor conforming to the scripts of others? Or have you found
your way to becoming the director and screenwriter of your life? How are you struggling right now to regain
control of your storyline? How are you and your friends working to regain control of the storyline of your
community, and our country?
No matter which question is ours, the answer, friends, is the same: Don’t give the storyline away.
Looking for more?
- Visit the Soul Matters Inspiration Facebook page.
- UUCM Members can access additional theme resource materials here.