Stories in Spiritual Life

At his blog Monkey Mind, Rev. James Ford has written a post about the role of stories in spiritual life.

He lifts up the value that stories can have, remarking “I suspect we in fact live and breathe and have our being within stories,” but goes on to say, “Ultimately our deepest experience, the opening of our hearts and our eyes is something that happens when we let go of every comfort, every story.”

I found this post challenging, because I have just over the last few years been discovering the power of stories to move me forward in my spiritual journey. I’m not sure I’m ready to let them go; I don’t think I could picture a life, spiritually nourished or otherwise, without stories.

About five years ago, I took a class on creating liturgy. The course helped me to better understand how a meaningful worship is crafted, from the shorter pieces, such as opening words, to the longer pieces, such as sermons.

One tip I picked up in this class was to begin each sermon with a story. Now maybe this seems like too easy a method, too much of a fix. But I was a beginner, and I needed some aid. Stories came to my aid.

At first I started with small stories, told in a few paragraphs in the beginning of the sermon. These were usually stories from my own experience. Choosing the stories helped me identify and understand the moments that had been important in my own spiritual development. But telling personal stories in a sermon, while sometimes helpful, can also be risky, and limiting. Once I had taken a few courses on the Hebrew scriptures, new possibilities opened up for me in terms of story telling.

Several of my sermons which have meant the most to me, and which I believe have been most helpful to those who heard them, have been examinations of stories from the Hebrew scriptures.

When I was growing up, I assumed that the only religious way to engage with the Old Testament was to agree with the “obvious” meaning of the stories therein. I’ve learned since that then that one doesn’t have to agree with a story to get great meaning from it. Now I understand better the ways in which people can re-read scriptures, sympathizing with characters that may be traditionally marginalized and offering new interpretations of what a story means.

Rather than offering easy answers, great stories are open to interpretation. Great stories make us work for meaning, and offer us the chance to arrive at our conclusions in round about ways. Often we reach conclusions that we might not have come if we’d tried to tackle a particular problem or question head-on.

In the Old Testament in particular, there are several stories which have captured my heart, and which I have preached about. Earlier in the summer, I posted a sermon here about Ruth and Naomi. As I read through the text and looked at scholarly commentaries about Ruth and Naomi, I became increasingly engaged with this tale. I began to really imagine these characters as people I knew, picturing in my mind the conversations they had with one another, the way they would have felt at various moments.

Imaginative engagement with stories has helped me to understand lessons about God and about myself I wouldn’t have otherwise.

And I don’t think the meaningful stories are found only in scriptures. I have started telling stories from children’s books in worship, whether or not the congregation has children in worship. In my experience, adults have gotten just as engaged with the stories as children do, sometimes more so. Tales of Wisdom & Wonder, by Hugh Lupton and Niamh Sharkey, is a book of stories from around the world that are nuanced and endearing.

Of course, you don’t need me to tell you where to find stories. Stories are in the newspaper, on our blogs, on the radio, in books, and many other media. And stories are in our conversations with friends, our lived experiences, and our memories. But for them to really mean something to us, we have to ask questions of them, such as “What is the Spirit doing in this story? Who do I sympathize with in this story? Who do I have trouble sympathizing with? What would I have done if I were in a similar situation?” By asking these moral and spiritual questions, we transform the story from a static text into something that can caution or inspire us.