Our
Stories
“My
story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if
I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize
that in many ways it is also yours...it is precisely through these
stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often
said, that God becomes known to each of us more powerfully and
personally. If this is true, it means to lose track of our stories is
to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.”
Frederick
Buechner (Telling Secrets)
This
was the Contemporary Reading in Sunday's worship bulletin. It says
what I feel about our personal stories so much better than I ever
could. So many of us think that we don't have stories, that our
stories are not interesting, and that nobody wants to hear them, let
alone read them. I don't find that to be the case. I have to say,
though, it's easier to write about them as memories than it was to
live them first time around. When things are happening in the moment,
they don't necessarily seem like stories, so we just live them and
keep going. We sometimes, in the midst of telling someone else what
has happened, say, “You can't make this stuff up!” but we don't
take that seriously enough to write it down.
If
you think about it more deeply, our stories are our biographies—they
are what we will remember when we're older, and the bulk of our lives
is behind us instead of ahead. Our stories, with all the small
details included, represent the accumulation of a life, the
maturation of a personality, and the evolution of a soul. They are
important—for us to recognize our own developmental growth, and for
generations to come, especially those who may never know us as a
person, to know from whom they sprung.
I
heard someone say just the other day that they are destroying their
old journals because they don't want their children to read them when
they're gone. That made me so sad. Our children need to know their
parents as human beings with all the foibles and doubts that they
themselves entertain. They need to know we make mistakes, do stupid
stuff, and now and then, triumph anyway. They also need to know how
we think about things, how we handle difficulties, and how we feel about all that. These days, when I come across a letter written by
one of my grandparents or parents, it's like discovering a treasure
map. I hold them closely and study them for glimpses of the person I remember. Those letters tell me not only about them, but about
myself.
I
encourage you to take your stories seriously. When some event, some
memory, some facet that you hadn't thought of before, springs to
mind, write it down. When you have time—and you will someday
have time—go back and fill in the details. They don't have to be
factual to be true. If it's how you remember it, then it's true
enough. Don't lose your stories. They are the map of your life and of
your soul.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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