"What Is Your
Story? - How Our Life Narrative Impacts Our Journey"
Rev. Alison Longstaff
Aug 5th, 2012
Grand River
Unitarian Church
Opening note. If this sermon sucks, I blame the Olympics. Just sayin’
So, “Who Are You? Where do you
come from, and where are you going?” How has the journey been so
far? Easy? or difficult?
What is your story?
Do you wish parts of your life had
gone differently? If you could rewrite
the story of your life, what would you change?
Here’s some of my story. “In the year 1985, I married my good
Christian soul mate---my true love. We
had many healthy, successful children, a beautiful home, and lived happily ever
after.”
Oh, wait. That’s what it was supposed to be. Actually,
here is more like what happened: I was nearing graduation with my four year
undergrad. I had dated some, but had no
idea what a soul mate was or true love felt like, and time was getting on. So at
the advanced age of twenty-four, I picked the guy who was the best fit so far
and made the leap. We declared it “God’s
doing” and, “marvelous in our eyes,” (that’s from Psalm 118 --- for if you can
quote scripture, it legitimizes a thing) we had a fairytale wedding in a big
cathedral, and set off on our life together.
Anyway, according to the script I
was raised on, my job was to become a wife and start cranking out Christian
babies, so that is what I was going to do.
Married? Check.
Crank out babies? Okay. Going
in, I thought fourteen was a nice
round number for children, though I was ready to settle for a mere seven.
We had one, and reconsidered. Did
things ever look different in real life than they had in theory! Ideals, scripts, and formulas are all very
nice on paper, but introduce a colicky baby, money troubles, communication
challenges, thirty degree temperatures and no air conditioning in a top-floor
apartment in Toronto, and ideals might begin a slick and sweaty slide into
“time to re-think.”
We opted to use the rhythm method
while we re-thunk. Consequently, we were
pregnant within a few months. (Our
rhythm method coach looked at our chart and said, “Huh. That
shouldn’t have happened.”)
So, nineteen months after the birth
of our first girl we welcomed our second. In the next four years we struggled
along, buying a tiny house and doing everything we could manage to keep above
water. In that time I was diagnosed with chronic depression and medicated; it
turns out that my inability to cope and oppressive sadness was not, after all,
because I didn’t pray the right way or try hard enough. Huh. What
a relief!
It was a hard awakening to begin to
realize that I may have been handed a faulty package of goods in my upbringing,
especially when some others I knew, particularly an older sister, seemed to be
managing just fine with six, then seven, then eight kids, no money, and her own
marriage challenges. Ah well, I must
take ownership of the fact that there was something in my nature that wanted the security
of a “God-ordained” formula. “If I
simply prayed for it and did X, Y, and Z, my life would be blessed because I
would be following God’s will.”
So for many years I was caught
between my desire to do what I had been taught was God’s will for me and my own
misery. It took suicidal ideation to
finally force me to think for myself: I
was left deciding that either, a) I was a failure in God’s eyes OR, b) that
what I had been taught for all those years about God’s will, was faulty.
I get points for truly wanting to be
a good person, but oh, the bumps and knocks it took to jolt me off the path of
“righteousness”! I suppose sometimes
clay has to be pounded good and hard before it is malleable enough to work with.
As I approached thirty, my husband
and I had to decide if we would try one more time for a boy or if I would get
spayed then and there. We opted to try
one more time, and indeed got a boy! A very
unique boy---a boy who has taught us
worlds, brought much joy, and led us into the complex and challenging world of
autism spectrum disorders. Gifted,
magical, and very, very different, he was nowhere in my already seriously
altered script. But we struggled on, finally getting a great house with a big
yard in Kitchener, and the proverbial dog and two cats.
It was somewhere shortly after 911,
when my wusband lost his job and could not find another, when we were burning
through our meager savings and finally had to sell our dream house---the house we
were going to retire in---that I finally threw out my script altogether. It was high time to face and live the life that
I had, as opposed to the life I was supposed to have had.
A word about approaching life with a
script: having a script of how my life would go if I just “did God’s will” gave
me a feeling of safety. There wasn’t a lot of fear in me when I stepped into
adult life because I was so certain I was doing what God had planned for me to
do. What did I have to fear? I was going to follow God’s plan perfectly,
and all would be well. It took quite a
while before my iron determination to do just that cracked. Reality had a Chinese-water-torture
persistence about it, and my iron will leaked, split, and finally gave way like
the proverbial Dutch dike.
So, what I’m here to talk about this
morning is the power of our stories. We
live in story, grow up on stories, are taught by fable and story, and when we
are together, a great deal of what we do together is share stories.
Wisdom and morality teaching through
story and parable is found in every culture all the way back to the beginning
of time. It is as if we humans are hard-wired
to learn best through metaphor and myth, analogy and fable, and “The boy who
cried wolf.” Our stories teach us and
shape us.
One
example can be found in the Christian Bible: “And with many such parables He
spoke the word to them as they were able to hear it.34 But without a parable He did not speak to them.” Mark 4: 33-34
The legal profession is all about
whose story is more truthful and who is lying. Politics are all about spinning
the story and whose spin will trump the others’.
And don’t we love it when one story
binds us all together and captures our imaginations? Look at Harry Potter, or the Olympic Games, or
simply “Canada reads….”
Our stories shape us and bind us
together, for good or ill.
And that is where I’m headed in all
this. Our stories have power over
us. But we can have power over our story
in turn. I was raised on the story that God
said that my best purpose in life was marriage and child-bearing. I had to reach a place where I was ready to throw
out that story before I could be open to anything different.
My new story is that God has quite
the sense of humour.
Between 1997 and 2001, due to
working through the Artist’s Way, a novel dropped into my consciousness. The writing of it was soul-filling,
challenging, and joyful. It provided an
artistic outlet that helped me wrestle with the difference between my dreams of
what my life was supposed to be and how it actually was turning out. When I started putting down the opening
chapters, my story about this new
adventure was, “Well, I’m writing something, but it will never be
published.” A few months later my story
about it was, “I think I’m writing a novel!
I’m having so much fun! It won’t
be published, but….” A year into the
process I could say, “I’m actually writing a novel. If I finish it, I’ll see if it can be
published.” To finally, “It’s published!
Come to my book signing at Chapters!”
My story changed from impossibility
to possibility. I couldn’t possibly
become an author, and then I was an author.
My story changed me and I was changed by a story.
Here is that story! (Hold up my novel) I literally
got a new story.
Okay. Enough word-play.
Some of you may have heard of the
therapeutic practice of telling our life story in different ways. “Tell your story through the eyes of your
dog. Tell it as a Greek tragedy. Tell it as a comedy. Tell it as an action-adventure movie.” It is a process that can be quite eye-opening
and freeing.
It was healing when my husband and I
looked at each other and could change our story with mutual forgiveness. No longer did we even need to fake being
“soul-mates” (whatever that is), nor made by God for each other. When we could admit that we each had been
scared shitless at the prospect of facing adulthood alone---when we could both
admit that we each grabbed hold of the nearest willing partner that looked good
enough, it suddenly wasn’t so painful that we had such a struggle making things
work. It even got kind of funny. The more I could let go of how my life was
supposed to be, the more I could show up to how my life actually was. And how my life actually was, wasn’t all that
bad---it was pretty normal.
I found healing and freedom through
the practice of playing around with my story, though at first it was hard. I was pretty attached to my old
stories---first to my “true love” story, and after that to my “I was sold a
crappy bill of goods and now I’m miserable,” story. On my best days now, I’m in acceptance of all
that has happened, and even think a bunch of it is rather funny. My ex and I were smart enough to call it
quits a few years ago, and that was a good
thing, for example, not a tragedy.
The stories we tell ourselves have
power over us until we have the courage to test them. We humans seem especially prone to stories of
hopelessness and doom: “The NDP will
never win; they are too impractical.” “All churches are corrupt; I’ll never
find a healthy congregation to worship with.”
“My brother (father, mother, cousin) will never change.” “There’s no hope; I might as well give up.” “I’m too old to become an actress / learn to
play the guitar / try yoga / take ballroom dancing / or… fill in the blank…”
So tell me, what is your story? Did you approach life with a script? How has your life changed you? Do you have stories that trap you, or stories
that free you? Perhaps some of each?
On this planet we are people of the
story. We have shared our stories over
campfires, along the road, as we worked together in the field, as we sung our
way into battle, as we mark the passing of a life or the arrival of a new
one. Through fable and legend, myth and
sacred scripture, fact and fiction, we have been living through and with our
stories from time immemorial. We shape
our stories and our stories shape us.
What is your story? Amen
And now we will have a time of
processing. In your pews are papers and
pencils, or the ushers can bring you some if you raise your hand. I invite you to try to write a haiku of your
story so far. (And before you tell
yourself a story like, “I can’t write a Haiku!” just try it. You might find out something new.
If writing a haiku really isn’t your
thing, just doodle, or journal, but in some way remain engaged with this
morning’s material and meditate on it. We
will take about 3 minutes. And for those
like me who need a reminder, an English haiku is 17 syllables in three lines: 5
syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables. Any questions? Begin now.
(Sadly, most of the amazing haikus shared after this process are not included. I do include one.)
Starry bright-eyed girl
Tumbled under real life’s hooves
Bruised, not broken, writes.
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