Mind Your Story

The Power of Liturgical Spirituality (Part 2)

Image by Petra from Pixabay

IT’S ALL STORY

What’s your story?

This question can be anything from an informal greeting as we catch up with a friend or get to know a stranger to a challenge as we face an antagonist or interrogate the motives behind someone’s choices. While we seldom expect the other person to respond with a detailed narrative, just asking the question reveals a truth about our human nature: we are creatures of stories.

Everything in our lives is viewed, experienced, and understood through a story. The words I am writing now flow from my story and, as you read them, they are being absorbed into and interpreted through your story. We are unable to function without the stories that give meaning to our existence and explain our place in the world. We are often unaware of the stories we ‘tell’ and how they impact our lives, but their influence is unmistakeable and consequential. From their earliest arrival on the Earth, human beings have used stories to make sense of their lives, relationships, and world. These stories were often ritualistic, even religious, and were carefully passed down from generation to generation, in an attempt to share wisdom about key questions and transcendent realities. As Brian McLaren notes, this means that we do not begin our personal and collective stories from scratch. From the moment we are born, our lives enter a story that began millennia ago.¹ And from the moment we take our first breath, every experience, insight, relationship, feeling, and thought is woven together into a story that shapes and directs our lives. As Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley write:

Human experience is structured in time and narrative. We comprehend our lives not as disconnected actions or isolated events, but in terms of a narrative. We conceive of our lives as a web of stories—a historical novel or a miniseries in the making. We think in stories in order to weave together into a coherent whole the unending succession of people, dates, and facts that fill our lives. The narrative mode, more than other forms of self-reporting, serves to foster the sense of movement and process in individual and communal life. In that sense, the narrative framework is a human necessity. Stories hold us together and keep us apart. We tell stories in order to live.²

The stories we encounter in conversations, books, and movies, and those we tell ourselves, become the myths by which we live. Some of these stories will be literal myths passed down to us from our ancestors. Some will become the ingredients of our personal mythology. The word ’myth’ in this context does not mean something that is untrue. On the contrary, as Marcus Borg notes, myths may not be literally true, but they are really true.³ Our myths shape us. “They are sequences of events that help us to understand the tidal wave of sensations that come to us. They put order into our world. They tell us what to do, who we are, where we come from. Is there justice in the world? How do we die? All the important things of our life.”⁴ We are all, as human beings, inescapably storied creatures.

STORIES AND SPIRITUALITY

At the heart of all liturgical or spiritual practice is a story—or rather a library of stories—that help us make sense of the world and our place in it, and into which we seek to live. Our stories are not just information. They are, as James Smith notes, “moral maps of the universe” that give us a vision of what a good life, a life of flourishing, looks like.⁵ They empower us to make meaning of our world, and to know what it means to live well. They inform us about what our culture expects of us and they guide our behaviour, attitudes, and understandings of how the world works. Every religion, every society, every group, every family, and every human being is living out their particular set of stories in the quest to find fullness of life. One of the challenges of our global community is that our stories often compete with or contradict one another and no story is complete or definitive. As Alice Morgan writes:

Our lives are multi-storied. There are many stories occurring at the same time and different stories can be told about the same events. No single story can be free of ambiguity or contradiction and no single story can encapsulate or handle all the contingencies of life.⁶

Some of the stories in our ‘collection’ will be less significant. Others will carry more weight and have a more profound influence on us. The most dominant stories in our personal and collective lives are what Brian McLaren calls ”framing stories”. These are the stories which inform, define, and shape all the other stories we tell ourselves. They are the ones that most determine how we engage with our world. And they are the ones with which spirituality is (or should be) most concerned.⁷ It is not that we “tell” our stories literally in words. It is that we embody the stories that frame our lives. As James Smith puts it:

The story becomes the background narrative and aesthetic orientation that habitually shapes how we constitute our world. We don’t memorise the Story as told to us; we imbibe the Story as we perform it in a million little gestures.⁸

The great challenge of our time, reflected in the results of the recent US election, and in the shift toward authoritarian leaders in some parts of Europe, is that, as Ilia Delio observes, we need a new story.⁹ To use Brian McLaren’s words, “Our societal systems are perfectly designed to yield the results we are now getting.” We have the world we have, because we tell the stories we tell, and they lead us to live the way we live. On a global level, climate change, poverty and inequality, violence against women and children, school shootings, polarisation, war, and patriarchy are all the products of our current framing stories. On a personal level, broken families, economic pressures, the mindlessness of much of our work, mental health struggles, and our commitment to fundamentalisms of every kind are all products of our framing stories. If we want a different world, we need to think and act in different ways. And that cannot happen unless we start telling different framing stories.

It is the work of spiritual practice—of our liturgies—to empower us to change the stories we tell, both personally and collectively. At the heart of every liturgy, whether religious or ‘secular’, is a framing story. The purpose of our liturgies is for us to remember—re-member—the framing stories of our faith that point us to a way of being that truly brings about flourishing for ourselves and others. It is to train us to think, imagine, and act in alignment with the vision and values of these transcendent, guiding stories so that we can create the kind of world they describe. Then, as we go into the daily routines of our lives, a little more practiced in these good, true, and beautiful stories, we begin to automatically act and relate in increasingly life-giving ways. Or, as James Smith describes it:

Liturgies are compressed, repeated, performed narratives that, over time, conscript us into the story they “tell” by showing, by performing.¹⁰

RESTORYING OUR LIVES

A significant part of the work of mindfulness, spiritual practice, and liturgy, is that of “restorying” or “reauthoring” our life narratives.¹¹ It is to become aware of the framing stories that are shaping our perspectives and behaviours, and to interrogate whether they are truly leading us to the life and world of flourishing that we desire. It is to identify what benefits and gifts are to be found in our framing stories and what dangers and deceptions there may be. And it is to constantly adapt our stories into ever-healthier, kinder, and more creative narratives. But as we work with our stories, there are few key principles that we need to be aware of.

Firstly, we need to remember that our stories are not, and can never be, reality. They are maps, descriptions, and interpretations of reality as we perceive it. As such, our stories are not fixed, but dynamic. They are—or at least should be—constantly changing, not just as we learn more about our world and ourselves, but as we learn to recognise that how we tell our stories is as important as the stories we tell. Whenever we tell any story, we highlight some aspects and diminish or ignore others.