What’s Your Story? — Attending to the stories we’re living and writing new ones forward.
The following is an adaptation of the framing conversation that Mike Rusert shared at Intertwine and The Wildwood Theatre’s collaborative series “What’s Your Story?” It was shared on June 3, 2018, at the first of two gatherings. The next “What’s Your Story?” event will take place on June 17, 2018 (10–11:30am at East Side Neighborhood Service — 1700 2nd St NE, MPLS — Consider yourself invited! RSVP via Facebook or Meetup.)
So, why are we hosting this “What’s Your Story?” series?
We are stories. We are narrative creatures. Story is how we give meaning to and understand life. We’re like fish, and stories are the water we swim in.
We find ourselves living in big stories, sometimes referred to as meta-narratives, like “Western”, or “Progress”, or “Christian”, etc. We find ourselves living in other stories like “woman” or “man”, “black” or “white” (We experience these stories changing — becoming less binary, more nuance, fluid and contextualized).
We are raised in stories, the stories of our families or ancestors, the stories of the place we come from, etc. Our stories live in us. They are in our bodies. They are in the dirt we come from (even as we are so separated from it…).
These are all stories we inherit. There are also stories that take root in us through experience. We are creatures of pattern and habit, aren’t we? Most of us are still living the same stories we started telling ourselves (or internalized from the stories others told of us) from our experiences as children.
So, what are the stories you’re living in and telling about yourself and the world around you?
I’m a ____.
I always ___.
Are these stories serving you? Are they helpful or harmful?
We’ve come back to this nugget of brain science a number of times in Intertwine’s conversations: It takes less than a second for a negative or harmful experience to register in our brains and change our synapses, while it takes nearly 15 seconds for a positive to register (Rick Hanson, Ph.D. writes about this a lot — he refers to negative experiences as Velcro and positive as Teflon…). Surviving, it seems, has shaped our brains and bodies to dwell or get stuck in harmful or fear-filled stories.
This is not to say that all of our stories are negative. We have many stories that help us to be more present, loving and grateful in life. We have stories of resilience. We have stories of being cared for by another in our time of need, and in turn we live a story of giving and being available to others. We have stories where we exercised courage in being vulnerable and that act leading to deeper connection and relationship.
These are good and powerful stories, but if you’re like me (and all the rest of our human species…) these are one story amidst fifteen fear-filled stories at work in my life.
So, how do we live more life out of the one story, rather than the fifteen?
Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life, and you will call it fate.”
We’re engaging in this “What’s Your Story?” conversation to make the unconscious conscious. We’re making room to listen to one another’s stories. We’re making room to deeply listen to ourselves — to identify the stories we’re telling about and living with our lives, both the helpful and harmful ones. And we’re inviting one another to re-write and uproot those stories that would entangle us in fear and separate us from each other.
What if we lived stories of love, healing, connection and creativity? What if those took root in our bodies?
Now is the time I drop some Jesus stuff on you…
I find it ironic and heartbreaking that stories of Jesus/God/Christianity, for many, myself included, have functioned as stories of fear, shame and disconnection. Maybe since the time of Constantine (a symbolic beginning of Christianity being enmeshed with Empire), a major expression of the Christian meta-narrative has been one of shame and manipulation.
Maybe you’ve heard of “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” History tells of people in power, in order to maintain the status quo, using story as a tool to keep people afraid and control their behavior. And of course, this is still happening today. Stories or labels are used to separate insiders from outsiders, the clean from the unclean. These labels are nearly impossible to remove. They mark the chosen few and allow for the scapegoating, exploiting, and neglect of those on the outside.
This is ironic and sad because these are exactly the behaviors and ways of being human that Jesus and the movement he initiated were about undoing.
A little context…
Jesus was born into a time and place where peoples were distinctly separated by social class. Then, too, was a massive gap between the haves and the have nots. There were the religious elites and those in good relationship with the occupying power that was Rome, who were people of power and privilege. And these, particularly the religious leaders, maintained control of communities and society by controlling the stories or labels that people bore. People of power determined who was in and out, who was deserving and who was not.
Jesus was most likely a working class peasant, and one who was raised in and would have known well, the religious laws and traditions of his people. He could have spent his life stuck, but through contemplation and through deep and mysterious spiritual experiences (e.g., going to the wilderness, experiencing the teaching of John the Baptizer, etc.), he has this enlightenment — this spiritual awakening — that allows him to see the deeper story at work in his Jewish spiritual tradition and the world around him.
Jesus takes on himself a new (or maybe forgotten) story — a story of radical love and acceptance — that he comes to know as the core of his Jewish spiritual tradition. And then he starts living that story among the people. He lives this story both among the people who were marginalized and wore the labels of “unclean” or “sinner” or “WOMAN”, and those who were dealing the labels out (the religious elite and other people of power and privilege).
Moved by a deeper story, Jesus shows up among these people and he listens deeply. He points beyond surface stories. To the marginalized he says, “This is not your story — your story is beloved — your story is connected. You belong.” To the ones dishing out the labels, he says, “STOP IT! You are not more deserving or lovable than them. You are them. And they are you. Clean up your act and experience love.”
Jesus shows up in the world to help people identify their deepest and most real story — that we are all connected and that we exist in love. The story isn’t shame. It’s transformation. It’s not separation. It’s community. And his living and telling this story, as I said, launched a movement that changed human history. It also got him killed. That often happens when you challenge the status quo (think MLK, Gandhi, and all the unnamed women martyrs who’ve refused to live the status quo stories…).
Now, I’m not telling you this because I need you to believe in Jesus. What does that even mean anyway?
I’m saying this because the status quo and overwhelming way of being human at work in our world and in our lives is a story of fear and separation. And it’s KILLING US! There is so much pain and paranoia at work in human being right now.
We are in desperate need of ways to be human that help us live more the one story of love and connection than the fifteen of fear and disconnect. We need ways of being human make room for listening and digging below our surface labels and stories of separation. We need room to breathe and to fall into love — a love story to move us through and beyond our fear.
Where are your stuck in stories of fear and separation? What if we took time together to listen and identify those stories and begin to uproot them? What if we re-wrote our stories from love? What new story would you live and create in the world?
We’re exploring our stories to make the unconscious conscious and to begin imagining and living new stories forward.
One last thing. There are many ways in this one way of love that moves beyond fear. It’s not one religion, or philosophy, or mathematical equation that is the only right one. This way of love, this energy, this mystery, cannot be contained by a single tradition. And it can’t be stopped. Love is irresistible.
I see it in Jesus (and a Christ-Consciousness), and in Sabbath-honoring Jews, and in Buddha, and in my sisters and brothers practicing Ramadan. I see it in the work of The Wildwood Theatre, in the way your performances and conversations build our capacities for empathy and remove stigma around mental illness. It is in practices of contemplation, in therapy, and science, and medication, and art and music, and the walk you take this afternoon. It’s in your filling of the pages of the What’s Your Story? Journal.
What’s your story? Can we live stories of connection, healing and creativity? We can, through the power of together. I’m excited for the stories we’ll write forward!
