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“The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Muriel Rukeyser (American poet and political activist, 1913-1980)
What’s Your Story?
Cave drawings suggest that stories have been with us since humans first walked together on Earth. A powerful story can do many things, such as help us make sense of our world or shed light on a dire situation that couldn’t get attention otherwise. On the downside, a well-told story can overwhelm the facts at hand. We’ll take a look at how stories unite and divide us.
Opening Words from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
As time went on, and the months and years came and went, he was never without friends. Fern did not come regularly to the barn anymore. She was growing up, and was careful to avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen. But Charlotte’s children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, year after year, lived in the doorway. Each spring there were new little spiders hatching out to take the place of the old. Most of them sailed away, on their balloons. But always two or three stayed and set up housekeeping in the doorway.
Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
Headed For Trouble
by Dick Skeen
The scantily clad hitchhiker knew she was in trouble the moment she stepped into the car.
The driver gazed disapprovingly at her costume. “Looking for some fun?”
“No…I’m just going to the beach.”
“Think so? Well, I’ve got other plans for you, sweetie, and they don’t include beaches.”
“Guess I’m grounded, huh Mom?”
The Caretaker
by Steven MacLeod
“Don’t walk on the grass!” shouted the little man.
“Don’t be stupid,” the large man replied. “It doesn’t feel anything.”
“You must care for it,” retorted the little man. “It gives us beauty, but it’s fragile.”
“Whatever.” The large man walked away.
Years later, each had moved on. Indifferently, the cemetery grass grew over both.
What’s Your Story?
How Stories Unite and Divide Us
by: Laura Pedersen
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen and Undecideds. Thanks to our worship leader Pamela Patton, our maestro Alison Sniffin and our soloist Michael Maliakel. Welcome to any visitors—who would be forgiven for thinking they’re watching an episode of that show “Between Two Ferns.” Actually, this is a support group for New Yorkers who don’t have summer homes in the Hamptons, just to make sure you’re in the right place. Actually, we’re downstairs for the air conditioning.
I grew up in Buffalo back when the area was 80% Catholic and if you said, “Whew it’s hot,” you could count on someone to say, “But we know a hotter place, don’t we?” I know, you don’t think of Buffalo as being hot. Hardly anyone had a-c so in the summer we just left our windows open and on Wednesday and Saturday nights you could hear shouts of BINGO ringing throughout the neighborhood.
Every Catholic family on my block fervently hoped to raise a priest or a nun while most UU parents were prepared for a confessional poet and a soil conservationist. By age 6 my Catholic friends all knew their catechism, 10 Commandments, Holy Trinity, and that you ate fish on Friday as dictated by the Bible in Paul’s letter to Mrs. Paul. When I asked my parents what we UUs believed they would just take a shortcut and name lots of famous Unitarians. We took pride in the large number of Unitarian presidents produced by our small denomination. Knowing how much we UUs love committees, I chalk this up to the fact that leading the American people is akin to heading the biggest committee of them all.
There was an Ethan Allen furniture store on our corner and my mother would remind me that he was also a famous Unitarian. My mother went back to school for nursing when I was in junior high and she made liberal use of my body when doing her homework. One night I woke up with a cold hand around my neck in the dark. It was the heyday of serial killers like the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, and the Zodiac Killer. I screamed and leapt out of bed. It turned out she was taking my pulse using my carotid artery. I said, “You scared the heck out of me.” She said “I didn’t want to wake you. But the main thing is that your pulse is normal.” At least it was until I’d woken up.
Whenever we went into Ethan Allen my mother would tell me how he got in trouble for inoculating himself against smallpox on a Sunday in front of a church at a time when it was controversial and required approval by the town selectman because one was supposed to trust in God and not look to man or medicine for help in such matters. He was fined, and a number of years later while Allen was waylaid in NY by the British, his son died of smallpox. Quite a story. However, as a child I thought it would’ve made much more sense to name a hospital after him, or at the very least a chain of pharmacies, rather than a furniture store. Somehow a vaccination crusader doesn’t bring to mind a new 5-piece dinette set.
Anyway, this was an anecdote of minor significance that I was told over 40 years ago, yet because of that story whenever I’m in a furniture store I wonder if I’m up to date on all of my vaccinations, and whenever I’m getting a flu shot I consider whether I should buy a new credenza.
As a child in kindergarten, the best part of the day was story time after lunch when the teacher would gather us in a circle and regale us with the doings of clever Charlotte and her billboard of a web or that poor Ugly Duckling. Story time came to an end once we learned to read for ourselves the following year (well, most of us, I was put in a reading group call the dinosaurs, which I tried not to read too much into), but that didn’t quench our love of being told tales.
In NYC I’m constantly amazed at the number of people, from housekeepers and subway conductors to sandhogs and thoracic surgeons, who head home after a hard day’s work and want to read a story or watch one on TV or play a video game that has a narrative. We use stories to put children to sleep and also ourselves. And even when we go to sleep the mind stays up telling itself stories! On top of that, studies show we have 2,000 daydreams every day. More if it’s a particularly harsh winter, or you’re on one of our social justice committees.
We all have our preferences for storylines that are sad, funny, true, or scary. In our free time we read them in books, magazines, and newspapers, and see them played out in movies or performed onstage as plays, musicals and operas.
In school, stories were used to help us synthesize enormous historical events such as Johnny Tremain for the American Revolution and Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln allegedly told Harriet Beecher Stowe “So you’re the little lady that started this great war!”
“Allegedly” is a wonderful word. You know the way Thomas Jefferson cut apart the New Testament and pasted it back together without the special effects? I’ve always wanted to take a pen and put about 4,000 allegedlys into the Bible because if it’s not just a collection of stories but the actual word of God and you aim to follow it to the letter then just for starters you not only have the right to kill anyone who trespasses on your property but it’s okay to bring back slavery and polygamy. I notice that people at All Souls tend to say “The historical Jesus” to differentiate from the “Walking on water Jesus.” Unless they spill their coffee, in which case “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ” is still the norm.
Johnny Got His Gun was assigned to us for World War I and of course Anne Frank to help understand the horrors of World War II. Lorraine Hansberry’s stage play A Raisin in the Sun depicted a single family fighting racism in 1950s Chicago.
Almost every time we turn on the news or pick up a paper a big story starts with an individual. “Fred Murray used to take his fishing boat out every morning in the Gulf of Mexico but since the Oil Spill he can’t.” Show the boat on land. Now we can get into the statistics of how much oil, how far it’s spread, and all the devastating effects. “The death of one person is a tragedy whereas the death of a million people is a statistic,” to quote none other than Joseph Stalin. The minute that spill was reported you knew it was only a matter of time before the oil-covered pelican showed up.
A picture also tells a story. After decades of famines in Africa where millions died and which people routinely read about in the paper — “another one”—a haunting photograph shocked the world in 1993.
It showed a vulture eyeing a single starving Sudanese child. Hundreds of people came forward wanting to rescue and even adopt this single child.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina a dog was shown stranded on a rooftop while the floodwaters encroached. I was well aware that many people were in similar circumstances and other animals too, so I was embarrassed by how much I wanted to save that one particular dog along with the thousands of other people who did as well.
War, famine, and natural disaster are often confusing and overwhelming until we can focus on a single being and say, “That could be me, or my parents or my child or my dog.” It reminds us that one million is not incomprehensible but actually one plus one plus one and so forth. I know I can’t save an entire country or city but I AM capable of helping one person or one dog.
Similarly, when an average Joe breaks out on a TV talent show and the video goes viral it’s so much more interesting than if they’d trained and practiced for years, paid their dues and worked their way up the ladder. It’s a great story. And one can’t help thinking, “Hey, that could be me! My special talent could be discovered.”
When I was growing up in Buffalo in the 1970s there was a big story unfolding just a few miles away. The ironically named Love Canal was the working class neighborhood built on a toxic waste dump causing residents to develop all sorts of cancers while their children were being born with horrendous birth defects. This is a case where corporate counsel and many local officials had an incentive to tell the story in a way that wouldn’t lead to expensive lawsuits and bad publicity. The residents weren’t doctors, lawyers, professors and journalists. They were factory workers. It was before the Internet. The recession was bearing down hard and residents were forced to move, quietly taking their problems with them. But Lois Gibbs, an area housewife, persisted in telling the individual stories of the people in the neighborhood—how they were denied healthcare and stonewalled and not compensated for having to move. Local activists took two EPA workers hostage. That certainly made national news! Had it not been for Lois Gibbs insisting that this version of the story be heard, Love Canal would not have become the first Superfund cleanup site with people being properly bought out of their homes and able to file medical claims.
Aristotle says in “Poetics” that storytelling is what gives us a shareable world. Stories help us make sense out of life. By trading subjective experiences we connect and identify with others. This transforms a biological existence of eating, sleeping and procreating into a human one.
Unfortunately, stories can divide as well as they unite. Every side in a war has its own version of events that can become a justification for killing. Terrorists are called Freedom Fighters at home. Churches are built over pagan worship sites and then mosques on top of those, thereby replacing one story with another.
You almost can’t have a religion without a creation myth and narratives such as those in the Bible, Book of Mormon, Koran, or Shirley MacLaine’s Out on a Limb. Humans conjure Gods and spirits to fill explanatory voids. I’ve always said that we’d have a lot more UUs with a good creation myth. Maybe a giant monster with a thousand heads, eyes, and feet whose body parts became the world. Oops, the Hindus already took that one. Honestly, can a billion people be wrong? Some Native Americans have the Earth riding on the back of a giant turtle. Then there’s the guy in the sky going on a 6-day work bender. Heaven and Earth hanging together in an egg-shaped cloud? The Chinese got there first. Scientology has Xenu, an intergalactic ruler, about to be overthrown, so he brings billions of people to Earth in a spaceship. They’re destroyed in a volcano but the vibrations produce a new population. People, this is very filmable.
How about something with vampires for us? They’re really in style right now. Maybe environmentally-friendly vampires who go around seeking alternative fuels instead of drinking human blood, which is probably high in cholesterol anyway.
As we well know, religious groups can do a lot of good work. On the flip side, more wars have been fought over religion than anything other subject, aside from gay marriage. The old, My God is better than Your God.
When I was a kid I read comic books and firmly believed I was Wonder Woman’s super-secret sidekick Galaxy Girl and would repeatedly leap off the couch wearing a green-and-white crocheted poncho with matching macramé bracelets. Fortunately, since it was Buffalo in the 1970s, our windows were covered with heavy-gauge plastic and no one could see inside.
As kids, most of us want to be superheroes, adventurers, spies or explorers. As adults, many of us still want to be those things, and watching an Indiana Jones movie can make us just for a second consider running away from all of our responsibilities. Fortunately there’s fare such as The Bridges of Madison County and It’s a Wonderful Life to remind us of the quiet brand of heroism that lies in staying the course. Or as that master storyteller Charles Dickens suggested in his most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, to discover whether we shall be the heroes of our own lives.