A story is a kind of map, shared from person to person, whether written down in a book, or remembered by heart. A story can take complex ideas, abstract ideas, amorphous feelings and changes that defy communicating, and give them a form we can remember, we can walk around inside of and see from different perspectives. A story helps us see a cohesive shape of things out of a blizzard of moments and facts and data and feelings. Religious traditions are full of stories for this reason- they give meaning and shape to our often confusing reality. Personally, I love to read fantasy and sci-fi novels, but different kinds of stories speak more clearly to some than others. I know some baseball fans look at a box score and it tells them the story of a game.
Psychologist Carl Jung posited that the stories we share help us talk about our collective experience. The really big stories shared by many people speak to many of us at the same time. When we say, for example, “Moses leading the people in the wilderness”, with just those few words millions of people around the world who have been steeped in Jewish and Christian traditions can touch into that story in their imaginations and recall the arc of the flight from slavery to the promised land. When I say “down the rabbit hole” generations of people remember Alice tumbling from the reality of 19th century England into the bewildering and fantastical wonderland.
Over the past few years, I have often felt as if I was traveling without a map. I felt as if I had come to the edge of the map I had been using and gotten to the vague part where old map makers used to write “here be the dragons.” I’ve had dreams of driving down a dark road with no light, no map, no GPS. Even the stories that I had used to guide my way when I was caught in the weeds and couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead were no longer helpful, I couldn’t find myself in those stories anymore.
In my own story, my parents had recently divorced with much drama before my wedding day, so I knew that marriage did not guarantee any kind of happy ever after, But there was a time in my life when I completed the long arduous training for the ministry, became a minister and became a parent, and that did feel like a happy end of one story and the beginning of the next, full of promise and possibility. I was also part of the larger story which said that women could not be ministers, certainly could not be ministers and mothers at the same time, A story going back to Olympia Brown, first universalist woman minister in the 1800s, to 100 years of women working for women’s suffrage, a story that continues today as women still don’t receive equal pay. The simple story about becoming a minister and mother has been shaping my life for many years, a story I stepped into as a young woman, but as I approached 50 had come complete.
I felt this sense of disorientation in the larger world as well, in this time marked by Covid, but not just Covid, this time when our fears about climate change have turned into nightmares of fire and flood. In this time when the foundations of democracy seem to be sliding out from under our feet. In this time when so much is in flux people of conscience are demanding the long overdue end to racial oppression.
This summer I read a novel called “The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern, which spoke to that part of my soul that felt like it was driving down a dark with no map. Our hero walks from his ordinary life, in which he is a grad student, into a sort of wonderland, where things are increasingly fantastical. As he moves deeper and deeper into the story, he understands that this story has been going on for a long time, hundreds of years, and is now crumbling and ending. He is sad to have arrived in this story when it is just a remnant of what it once was, but, it turns out, he is here for the very end, the story needs him in order to end. The very nature of reality crumbles and swirls as he moves deeper and deeper, He spends quite a long time walking through shadows and shifting phantasms towards, he’s not quite sure what, until the whole story, not just one story, but a whole universe of interwoven stories, a whole reality that meant so much to so many, built with love and care and story and art by generations, all of it is drowned in, of all things, a sea of honey. What we the readers, and what our hero do not know, is that even as one story is ending, the seed of a new story is already there, waiting for the old story to end, and the new story to begin.
Aha! I felt, “yes, that is where I am in my story, where we are in our story right now!” so many stories we have loved and inhabited for centuries (and lifetimes and years, big stories and little stories) are ending, the nature of reality seems unstable, because we are at the end of a very large story, at the end of an age. Doubtless seeds of the new story are here among us, right now. But we are between stories, and that is a confusing and frustrating, but also sacred and sometimes beautiful place to be. This transition from the old stories to the new ones might take quite a long time. There are parts of the new story that only our children and grandchildren will see come into being.
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| Pausing in the midst of unraveling my work of many hours |
Imagine that you are the old woman in the story Weaving the World, come back from stirring your soup to find the tangled wreck of years of weaving on the floor? How would you feel? What would you do? I imagine I would feel angry, I would feel bereft and brokenhearted. I would probably call some friends who would understand. I know when something I have knit is ruined, I can’t just get right back to work, I have to pause and grieve what I’ve lost, all those hours, and gather some energy before I can begin again.
What would it mean to live for a while in that story of being in between an ending and a beginning? It might allow us to let go of the status quo. This is not the time to invest in getting things back to where they were in February of 2020. Too much has already changed. It is time to invest in the new story not the old. In this place it’s okay to set down our packs and weep when we need to. It’s easy to say “let go of the status quo” but so many comforting, normal, sometimes beloved things, sometimes oppressive and toxic things are part of the status quo, but if we understand that we are in a time of great change, we must set down the old story, piece by piece as we are able, and grieve what needs to be grieved, release what needs to be released. Like the old woman in the story, we pause to honor, grieve, release all that has unraveled before we begin again.
In this place may feel adrift, but that is normal for people of in-between times, like Moses and the Israelites in the desert, like Frodo and Samwise on their long journey. It is time to set up tents, and not build palaces. In a transitional time we build flexible structures that can change as the world changes, as our stories change.
Whenever we are unsure, we let love guide us. The stories of our collective conscious agree, Love guides where we need to go, which is to our hearts desire. In the wisdom stories we see that he love we show for others on our journey matters, the connections we make are never made in vain.
We are dreaming this new story together, in the collective unconscious not only of our small community, but all the imaginations all over the world. The reason humans evolved our capacity for imagination is so that we could begin to understand something we have never experienced. Let us imagine together a future where we live in harmony with the web of life, a future where those now at the margins of our society are welcomed to the center, let us dream new structures that are anti-racist and anti-oppressive -- a liberatory future.
How many decades did the suffragettes tell the story of a time when women could vote, could own property, could be educated before that came to pass, How long did enslaved Americans dream of being free, and still we dream of a time when all are truly equal under the law. When people are wandering in the confusion of this in-between time, let us be among those holding up a lantern, shining the light of consciousness, truth, justice on the path ahead, because whatever seeds are planted in first pages of a story grows in the pages that follow.
I spent last week at a conference of Unitarian Universalist ministers, and what we all knew, as we arrived from our very different contexts all over the country, was that so many stories, individual and collective, are ending, have been ending. And one of those old stories is the story of organized religion as we know it, and the story of Unitarian Universalism. If you look at the box scores of organized religions, you will see they tell a story of steady decline for decades now. Ministers and lay leaders have wrung our hands since I was in seminary about how to get back to the status quo, back to the time some of our members remember being children in the Cortland congregation and you had to get to church early if you wanted a seat. The stories we told each other all through that conference arose from our shared experience of life in our congregations, of life in this time of Covid, all wove into a larger story that there is no going back to the status quo. We can grieve that, we can cherish and love the way church used to be, but that is not where hope lies.
The world has deep spiritual needs right now. The world needs spiritual community, the world needs liberation from oppressive structures, the world needs a way forward into a new story, and if our faith, if our congregations are going to meet those needs, they will have to change. Hope lies in the truth that we are changing. Look around- look at this strange new sanctuary we have created together because it met a deep need in our own hearts. If we can grow something this strange and new and useful and meaningful, I have hope that we can build something together that will have a useful role in the story ahead.
The story “Weaving the world,” which was offered at our closing worship for the conference, did for me what stories do best; it took all the statistics, all the anecdotes, all the complex feelings and events and created a simple shape, a story shape that could hold it all. Friends, things have been unraveling, there is no denying that. We have been grieving that unraveling these past 2 years, and longer. I don’t quite know where we are in the story, are we still in the unraveling? Are we, like the old woman, sitting with the “tangle of undone threads? Is it time to pick up the loose threads and begin to weave again? I’m not quite sure. I suspect the unraveling will continue for some time, and I suspect the new weaving has already begun. But this story reminds us that even the most heartbreaking and complete unraveling is rewoven into something new by the spirit of life.
The hope I offer you today is that when a story ends a new story begins. In between may be a tangled mess of loose threads, or a period of wandering in the wilderness, but I have faith that among these tangles a new story has already begun, a huge story, big enough to hold us all.
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