Have you seen those family stick figures that people put on the back of their vehicles? They are very popular around here, in the Stepford Suburbs. I mostly see them on the rear windows of minivans. There's one Suburban kind of truck that I see around frequently, with the entire lower quarter of the back window filled with family stickers, including a baby girl with angel wings (which I find a little disconcerting, honestly). At the same time that I have an intellectual disdain for this kind of mommy subculture, I completely understand the compulsion. People just want to tell their story, and if their chosen tableau is their vehicle, who am I to get all haughty?
People - all of us - have stories to tell.
There's a great feature about memoir in this month's Yes magazine. Faith Adiele claims, "Official history is penned by power brokers, but the real stories are lived on the ground by ordinary folks. Memoir is the ultimate multicultural act." You can read a excerpt from her memoir at www.yesmagazine.org/meeting-faith.
When I worked at United Way, I tried to impress upon our freshly prepared campaign volunteers the importance of story-telling. They were mostly young professionals, eager to impress their superiors by working hard for the community and spreading positive PR for their employers. They liked facts. A lot. "Tell a story," I urged them. People will forget your statistics... even the important ones about overhead percentages and numbers of people helped each year... but a story can stick.
Adiele, a Mills College visiting writer with a Nigerian-Nordic immigrant roots, shares a story (naturally) about her own students sharing their stories and the boundaries that fall down as a result. I think instantly about the people that have felt comfortable in their cultural roles, confident in the rightness of their convictions, until they get to know someone who is different. It's easy to be a bigot when you don't know anyone with different skin. It's easy to be heterosexist when you don't know any gay people. It's easy to be an exclusivist Christian when you don't know anyone with sincere faith that differs dramatically from your own.
Somehow 'story' gets wound up in 'journey.' So telling our stories becomes part of our journeys. When others are inspired to share their stories with us, those stories too weave their way into our journeys.
In that spirit, here are two of my stories for you.
How I Became a Liberal
In first grade, 1976, I voted for Gerald Ford. In fifth grade, 1980, I voted for Ronald Reagan. These facts continue to amaze me 30+ years later. But in ninth grade, my only science option was General Earth Science. My section was taught by the assistant football coach. At the time, I had an extremely low opinion of his intelligence, but I'm inclined to think now that he really wasn't all that bad. During the first quarter, I disagreed with him about something. The details are long forgotten. But he squinted at me from over his lectern and said, "So you're one of those bleeding hearts who wants to feed the world, right?" Well I'd never thought about it like that, but I pondered for a second and answered with a strong and simple "Yes." It was my task from that day forward, assigned by my peers, to distract Coach X with current events so that he never got around to that day's science lesson. It worked fairly often. I still remember most of the chemical abbreviations from the periodic table of the elements, but mostly what I retained from that class was my political identity. Thanks, Coach X.
How I Became a Universalist
This story is really just an episode from my faith story that's brought me to the place I am now, but if my spiritual journey is a TV series, this might be a scene from the pilot. I had a high school beau (HSB) who was just not churchy enough for me. My family was a if-the-church-doors-are-open-we-are-there kind of family, and his family was thought that playing occasionally on the church softball team was plenty religion. It was my sincere hope to save his soul. Now we had a mutual friend who was even more churchy than I was (or maybe it's just that his church was a little more fervent than my own). HSB attended a youth event with mutual churchy friend and had some kind of spiritual experience. Mutual churchy friend called me the next morning triumphant: "HSB is saved!" Well he might have jumped the gun a bit on that pronouncement. Later that same weekend, I was talking with HSB on the phone. We had only one phone in the house, a wall-mounted dark red rotary dial phone with an extremely tangled cord. I would wind the cord under the door to the basement steps and sit there on the steps for a bit of teenage privacy. He asked me there on the steps about atonement and salvation, eternal life and the whole concept of being born again. I responded as I had been taught, and it went something like this, "Well everyone sins right? And sin has to be punished, that's just the way it is. So Jesus took all the punishment on our behalf so that we can go to heaven." I don't know the current state of HSB's spirituality, but I do know that once the words were out of my mouth, they stopped making any kind of sense to me. it was a long time before my childhood belief in substitutionary atonement was replaced by anything substantial, but the beginning of the story is on those basement steps.
Find someone this week: share your story and listen to theirs. It might be the most radical thing you do.
You're so fortunate that this occurred to you when you were in high school. I was in my early forties before I experienced any cognitive dissonance around atonement and what not:) But whenever it happens, its a good thing, yes?
Posted by: Dee Dee Allan | 06/19/2010 at 10:21 PM