Have you ever struggled to explain how something feels? Like when there are just too many different things going on that you just can't find the right words to explain it? And then, finally, it hits you: this is exactly like that one scene in that movie, that book, that song, that TV show, that poem, that story! You feel just like that one character must have felt! . . . But the person you're trying to explain it to never saw that movie, read that book, played that game, heard that song, learned that story. If only they understood that character! Then you wouldn't have to struggle to explain how it feels.
I think this happens much more today than must have happened in "the olden days," when stories were all shared by oral tradition and carefully passed down to the next generation. Communities were smaller and all had the same stories, so you could expect that whoever you talked to would understand a reference to any of your shared, cultural stories. It gave you a shared language beyond just words, a way of communicating without needing to be perfectly articulate.
In our global society, it seems increasingly impossible to find anyone who knows all of the same stories you do. And I don't mean facts or historical events, but the spirit of stories, the soul of them. We all know the Holocaust was a horrible point in our history. We pass the story down through our education system which teaches kids things like which country fought on which side, but the story of Anne Frank gives us something much deeper than just facts, figures, and death tolls. It is only through the story of individuals whose lives were deeply affected by WWII that we understand the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank gives us a way for our hearts, our guts, our very cores, to comprehend the tragedy in ways that history books never will.
As a young child, I had a book full of Bible stories told in ways that were accessible to a young child. It wasn't literal, but it made me fall in love with the Bible. Not because it explained theology perfectly or articulated the dogma and doctrine of the church flawlessly, but because it gave me stories and culture. It gave me a shared language beyond just words, a way of communicating without needing to be perfectly articulate.
I think the point was to make me believe the stories to be perfectly factual, a sort of history lesson, but that's not what I got at all. It didn't matter whether any of the people I read about really lived; what mattered was that, suddenly, I could relate to people, I could connect. If Anne Frank wasn't "real," would mean that no one had ever lived through something like what she lived through? Of course not.
I am well aware that Harry Potter is not a factual story, but it is not the facts that inspire me or give me strength and courage, just as no historical fact in the Bible or The Diary of Anne Frank has ever inspired me or given me strength and courage. It is the stories and the human experience that they articulate that fills my soul, that helps me connect to, understand, and explain the complexities of our confusing world.
I found myself trying to explain how something felt very recently, and it occurred to me how much being a part of a very specific community has helped me feel a little less hopelessly desperate to explain the things I just cannot. My community happens to be a church (though we've been accused of being nothing of the sort over the years, most recently after reading from the Qur'an [in both English and Arabic] and having Dr. Maher Hathout preach from our pulpit on a Sunday morning for Faith Shared), but what we share is not so much beliefs but stories, both the stories of our shared Biblical text and of our community's shared history.
Whether it is Jesus overturning the tables in the temple or our previous rector overturning tables in the greater Christian community when he blessed the union of two people of the same sex for the first time in our church nearly 20 years ago, the Saturday after I was born, or Moses asking, "Who am I?" when called to the unfathomable purpose of leading the Israelites out of Egypt, I am surrounded in rich stories, not just facts, dogmas, or "souls saved" quotas.
It's so much easier to deal with struggle when you have such rich, shared stories with which to connect.
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