Stories Matter
For the next two weeks, the Daily Meditations will be inspired by The Seventh Story, an e-book written by Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins, which offers a vision of love, reconciliation, and hope. Father Richard describes how stories provide purpose:
It doesn’t matter how old we are; we all need stories to believe in. If there’s no storyline, no integrating images that define who we are or give our lives meaning or direction, we just won’t be happy. I can’t imagine I’m alone in longing for us collectively to embrace a better story, one with the power to change our hearts and minds and enliven our imaginations. [1]
Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term “paradigm shift.” A paradigm is a set of beliefs, stories, images, concepts, and structures that govern the way we think about something. Kuhn (1922–1996) held that paradigm change becomes necessary when a previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork “fixes” that a complete overhaul is necessary. The shift in thinking which might have felt threatening at one time now appears as the only way forward and as a real lifeline. I hope we are at one of these critical junctures again. Might we be willing to adopt a new story, a new set of beliefs, values, and systems that could change (and maybe even save) humanity and our world? [3]
Brian McLaren uses the phrase “framing story” to describe a similar change in paradigms.
[A framing story] gives people direction, values, vision, and inspiration by providing a framework for their lives…. If it tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little reason to manage our consumption. If our framing story tells us that we are in life-and-death competition with each other … then we will have little reason to seek reconciliation and collaboration and nonviolent resolutions to our conflicts….
But if our framing story tells us that we are free and responsible creatures in a creation made by a good, wise, and loving God, and that our Creator wants us to pursue virtue, collaboration, peace, and mutual care for one another and all living creatures, and that our lives can have profound meaning … then our society will take a radically different direction, and our world will become a very different place. [4]
The Stories That Don’t Work
In their e-book The Seventh Story, Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins create a tale of the origin of seven stories of how humans—The People—interact and live with one another:
One day, a long time ago, one of The People saw another one of The People holding something shiny. “I want it,” said one of The People, so he took it. When he got back home that night, the rest of The People were amazed. “Because I have a shiny object,” he proclaimed, “You have to listen to me.” He told them a story about what he had learned about how to be happy, how to have peace and security, how to keep the shiny thing that he had found. The first story [the domination story] said that the way to be happy is to rule over others.
But every time that story was attempted, people were unhappy because the rulers oppressed them. So a second story was invented: Let’s overthrow the rulers. This [revolution] story didn’t work either because it just turned the tables, putting new people under oppression.
Another story began in which the old revolutionaries withdrew into their own isolated spaces and judged the world. Nothing changed. These island communities used the same old stories to run themselves, competing to be in charge … and dominating each other.
Meanwhile, the domination story and the isolation story had a business merger, which resulted in an experiment: if they could get rid of the people they didn’t like, who looked or sounded different, or whose customs weren’t like their own, surely that would fix things? Of course, that [purification] story just led to more suffering.…
The People still weren’t happy, and they knew it…. The People tried to convince themselves that things were okay by accumulating things; toys or nations, it was all the same to them.… The People kept hurting, and hurting each other. A sixth story [the victimization story] was created…. The People would make sure that no one would ever forget that they were the victims, that their suffering was their very identity, and that no one had suffered as much as them.…
Then, something new; a poet came to town, a storyteller who knew that the domination story, the revolution story, the isolation story, the purification story, the accumulation story, and the victimization story were all destined to fail.
They were destined to fail because they invited every human being, who is already interdependent with every other human being, and even with the earth itself, to pretend instead that we are in a competition.… The poet had a radical idea, the seed of a Seventh Story that will heal the world.… In the Seventh Story, the story of reconciliation, we still get to win, just not at anybody else’s expense. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.
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From our friend Gareth Higgins site, The Porch:
FULL VERSION: Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago this week, had been such a presence in Irish and northern Irish culture from before I was born that his death was more shocking than most. His distinction not only as a poet in the traditional sense, but a national wisdom figure had taken on an almost supernatural quality. He helped us know ourselves; and probably more than any other writer of his time, had things to say about the suffering arising from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. Things to say that transcended us versus them. Words that made things like pens and shovels seem like mythical artefacts, blackberries and skylights like miracles. Part of the point of poetry, of course, is to puncture our mundanity, revealing the beauty potentially underneath everything. Heaney, obviously, had a special gift, which he honed; I don’t know if he’s the best poet Ireland has ever produced, and I’m not sure “best” is a poetic category, but we needed him then, and we need him now, because he took what mattered seriously.
I once briefly worked for BBC radio, presenting an arts show; and when Heaney would appear on it (he was loyally generous to Belfast broadcasters), he communicated by fax. This was long after fax machines were unnecessary – but he didn’t do other forms of electronic communication, at least not with us (it’s well known that the last message he sent to his beloved was by text, noli timere, be not afraid. The Latin overcomes the digital tendency to superficiality.) Come to think of it, a handwritten fax sent by a Nobel Laureate to thank a production team for a good job felt a good deal more real than email. Perhaps he did consider fax to be necessary after all – it suited the humane depth you would expect from him in conversation.
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Celebrity culture and our current status hierarchies tell us that the meaning of our lives is proportionate to how many people are paying attention to our work (or even merely what we wear, or who we are seen with, or how much money we get paid). But that’s a lie. It doesn’t serve the common good nor our own individual wellbeing to remember Seamus Heaney as unreachably better than any of us, just because he was famous. Like all publicly successful artists, his prominence started out as luck.
The fact that he was a magnificent poet (which may be worth aspiring to) had little to do with his fame (which may be worth ignoring). So it is with all of us – your gifts are probably not proportionate to how many people are buying your books or records, or watching your films, or coming to your shows or festivals. “Success” comes through chance, being in the right place at the right time, or having something so awful happen that it attracts the attention of crowds.
Your book sales or social media stats or the number of people attending your community gatherings are not the measure of you – either your inherent value or what you bring to the world.
You are, we are like characters in a play in which all the roles are supporting parts. It’s the responsibility of poetry to help us value the lives that are usually out of the spotlight as much as those that are bathed in it.
It moves me to think that Heaney’s best known poem, Digging, is about something as small and as cosmic as the relationship between a son and his father; so mundane and astonishing as cutting turf and holding a pen.
I don’t know more than most of us about who Seamus Heaney really was. But his way of holding himself in his writing, and in public appearances, and the one time I talked with him – neither light nor heavy, knowing who he was but not letting it get in the way of your own unfolding – was one good answer to what we need right now.
To take life seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
To breathe before we speak.
To reimagine the places we’re from and the people we are in ways that honor both the light and shadow of experience, the shock and solace; and in the way we story them, make them a little better than when they found us.
We are each given a field to tend, and a shovel to dig with.
I am beyond glad that Seamus Heaney tended and dug the way he did. Because of that, he helped me see myself, and to see through the darkness that so often threatened to overwhelm me and my people, and the place I’m from, over and over again. I can imagine a northern Irish upbringing without his voice, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I am willing to risk saying right here that there is someone who needs your voice, today, as much as I needed Heaney’s then.
So please, keep digging.
If you haven’t started yet, because you don’t believe that your field or your shovel matter, or you didn’t know you had a field or a shovel, please, for the love of life, do us all a favor. Try experimenting with the story that you matter as much as anyone else, and that whether what you do is seen by millions or one person who needs it, the meaning of you may actually be found in interrupting the way you’ve always thought about yourself, and picking up the tool that has been waiting for you.
And just begin.
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Here’s the poem;
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
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