CAC teacher Barbara Holmes finds strength in collective storytelling:
We are revived by the stories that we tell about our reality, our bodies, our spirits, and our God. These stories challenge and unsettle us. They touch us in places that facts seldom reach and often move us to action. Most religions have more stories than anything else. Whenever Jesus is asked a question, he answers with a story, a parable. “He did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34).
We tell our stories because all of us have survived something, because stories are signposts from the past that give us clues about the future. Finally, our stories are a witness to the next generation and an opportunity to understand the universal as well as the particular in tales of trauma, healing, and survival. [1]
Writing to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates names the importance of each person’s story:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. [2]
Holmes continues:
When I allow myself to succumb to storytelling, I sense connections to others that I seldom notice. I hear the black community’s story in the stories of Jewish persecution and the attempts to destroy the cultures of Native people in the Americas. My memories are specific to the sacred stories of my village, but these stories also resonate with others who have endured similar circumstances.…
There is a future because the stories are not locked up within our individual lives. Instead, they are held as precious elements of communal wisdom. Our stories do not need opportunities for neat resolution; they just need to be told over and over again … heard and pondered before the dancing begins—and the dancing will begin again because when we lose hope and joy as individuals, the community digs deep into its shared resources and starts the beat yet again. They tap their feet and drum the promises of God. [3] ==================================================
| Remember the Future |
 Click Here for AudioYesterday, we saw how the table does more than commemorate the past. Based on the Hebrew understanding of remembrance, when we come to the table we are inviting the power of God’s salvation in the past to find completion in the present. But the table is more than a time machine to the past; it is also a glimpse into the future.At the Passover meal, Jesus used the bread and wine to represent his redemptive death. The sorrow of betrayal, abandonment, and death was certainly on Jesus’ mind. His hour of suffering had finally come. But there was more on his mind than the cross. He said to his friends: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, he said, “Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”These words reveal that Jesus was not just focused on God’s past faithfulness or even his present work of redemption through the cross. He was also looking to the future—the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. At that table, Jesus anticipated a future table, a future feast, and a future cup. On the other side of his suffering, he saw a celebration. Revelation 19 offers us a glimpse of the banquet Jesus imagined. Known as the wedding feast of the Lamb, the meal represents the fulfillment of God’s redemptive work in history when all evil is vanquished, the innocent are vindicated, and the world is put right.Like Jesus, the earliest Christians saw the communion table as a prophetic symbol, a window into a future age. For those experiencing great persecution, pain, and trials, the table offered hope. It was a foretaste of the feast that was to come in a world without pain, where we will sit at a table with no traitors, with bodies that shed neither blood nor tears and where God himself will serve us.Therefore, we come to the communion table not just to remember the past, but to remember the future. We gather to feast on the imagination of Christ—to see what he saw, to fill our minds with the sights, and sounds, and smells, of heaven even if the darkness around us feels like hell. When we come to the table as Jesus did, we will discover it is where the past, present, and future converge into a single point of grace. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 22:14-20 REVELATION 19:1-9 WEEKLY PRAYER. From Thomas Ken (1637 – 1711) Glory be to you, O Jesus, my Lord and my God, for feeding my soul with your most blessed body and blood. Oh, let your heavenly food transfuse new life and new vigor into my soul, and into the souls of all that communicate with me, that our faith may daily increase; that we may all grow more humble and contrite for our sins; that we may all love you and serve you, and delight in you, and praise you more fervently, more incessantly, then ever we have done before. Amen. |
