Tending the Hearth
Many thousands of years ago, before early humans figured out how to start fires on their own without waiting for random lightning strikes to spark a tree to flame, protecting the precious small embers became the work of a select few of the tribe. Their work was to keep the fire going. Guarding glowing embers throughout the night was important work, in some ways the most important work of the clan, because fire meant not only warmth for cold bodies, but also heat to cook food, and light for long nights. It meant protection from the predators whose stalking began with the setting of the daylight sun.
Tending the hearth, the sacred fire, became holy work for the fire keepers.
As with many chores, whether sacred or ordinary, fire tending was easier to do with the help and company of others. Despite the importance of this work, staying awake through the long night was challenging. To keep one another awake, the fire tenders told stories to one another. Stories were created about the beginning of the world, about the ancestors, their names and the gifts of life they brought to the clan. Stories were woven to document activities, and information was shared, such as where the animals tended to graze most often. Hunting stories were told of the ones that got away, and tales of success were also shared, becoming part of the tribe’s lore for generations.
Stories then turned into songs, sung with a beat or rhythm to remember them. The songs and stories inspired others of the tribe and became greater with each retelling, more important each time they were told, shaped anew by each story teller’s contribution.
That is the story of human storytelling.
But far beyond the importance of fire tending, and for long after a way to actually start fire had been found, story telling remained. Jack Maguire, in his book The Power of Personal Storytelling talks about this. He says that “once upon a time, people …created more stories about their life experiences. They told these tales to each other regularly, gracefully, and productively. They did it to give each other insights, to entertain each other, and to engage each other in times of celebration, trial, mourning, or reverence. But primarily they did it to connect with each other. Sharing real-life stories was an essential element in forging friendships, alliances, families, and communities. It brought individuals a greater intimacy with each other, and simultaneously, a stronger sense of self.”
Today, most of us in North America have sources of heat and light or cooking methods that are unconnected from any physical commitment on our part to tending the flame. We benefit from modern technology that provides us with heat and light.
But what about those other things that Maguire says that storytelling provides? What about our need to give each other insights, to entertain, to engage in celebration, mourning, reverence?
Do we need to, as Marge Piercy says ‘sit in the dark . . . and “utter our feelings, say what we feel and what we want, what we fear for ourselves and each other’?
I believe we need to tell one another stories of our lives to keep the fires of our lives lit. Today, more than ever, because of the frenetic pace of our lives, we must find the time, make the time, to tell our stories. There is too much at stake if we don’t.
But how do we do this?
Many of our religious education curricula include storytelling as key elements for learning our religious heritage. Timeless Themes, our UU curriculum for grades three and four, uses Judeo-Christian stories of our heritage to teach the human themes of our lives. Our youth begin each Sunday evening together by sitting in a circle, holding a lit chalice, telling one another of their lives. These activities “forge friendships, alliances and build community.”
What happens to us when we fail to tell our stories to one another? What happens when the only stories told are by storytellers with ulterior motives?
We know from looking at the history of history telling, that when only one voice is heard, or when the only history that is written is written from only one perspective, that invisibility can result. For example, recall the history books we used as children. In these textbooks, whole peoples’ lives, cultures, histories were eliminated or falsified.
Often, only part of the story was told. In the history of early America, the contribution of the slaves to the growth of the colonies was not noted. In the history textbooks of the 1950s and 60s that included stories written only from a colonizer’s perspective, much of the true story of what happened in an era or place was ignored or eliminated.
When this happens, and when the stories told only tell part of the story, whole peoples, cultures and places are ‘disappeared’ from the past.
How history gets written depends not only upon what stories we hear, but the sources of the information that create the stories. Last year’s disasters in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast provide many good examples of this. It was difficult to determine the whole story of what was happening in the first days and weeks following the disaster, but our TV’s were filled with images of vast destruction, suffering and neglect nonetheless.
Sometimes, different stories are told about the same events, leaving us to search for the real truth behind the story. The story changes depending upon who tells it. For example, many stations’ news coverage showed people taking food and water and other supplies from stores in the aftermath of the hurricane. According to Fox News, when the white people took these items, they were identified as heroes, while people of color doing the same thing were portrayed as thieves and looters.
As we demonstrated in our children’s story this morning, a story can change as it moves from person to person. In the case of a game being played, this can be a fun and inconsequential thing. But if we withhold our stories because of fear of how others might receive it, we not only risk losing the opportunity to share the whole story, we risk it never being heard at all.
Are there theological implications for not telling our stories?
Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker wrote the book Proverbs of Ashes because they believed that the real story of Christ’s life has been mistold, rewritten to benefit revisionist writers’ interest in a violent meaning of atonement. While doing research for the book, they found that early houses of worship had walls painted with images of animals, rushing water, starry night skies, and birds and flowers and nature. The meaning of Christ’s life was that of the peaceful kingdom, of harmony, of paradise.
However, during the time of the Crusades images of the crucifixion and suffering of Christ began to appear in religious houses of worship and in religious art. The story of Jesus’ life was being reinterpreted to link the violent death of Jesus with the concept of redemptive suffering. The crusaders’ deaths, along with their violent activities, were opportunities for salvation, sanctioned by the church. Domestic violence, rape and abuse are the modern day legacies of the story of suffering as a way to salvation.
Brock and Parker, in the introduction of their book reveal the struggle to write it without the including their personal stories. They say: “The mask of objectivity, with its academic, distanced tone, hid the lived character of our theological questions and our theological affirmations”. They were told, in the end, advised by close friends, that the stories matter. Their stories carry the theological ideas of the book. They decided to tell their stories.
However, “telling the stories meant [we] could no longer remain anonymous behind academic prose.” But according to Parker, it was the telling of the stories of what saved their lives that bore “witness to a theological vision for resisting violence and affirming life”.
In these trying times, stories that inspire and tell of the whole of who we are, seem to have receded into the background of our hurried, task driven lives. They have become less important, more difficult to find. We have a tendency to forget to take the time to sit beside the fire, to tell and listen to one another’s stories. It would appear at times as if all the storytellers have retired, have fallen asleep and forsaken this important task.
But, of course, that is not the whole story!
At First Parish, through our work with the Bridge to Biloxi program, Cynthia and her family have become real to us. We hear this in the stories of the volunteers who have returned from Biloxi. Our understanding of the lives of Jozsef and Anna and Piroska and Erzabet and our other friends in Szekelykeresztur, changes once we spend time sharing our stories with each other. Our small group ministry provides opportunities for telling our stories, as do our religious education programs. Our weekly coffee hour offers us a chance to fan the flame, tend the hearth.
We re-inscribe the truth of our lives when we share our experiences and exchange tales with one another.
For Brock and Parker, the inclusion of their personal stories is important for another reason, because the stories reflect a belief in a sustaining Presence, one that accompanied them throughout their lives. “In our efforts to cleave to life, we . . . found the presence of God.”, they wrote. They believed that the telling of their stories could prove “that life holds more than its destruction. The power of life is strong.” The story telling becomes, they say, part of what saves us all in the end.
If we do not create and tell our own stories, they will be written for us, by others who do not know us, and who cannot know our tales. We must tell our own stories to prevent them from being written by others. After all, we have important work to do, the work of the tribe, and we must help keep one another awake. Tending the hearth is our sacred and holy work.
So consider these questions: Whose stories are the ones that will be told? Which ones get written? Whose do we listen to, whose do we believe? What are your stories and where shall you tell them?
And, finally, what is the cost to us all if we do not tell our stories, if we do not tend the hearth?
The legacy of the firekeepers is ours to live. Witnessing our truths by telling the stories of our times, engages us in the process of co-creation.
Storytelling and songwriting become acts of resistance, insomuch as such acts confirm life, claiming them as our own.
Telling the truth of our lives keeps the ember fires burning. Our stories contain the fires that sustain us. The stories we tell honor one another and our ancestors. They help make us whole, they help make us holy.
Acting as co-creators with God, the abiding Presence, the Holy Flame, through tending the hearth that gives us warmth and lights our way, we keep the beasts at bay.
May it be ever so. Amen.
Reading from The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology by Jean Houston
Why is telling our stories important to our collective life? Humanist psychologist Jean Huston, suggests a way to heal from the collective trauma of others writing the stories that are not ours. She says: “How do you take your woundings, your betrayals, your ‘holes’ and make yourself holy instead of battered? This process involves the dramatic remythologizing of . . . life, and the gaining of a different perspective on the woundings and betrayals, the varied road of (the) trials of . . . history.”
Councils
by Marge Piercy
We must sit down
and reason together.
We must sit down:
men standing want to hold forth
They rain down upon faces lifted.
We must sit down on the floor
on the earth
on stones and mats and blankets.
There must be no front to the speaking
no platform, no rostrum,
no stage or table.
We will not crane
to see who is speaking.
Perhaps we should sit in the dark.
In the dark we could utter our feelings.
In the dark we could propose
and describe and suggest.
In the dark we could not see who speaks
and only the words
would say what they say.
No one would speak more than twice.
No one would speak less than once.
Thus saying what we feel and what we want,
what we fear for ourselves and each other
into the dark, perhaps we could begin
to begin to listen.
Perhaps we should talk in groups
the size of new families,
no more, never more than twenty.
Perhaps we should start by speaking softly.
The women must learn to dare to speak,
the men must learn to bother to listen.
The women must learn to say I think this is so.
The men must learn to stop dancing solos on the ceiling.
After each speaks, she or he
will say a ritual phrase:
It is not I who speaks but the wind.
Wind blows through me.
Long after me, is the wind.