Story of Me
The other day I met a very nice woman. She had a story to tell. At first, I thought it was a story about a trauma. The woman—I’ll call her Kathryn—was single and had lived alone for years. She was happy with this arrangement. Life had a rhythm that suited her pretty well. Work, exercise or socialize, and then go home to peace and solitude. But then one night, while she was sleeping—maybe at 2 or 3am—a man broke into her home and tried to attack her. She didn’t go into many details when she described this, but I get the sense she fought him off. I imagine her half awakened, realizing something was horribly out of place in her world, and then springing into action. She survived to tell the story, which means we don’t really need any details to see the amazing courage this woman has within her; courage and strength she probably had never realized were there. That’s one of life’s little ironies, isn’t it? We don’t really know how strong we are until we are put in the most vulnerable position we’ve ever imagined. There’s nothing like wondering whether you can go on, and then going on, to acquaint you with your inner resources. Well Kathryn found some extraordinary strength within, and she made it through that night. By the time the police came, the attacker had been scared off. They never found him.
This last bit was most unfortunate. Kathryn had made it through the traumatic night, but as is often the case with trauma, the real challenge was only just beginning. She was terrorized by mental playbacks of what had happened, struggled to make sense of it, and worst of all—because the attacker was presumably still on the loose somewhere, she lived in fear that he would return. For weeks she did not sleep alone at her house, but stayed with friends. However, this could not go on forever, and eventually Kathryn decided to try to move on with her life. That first week home alone, she says, she could hardly sleep. She checked the locks on her doors repeatedly. She kept a phone and a large knife close by. Every noise made her jump. And, she says, she left every light in the house on. Unbelievably, it was that same week when Kathryn again had to face a scary situation.
One night at about 3am, she was startled out of a restless sleep by the sound of her doorbell. It rang into the brightly lit house not once, but incessantly. (Pause) Kathryn cowered. She panicked. She called 911. As the sirens approached, she decided to try to peek out and get a glimpse of the perpetrator, if only to provide a better description to the police. To her surprise, there on her stoop instead of the man who had tried to harm her, Kathryn saw another woman. It only took a glance for her to realize that this other woman had herself just survived an attack. The police pulled into the driveway as Kathryn opened the door. I imagine quite a bit of chaos ensued. But later, when she had the chance, she asked the woman the question that –in one sense—had already been bugging her for so many weeks. “Why me?”...She asked the woman, “Why did you ring my doorbell?”
The woman’s answer? “I saw your lights on.”
Kathryn says that now she always leaves a light on. But it isn’t because she’s afraid to be there. It’s precisely because she is there-- for others.
…
There is no way Kathryn could have known how her story would turn out. Nor does it seem likely that she thought to ask herself that question. Before the woman’s startling reply Kathryn was in coping mode. In the middle of a lot of pain. For most of us, it is hard enough to get a balcony view of our lives when things are going normally—we just don’t think to pan back and ask how things are fitting together or how it might look further down the plotline. We are absorbed in the moments that string together into our days, and even though those days are in turn strung together into weeks and years that make up finite lives, we tend to experience them in more of a cyclical sense than as part of a line that begins and ends. Even the language we use to describe time is almost always cyclical: days, weeks, seasons, years--all begin anew on a regular basis.
To be sure, much about us truly is cyclical, right down to the atoms of which we are made. Our fragments belonged to this world far before what the Rev. Forrest Church describes as the “billion billion accidents” that had to take place in order for our unlikely existence to occur; far before we awakened to our lives, conscious, and began to consider such things. But at the same time, there is something of us that is clearly finite. Within all the cycles there is another truth, and that one is harder to take: it’s impermanence. The familiar life and the self-concept Kathryn had before her home was invaded were impermanent. The same is true for all of us, for all that we are accustomed to thinking of as normal—all that we take for granted.
For me, this became a personal truth when I entered into a chaplaincy internship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital a couple of years ago. I knew that my life, despite personal struggle to break away from the poverty in which I’d grown up, had for the most part been marked by successes, not losses. I had that sense of groundedness that is based on one’s relationship to the pieces of their life—to my spouse, children, work, goals. It’s the kind of grounding that’s prone to great upheaval when Change happens. Capital C. The serious kind. The kind we’d prefer to forget about, but which is the nature of being human.
In the hospital, I encountered one woman whose sense of stability was not based on anything physical—cancer had removed that illusion from her path—rather, it emanated from within. It was tangible the moment I walked into her room, and she smiled at me, a smile that beamed. It came at me like rays of light, widening as it got closer, so that it surrounded me as I stood in her doorway with my mask and gown on. As I visited with her, I saw that there was a deep connection between her innermost self and something much larger, a connection that bypassed the hospital machinery and other interferences. But how does one develop this perspective? She had found something that transcends change. A way of seeing her life in which plot was only the medium through which the storyteller’s identity—her identity—was illumined.
Unfortunately, other patients I saw were often in bad shape, physically and spiritually. I felt useless. “How could I be qualified to help these people?” I prayed—often in my car before entering the building. “Because you are human, too,” came the answer. And I knew it was true: after a particularly difficult night that involved multiple calls, including three deaths, I had a hard time doing normal things for a while. I struggled to hold what I had seen at the hospital alongside my life: my happy, silly children, my urge to play and eat chocolate. Some days it felt like all these things were only distractions from how vulnerable we are. What makes being with people who are suffering so painful is the same thing that makes us all qualified to minister to one another: our own vulnerability to such calamities, and the way this clashes with a more comfortable way of seeing ourselves, which is to say, not very clearly.
My professor, Marshall Ganz, likes to tell an old rabbinical joke (his dad was a rabbi): He says (leaning forward), “Who discovered water?” Then he smiles: “I don’t know but it wasn’t a fish.” His point, of course, is that it’s hard to see the thing you’re immersed in. And what are we immersed in? Stories. The stories of our lives, unfolding whether we think of them in such a way or not.
When I was a teenager, I could be very…bristly toward my mother. And I had a little bit of a wild streak. Nothing too serious—I had a few more earrings than she would have liked, and my clothing was…um…creative. But mostly I just loved being with the really wild people. It wouldn’t be wrong to say I kind of studied them, but I respected them, too. They didn’t care what people thought and even though I secretly did care, I really admired that. Whenever my mom sensed I was thinking of adding another piercing or when she worried that I was headed in the wrong direction or even just eating a lot of junk food (this was a woman who had raised me on wheat germ and tofu burgers)—when she worried about these things my mother used to ask me, “What is your future self telling you right now? The wise old grandmother Angela--she is looking back at you, she’s watching and she knows how this is going to go.” This almost always irritated me—much of what my poor mom said did at that time. But I was also sensitive and intuitive, as many indomitable teens are, and it was hard to ignore the wisdom of my mother’s words. It was a crafty act of maternal jujitsu—my mother had turned my refusal to listen to anyone but myself on its head. She knew I wouldn’t always listen to her, or at least, that’s what she feared. I worry about the same thing now with my own daughter, who will be a teenager next year. But while there were a few close encounters with Danger, in reality, I didn’t do most of the things she advised against. I listened more than I let on. And her suggestion had something to do with that.
Looking back, I now also recognize that the idea that I already had access to a wiser version of myself was spiritually insightful. What it did was prompt me to take that step back, and look at how the events in my life were linking together into a story. Would I be proud to tell it? Or embarrassed? What parts would I be skimming over? What parts would I be linking together? And most importantly, what would it mean? Good questions to ask at any age.
Early on in that chaplaincy internship, I attended a workshop led by a psychiatrist. He showed us the picture book, Zoom, by Istvan Banyai, in which as you turn the pages, each picture turns out to be a small part of the next. It begins with a close-up of a rooster’s comb. Turning the page, we see that the rooster is in a barn, which we then learn is part of a toy set a girl is playing with, all of which makes up a poster advertising the toys…you get the idea. As you read, you find yourself constantly trying to figure out how what you are seeing will fit into something bigger.
The psychiatrist was teaching us one of the most stand out lessons I learned that year: the value of understanding how patients saw their difficult experiences in terms of a larger context. Sometimes people were really clear about it, like the woman with the radiant smile. Other times, I would ask questions and as the person answered, they were hearing their own story told out loud for the first time. Themes would emerge that they were unaware of before: values like leadership, love, and loyalty that had guided them all their lives and that had the power to transcend plot changes. Faced with pain, a difficult diagnosis, or the loss of someone dear, such a context couldn’t take away the hardship, but it could lift up deeply held values and connections to something larger than oneself; values and connections that imbue such difficulty with meaning. Meaning by definition requires context.
There’s something else I want to mention about Kathryn. She told her story not to make a point about leaving lights on—at least not in the literal sense. She told it to explain why she is part of a religious community that is struggling to discern what it means to both be radically inclusive and have a clear identity. To be grounded both in its history and in a vision of the future. A religious community facing Change. She isn’t a UU, but it’s a challenge that resonates in our tradition too. What’s more, she told it to members of her church who had known her for years, but did not know why their shared mission was so important to her personally.
Here in Concord, where the UU church has such a rich and unique history, is it possible that something similar happens? Look at the person in front of or behind you. How did they come to be here? At what point in your neighbor’s life did they experience the kind of tension or flagrant disregard or even violence against certain of their values that made this religious community indispensible to them? Important enough that—like you—they even came on a Sunday in the summer, in a different location, with a student preacher? And you—what story brought you in on your first Sunday, and keeps you coming back? These are what that professor of mine, Marshall Ganz, calls the “stories of me.” Wherever two or more are gathered, they intersect with a “story of us.” And when we share them—the stories of me that—like roots—reach into a story of us, the result is a powerful sense of community and shared mission—something that can become an unstoppable force for change in the world around us. I’ll say more about that next Sunday. For now, I wish you this: Wherever you go, and in all that you do, may your story continue to take on richer and more lovely meaning. May it be so.