© Davidson Loehr
27 May 2001
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
One way we can get to know ourselves more intimately is by understanding what our sacred stories are. These are the plots, the scripts, the “necessary fictions” through which we find ourselves in the most comforting and compelling ways. We’re probably all living out the plots of some stories. We’ll look at some, and leave you the homework of wondering about your own story, how well you’re serving it, and how well it’s serving you.
STORY: The Great Stone Face
Once there were people who lived in a valley at the foot of a large mountain. High at the top of the mountain there was a face, a great face carved in the stone. The people said it was the face of a god. And if you could see that face clearly, they said, it would show you who you were, and how you were meant to live your life.
That sounded easy enough, but it was not. For the face was in a part of the mountain impossible to climb, and so high up it was almost always obscured by clouds or fog. Furthermore, the face seemed to look differently in different light, and no two people ever saw it exactly the same. But it was important, this face, because if only it could be seen clearly – well, then you would know who you really were, and who you were meant to be. And so the people studied what they could see of the face, as best they could, and they told others what they thought they saw.
Stories even arose, stories about times that the great face had actually spoken to someone, and what the great face had said. People wrote these things down, and tried to make a list of do’s and don’ts for living, but no two lists ever completely agreed. Still the people told their stories, and listened to the stories of others, because after all there was so much at stake, if only they could get it right.
And as they believed they understood the message of the great face in the stone, they tried to live in the ways they felt they were meant to live. Usually, this just meant they tried to be kind to one another, to be good neighbors, to work hard, to make their little valley a better place and so on, as you would expect. There were always a few, of course, who did not care much about making the valley a better place. They lived to chase after power or wealth or other things like that, and they too, if pressed on it, would argue that this was the way the great face of stone had intended things to be.
From time to time, as you would also expect, there were people who said that all of this was just nonsense, that there was no face at all in the stones above, that these were just these silly myths. And it was certainly true that if there was a face up there in the rocks, it was very faint, so faint that you couldn’t even be sure you were seeing anything at all.
Yet others would then say that without the face, and the stories about the face, the people in the valley might not have been so eager to be decent to one another, and then what kind of world would they have? After all, you needed something to live for, and some kind of rules to live by.
But as any visitor or other objective person could see, if there was any face at all up there, it was too vague to be clear about, even on a sunny day. All you could be sure of was that the people had these stories, and they lived by them. Should there be an expedition to the top of the mountain to try and see once and for all what the great face of stone was trying to say? Or should they instead be paying more attention to their stories, and their lives? If they could never see the great face clearly, then all they had were their stories, and their efforts to live well together. And if someone swore that the great face had indeed spoken clearly but the way it wanted them to live made no sense, either to individuals or to the community, then who would have cared what the great stone face said, anyway?
Well, as you can tell, this is not settled, neither within that valley nor elsewhere. And yet there is something here of importance, and we cannot seem to stop thinking and talking about it.
SERMON: Sacred Stories
There is a wonderful old story about stories; it is the legend of Sheherezade. She was condemned to death by an immature, woman-hating tyrant. To save her life and the lives of others, she began telling the tyrant a story the night before he was going to have her killed, and she ended the story in mid-air, to be finished the next night. He let her live another night because he wanted to hear the ending. But she was no fool, and the story kept going on, for a thousand and one nights, until through her stories she had finally softened his heart, and opened his eyes and ears. She awakened the decent person that was inside of this tyrant. The decent person was waiting like a Sleeping Beauty, for someone who could reach his soul and break the evil spell under which his life was being lived.
I like the Sheherezade legend because it shows some of the power of stories to change our lives. But I also like it because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live. And we tell them, as well, in order to transform both ourselves and others into the people we think we were meant to be.
We live trying to act the way we think we should, trying to conform to some image of who we are supposed to be, how those we care for want or need us to act, some picture of how life is to be. And when you watch how we live, it’s clear that we are giving those pictures, those mostly unspoken stories, immense power. We’re puppets, they’re the strings. And we move and obey as though our stories were sacred – which, to us, they usually are.
And there’s the rub! If only all our stories were sacred! But they’re not. We all live by some stories that aren’t worthy of us, that don’t cherish us or even affirm our basic worth or honor our spirit, our energy, the things we really love. The more a story can do that, the more sacred it is, and the more it serves life. The less a story does that, the more profane and unworthy it is.
I’ll give you an example of someone living out a very powerful – and famous – story without even being aware of it. About ten years ago I was the theme speaker at the weeklong Unitarian summer camp at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. There were about 600 adults and 400 kids there, from ten or twenty states, so none of us knew many of the people. But since I was more visible than the other ministers there, a lot of folks cornered me during the week to tell me their stories. I spoke with one woman who told me her problem was that she just couldn’t seem to do enough. She was working hard at everything, sacrificing herself to her husband, her children, and nearly anyone else who asked. But her life felt empty, she didn’t seem to be getting anything out of it, didn’t seem to be getting anything back from all this giving she was doing. I recognized her story, and asked her if she thought she was supposed to be getting something out of it. She got a little indignant and said yes, it’s supposed to work that way: you give and you give, but eventually, you get back, too, and that’s what makes it all worth it.
That’s what I mean by a script, a guiding fiction, a myth to live by. There is a story being lived out not only by that woman, but by millions of women and men – though that one is mostly a women’s story. But there is no way to help this woman do well enough to get what she wants, because she is living out a story that is not likely to have a happy ending unless she can change the4 behavior of the other characters in her life. She is living out the story of Cinderella, who works and slaves for others, and whose only hope is that somehow a fairy Godmother will see her pure heart, reward her with a handsome prince, and usher in a kind of Judgement Day, when all who have wronged her will be punished. Probably, the only way she can win is to get out of this story and find a different kind of role to play, because in real life – as you have noticed by now – there is a serious shortage of fairy godmothers.
Cinderella is only a fairy tale. But the best fairy tales have plots that have been told many times in many other ways. This Cinderella script, for example, has been compared to the ancient Greek story of Persephone, the obedient daughter. It’s also a lot like a traditional script for women found in many religions, that says you spend your whole life giving to men, to children, and to all others who ask, you spend your life as a Suffering Servant, and you’ll get your reward in heaven.
To be fair, you have to say that this role is not always, or even necessarily, bad. It depends on the other characters in the story, and what roles they are playing. This is often a very rewarding role for women, because their husband, children, and friends do appreciate and love them not in heaven but here and now for their hard work and their good heart.
Nor do you have to be a woman to find yourself in this story. College students living on no money in crummy apartments can identify with Cinderella too, where the role of the fairy godmother will be played by their eventual employer who makes all of this sacrifice worth it. And that usually happens. So it is not necessarily a bad story. But sometimes, a story like that Cinderella story, that “pay now, fly later” script – sometimes it only makes people perpetual victims. And then the only way out of it is to get out of the story, and find a better myth to live by – a more sacred story that treats you like a more sacred person.
Bad stories enslave us to visions that are profane because they are too small to hold our spirits and serve our destinies. Most Cinderellas are perpetual victims. Little visions demean and degrade us; expansive visions ennoble and honor us, and call us toward greater things. That’s what I mean by looking for and changing to a sacred story.
Changing from a small story to a bigger one can make a huge difference. I had a very simple revelation of this sort just yesterday morning. It isn’t dramatic, but it’s the kind of “Aha!” experience you have had before too. I was riding my new bicycle on the Hike & Bike trail that runs along both sides of Town Lake downtown. As some of you know, that’s about a ten-mile loop, going along the north side of the river, then crossing over several bridges and running back along the south side.
The trail, as the name says, is for both bicycles and people who are walking or running. It isn’t all that wide a trail though, and as I got more exhausted and dehydrated, I noticed that those walkers seemed to think they owned the whole path! They’d just spread out, two or three across, so they could talk, forgetting there were bicyclists trying to get by! While I’m riding the bike, I start thinking to myself “Well, get out of the way, will you? It’s supposed to be a bike path!” Then while I had stopped to rest (and work on this sermon), I saw a bicycle brush by some walkers pretty closely. I knew just how she felt! After she had passed them, one of the walkers turned to the others and said “Damned bicycles!”
I began fantasizing about all the bicyclists getting together, hiring a lawyer, and filing some kind of a class action suit against all the walkers, to establish bikers’ rights. Then I imagined that all the walkers and runners would do the same thing, and sue to have the bicyclists removed from the path. After just a short while I stopped that, because it began feeling too much like the world we’re already living in.
Finally, somewhere around the 6th or 7th mile, I backed off, drank a lot of water, and thought about it again. That’s when the minor revelation came, and I said “Oh wait, I get it; it’s not like a clash of bikers’ rights versus walkers’ rights. It’s supposed to be like a kind of dance, and we’re all supposed to help choreograph it so we can move together.” Suddenly, the bike ride was a lot different, and a lot more fun. I was more aware of the whole pattern of movements of bikers, runners and walkers going both ways, and of trying to blend my movements in among theirs so the dance went more gracefully.
When my story got bigger, my life got better. A bigger and more inclusive story is closer to a sacred story than a smaller one. And it pulls you into a bigger and more positive picture of life with its affirmations, rather than shutting you out with its self-centered walls, the way battles of individual rights and entitlements can. I’ll take my bike back there tonight for another round of dancing.
I’m trying to plant the idea that we have the power to change from a small story to a bigger one, and that change makes a huge difference in the quality of our life and our joy in living it.
Let me give you some more examples, from the field of psychology. I don’t think of psychology the way most psychologists do. Our fields overlap, because the word “psychology” means the structure and understanding of the soul – “psyche” is the Greek word for “sou.” I don’t think psychology is a science. I think that psychology, like religion, is an imaginative art. There are many different kinds of psychology, of course, and each school of psychology adopts a basic story, a basic set of assumptions about people, and use that to interpret the lives of their clients – or even to force life to fit theirstory. I’ll give you two vignettes to let you feel how the same life transition can be seen through several very different stories.
The first is a story about the childhood of Manuel Manoleta. He died in 1947, but many bullfight fans still regard him as the greatest and most courageous bullfighter in Spain’s history. When Manoleta was a child, however, he was neither great nor brave. He was delicate and sickly, interested only in painting and reading. He stayed indoors and clung to his mother’s apron so much that his sisters and other children used to tease him. He rarely joined other boys’ games of soccer or playing at bullfighting. But when he was eleven, all of this suddenly changed, and for the rest of his life, nothing much mattered to him except the bulls. In his first bullfight, while still a young boy, those who were there said he stood his ground without moving an inch. (from The Soul’s Code by James Hillman, pp. 15-16)
What kind of a story could we use to explain this radical transformation? Psychologists who followed Alfred Adler would recognize this as classic compensation, where his adult bravery was just to make up for feeling inadequate as a boy. Freudians would go even farther, seeing this as sublimation, and would describe his adult bravery in the bull ring as just his childhood fears trying to wear masks to fool people. He remains a damaged and frightened boy all his life in this story. It is not a sacred story. It denies both real courage and a nobility of spirit to Spain’s greatest bullfighter, by reducing him to fit a very mechanical kind of story to which some – though not all – psychologists have become addicted. I’ve always thought of Freudian psychology – and most of traditional psychology – as a kind of cousin to the field of hydraulics. They deal with pressures from one part of life that exert pressures on another part of life until they’re released or resolved. Not all Freudians agree with this interpretation, of course.
The second explanation of Manoleta’s transformation comes from the Jungian psychologist James Hillman. Hillman sees the boy hiding behind his mother’s apron as a boy called to great acts of courage for which he is not yet ready. He is scared of his calling, scared of the greater dangers he must prepare himself to face. Something in him drives him toward his personal destiny. At age eleven, he was ready. And from that time on, the “apron” behind which he hid was bright red, meant to attract the danger of thousand-pound bulls. In this story, little Manoleta had a great calling, even as a child, and his life’s destiny was to grow into that calling and become Spain’s greatest bullfighter.
The second story grants Manoleta dignity, and gives him credit for his courage, while the first brushes it all off as the false costume worn by a neurotic and frightened child. The second story is ennobling; the first is demeaning. Let’s do another one. A similar pattern occurred in the childhood of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin. When he was only three, he heard a concert violinist play a stunning solo at a concert. He felt from that moment that he was meant to play the violin, and asked his parents if they would buy him a violin for his fourth birthday. They humored him by buying him a toy violin made of metal. He burst into sobs, threw it on the ground and would have nothing to do with it. He wanted a real violin, not a toy one. At that time, he wasn’t ready for a real violin. His hands were too small (Hillman, p. 17).
A Freudian psychologist could explain all his later success as compensation or sublimation to cover his childhood humiliation. I don’t think those are good stories because they can’t see the spirit, the calling that Yehudi Menuhin felt even at that young age. (Or, to put more of a point on it, it’s a psychology that has left out the psyche, the soul.) James Hillman suggests instead that he felt a high and noble calling as a three-year-old, and spent the rest of his distinguished life answering and serving that calling as one of the world’s greatest violinists. Hillman’s story is a sacred story because it affirms life, rather than explaining profound and creative drives away as though they were nothing but the neurotic charades of a damaged young boy.
Hillman calls this his “acorn theory” of psychology. He suggests that we carry within us the awareness of the kind of person we are called to be. We are born with a certain distinct style, and need to develop in certain ways to fulfill that style. We are called toward certain things, but not others, and we need to pursue those things toward which we are called. We are driven to certain experiences and adult paths to fulfill real and healthy callings. We’re not driven by neurotic reaction against childhood injuries, but by the sacred calling that wants to connect us with life. That’s a sacred story.
I agree with James Hillman that “We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives,” (p. 33) Another psychologist I’ve always liked is Rollo May, who once defined psychotherapy as “the search for an adequate personal mythology.” That’s what I’m calling a sacred story: an adequate personal mythology, a myth worth living by.
We are the people living in that valley where we look up to see a vague but important face carved in the rock high above. We know there is something terribly significant about that face. Somehow, it calls us toward a noble, even a sacred, destiny. We are not quite sure what that is, for the face seems to change as you move through life, or as you view it from different perspectives.
Or perhaps this is just a myth. Perhaps there is no face up there in the rocks at all. There may have been long ago, but the image seems to be worn away beyond recognition now, and all we have are the stories. They are not much. Children’s stories, fables, old myths, tales and images from our sacred scriptures – these are about all that we have. And so we tell those stories, as Sheherezade did, in order to live. That is why it is so important to know these guiding fictions that shape our lives and to find better myths to live by: because we are all under the spell of Sheherezade. We all tell our stories in order to live.
What about you? What are your stories? What roles are you playing? What are you serving with your life? And is it worthy of that spark of life inside of you that is only really happy when you are being true to yourself?
What if it is true that your heart, your soul, holds the image of your destiny and calls you to it? Unpacking the image can take a lifetime, because we tend to keep forgetting what we are meant to be. But according to a Jewish legend, the evidence for this forgetting your soul’s calling is pressed right into your upper lip. That little crevice below your nose is where the angel pressed its forefinger to seal your lips. That little indentation is all that is left to remind you of the fact that your guiding angel is a part of you, trying to tell you what to do. That is why, they say, when we are trying to recall an insight or a lost thought, our fingers go up to that spot. Could it be true? Well, it is certainly loving, affirming and life-giving. And if it is that loving, affirming and life-giving, if it leads us into a bigger world and a more authentic life, isn’t that precisely the kind of truth for which you yearn?
