animated by being spoken in spiritual direction, and Zoe’s shame was evoked by my presence and attention. That was uncomfortable . . . and healing. As Zoe wept, she reexperienced the wounding experience of her family not listening to her and expecting her to take a job that she felt was humiliating. God’s grace touched her shame on an even deeper level than it had been touched when she prayed in solitude. In telling the story, the vision from God also became a narrative she (and I) will remember.
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02.
The Gifts of Storytelling
Our faith is informed by narrative knowledge, relying on stories to help us know how to live faithfully. These stories shape our lives in various ways, four important ones having to do with memory, meaning, morality, and mending. (“Healing” might be the better word, but the alliterative pull of “mending” is strong.)
Memory
Stories elicit emotion, and emotions embed memory in our bodies. Preachers and professional storytellers of all kinds know that if you want someone to remember what you’ve said, engage their feelings. If we laugh, cry, or feel any strong emotion, the experience will stay with us more than if we weren’t moved by it. My directee who wept tears as she spoke of her shame in having to work at a café will remember that experience. She was fully engaged in it with her mind, soul, and body. Shared cultural stories, like that of September 11th, are remembered, in part, because of the emotions they triggered in us. Remembering the story stirs an echo of the original feeling.
Often the mention of an event will cause a full-blown memory to surface as though it had been frozen whole in the amber of emotion. Recently in a spiritual direction session, a woman spoke about changes in race relations she’d witnessed in her lifetime: “When I say ‘apartheid’ right now, I remember watching TV in the family room with my children, seeing Nelson Mandela at his inauguration. I never imagined I’d live to see such a joyful day. I feel that joy again as I remember it. My children were too young to appreciate it fully, but on that afternoon all those years ago I looked at each of them and told them to remember the day, as it marked the beginning of hope for equality in South Africa. I can see my children’s faces again as they were that day. They were so young. Remembering the love and hope I felt for them helps me mark how many years have passed since the end of apartheid. Thinking of the end of apartheid makes me remember what it felt like to be a young mother with so much hope for my children. I feel hope,” she said, sitting back in the chair with a peaceful expression on her face. An idea had triggered a memory that elicited a story and all the feelings associated with it.
The return of a memory can also be evoked by a bodily sensation or emotion. Post-traumatic stress experiences are like this. A veteran of combat might hear a car backfire and suffer the full-blown physical and emotional experience of battle, the remembered horrific images then generating even more trauma. Telling the story to another can facilitate healing of the trauma.
One practice of spiritual directors is that of intentionally guiding people toward remembered stories of grace-filled experience. The woman who received the vision of the Incarnation felt peace, relief, and hope in the experience of God’s presence. That’s a gift she’s received. She’s shared it with me, so I can help her hold it, and it’s something to return to when shame wells up and life feels too heavy. As she remembers, she again experiences the Living Water of God’s grace flowing into her aching heart and care-weighted life. There is blessing in the original experience as well as in reexperiencing it through telling the story. Her soul is shaped as she contemplates God’s glory and receives the Spirit’s renewing grace (2 Cor. 3:18). Wholeness and healing are cultivated.
Meaning
Stories also cultivate meaning. Religion, etymologically, is that which binds together just as ligaments are binding agents in the body. We’re bound by the meaning that religion offers, and we’re bound relationally to God and others in the body of Christ. Personal stories bind us together internally, through coherence and purpose, as do the stories we call history, literature, and Scripture. In spiritual direction we hear all these varieties of story, and the practice affords a regular time to bring all these stories into communication with one another.
Sometimes directees have been exposed to biblical teaching that leaves them with the impression that God is merely a harsh schoolmaster and judge looking down from above. That is a narrative that has been metabolized and associated with feelings, self-image, hopes, and fears. Yet, inklings of a different spiritual narrative have brought the directee to spiritual direction. There’s hope that a loving relationship with God might be forged, perhaps a relationship based on honest conversation.
In our first spiritual direction meeting, “Theo” told me that he wasn’t sure he wanted anything to do with God because God is so condemning. As I listened to him I wondered what small hope had led him to try the spiritual discipline of spiritual direction, which is, after all, about getting to know God better. I acknowledged what he was saying, and asked him to tell me about any experience he’d had recently that he thought was an experience of God. He told me that at a retreat the previous month he’d had a quiet moment outdoors when he was alone and silent. In the stillness he’d felt as though an Other were regarding him. It was a gentle, silent regard. It wasn’t judging, nor was it gushingly affectionate. It was loving, like the love he himself feels for his children, imperfect as they are. Theo felt as though he was seen as he is by the God who knows and loves him.
Over the years of working with Theo, I’ve seen this movement time and again: He laments God’s stern remoteness and his own inability to please him. Then he recalls an experience of God or actually experiences God as he prays during our hour together. He then tells me that story. His concepts and experience come in contact with each other, and, bit by bit, his knowledge of God shapes his knowledge about God.
I recommended to Theo that he keep a journal of his experiences of God. That journal became for him a florilegium, in Latin, “a gathering of flowers,” and the classical term for a compilation of Scripture and holy writings that had moved the reader (monks and others) to prayer. Theo read his again and again, encouraged by grace remembered. His florilegium, like Scripture itself, recounts personal, human encounters with the Word. This narrative of his life with God holds meaning that anchors him to God, especially when he gets swept away by life-sapping ideas about God.
Morality
Narrative carries moral heft. “What shall I do to gain eternal life?” “Whom exactly is the one I must love as a neighbor?”Luke 10:25, 29, author’s paraphrase. Let me tell you a story. Jesus taught us how to live by telling us stories. Robert Wuthnow found that one of the most significant factors in whether young people engaged in volunteer activities was whether or not they knew the story of the Good Samaritan.Robert Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Without delineating ethical principles or arousing a rational debate, a robust morality is conveyed through story.
Spiritual directors are with directees as stories emerge and enlighten. Zoe was taught by her vision of the Incarnation. She saw that God so loved the world that He became a person, suffering the hardships and indignities to which flesh is prone. That enabled her, for the sake of her family, to take up hard and, for her, humiliating work. She was encouraged. Moreover, she was edified, for she identified with her savior in the work she was