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This I Believe ... This I Believe by
I have made many discoveries over a lifetime while watching a film, or seeing a play, or reading a novel. But especially while listening to other people tell me pieces of their life's story. And I have come to believe that whatever the final moments of a life hold, ultimately every single life's story reveals in its narrative something deeply worth knowing, worth hearing. Most importantly . . . worth feeling. My daily spiritual practice consists of just three actions: I sing love songs; I react to stories I come into contact with; and I listen to music from film scores. Each of these activities functions in some way as my own form of meditation and prayer. For more than anything else in my life, I have always wanted to understand the "Why" of things, especially when it came to discovering what human beings felt and wanted, and what they might do to try and get it. I believe I've learned most of that from stories. That's probably why I became a storyteller and a stage director. But to truly hear another person's story, you must invest in and value deeply the art of listening. More than anything else I do, when I want to be, I am a great listener. Especially to stories. And that's the real trick to listening or experiencing any kind of story, isn't it. Emotional empathy. Learning how to feel what someone else feels. Especially someone who is fundamentally not at all like you. Learning how to get past just the account of the facts of what a person did, or judging if what they did was right or wrong, and to actually experience their world in those moments, and know the emotional circumstances as if you'd lived through it too. I used to believe everyone could do that. But I've learned that many people can't. It's a gift. Or if someone is too gifted with that capacity, a curse. And what of those moments of epiphany when we seem to wake up, and we see a truth where there was none before? In recent years, some of that has happened here, among many of you, in ways and places too countless or personal to reveal here today. And it is one of the principal reasons I come here. It's like having a second pulpit that offers up a forum of insights week after week. To learn from each of you and to hear the great melodies of your lives in the events and insights that you have acquired over time. In hearing these riches, I hear the great songs of your experiences, and I know I am better for knowing them, and perhaps wiser too. But now I'd better warn you. You need to be cautious telling me your tales. For I'm a writer. And writers are terrible thieves. We cobble your event into our own fictions. And we will steal any part of a good story if we can. And we won't pay you royalties. And we're absolutely shameless. We'll even come around a year or two later hoping you'll buy a copy of our book, or ask you to buy a ticket to see our new play. Of course we all recognize that we are the starring character in our own life, in what Dante called, The Divine Comedy. And this play we inhabit is a vast and puzzling work to endure at times, as each of us discovers how we struggle with our own pivotal role and how best to play it. And yet . . . sometimes, when we're more fortunate, we stumble into a moment of triumph; we find love where there was none before; we transact a piece of grace as we offer up some piece of ourselves to another receptive human being, and are blessed when we help lift that other soul out of some terrible pit of despair, or send them on their way just a little wiser, a little stronger. Pastoral care is not just for ministers. Listening to the world and all its languages of expression requires great art. But it always begins with dialogue. An actual conversation. As I said, from almost the first moment I became aware, I have been interested in why people say and do what they do. As a small child sitting on my slab of concrete front porch, I often listened in hushed silence to the sad and compelling tales of two of our neighbors who were World War II vets, and who sometimes told us on hot summer nights what they endured fighting the Japanese out in the South Pacific. I heard there no talk of the glory of war. Not from them. For they spoke mostly in sputtering fits of rage muttered over a bottle of beer, as they conveyed the many gruesome horrors of both enduring and inflicting brutal death. Even while witnessing astonishing acts of self sacrifice from boys no more than teenagers. War offers nothing if not Paradox. Once, when I was a small boy, I woke about 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday night to hear the drunken voice of one of those same vets, a man I knew well and liked. His voice was loud and carried clear across the street to my window on the front of our house. And I heard his wife scream at him as he was raging, and that terrible sound as he struck her. This was a man who only a few hours before had sat on my front porch sipping a beer. And now his wife was screaming for the police. He'd always seemed a good man to me. What was his story, I wondered. Why would he do that? Was it just the war coming back, or the liquor talking, or was there something more? Out of such curiosity, I was stirred when I was still only eight years old, to stop reading my Albert Payson Terhune dog stories about collies, and plunge into more grown up books of adult fiction. Much about those stories and their characters bewildered and eluded me then. But in grappling with the why of all those confusing adult situations I always felt pressed to go on. I still do. I go on reading stories. And writing them. And I talk to people. And I still try to listen. For in my heart of hearts I guess I feel I have accidentally stumbled on to my own private path to revelation. For I believe that we are each awarded an honorary place at the spiritual table, and we are invited to listen to all the stories that come our way, however they arrive, whether in person or by flatscreen HDTV. And by truly listening to them we are taught how every soul is a marriage of many frailties with sometimes magnificent capacities for endurance and courage and self sacrifice. And this is the great paradox of who we are and how we rebirth ourselves through our days, as we constantly grow. That in one life we are many. Because in our navigating through what I call "the Way of the Story", we cannot avoid recognizing the many faces of ourselves, and that our own life is forever awash in contradiction, and that acts of grace are often the children of misbegotten parents. And if that lesson was hard for me in the beginning, in later years it has humbled my pride and chastened me enough to always take a few steps back before I make any important critical judgment. I urge you to believe and listen to life's stories, wherever you find them, or they find you. Thank you. |
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