Our Stories

Notice I titled this “OUR” stories.

MY story is important. It is who I am. But OUR story is also important.

The problem is that our society, and most “modern” societies are so individualistic that people no longer have stories that give them a sense of belonging. People grow up being told that they can do and be anything they like, without reference to other people. They are not given stories that locate them in a larger context.

Two events are grounding this reflection of mine. One is the blockade created by truckers on the Canadian border of the U.S. There is fear that the idea will be picked up and replicated all over the country. Truckers are the ideal carriers of such a vision. They occupy a special place in popular imagination. They pilot huge rigs, symbols of American power, and they are loners, on the road alone day after day—the American dream.

But if they have no group story that can locate them, that can give them a sense of belonging, something like this protest will provide that. It is a cause beyond themselves. The Canadian truckers are crusading against an oppressive Canadian government forcing people to accept vaccination. They now have a story, a cause. Finally, life has meaning.

The other event grounding my reflection is a book I have just begun to read. It is by two Mennonite people struggling with the stories of their peoples. The story of one of them begins in Ukraine, when the Russian government, in the early days of the Communist revolution, forced their Mennonite ancestors to flee the country. They “settled” in western Canada. The word “settle” is important in their narrative, because their settling displaced other peoples who occupied the land before them. Their story is a combination of personal history and place—Ukraine and Canada—and the “songs” that have given meaning to the journey of all the peoples. Their book is a plea for taking seriously physical places, the physical surroundings from which one has grown, as well as the stories of other peoples who occupied those same physical spaces.

Places are important. Much of the energy behind Trumpism is resentment against an economy that destroys the places that give people roots. Rural America is being hollowed out, and with it, the family stories that tell people who they are. People left behind see Donald Trump as leading a protest against the system.

The authors of the book use three tag-terms to keep all this together: “landlines,” the physical places that have grounded their stories and the stories of their ancestors; “bloodlines,” the physical and cultural histories of their peoples; and “songlines,” which they describe as “liberative traditions that inspire practices of justice and compassion.”

What intrigues me about this book, which I have just begun to read, is its grounding in the experience of indigeneous peoples. The recent “Amazon Synod” which Pope Francis convened, made us think about the importance of people all over the world who have been thrown away as useless relics of the past, including the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rain forest. But those peoples have not gone away.

The book is Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, by Elaine Enns and Ched Myers. I got it on Kindle.

Back to the truckers.

Too many of our fellow Americans are spiritual truckers, driving all over the landscape without a story to tell them who they are.

This morning I was praying Psalm 105. The psalm is the story of a people who began with an enslaved person, Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, and continued through Moses, who led the people from Egyptian slavery into freedom in the promised land, where they, sadly from our Christian perspective, benefitted from appropriating the places and properties of the people who were living in those places before. The story of the conquest of the chosen land by the chosen people is a story of genocide.

But it is our story. Our own American story is a story of genocide, and our American forebears carried it out with the same ideological fervor that must have inspired the biblical actors, or at least the bibical authors who told their story. “God willed it” they would have said, and even if they did not have God in mind, as most of them probably did not, the term “God” functioned just as successfully for them as for any pious believer. Our truckers probably also would say “God wills our action,” even if they do not have God in mind.

In this context, it is useful to think about the term “God,” and to reflect on the merits of having a more disciplined story about God than the wild and unbridled gods that inspire truckers and so many others in our country, such as predatory investors who crush local cultures all over the country. Surely those investors too will say that the gods want them to do it.

We as a people need to take seriously the physical places where we live and have lived, and the stories of the people who have made us who we are. Then we need “songs” that will inspire us to create greater justice in the midst of the chaos that we have created.

Not a new situation. That is why generations of our ancestors kept telling the stories to their children. We need to take up that custom again. Our people wander in a wilderness of loneliness and hunger for meaning.

Our churches are a place that should be telling these stories. Evidently our churches have gotten away from doing that. The stories are not being communicated. No wonder church membership numbers are down. We are not reminding our people who we are.