Power of Story

People don't act based on reality, they act based on the stories they believe about reality. If facts and numbers form the skeleton of our understanding of reality, stories are its flesh and blood. We become characters in the plots of the stories we believe in, often without being aware of it. In recent history, because of stories that Nazis told about Jews, and Tutsis told about Hutus, millions died. We hear stories everyday that shape our attitudes and determine our actions towards the poor, immigrants, gay people, people of other religions, and the list could go on.

I see the Bible as the Story of God, written by people imperfect as they were, who experienced a Reality that profoundly changed their understanding of the story in which they lived. The Story of God has often been over-simplified and interpreted into lists of rules meant to bring humanity into religious conformity. It sometimes gets reduced to a compilation of facts about reality which fail to inspire. The Bible is, however, mostly story. A story the reader is meant to enter into. A story we are meant to find ourselves in.

Judith M. Kunst in her book, The Burning Word, a read I highly recommend for its ability to draw the reader into God's story with playfulness, curiosity and imagination, has helped me experience God in a very real way within the pages of Scripture. With suggestions for personal practice The Burning Word invites the reader into a very engaging relationship with the God found in the pages of Scripture, a God to be wrestled with, reverenced, argued with and savored, just as the authors of the Bible themselves did. For me, it has reminded me of the fact that God continues to speak today just as God always has. The Story isn't finished, and just as the authors of the Bible wrote their parts of the Story, we are invited to write the next chapter with our communities.

Accessing God

Years ago I did what I believed every good Christian ought to do, and told my spiritually curious Jewish friend about my "personal relationship" with God. I should clarify and mention that my friend was an agnostic, cultural Jew who went to synagogue for the occasional bat mitzvah or wedding, not orthodox by any stretch of the imagination My gushing about God was met with genuine confusion. How can I claim to "talk" with a God she couldn't see, hear or touch? Fair question.

Over the years, if I'm being honest, my conversations with God have often seemed one-sided. Yes there are moments of overwhelming beauty and emotion when a song speaks to me so directly that it might as well be God Himself singing to me. Or the times when through a friend and a conversation, or a time of reflection, a light bulb goes on that might as well be illumination from the throne of God. Most of the time, however, the only voice I hear is my own. My friend did not find my circular reasoning terribly convincing. In her estimation, I was simply attributing my emotional and intellectual chatter to God. In all fairness, her skepticism has helped me more than the Christian pat-answers over the years.

While I suspect I'll always be less than fully satisfied with my relationship with God, I've learned two ridiculously simple things about accessing God:

1. Never get too comfortable with your idea of God. I have to be willing to continually let go of my preconceptions of God. Every one of us has some idea of what God is and who God is not. Many of us want to know God, to hear from Her, but only as long as what we hear jibes with what we already believe to be true about God. Fortunately, God's patience is infinitely greater than mine and God keeps drawing me in closer, expanding my heart and mind with an ever more gracious, merciful, compassionate and truly just vision of Godself. I am convinced that God speaks to everyone, all the time, Christian, or decidedly anti-Christian. So often the glimpses of limitless divine love we do get scare us, because they seem to contradict what we've been taught to believe about God. The good news is, as long as we're alive, if we're dealing with the divine God, the invitations into still larger visions of God will keep coming, no matter how many times we expand our hearts and minds. The more we begin to trust, the easier this becomes.
2. It's hard to listen when you're doing all the talking. How many of us would keep a friend if they treated us the way we treat God? We go to God when we're in crisis, when we get desperate enough we bargain with God, hoping to trick Him into giving us what we want in exchange for empty promises we have no intention of following through on. This seems like a generally bass-ackwards thing to do when dealing with the very Source of life itself. When we do talk to God, we tend to come on our terms, with our requests, our priorities and questions, on our schedules, but rarely if ever take the time to listen back. I'd lose a friend like that faster than you can say "basket-case". Despite my best intentions, I know I won't make time to listen unless I create a rhythm that allows for times of not thinking and instead, listening.