The Whole World is a Story

Students at Harvard University have been crowding into Dr. Harvey Cox’s class, JESUS AND THE MORAL LIFE, for the past fifteen years taught in the largest lecture hall on campus where the concerts and conferences are held, and attended not by the philosophically or religiously inclined, but by those in the Business School, Sciences, Graduate students and even visiting professors from other disciplines. The interest has been somewhat of a surprise since, though Harvard was founded as a Puritan college, with religious underpinnings, it had not had a class with “Jesus” in the title since 1912! A major factor in the interest according to Dr. Cox is story. Harvey Cox, an eminent theologian and professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, in his recent book, When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, contends that Jesus was one of the rare and gifted leaders who was both a great story teller AND about whom great stories were told. The Gospels contain both the stories Jesus told and stories about Jesus life. He told the stories Jesus told, and he told the stories the Gospel writers told about Jesus. Then he let the students react. Some were reading the stories with Sunday School backgrounds, others from Buddhist or Muslim backgrounds and still others for the first time.

One of the interesting observations he makes in the book is that the only way to answer the questions, "Who am I?" and “What am I to do?” is to ask, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” Of what story or stories are you made?

“ A wise Jewish Rabbi named Reb Zebulun once said,
Today we live, but by tomorrow, today will be a story.
The whole world, all human life, is one long story.”
When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today, p 32

As I listen to the stories told at Enterbeing I am asking myself if there is a bigger story of which our stories are a part, what some have come to call a Mega-Story, like the Odyssey, the Exodus, the Creation and Salvation stories of all great religious traditions. Who has longed for freedom in the past and what story is writ large depicting this struggle in deep and overarching ways? What people have lived for peace hoping against hope, and telling a story of struggle and courage which might inspire and provoke us today? Cox quotes a British theologian, Don Culpit:

"Stories are interpretive resources, models and scenarios through which we make sense
of what is happening to us and frame our action. Unlike the forms and concepts of philosophy,
stories are stretched out in time...They shape the process of life. It is through stories
that our social selves, which are our real selves, are actually produced." p 39

Cox goes on to outline a crisis in storytelling. First, it's importance has been demoted unfairly in favor of fact and "reality" based disiciplines. Second, we are story-sated--there are too many stories bombarding us. We are drenched in stories and thus stories are trivialized and misused. Thirdly, we have lost the connection between our own stories and the larger stories of our ethnic and religious traditions. Our stories are like life vests thrown to scattered castaways while the ship has disappeared in a fog. Interestingly Dr. Cox laments the lack of places to tell and hear our stories in a way that honors and cherishes them. The only example he can cite is AA. I guess he hasn't heard of organizing or Enterbeing!

What an honor we are in the midst of: to hear and tell our stories! To honor them by reflecting on them, making connections with our own stories and with the larger narratives of which we find ourselves a part! To light a candle to story and pay reverence to The Story beyond words and experience, yet somehow near! May we take seriously the gift we have to teach and practice the art of storytelling to a world thirsty to be remade not from dictums, facts and narrow truths, but of the rich, colorful fabrics of imagination in story.

P. Moe
May 23, 2005