Because God Loves Stories

• Opening Words
• Sermon: Because God Loves Stories Rev. Kerry Mueller

Opening Words

An Untold Story: Group Process as a Pilgrimage

Richard L. Morgan

In the midst of struggles, silence, and stress
We gather as pilgrims in a new land
to explore our stories
and the space that separates us from one another.
The air is tense with anxiety as the journey into the unknown begins.
We all have stories to tell;
Some we know, others locked within our hearts.
But we are our story.
We wonder,
Will all who sit here understand and accept my story?
Or will the episodes from my past
Not be heard...or understood?
I realize the group in which I move
Has power to create, reveal, and heal
all in a one-time unique way.
I am afraid and yet hopeful,
Alive in the presence of myself and others.

(Remembering Your Story, p. 27)

Sermon

Because God Loves Stories

Rev. Kerry Mueller

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Mary Lou. Her family's name was Hall, and she was born in Greenville, S.C., on the very first day of 1895. That was a very long time ago. A man named Grover Cleveland was President of the United States, and there were only 44 states. They did not have radio or television in those days, but Mary Lou was never bored. She loved to listen to her mother and grandmother tell stories about the old days.

Her grandmother, who had been a slave, had worked in the kitchen of a great big house. She told Mary Lou what it was like to cook a really wonderful meal for the master's family and then not be allowed to eat any of it.

When she was not listening to her mother and grandmother tell stories about the old days, Mary Lou would play with her sister and her friends. Her father was a carpenter, and Mary Lou never forgot what nice things he made for the house, even a swing for the back yard. Come to think of it, Mary Lou didn't forget anything.

Years later, she could recall how her dog, Bruno, would pick up a pail with his mouth and carry it along in his teeth on family errands. She remembered feeding the pigs and the chickens and the other animals the family kept behind the house. And she had such an eye and memory for detail she could tell you the color (usually red) of the dress she was wearing whenever anything interesting happened to her, which was all the time.

Her father was a very nice man, but he gave Mary Lou a whipping one time. What happened was that Mary Lou and her sister felt sorry for two little girls they knew. Their friends were so poor their toes were sticking out of their shoes. And when their friends' stepfather bought new shoes for his own daughters but none for them, Mary Lou and her sister took their own Sunday shoes and gave them to their friends.

When she grew up, she met a man named John Lollis at a party. He had taken someone else to the party, but Mary Lou was the one he married. They had two little girls, Alice and Ruby. Mr. Lollis was a bricklayer, and when he could not find work in South Carolina he got a job in New York City, then sent for Mrs. Lollis and their two little girls. They settled in Harlem in 1924, and Mrs. Lollis, who never forgot anything, always remembered the sounds of jazz and laughter and how neat and clean the streets and the people were.

When hard times came in the Depression, Mrs. Lollis began making pies in her kitchen and selling them around to the barbershops and drugstores and pool halls and anywhere else she might find a few hungry men.

Cab Calloway was one of her best customers, but the one who gave her the name the Pie Lady and made her famous all over Harlem was another fellow. Maybe he was never actually called Slim before he got into Mrs. Lollis's sweet potato pies, but once he did no one ever had a reason not to call him Fats Waller.

Mr. Lollis died in 1949, and Mrs. Lollis never got married again. "John was a good man," she said. "I could never put up with another man, especially the ones around now.

Over the years, Mrs. Lollis cooked and cleaned for other people and once worked for Western Union, but as she got older she mostly did volunteer work for the Mount Olivet Baptist Church and kept up with her grandchildren and her great grandchildren, telling them stories about the old days.

The stories might have stayed mostly in the family if Mrs. Lollis had not been waiting for a bus one day in 1989 when she met a woman named Malika Lee Whitney. Ms. Whitney runs a theater group called Pickney Productions, and pretty soon she had Mrs. Lollis telling her stories at schools and libraries and museums and parks and civic club meetings and African street festivals and black history celebrations all over New York and in Washington.

People of all ages said they learned a lot about 20th century history listening to Mrs. Lollis, but it was the children whose eyes would get the widest and who would listen the hardest when Mrs. Lollis stood up and started telling stories about how things were in the old days.

Afterward, they would ask questions and want to know how she managed to live so long. Mrs. Lollis would tell them she never used tobacco, alcohol or drugs.

After she turned 101, Mrs. Lollis slowed down a bit, but it took a while for her to run down. When she died on Feb. 2, the woman who told stories about the old days was 103 years, 1 month and 1 day old.

Mrs. Lollis, whose daughter Ruby Jewett died in December, is survived by her other daughter, Alice E. Wilson of Atlanta, 3 grandchildren, 6 great-grandchildren and 20 great-great-grandchildren.

(Robert McG. Thomas Jr. NYT 2/15/98)

An old Jewish saying asks: "Why were human beings created? Because God loves stories." (Because God Loves Stories) When I read this magical obituary in the New York Times some time ago, I thought how much God must love Mary Lou Lollis -- a lady who lived a wonderful story, and who preserved the stories of her family, and shared them with a generation of young people. Jewish and Christian theology hold that God made humanity in God's own image. How precious our stories are, each a bit of the image of God. In Unitarian Universalist terms, we would say that with our stories we affirm our inherent worth and dignity -- we affirm that each of us has value in our own right. There is a legend about Zusya of Hanapoli, a Hasidic rabbi of the 18th century:

Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said,

"In the world to come, they will not ask me, "Why were you not Moses?" They will ask me, "Why were you not Zusya?"

(Voices of Wisdom, Klagsbrun p. 6)

I doubt if William Ellery Channing ever heard this story. His life -- which was distinguished, and included founding the American Unitarian Association -- overlapped Rabbi Zusya's in years, but the two were a world apart, geographically and religiously. Yet had he heard it, Channing might have claimed it as his own. As a young man, he was plagued by self doubt, wrestling with demons and thinking himself unworthy of God's love. Then one day, he understood in a deep and mystical way, that he was meant to be himself. This story is recorded by his nephew:

He was, at the time, walking as he read, beneath a clump of willows yet standing in the meadow....There burst upon his mind that view of the dignity of human nature which was ever after to uphold and cherish him...The place and hour were always sacred in his memory, and he frequently referred to them with grateful awe. It seemed to him that he then passed through a new spiritual birth, and entered upon the day of eternal peace and joy.

(Holy Curiosity, p. 4)

Channing articulated the idea of the inherent worth and dignity of every person, a principle which is still central to Unitarian Universalism. At the heart of storytelling lies that affirmation. Two centuries later, the Rev. Kim Beach also writes about human dignity encapsulated in a story:

Back at the office, three men come by and ask for money. It's for groceries, they say. I'm impatient and try not to show it. Wary of being taken in by petty con artists, I listen to their story. They are Bolivians. They say they are out of work, and their families are hungry. I am skeptical. I am trying to decide whether I believe their stories. Then I realize there is a prior question: How much does the truth or falsity of their stories matter? Their eyes are downcast; they seem unhappy to be asking for help. The idea of probing their veracity begins to embarrass me, and I cut the explanations short; here, human dignity is also at risk. Thanks to the discretionary fund that the church makes available to me, I am able to respond to their need without a lot of red tape, and I do so.

(If Yes, p. 113)

Less than a week after reading this story, I found myself in a similar situation, talking on the phone to a man who claimed to be a Vietnam Vet, needing bus fare back home. I called the trustee for outreach of the church I was serving, and we decided to err on the side of affirming and trusting this man's inherent worth and dignity. Perhaps we were taken. You never know. His story, however, touched us. We had a choice. He did not. But for grace, his story might have been ours.

If affirmation is one fruit of telling our story, then another is actualization. By that I mean taking control of your understanding of your life, and who you are and where you come from, so that you can decide whether that is all you want to be or how you want to be. Author Susan Miller (The Good Mother, The Distinguished Guest) in her memoir, Never Let Me Down, depicts a chaotic childhood, with a heroin addicted father, a severely depressed mother, an abusive brother -- problems that were never acknowledged by any of the family members. Asked by Terry Gross of "Fresh Air" why she chose to write a memoir, Miller answered that she had been writing it all her life. "I needed to make a story of my life," she said. I had to make things fit together -- things that made no sense -- like why were we moving now, and why did my parents not step in when my brother hit me. To make a story was to make a life."  (Fresh Air 2/5/98)

Several years ago, I took part with others in making a life by making a story in a spiritual autobiography course. Each of us reached back into our own lives and gave shape to events that might have seemed at the time to have just rolled over us. In creating a story to share, we became the actors in our own lives, not the passive receivers of experience. Let me share a little of my story, a story that helped me understand why going to Rowe, a Unitarian camp, was so pivotal in my life.

We lined up in pairs at the end of the evening's activity for the fifteen minute walk down the hill to the chapel. It was thirteen, my first time away from home. I wasn't quite sure what I had gotten myself into, or how I had ended up here instead of at Girl Scout camp with my friends. But here I was, my sneakers crunching on the dirt road, walking with the one girl I knew from my home church. After we reached the town, we fell silent. Someone was ringing the old bell in the Preserved Smith Memorial Chapel. Stepping inside was a little eerie -- a musty smell of old books and ancient wood, the sudden cool of the stone foundation, a wheezing old bellows organ playing in the corner. We filed into the pews for the first evening's worship service.

I don't remember much about the service itself, but that night I entered a process of truly belonging. A couple of years ago I read a short article in our denominational magazine by a young woman telling other teens that they would love this camp, and hard as they might find it to believe, going to chapel was the most wonderful part. Her words took me right back across the decades. The hours I spent in the Rowe chapel, at worship, or in workshops, or just visiting, are an island of peace that I carry with me today.

The quest that seemed so agonizing and unique to me as an adolescent is an ordinary enough story. I was struggling between isolation and connection. During most of my teen years and young adulthood, isolation won. Rowe was different. It was the one place where everyone was accepted unconditionally. Everyone had something to offer. Academic ability was irrelevant -- you didn't get prizes or grades for it at camp, and it wasn't a social handicap either. Together we experienced the Spirit of Rowe, an overarching community in which each of us had an honored place. In the summer of 1980 I visited Rowe one afternoon. One of the girls sat down next to me on the deck and explained earnestly, "This is a special place. You see, we have something here called the Rowe spirit." I was at home again. Decades after living the Rowe spirit, I know that my ministry began there.

Each of us in that spiritual autobiography course had a precious story to tell. For none of us has life been all smooth sailing. We have made mistakes, we have found ourselves unloved and misunderstood when we most wanted to be cherished, we have harmed others by our weaknesses. But in the course of listening to each other, of sharing our joys and sorrows, each of us was able to claim our life as our own, and give it shape. One could say, "I have been victimized. Yet I am no longer willing to let others control me." Another could say, "I made it on my own, nobody helped me. Yet in hearing these stories I find myself more sympathetic to someone who needs encouragement." Another can ask, "Why have I been such a good girl all my life? Can I now ask bold questions that challenge the assumptions of those all around me?" New insights, new understanding, new courage -- our stories embodied our self actualization.

Stories also lift up the aspirations of a people, the hopes that keep them going from one generation to the next. The Kalahari Bushmen in South Africa believe that their stories hold their very souls. The power of their stories sustains them. But it makes them vulnerable as well. Stories are to be shared only with those who can be trusted. An enemy could destroy them spiritually my misusing their stories. (Morgan, 20) Our stories hold our aspirations, whose power may save us or erase our very souls.

But God loves stories. Here's a story of hope and trust from the time of the Holocaust.

A story. Suddenly one night at the Janowska Road Camp, the inmates were herded out of the barracks to a cold dark field. In the middle of the field were two huge pits. The inmates were ordered to jump over the pits or be shot. There stood Rabbi Israel Spira, with his friend, a free thinker. "Spira," said the friend, "All our efforts to jump over the pits are in vain. We only entertain the Germans. Let's just sit down and wait for them to shoot us." "My friend," said the rabbi, "We must obey the will of God. We must jump. And if, God forbid, we fail and fall into the pits, we will find ourselves immediately in the World of Truth." The pits were rapidly filling up with bodies. The two men, starved and frozen, reached the edge of the pit. The rabbi whispered his command with closed eyes: "We are jumping." They opened their eyes and found themselves on the other side of the pit. "Spira, were are here, we are alive! Tell me, Rebbe, how did you do it?"

"I was holding on to my ancestral merit," said the Rabbi. I was holding on to the coattails of my father and grandfather and my great grandfather of blessed memory. Tell me, my friend, "how did you reach the other side of the pit?"

"I was holding on to you," replied the rabbi's friend.

(Adapted from "Hovering Above the Pit," in Because God Loves Stories, p. 218f)

Affirmation, actualization, aspiration. From Mrs. Mary Lou Lollis, to Rabbi Spira, to Susan Miller, to the children we welcomed into this congregation this morning, to each one of us. Each of us is an unfinished story, beginning far in the past, back to our earliest human ancestor running across the African savanna, and stretching forward to to the last human breath under a sky filled with alien stars. Each story is worth telling. Every act of storytelling is a sacred act, a sharing of self. Our story, our truth, can carry us over the pit -- and take a friend with us. May we each honor the stories we tell, the stories we hear, and the stories we live. Amen.