I’ve been thinking a lot about stories lately. Stories are everywhere. Stories are how we tell others who we want them to think we are. Stories are how we tell ourselves who we are…or are not. Above all, stories are how we learn about the world around us. Most of us discover early on that not every story is for everybody. For those of us who straddle the communities of recovery and faith, this can complicate things.
When I was in early recovery, both in rehab and in the rooms of NA and AA, I often found myself surrounded by deep, sometimes hostile, anti-religiosity. Perhaps you have had similar experiences, but as a religious person, not to mention an ordained person, I was beyond bewildered.
Some people told me that I had to change everything… including the way that I understood God. Others told me, or scolded me, that my occasional use of religious vocabulary meant that I “just wasn’t getting it.” I often felt that I was being asked to make a choice between God and recovery. Of course, I thought, as an Anglican, the either/or thing didn’t make any sense. The real story, however, was that this this stubborn and scared person didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
Fortunately, the grace of humor (what I call humor, anyway) came to the rescue early on, and I began to change the story that I was telling about myself. When people asked me what I did for a living, instead of (ever) saying that I was a priest, I might say that I worked for an internationally recognized Higher Power. Laughter really can be the best medicine, lovingly jostling stubbornness (especially my own) into a bit of teachability.
Spoiler alert! My understanding of God is not the same that it was in those early days. For me, my understanding of religion, the Who of God, has remained fairly constant: traditional, western, and Trinitarian (no surprise there). But here’s the good news: my understanding of spirituality, the How of God, has blossomed and grown. And this is where stories come in.
Over time, I have come to believe that the How of God is most active when stories are shared within community. In the fulness of being heard aloud, stories can embrace the entire human condition, good, bad, and indifferent – our joys, our scars, even our still-open wounds. And in that embracing, stories of experience, strength, and hope – whether told downstairs or upstairs – serve to convict, and caution, and comfort us.
This is the great gift of stories shared in community. The tradition of cross-generational storytelling, whether from the Good Book, or the Big Book, generates a matrix. You might see it as a tapestry. The sharing of our stories, and the stories of those who went before us, gives us a context in which to see our own experience, our own strength, and our own hope. This communal matrix provides a framework on which each of us can organize our amazements and our agonies, our joys and our sorrows.
We need each other’s stories to remind us that we need each other. We need each other’s stories to remind us that each of us relies on all of us for health, and wholeness, and sanity. We need each other’s stories to remind us that we are not alone.
One of the spiritual exercises I’m trying on this Lenten season is to recall some of the stories that were important in my recovery and in the growth of my faith. There’s the first time I heard someone tell my story. And that story that said, “there’s someone with whom I can identify.” And that story that planted the seed that, maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t quite as alone as I had thought. And that story that gave me enough courage to say, “Hi, I’m Paul. I’m an addict.”
For me, for this recovering person, the How of God as I understand God is in that place where the matrix of Christianity and the matrix of Recovery are in deep conversation with each other, sometimes even dancing with each other. The way I hear upstairs stories has been forever changed by the stories I’ve heard downstairs. New light fills the story of Joseph forgiving his brothers, and the one about the prodigal child, and the one about the raising of Lazarus.
The list is endless. Every story of a power greater than me gives me hope and, in that hope, the power to imagine that I am not alone, that I belong here, in these twin communities of recovery and faith. I hope you can, too.
Paul J.
Muncie, IN
