There are stories, and then, there are other stories

A couple of Sundays ago, as we have been exploring how even an old tight-fisted, hard-hearted miser like Ebenezer Scrooge can find redemption, we took a look at how our memories can become fuzzy over time. The community of family and friends around us can help clarify what we remember, but there is a danger in blindly trusting a version of the story without checking it out.

Usually it is the victor’s side in a confrontation or war that tells the version which gets accepted as truth. Here in the United States, we have grown up with one primary story of how our nation was founded and expanded. That conventional account leaves out a great many of the darker details. The people who were on the “receiving” end of those omitted or de-emphasized events often experience further trauma as they try to reconcile their own stories.

Recently, I have had to work hard at reclaiming real stories from alternative versions offered by others. This is difficult work for me since my memories were challenged fairly often by my mother who said things “didn't happen,” or “didn't happen that way,” creating a tendency to doubt my own story and allowing it to be discounted, though never really forgotten. The psychological concept of dissonance describes what happens in a case like this. The person who experiences dissonance often seeks resolution or harmony by choosing to give assent or allegiance to the “side” put forth by the ones with whom she or he wants or needs to be accepted even if that runs counter to what he or she really believes is true. Correcting this tendency takes hard work and often creates conflict.

We have seen this at work lately in the world in our political system, in the very real case of the Dakota pipeline, in Black Lives Matter, and in so many other situations. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge confronts his memories, he begins to make connections in his mind with his behavior in the present. He begins to rue shooing away the caroling boy to whom the smallest copper coin would be a fortune, turning away the gentlemen who sought his assistance for the poorest, and treating his clerk so harshly. That he begins to regret his actions is important; he is not quite ready to go into full-on atonement, but cracks begin to form in the hardened armor of chains in which he has protected himself.

Where do those cracks need to occur in our own lives? Where do they need to be widened? What is the story that needs to be rightly told and known? How about the story of why we celebrate the birth of a particular baby so long ago? What if, instead of telling the story that the world was evil and needed to be overcome—keeping us at odds with the world, we tell the story of how God comes to remind us of what we have forgotten: who we are, whose we are, how connected and in relationship we are to be with all the creation?

Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

John 3:17

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.