More than belief: a story we live in

An adult in the Education for Ministry program that I mentor said she noticed that Moses presents the laws differently in Deuteronomy than in Exodus, and she wondered, "Do you think Moses changed his mind?"

She comes from a background of literalist Sunday school teachers and college professors for whom any inconsistency in Scripture must be explained away, lest the whole faith be vulnerable to scientific attack.

I replied that the difference could also be evidence that the people writing about Moses had changed over centuries. Scripture doesn't have a single author; it's a scrapbook collected and edited over 1000 years. "So we're reading more than the story of God's people," I said. "We're also seeing unfold the story of the story, as the idea of what it means to be the people of God changed over the centuries."

She brightened. "And we're still living it!" I told her that she can now forego the other three and a half years of the program, ha ha.

An Episcopal Priest named Joseph Yoo wrote about the same idea in the introduction to his book When the Saints Go Flying In (Precocity Press, 2023):

Stories are powerful tools. LIves can be transformed when stories are shared. THe most effective way to transform someon'e mind isn't to bombard them with facts and figures but to tell them a story. Jesus absolutely knew this. It's why he told stories. He connected things that were familiar, things that were orginary to God's truth. People listened and were transformed. We still listen and lives are still being transformed because these stories aren't just about what happened centuries ago. They are still happening to your and me today. - Joseph Yoo

Subtitled Stories About Faith, Life, and Everything in between, it's the story of Yoo's path from Methodist boyhood to Episcopal priesthood wrapped around the stories of numerous saints. In that one paragraph about stories, he pretty much sums up what we do in EfM, where we put our own experiences into dialogue with our studies of scripture, 3000 years of Judeo-Christian history, and theology. (See the blog I keep for class reference, EfM at St. James Marietta)

With both of these encounters in my head this past week, I've been trying to remember the source of a rhymed couplet equating faith with living a story. Then I remembered: it's from my own self-portrait as an introverted writer inside his own shell:

We love, we hurt, we forgive, and we're forgiven.
My faith's not just a creed; it's a story I live in.
(from Interview with Box Turtle)

[Photo: Print of my alter ego purchased by my friend Susan at Marietta Square's annual arts fair, for a gift. It's been up on my kitchen wall ever since.]

These past several months, I've felt swamped by the competing narratives of dire consequences if the other political part wins. Now that the election's over, I feel, not happy, but relieved. I've turned the radio to classical music programming, I've quit scrolling the news feed on my phone, and I've concentrated on the story of God's people. I've re-read Joseph Yoo's book, and yesterday I bought poems from Mary Oliver's long career selected in a best seller called Devotions. I feel much calmer with God's story the context for the national story, financial planning, and my own aging.

Of related interest:
My post about Mary Oliver's 2006 collection Thirst, written when it was new, is one of my most-read. See Poetry as Prayer.

For EfM, I created a worship service made from her verse: Liturgy Adapted from Mary Oliver's Thirst (mostly).