the Crucible of Story

Some thoughts from Sue Monk Kidd's Firstlight  - "The Crucible of Story"

"Discovering our personal stories is a spiritual quest.  Without such stories we cannot be fully human, for without them we are unable to articulate or even understand our deepest experiences.

Many of us left the storied approach to life at our nursery windows…In a culture that is rational, scientific, and abstract we have lost touch with the intuitive, imaginative, and concrete dimensions that inform story.  And as the church has made theology and doctrine the core of our religious expression, we have become unstoried in the spiritual life as well.  We have lost the ability to probe the soul, to know and refine its experiences…

Those who fail to tend to their inner stories risk creating a rift between what they believe and how they live.

The inner story creates identity, transforming our vision of who we are.

The inner story converts and transforms us by sustaining us in the midst of suffering.

The inner tale transforms us by reorienting us to new truth and insight, breaking open the hidden holy that dwells in our experience.

The word story actually means “to know.”  In the act of creating story there is always an event of coming to know. God surprises us with glimpses and truths we did not grasp until we tried to tell the story

Discovering my inner story reveals God in time and place, my time and place…Through story we draw connections between the happenings of life and the lessons of God.  We catch God suddenly in the thick of our days, disclosures unraveling out of the mundane. Such awareness transforms life from a series of random events to the poetic realm of a sacred tale.

When we share our inner stories, we allow others to enter our lives and partake of our deepest truths.  We discover that we share the same joys and tragedies, the same ambiguities and struggles.  In the end we are all one story.

But creating personal spiritual stories is an act of soul-making that does not happen automatically.  It comes only as we risk stepping into the chaos of our lives and naming the angels that inhabit the shadows. It comes as we give expression to our struggle for individual meaning, identity, and truth, as we wrestle with angels, both light and dark, and celebrate the places where God stirs.  In the crucible of story we become artists of meaning.  There we meet God most surely."