Young Pastors Blog

Jim Goodmann

Regional Director, Calling Congregations

LEAVE COMMENTS FOR THIS POST AT BOTTOM OF PAGE

February 12, 2010

Story-Telling as Care of the Soul

I recently introduced Calling Congregations’ Vocation Care practice to my home parish in Atlanta. The way I presented it was telling our stories as a way to care for our lives. Our conversations have had a surprisingly rich character. Though the identified object of that curriculum is vocation – yours, mine, and ours together as the church – the way to a calling, it seems, is less systematic than textbook theology and closer to a practice of careful attention to our lives, to their warp and woof, formed and fashioned as they are by our Creator “in the depths of the earth” (Ps. 139:15) as well as by our choices. If the Psalmist’s phrase suggests a kind of mythology it may just be the needful imaginative platform that helps our thinking about our lives, about who we really are—creatures who belong not only to ourselves but to others and to the great Artifacer. Our divine origin is a given.

Thomas Moore in his now-famous Care of the Soul says that “care” is a more appropriate posture toward our lives than heroism, however desirable heroics may be to the ego. We engage the stories of our lives, he says, not to make them problem-free but to “give to ordinary life the depth and value that comes from soulfulness.” Our lives just as they are with their story-woven content just as it is. Our attempts to heal, says Moore, “can get in the way of seeing.”

When Jesus declares, “the kingdom of God is like…” the preponderance of his images come from the everyday: the kitchen, the vineyard, the farmer’s field (a favorite), an accountant’s office, or the site of a building project. The stages of ordinary living with their indigenous raw material. I wonder, could he not point to our lives with their emotionally charged content and say, “…the kingdom of God is like a career turned upside down, a dearly loved child in distress, a long illness, a congregation in search of its mission, a community that longs to define itself by something other than fear and foreboding”?

In the circumstances that are unacceptable or which challenge our view of the perfect world there is the kingdom of God. We begin to dwell in that kingdom by paying careful attention. Our stories, told in all their color and dimension deserve a hearing – not least by ourselves. And like passages of Scripture, they require a compassionate exegesis, the careful attention of other listeners.

This Lent, consider that the kingdom of God is “at hand”(Mark 1: 15), maybe under your feet, or sitting in your desk drawer, lying in a memento of years past, or – even better – in someone’s memory of your growing up together or falling in love. Where your understanding of your life’s calling fails, listen to the call of your stories. For instance, as we say at FTE, “Name a time when someone noticed you and your gifts—and you knew it!” We also like to say, “To be available to one’s own story is key to being available for what God is up to in the world.”

This practice is best facilitated by delineating a sacred space in the company of others – a space mindfully entered. As Thomas Moore suggests, “Many religious rites begin with the washing of the hands or a sprinkling of water to symbolize a cleansing of intention and the washing away of thoughts and purposes. In our soul work, we could use rites like these, anything that would cleanse our minds of their well-intentioned heroism.” What we need most from each other may be our simple attention, the kind that comes with no hidden motives of fixing or re-drafting. It is in these small spaces of listening that we may be most clearly identified as the body of Christ.