Swapping Stories Builds Community

Our theme for January is STORY and my challenge to you this month is to Swap Stories with someone. Swap the Story of your life with someone who doesn’t know it. Your partner for this probably won’t be your life partner or spouse or closest friend because they will most likely know too much of your story too well already. The most difficult part of this challenge is finding a partner. The partner you want to find for this challenge is someone you know, but don’t know well enough that they really know your story. People you know from church can be great for this exercise, or perhaps someone you know from another group or endeavor such a gym acquaintance, a distance relative you’re friendly with but perhaps all you know about their story is the parts you share. If you can’t find a partner or don’t know how to ask, get in touch with me and I’ll match you up with another person who is looking for a partner.

Watch the video for this Spiritual Challenge on my YouTube channel.

Once you’ve found a partner, agree on how you’ll share your stories as well as when and where. You might choose to share them over a meal or coffee or even via Zoom. You could write your stories and swap them to read. You could make videos and share them. You might get very creative and tell your story via poetry, or painting, or drawing. Musicians might write a song. You could make a collage or storyboard. There’s no “wrong” way to tell your story.

The big outline of your story is something most of us share. We have a story about our birth, where and how we grew up and where and how we were educated. We have stories about relationships, marriages, jobs, careers, illness, successes and difficulties. These are things you'll most likely think to tell your story swap partner. To add some color, detail, and more insight into who you are, where you've been, and what's happened to you in your life, here are some suggestions for anecdotes to add to your personal story:

• Some of the prompts mentioned for adding anecdotes to your story.

• Imagine that you can travel back in time to visit a younger version of yourself. What lesson/tip/reassurance would you tell your younger self?

• Tell a story about a time when you were terrified to do something, but you did it anyway and found out it wasn’t so bad.

• Tell a story about a time you did something you thought would be easy and it turned out to be hard, difficult, or a disaster.

• Share something that most people don't know about you and would be surprised to learn?

• Share a story about what you consider one of your greatest accomplishments?

• Share a story about the most exciting thing you’ve ever done or the biggest adventure you’ve ever been on.

• Share a story about a time that someone let you down and it hurt your feelings.

• If money, time, and health were no object, where is one place on earth you would love to visit and tell the story of why you want to go to that place.

• Tell the story of a person who has had a wonderful positive influence on your life and why they are important to you.

• Tell the story of the best Birthday you ever had.

• Tell the story of the best Thanksgiving you ever had.

• Tell the story of your best memory from when you were a child.

• Tell the story of the worst trip you’ve ever been on.

• Tell the story of the best trip you’ve ever taken.

• Tell the story of the last time you were bored out of your mind.

• Tell a story about something you did or that happened to you during a rain storm or a snow storm.

• Tell a story about the most beautiful place you ever seen, how you got to see that place, and why it was so beautiful to you.

• Tell a story about favorite childhood toy and why it was your favorite.

• Tell a story about the best time you ever had with a pet.

• Tell a story about the saddest time you ever had with a pet.

After you’ve shared stories, and hopefully asked each other questions about your respective stories, reflect together on what it was like. What was it like to hear your partner’s story. What really grabbed you about their story and the way they told it? What did you find yourself asking about and wanting to know more about their story? What was it like for you to “tell” (or write or draw, etc.) your story. What did you learn about your own story and how you usually tell it by telling it to this person who didn’t fully know it?

Sharing our stories builds community. It's very difficult to dehumanize someone once you know their story. The more we know about others and the more they know about us, the more likely we are to see our common humanity in each other. Swapping stories helps us practice letting others own and define their story while at the same time enhancing our ownership and understanding of our own story.

As always, if you undertake this challenge, I’d love to know how you did with it, and if you made a new friend.

Hope is Resistance: Recommend Resistance Reading Part 2

Hope is resistance and rebellion and these six books inspire hope and courage, helping you resist tyranny and injustice. Hope is also resistance reading, especially books about hope! Many of us are still circling around somewhere in the stages of grief. Part of what we need right now is hope. Hope isn’t blind optimism. That type of hope is bigoted and useless. Pie in the sky wishing for the privileged is not going to help us.  What we need is a strong courageous hope that comes to life in memories and stories of struggle and survival. Hope is a process as much as a feeling.  Hope comes from a profound trust that there is and can be goodness, love, and justice and doing something to make those things real. 

I recommend to you books that have grounded me in a just and realistic hope.  Three of these books are fiction. These novels and novella are stories that provide you with an opportunity to image how things can be better, and relish the good, the kindness, and the compassion in the world.  Three of the books are non-fiction and focus on hope from the perspective of spirituality, political organizing, and philosophy.

All the books I discuss in these Recommended Resistance Reading posts are generally available at public libraries, bookstores, and through online booksellers. Please purchase them used or from independent or minority owned bookstores, if you’re going to buy a copy.  

Hope springs from these six books

FICTION

• A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers

• The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

• Hope Punk: Hope is an Act of Resistance by Preston Norton

A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers is a utopian, not dystopian, work of science fiction about a world that has gone through the worst of ecological devastation and over-reliance on technology run amok and come out on the other side. The story centers on a monk and a robot who form a unique friendship and together explore what it means to be human, to be good, and to be alive.

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig is an exemplary work of magical realism that deals with themes including ecological collapse, political corruption, and person integrity.  A mysterious energy or being found in the ocean of a Spanish island sustains and heals the planet and its people. The protagonists fight against political power and corruption that endanger the environment. 

Hope Punk: Hope is an Act of Resistance by Preston Norton is a YA novel about a teenager who battles spiritually abusive Christian fundamentalism with queer family and friends who finds out that hope isn’t just an emotion, it’s a tool of rebellion and survival.  And as all punks know, love and music are such tools as well.  

“Hope Punk” is also the name of an entire genre of science fiction. The term was coined by fantasy author Alexandra Rowland in a 2017 tumblr post that went viral across other platforms as well, where she wrote “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.”  Grimdark stories are nihilistic, dystopian, amoral, and violent.  In grimdark stories there are no heroes, even the protagonists you might come to root for aren’t great people. The mood tends to be cynical and disheartening.  Nothing matters and what if it did?  Hopepunk is the opposite. And although there’s debate about whether hopepunk is a sub-genre, it certainly is a theme and a trope and vibe.  What makes it punk is the anti-establishment and resistance to oppression present in the work.  Alexandra Rowland further explained her take on hopepunk in essays and interviews. She noted that Hopepunk is a refutation of the glass is half empty lazy nihilism of grimdark. Hopepunk reminds us, as Rowland noted in an interview “kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”

NONFICTION

• HOPE: A User’s Manual by Maryann McKibben Dana

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown

• Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility, and the Meaning of Life by Viktor E. Frankl

HOPE: A User’s Manual by Maryann McKibben Dana is self-help workbook for training yourself to be more hopeful. McKibben Dana is a Presbyterian minister and this work does have Christian spiritual references (not too many for a non-Christian reader), but she is careful to provide alternate wording and ways of thinking of things if a Christian approach doesn’t work for you. The books is organized into short chapters of only a couple pages each with questions for reflection at the end along with a practical challenge such as “write a poem that uses the phrase ‘hope draws near when’… or  “take a walk in nature and find an imperfect natural object to remind yourself imperfect is beautiful.”

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown (not a typo, she spells her name this way) is a reflection on the need for joy and pleasure to sustain us, especially in the work of fighting injustice and creating beloved community.  Fun and pleasure are not luxuries reserved for the privileged and powerful, but the birthright of being human.

Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility, and the Meaning of Life by Viktor E. Frankl is a collection of interviews, lectures, and articles spanning decades. All them revolve around Frankl’s central philosophical theme of surviving and creating meaning even in the face of injustice and death.

mending meditation: a spiritual challenge

Our theme this month is REPAIR and my challenge to you for the month is something I call the “Mending Meditation.”  It has three parts and each part involves a different type of mending or repair work: 1. Mend something that physically or mechanically needs repairing. 2. Mend something about yourself. 3. Mend something in the world around you.

First is to find something that physically or mechanically needs repairing and fix it. Some things will be beyond most of us. If you’re not a car mechanic, or HVAC technician or computer IT person, perhaps look for something you can do already or you may be able to learn with a lesson or two from a family member, a friend or YouTube.  Manageable repair tasks might be things such as a sock with a hole in it, a pair of jeans with a rip or tear, a squeaky door hinge, a flat bicycle tire, or even a dead battery in a television remote.  The physical act of fixing it yourself is a meditation. Be present to it. What did you have to do to mend something that was broken? Did you need to learn a new skill? Was it frustrating? When you fixed it and it was repaired, how did you feel?

Next, repair something about yourself.  No one is perfect. There is probably something about you that could use a tune-up. This could be something physical, something emotional, or something spiritual. It might involve your physiology or mental health. It might be an attitude or a skill. Perhaps you’re already doing this. Those of us living with physical or mental illnesses engage this type of mending daily.  Maybe choose something about being nicer to a family member or friend who gets on your nerves. Maybe finally learn to use Google Docs or go back to yoga class or take up tai-chi.

Finally, do something to repair the world. Tikun olam is Hebrew for “world repair.” Although the term is found in the Mishnah (compilation of oral Jewish law circa 200 C.E.), since the 1950s it has come to mean doing social justice work in more liberal Jewish circles.  How you repair the world takes many forms.  Sometimes it’s as simple as acts of loving kindness toward family, friends, and neighbors.  Sometimes it’s more involved such as volunteering for a social, racial, or environmental justice organization.  It could be as simple as voting or donating money to a worthy charitable cause.  

The challenge is to practice each of these three types of repair this month and reflect on the commonalities and differences of these three ways to mend things.  Rev. Laura Everett, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Council of Churches says the spiritual practice metaphors of mending are rich and tactile. Experience these for yourself this month.  As you do reflect on how mending something, including yourself, is as Rev. Everett reminds us “a validation of worth.” 

As always, if you take on the challenge, I’d love to hear about your experience with it.