Tag Archives: blogs I read

credit: Ann_Mei

David at the Direction of Intention likes to tell stories. But not so much the regular kind most people tell these days. His stories are more like the old ones that lead us out of our everydayness, to somewhere rich and mysterious. His prompting has me in a general wondering about the power of story.

I think these days when we tell stories we are usually being narcissistic. When people talk about their story they are generally referring to the set of beliefs they have adopted, and the way they tend to ossify into a narrative. Such stories take on a lot of inertia and tend to morph into the proverbial comfort zone. And so we find ourselves rattling around inside a cliché. And sometimes we look for ways to shift it, or release ourselves from it. But to what?

There’s value in understanding this type of story, to be sure. But I think that without a larger context, we can become lost in loops of narcissism. I suspect the reason we collapse into these looking glass stories is because we have fundamentally lost the plot. I mean this in the deepest possible sense.

For the most part, human beings no longer have a viable cosmology. A real Story. We no longer share and shape a Sacred Story about our being and becoming. The holy meta-narrative. Not really. We have some limited chapters that we have pretended are something more, but many of us have noticed that they are worn and thin, and we have lost our enthusiasm for them.

Thomas Berry wrote at length about our predicament. As he saw it, we are caught between the religious traditions that abandoned cosmology in favor of narratives of personal redemption and transcendence, and the false cosmology of rationality and science that spews forth a litany of facts without saying much about what they ultimately mean. The problem is that neither offers much guidance for our living-breathing soul journey in this more-than-human world.

We have all heard the stories about nirvana, enlightenment, ascension, the New Jerusalem, Paradise, the rapture, etc. They all celebrate some place other than where we are. Yet in our souls and bones we know that this mighty moment is also precious. The now of this body, this breath, this green leafy world, is miraculous and infinitely full. We know that when the burning bush ordered Moses to take off his shoes, the holy ground it spoke of was not in the promised land. We are standing on it now.