166 - My Story and "The Story"

My Story and "The Story"
By Robert McAfee Brown

"A story ... must reach me on some level to which I can respond, but it must also 'stretch' me, pull me beyond where I now am ... One of the most telling aspects of 'The Story' may be this very unexpectedness intruding upon the familiar. We know about kings, for example, but we do not know about kings who come as servants."

IN these brief comments, I want to address myself to a single problem. When we hear a story that is initially someone else's story, how does it happen that sometimes we respond by saying, "That's my story, too"? In engaging in this exercise, it should be clear that in addition to an interest in the overall problem, so baldly stated above, I also have a not-too-hidden agenda that goes like this: in a day when the Israel story and the Christian Story (which for shorthand purposes I shall hereafter refer to simply as "The Story") seem to have lost their power to inform and to engage, can we, by reflecting on what happens when other stories are told, get any clues as to how "The Story" might once again be told in such a way that we could respond, "That's my story, too"?

My engagement with another story seems to depend on a curious dialectic of similarity and dissimilarity between the story I am being told and my own story. If the story is too dissimilar to my own, so that I can get no grip upon it, find no point of contact between it and myself, I will become increasingly frustrated with attempts to understand it and (unless I am an old-style Barthian) I will finally give up in despair. As an attention-getter, " 'Twas brillig and the slithy toves" may be auspicious, but if all that follows is on the order of "did gyre and gimble in the wabe," I am soon on to something else.

On the other hand, if the story is too similar to my own, so that it introduces nothing new, nothing unexpected, nothing I could not have predicted in advance, I will become increasingly frustrated with attempts to maintain interest in it and will give up again, this time not in despair but in boredom.

Robert McAfee Brown is Professor of Religion at Stanford University. He is a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY and the author of several books, such as Pseudonyms of God (1972) and Religion and Violence (1973). "is article on "The Uses of the Past" appeared in the July 1974 issue of THEOLOGY TODAY. This present article picks up some themes presented in a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Washington, D.C., October, 1974.

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There must be a mixture of similarity and dissimilarity. Paul Kocher points out, in Master of Middle-Earth, that one of the marks of the genius of J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy is that while Middle-earth is different from our earth, it is enough like it to command our assent:

The reader walks through any Middle-earth landscape with the security of recognition that woos him on to believe in anything that happens. Familiar but not too familiar, strange but not too strange. This is the master rubric that Tolkien bears always in mind when inventing the world of his epic.¹

A story, in other words, must reach me on some level to which I can respond, but it must also "stretch" me, pull me beyond where I now am, open up some new door of my mind or heart, so that, wanting to explore further, I become an increasingly willing listener. This must happen whether I am reading a Tolkien story, or an Aeschylus story, or "The Story." Indeed, one of the most telling aspects of "The Story" may be this very unexpectedness intruding upon the familiar. We know about kings, for example, but we do not know about kings who come as servants.

With that as background, let us examine ways in which we can enter into stories other than our own.

(1) Sometimes this can happen simply by a comparison of different stories, one of which may begin to exercise compelling power. There are many stories to which I can relate, since I not only am many stories, but also have many stories and know many other stories not my own. I am constantly balancing-or juggling-a number of ways of telling my own story: the masculine version, the American version, the human version, the Christian version, the university professor version, and so on. But I am also constantly reviewing those stories by seeing them in relation to some other stories of my time: the feminine version, the black version, the Third World version, the Jewish version, the blue collar version-a list that can be extended even further to include the Buddhist version or the Marxist version or the South African (white/black/colored/Asian) versions. Within this multitude of stories, I accord one story, or several stories, a higher authority than others, using it (or them) as normative.

If things go well, my normative story is increasingly bolstered and authenticated as other stories confront it supportively and enable me to refine its details more clearly. Stories in sharp conflict with it are seen to be inaccurate and misleading and are discarded.

But things may not go well. My normative story may be rudely challenged by another story or by several stories. It may be so badly shattered that I must painfully reconstruct a new story for myself, either out of the debris of my former story or by using materials that come from one or another of the stories that created my predicament.

¹ Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1972, p. 2, italics added.

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I (R. Brown) choose, as far as I can, to make the Christian story my normative story, and to keep the masculine story, the American story, and all the rest of my stories subordinate to it, so that they are defined by it, rather than the other way around. But I cannot tell my normative story in isolation from them, nor (a fact that is increasingly important for me) in isolation from stories that are not part of my original story but need to be increasingly interwoven with it-the black story, the Third World story, the Marxist story, and so on. All of these other stories both threaten and refine (even purge) my normative story. The black story tells me how much my Christian story has been tainted by my white story; the Third World story unmasks the uncritical way I have interwoven the American story and the Christian story, and so on. In principle, it is possible for one of these encounters-or a series of them-so to undermine the Christian story as to force me to discard it. But if that were to happen, it would not leave me bereft of any story (though for a while it might seem that way). It would simply leave me with the necessity of painfully constructing the outlines of another story, or series of stories, that would become normative for me.

This risk of the destruction of the normative story must be run, and, if I am to be honest, I must juxtapose conflicting stories as harshly as necessary. For Elie Wiesel (as we shall see shortly) the Hasidic story and the Auschwitz story were thus juxtaposed-not by his choice-and the former was, for many years, destroyed by the latter. But for him (as we shall also see) the stories continued to be compared, and the Hasidic story (and the biblical story from which it ultimately came) began to assume a new and defining power, precariously won but increasingly important.

The same exercise is necessary with all the other stories we tell. The Christian must relate the Christian story to Wiesel's Jewish story, and for both the central point of contention between the stories-the Messianic claim-will emerge with a new intensity and even a new vitality. The Jew has a problem: the world is so evil, why has the Messiah not come? But the Christian also has a problem: the Messiah has come, why is the world so evil? Each must re-examine the one story in the light of the other.

In a shrinking world, the number of stories that need comparing will grow. The Jewish-Christian stories will have to be re-examined in the light of the Taoist and the Buddhists stories; the "northern" affluence story compared to the "southern" poverty story, and so on. No one can know in advance the outcome of such encounters. Perhaps a new story will emerge, perhaps one story or a cluster of stories will predominate, perhaps the different stories will begin to look like different ways of telling the same story.

In all of these situations, the validation of my normative story-or its destruction (for which, if it is false, I should clearly wish)-is dependent on an ongoing interplay in my life of a number of stories. And "The Story" cannot be exempted from this interplay.

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(2)"The Story" may become my story by being re-told to me or by me, in various ways. Increasing familiarity with "The Story," and ongoing engagement between it and my story, may serve to bring them closer together, so that in the end to tell either one is to tell them both. This insight has been movingly and compellingly illustrated for me in the spiritual pilgrimage of that incomparable teller-of-tales in our times, the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel.

Wiesel begins by telling his own story in autobiographical form. Night is a story of almost unmitigated horror, about a fifteen-year old Hasidic Jew whose family-and whose faith-are destroyed at Auschwitz. There is nothing left. There is nothing he can do but re-tell the story, in the hope that at least people will not remain indifferent the next time a holocaust impends. And so he re-tells the story, in a different genre now, in half a dozen novels, all thinly-veiled autobiography, in which the present and the past are increasingly interwoven as the old Hasidic tales become ways of illuminating the contemporary tale. And then there follows another shift in genre. After the novels, we have Souls on Fire, a direct retelling of the old Hasidic tales of eighteenth and nineteenth century middle Europe. The book, however, is not a "retreat" into the past but a new way of understanding the present, for every Hasidic story is also Elie Wiesel's story. As he puts it, referring to himself in the third person: "In his role of storyteller, and that is his main intent-he has but one motivation, to tell of himself while telling of others."²

In a recent work, Ani Maamin, Wiesel goes even further back, to a pre-Hasidic Jewish tale elaborated in the Midrash, in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wander the earth-now retold by Wiesel so that their wanderings take place during the holocaust-and intercede before the Divine Presence for the plight of God's children. The tale, which appears until almost the end to be a threnody of divine indifference, finally becomes a testament of faith-faith that in spite of all, God does not remain aloof but engages, in however veiled a form, in the sufferings of creation. It is Wiesel's own testament, in which his own story cannot be disentangled from the story of his people.

There is yet a further milestone on the pilgrimage, for Wiesel's current writing goes back all the way to the biblical stories, from which all the subsequent stories have come. The theme is "Biblical Heroes: Our Contempories," and here the identification between his own story and "The Story" is complete. To me, the most poignant illustration of the fusion is the treatment of Isaac: Isaac is a survivor of the holocaust, Elie Wiesel was bound at Mount Moriah. Both have known horror indescribable. And yet ... irony of ironies, Isaac means "laughter." How can laughter be a response to the holocaust, unless it be the laughter of the mad? But the Isaac story must inform the contemporary story, and somehow, because of the strength drawn from it, the contemporary Isaac may not finally succumb to anger, bitterness, and despair, but must, once again in spite of everything and

² Wiesel, Souls on Fire, Random House, New York, 1972, p. 259, italics added.

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anesthetizing no nerve of pain, find ways to affirm, even to the point of laughter.

Something of almost indescribable power is being communicated through this thirty-year pilgrimage from nihilism to a deep if hardly-won kind of affirmation, and it is an unthinkable journey apart from the increasing interrelation of the Elie Wiesel story and "The Story." The re-telling of "The Story," as Wiesel has demonstrated, is one way in which "The Story" can become my story.

(3) I can also relate my story to "The Story" by watching how others of my contemporaries do so. Wiesel serves as an illustration of this point as well as the preceding one, but let me suggest another instance that is increasingly important to me in my ongoing wrestling with this task-an instance soon to be revealed.

One of the greatest problems in relating to "The Story" is that it happened so long ago. Such a story might have been compelling in another era, but it is too far removed from me-historically, culturally, and geographically-to be compelling any more. On such grounds, I can seek to dismiss "The Story" from consideration.

But suppose it turns out that some of my contemporaries do find themselves able to bridge this gap, and do find "The Story," the ancient story, illuminating their story, the contemporary story. In that case, I have at least to watch what they are doing and listen to what they are saying. The instance I have in mind is the "theology of liberation" developing among Third World Christians, particularly in Latin America. Here is a movement dramatically in touch with all of the contemporary issues of poverty, exploitation, and oppression. And while it draws on both contemporary economic analysis and on Marx, it draws even more basically on "The Story," the biblical story as the story of liberation. The contemporary story and "The Story" are heard as part of the same story, and cannot be disengaged.

One example: the Exodus story describes Yahweh's freeing of his people, not only from the power of "sin" in some individualistic sense, but also from the political and economic exploitation of Pharaoh. Third World Christians hear that story not just as a tale of the past but as a description of what could become their present and future-so even today liberation is a possibility, not only from the power of "sin" in some individualistic sense, but also from the political and economic exploitation of the contemporary Pharaohs, whether represented by national oligarchies, the American CIA, or multi-national corporations. "The Story" is a way of telling their story, and, in the process, it becomes a vehicle of liberation.

I have to take such witness seriously. Since "The Story" speaks a contemporary word to them, I have to ask whether it might not also speak a contemporary word to me.

Here we must note in passing a further reason for resistance to "The Story." Sometimes it is rejected not because it is too archaic but because it is too contemporary. When I re-examine the Exodus story

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as my story, I cannot fail to conclude that as a white notherner, I am serving in Pharaoh's court, and am impeding, rather than furthering, the process of the liberation of the politically and economically oppressed. This is an uncomfortable discovery that gives me all sorts of reasons to want to discard the contemporaneity of "The Story."

(4) "The Story" can become our story (here we must shift to the plural) as we enter into it by re-enacting it ourselves. Such a claim has a venerable history (in some ancient cultures the re-enactment of the myth was the only way of ensuring its ongoing validity). But I think it speaks to our day as well. As long as we hold "The Story" at arm's length, analyzing it in disinterested fashion, it will always remain ... at arm's length. Only as we live it out will it be able to become our story as well.

This, of course, is what liturgy is all about, and liturgy is probably the most significant way to "tell the story," for then the story becomes a drama that we do not simply watch but in which we participate. "The Story" and our story are thus interwoven.

One of the most powerful and explicit instances of this is the Jewish Seder. I have never gotten over my initial amazement at discovering that the meal is not celebrated in the past tense but in the present. Deliverance is not only an event of the past but a new possibility for the present. Past events are re-lived and become alive once again. At the climax of the meal, it is said:

In every single generation it is a man's duty to regard himself as if he had gone forth from Egypt, as it is written: "And thou shalt shew thy son in that day, saying, because of that which the Lord did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt." Not our fathers only did the Holy One, Blessed be He, redeem, but us also He redeemed with them; as it is said: "And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the Land which he sware unto our fathers."³

Every celebration of the Lord's Supper in the Christian liturgy, which is the extension of the same Passover event, has a similar quality. "This do for my recalling," is how D. M. Baillie translates the anamnesis. It is a "making present" of something that originally took place in the past, an entering into participation in "The Story" so that story and our story become one and the same.

There is obviously much more to be said on this point, stemming from a recognition that "liturgy" (laos + ergon) is not simply "the people's work" that is done in church, but "the people's work" that is done whereever they are. Thus our engagement with "The Story" of liberation can occur "liturgically" when we are re-enacting liberation on the political or economic front, shedding the role of Pharaoh's helper and siding with the oppressed. We finally "tell the tale" as and wherever we embody it.

Rather than pursuing that interesting bypath, however, let one further example indicate how "The Story" and our story can be made

³ Roth, ed., The Haggadah, The Socinio Press, London, 1959, p. 36, italics added.

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one by enactment. Early in his brief pontificate, Giuseppi Roncalli, by the grace of God John XXIII, greeted some Jewish visitors to the Vatican by descending from his papal throne and embracing them with the words, "I am Joseph your brother." In this simple incident, several things were happening: (a) Pope John was recalling part of "The Story" (Genesis 45:5), a part familiar to all of his guests, in which it is indicated that God will turn to good effect whatever evil has been done in the past. (b) The incident from "The Story" was recalled by being re-enacted. Pope John did not simply issue a message saying that things must get better; he embodied the message by his embrace, and by that gesture the ancient promise became a contemporary reality. The reconciliation achieved in the past between the ancient Joseph and his brothers became a reconciliation achieved in the present between the modern Joseph (Giuseppi) and his brothers. (c) Re-enactment of "The Story" in the present created new possibilities for the future. Jewish-Christian relations cannot be as bitter in the future as they were before the event we are examining, so long as the story of that event continues to be told, and its own analogous counterparts are re-enacted elsewhere in the world today.

(5) Finally, what may happen is that hearing another story can force us to tell our own story in a different way, transformed to such a degree that we can properly call the experience one of conversion. Either we must become participants in the other story or we must disengage fully from it.

Two examples, to conclude. One of the most dramatic biblical instances of hearing a story in such a way that one's own story is radically transformed, is the famous encounter between David and Nathan (II Samuel 12:1-15). This episode is so rich that it deserves fuller elaboration than is possible in the present context, and the reader is referred to Peter Berger's classic exposition in The Precarious Vision (Chap. 12, 1961). Nathan tells David a charming and disarming tale about a ewe lamb, with a moral so explicit that David is drawn into the story to the point of taking sides, expressing sympathy for the underdog and prescribing serious penalties for the villain. At which point Nathan has him, for the story has really been a story about David and his unjustified murder of Uriah, whose wife be covets. Nathan's response "You are the man!" places David in the story as a participant rather than an onlooker. David must now see himself and his world in a totally new light, and it is a devastating light which forces him to turn about. The "retreat" into a story turned out to be no retreat at all, but only the prelude to a deeper plunge into the world around him than would have been possible without the intrusion of the story.

So stories can change us, turn us about, be instruments in a process that can be called "conversion." Sometimes they can even convey the power they describe-an abstract statement that can be redeemed from abstraction to specificity only by being itself recast in story

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form. Such a story constitutes our second example, a story about the power of telling a story "in such a way that it constitutes help in itself."

There once was a rabbi, Martin Buber tells us, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, and who was asked to tell a story about him. He said:

My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That's the way to tell a story!⁴

⁴ Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Early Masters, Schocken Books, New York, 1947, pp.v-vi.