Other people’s stories
I looked at the 30 or so elderly faces
in the room, all enjoying a lunch and conversation, company and banter. 18 months ago I would have passed them by in
the street and classified them under the label…old folk. We use generic labels like this for
processing the people we pass by every day into simpler and more manageable
categories. It’s the brains’ way of
focusing on the essentials of decision making and navigating the complex world
we find ourselves in. However, now
that I have made a start to getting to know these folk they have become a very
rich and textured part of my social landscape.
They are all individuals, unique, defying any generalisation. Each one comes with a thick hinterland of
story and experience, relationships and memory.
As their priest I am called to listen and value this richness, to slow
down enough to allow this courteous and reserved generation slowly and shyly
bring out their treasures of family, place, work, church, God. Each is worthy of a Chronicler who can at
the end of their lives recount the Saga, tell the Epic of a long obedience in
the same direction.
The next day, sitting in George Square
with an unexpected spare half hour, I watched Glaswegians and others walking
by. Hundreds of people with stories
passed through that square in the 30 minutes I sat, many of them young, a few
of the middle age men that are ubiquitous in any public space with seating,
tourists, people of different races and faiths
etc. etc. It would have been easy to let the variety wash over me, to
simplify such diversity into a bleached out ordinariness. Yet it was CS Lewis who said that there is no
such thing as an ordinary person that we walk amongst gods and goddesses if
only we had eyes to see this. Such a
sense of wonder nurtures in us ways of truly paying attention to people,
listening deeply and seeing the ordinary until it is not ordinary anymore.
Such attentiveness to others slowly
grows from believing that our lives do really count for something, that other
people matter, that traces of God can be found on a thousand faces. We need to get over our preoccupation with
ourselves though, the default looking at the world from our perspective and in
terms solely of our story. A small step
of imagination or empathy is all it takes to start us down the road to ‘doing
unto others as we would have them do unto us’.
Christ’s example of serving others and his call to die to self, continue
their subversive work undermining our pride and complacency. There is no other way to create a space in
our mind and hearts for truly giving place for the stories of others, to really
honouring and paying attention to the person in front of me, known or
unknown. In the letting go we receive
so much more, but there is always the risk that the story of the other may
challenge or question our story, our values, our faith.
Apathy (that the stories of other’s
don’t matter) and fear (that the stories of other’s may threaten our own) are
then the main brakes on growing a sense of wonder and curiosity. As a person of committed Christian faith I
am ashamed to say that this is true for me at times too, particularly regarding
anyone outside my community. And yet I
follow a God “who emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”.
Such emptying was motivated by a deep cosmic love for the human race,
despite the darkness that, yes lies within all our stories, and our own utter
unworthiness. And here lies the kernel
of it all, that celebrating, in wonder, the lives of others is not about
denying the mess and the murkiness that lies therein, but incorporating it into
this wonderful story of a God who loves and values us and says we are worth it. His blurred and marred image is what we look
for in one another and the song that is sung and the epic that is told about
each life is about mercy and grace and how they are found in the most unlikely
of places and people.
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