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Chapter Nine:
The Possible God: How Story Shapes the Spiritual Dimension of Our Lives
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
Spirituality is story. Since consciousness and language first claimed us, human beings have made up sacred stories to explain how something larger than ourselves created us and the world. Spirituality seems to be innate to human beings. If children are not told a spiritual story they will quite confidently make up their own explanations. And just as society develops language, so society develops a spiritual story of its creation. The story of creation is the universal first story.
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Religion is also story. Religion grows out of our innate spiritual base, but it takes spirituality and systematizes it to foster uniformity, universality, and immutability. Religion develops a priest class that serves to interpret religious teachings to ordinary people. It develops a hierarchy, becomes a landowner, becomes protective of its wisdom, centralizes its sacred places and texts. And each religion believes it holds the correct interpretation of the Divine, of human nature, and of the world before, during and after life. Religion developed in human history at a time when people began to organize beyond locale into larger identifying groups. Before and after the rise of nation states, people see religion and race as the primary definition of where, and with whom, they belong.
 Starting five thousand years ago in India, Hinduism began to consolidate hundreds of local gods and goddesses into a complex pantheon of deities to interface between the spiritual world and human society. Just as Krishna brought order to heaven, the priests of Krishna brought order to the continent. Born into this system in 1029 BCE, Gautama Buddha introduced new elements of thought and insight that became codified as Buddhism. In the Middle East, Abraham, born around 1800 BCE, discovered monotheism and founded Judaism for the twelve tribes of Israel. When Jesus was born into this system he introduced theological shifts that became Christianity, and around 600 CE, Mohammad introduced another shift in monotheism that became Islam. Back in Asia, Shintoism developed out of indigenous Japanese nature worship, and the world as we know it — a world arbitrarily divided into five great religions — was set into place.
... When she was about nine years old and visiting my apartment for a weekend ritual we called, "going to Auntie Camp," my niece Erin asked me, "So what is religion anyway?"
"Religion is a language for God," I responded. "What God actually is remains a mystery as big as the stars, but people need a story that helps us think about it. So religion talks to us about what God might be, and how to be a good person, and what to do with our lives. Around the world people have many ways they imagine God. Some of that imagination has become religion, with its own language and stories. Some people think of God the Father, and Jesus the son; some think of Allah and Mohammad the son; some think of Buddha; some think of the Great Mother; some people believe in many gods and some people believe in only one."
"Cool," she said, her question more than answered. And we went back to reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
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There is an Episcopal church in the Potrero Hill section of south San Francisco that invites people to engage in expansive spiritual conversations. The church building itself is an aesthetic blend of cedar shingles and octagonal cupolas adorned with ornate crosses in an architecture that combines a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright, a brush of Byzantine, a hint of yurt, and a little Shinto temple at the corners. It seems to say: Come on in, whoever you are and be ready for surprise. The main entrance leads into an open octagonal room with a simple raised table often covered with heavily embroidered African cloth. This is the altar. At various moments it holds name tags and liturgical songbooks, it holds communion, it holds coffee and tea and a potluck buffet of noontime snacks, it holds a toy picked up off the floor, it holds a child's drawing brought up from Sunday school. It is rimmed with the sticky fingerprints of toddlers and polished with reverence before the laying out of the cup and bread.
 "Everything that happens on God's table is holy," says Father Donald Schell, one of two priests who co-pastor this parish. "The central message of our theology here at St. Gregory's is that God brings us into community with Himself and then entrusts us to take care of each other. The altar is the center of what holds us together, not the edge. The baptismal font is at the back in a garden alcove, it's not a ticket to the table. We feed each other in body and soul first, and then as people are ready to make a commitment to Christianity we meet them at the holy well. We baptize as many adults as children, I think because we frame that sacrament as a signal — I am coming up God's mountain by this route — not a demarcation line between the accepted and the forsaken."
Father Rick Fabian joins in. "God is having one conversation with humankind," he says, "but in a thousand voices. Religious people all over the world need to be in conversation with each other so that we understand the fullness of God's conversation with us. The complete story of God is discovered in how the sacred manifests in every religion, in every gesture a person makes toward the Divine. Whether kneeling, standing, dancing, chanting, meditating, crying, laughing — I'm listening to the conversation between God and the human heart. When we understand that every one of us is sending and receiving part of the message then we can embrace each other with that knowledge."
The two men might be brothers. Graying, balding, trim, one on each side of sixty, they are friends who met in seminary in the 1960s. Fr. Donald grew up in California; Fr. Rick grew up in Texas. They both went to General Theological Seminary in New York, interned together in Spanish Harlem, were chaplains together at Yale in 1972, and then briefly took parishes in different parts of the country. They never lost touch with each other, or with the rich experiments in worship they had developed together...
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Storycatchers, with our ability to entertain curiosity rather than judgment, and our practice in listening, speaking, and writing, may find ourselves serving as a bridge between polarized groups and theologies. To be present in these difficult conversations will require us to be grounded in our own spiritual stories and journeys.
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St. Gregory's echoes in midweek emptiness, but it comes to life on Sunday mornings, when an eclectic gathering of several hundred people — the fullest range of humanity that south San Francisco and a commuting range of over an hour can offer up — arrive for worship. People come here because the theology and the community help them live with uncertainty and hold a spiritual core. They are not rescued from the trials of the world; they are offered community, communion, and conversation so they know their experience is held within the larger story. The people stand around the altar and sing. They sit together around a seated homilist, listen, and dialogue. They dance to the communion table to the beat of drums, the sound of their own feet gently slapping the wooden floors, the chants of their own voices filling the room. This is radical Christianity — radical as in root — third-century Eucharist in a twenty-first-century church.
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Everybody is on a learning curve in this conversation. God is mystery. We may stake our lives on one definition or another, but that doesn't resolve the mystery. And where there is mystery, the plot is still active; the insight is still in shift.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
Religion is a story. Not just one story, but many stories brought forth to explain the world and our place in it. Throughout our history, the political — the structure that governs human society — and the religious — the structure that governs the creation story — have often been in an uneasy dialogue and struggle for power. Every human life and every human society is commissioned to create a workable story between the secular and the spiritual. Storycatchers accept a responsibility to preserve all of the stories, to ensure that generations to come can choose their own religious story.
Who is your brother/your sister in the spiritual journey of your life?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>
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