Finding One’s Niche, Destiny, & Aiming for Good

Now that the Spring Term 2017 has closed, I’m drawn to reflect on the Good Stories course: purpose and possibilities, intentions, redirections, serendipities. In looking over open-ended notes from the final days, I’m taken back to the inception of Good Stories, back to re-read a mostly-forgotten blog composed when planning for the first session some six years, over eleven hundred students ago. In January 2011, my deliberations about the purpose for Good Stories concluded:

Cooperation depends on maturity, not naïveté.  Civilization advances partially through the detection and treatment of cheaters.  Boyd [author of the primary textbook] states that our stories teach us how to do that.  My engagement in this text meshes forward into my appreciation and high value for integrity.  The compelling story consists in the truth of the word and speaker infused inseparably.  Society urgently depends on such storytellers/leaders as well as citizens with story savvy who discern lies and cheaters.  Discernment depends on purification.

     Over the fifteen times the course ran, we did engage stories featuring betrayal and deception. While we searched out applications to both the individual and the local level to discern lies from truth, the themes that resonated more frequently and strongly focused courage, perseverance, love, and on the pair found in the subtitle of the course: peace and justice. In concert with the textbook, Brian Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories, our course progressed through four levels of explanation, culminating in the Particular Level. 

     Boyd illustrates the particular level:

“even highly creative persons create in distinctively personal patterns. Shakespeare learned from the opportunities and examples of the drama of his day-blank verse, rhetorical exuberance, multiple plots, the genres of tragedy, comedy, and history-but from the first extended them in his own way, becoming, as his work matured, more idiosyncratic in vocabulary, phrasing, imagery, meter, speech construction, characterization, scenic structure, plot development, plot parallelism, emotional change and range, and sheer artistic confidence. By working at their own kinds of problems intently, geniuses can build on their expertise, their peculiar neural networks, their own mental materials and methods, rather than reinventing elements and methods each time from scratch. Even writers with a high inclination or a high determination to maximize novelty will reach positions and discover practices distinctly their own that they continue to recycle and recombine in their own way." (p. 356, Kindle 4039-4044)

     Boyd explicates this level and its application to moral sense most thoroughly in his focus on Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss, and specifically in Horton Hears a Who!

Part of what makes the story so satisfying, indeed, is the delicate balance between our admiration for Horton's having the courage to stand up for himself despite the pressure of his entire jungle community and young Jo-jo's having the decency to respond to the pressure of his community. Both nonconformity and conformity have their claims. This kind of symmetry may not be consciously noticed even by most adult readers, yet it contributes naturally to our sense of the rightness of the story. In his case, Horton has good reason to resist the other animals; in his, Jo-jo has good reason to join his fellow Whos. (page 374; 4244-4248 Kindle)

     In Good Stories, we applied the particular level to the production of the final Digital Media Project. The assignment was explained:

DMP3 shows movement toward the Particular Level where the previous three levels are best engaged, both now and in a future vision, for “truth” in answering the big questions of peace and justice, in a specific response to the individual’s destiny, gift, opportunity, and responsibility. DMP3 shows the transformation necessary to move toward destiny (including humans' progression toward cooperation) and the transformation develops through challenges.

     Evident in a note written on May 12, the day after the last class, I see one of those words emphasized—gift. Perhaps emerging over the fifteen terms as most important to me was a wish and intention that the course serve as a gift to the lovely students, in ways like grandchildren—especially shown in the tears of the one staying as all others left the room to say, “I don’t want it to end.” If our time together led to the gift of stories, our course doesn’t end. As the May 12 note put it:

“Gift” closes up inaccurately, like a flower that reverses into a bud instead of opening into the fullness of the bloom. Yes, it moves toward the petal-dropping moment, a direction threatening, calling to the edges of our misguided mind the specter of death. But, “No problem,” as the now-phrasing gives it. The gift from God, the distinctive mark to each being, is a giving, continuous flowing, not owned by us. That unique fingerprint of now, the DNA of one’s true identity, dare not be mine but only known to be the longing, pulling toward and uniting with the source.

Love Inseparable from Justice, Mercy, Compassion

5 AM-ish is the perfect time for coffee, especially on May 25, 2017, when the world turns sepia-toned, the tin roof echoes the gently falling rain, the robin joins in, not exactly singing but offering unabashedly itself. And the Amish-made rocking chair on the back porch, along with the man in it, creak just a bit. 

     Most Thursdays for the past decade would likely have found me at Starbucks when the door opens, 5AM, often the one on the corner of the Beltway and Route 1, pondering matters academic, like everybody else, wondering. Whatever: how we got here, how to get out without completely betraying the soul. 

     I don’t think humans are born nice and we’re not born mean either, but it sure looks like it. There’s a book within reach of my desk called Just Babies, mostly not-yet-read, but the point is that we’re born, at least most everybody is, with a capacity to prefer goodness and even with discernment of good guys. Just—as in born-with justice. Even before speaking or walking infants can choose the person who was nice, looking away from the actor who meanly stole the toy from another child, preferring the one showing love.

     What happens? How can so many people fail to see corrupt wanna-be leaders who are going to betray them without batting an eye? How can folks choose to watch a network spewing lies and hate? And then go to church, even send missionaries! The good book, just about any of them, warns of this. Freedom, this gift given humans, means suffering and most would rather not. The textbook we used in Good Stories preaches reciprocal altruism and asserts the necessity of imposing disincentives even to persons who collaborate with and who do not resist the evil-doers.

     Other good books teach purification. The person who wants to stone the one caught in adultery is not to be hated or vilified. The resistance needs to come from a clean heart because harboring hate destroys. So the person who committed the horrific hate crime on campus, the persons who support a power-crazed politiican, those who maim horses to win competitions—all these should be stopped but best not by those calling them nasty names. 

     Somehow love is still the answer. And it must be a love greater than we have grown, one inseparable from justice, mercy, compassion.

Human Choice

If we accept the wisdom of “there’s nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), we might be liberated from the shut-down of saying/doing what’s already been said/done. Freedom and change, renewed and evolving, are also truths alongside the nothing-new. And words, although in print they appear unchangeable, they, too, are ever moving, even if at glacial speed. 

     Then, if I don’t have to wait for the perfect, or even the right, beginning and if I escape from the fear of being redundant and looking ignorant of a previous tome, then what guides the choice of word and act? Yes, I am familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy, and I’m often drawn to the fitting of the niche, the resolution by the hidden treasure, the parable of talents (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-28). More compelling as a model for living in freedom glimmers the “path of attraction.” 

     But “attraction” invites the amusement park or, more darkly, Dante’s circles of Hell littered with tortured bodies laid waste by lust, hate, greed, and other evil turns of power. As evident across history and certainly flagrant on the pages of today, human choice runs to waste and to harm. That the holy books overflow with commands and with hell-fire consequences makes sense as a force to hold against the dark side of our nature, waiting for maturation, for developed capacity to know better and to choose more wisely, more generously, more compassionately. 

     Sufis tell of the “animal soul.” My favorite storybook, Rumi’s Mathnawi, like the recurrent seaside waves, each still unique, sends the current that offers insight and inspiration for living on the path of attraction. There’s no attempt to hide from satanic allure, even if it looks like small pleasures, like “no-harm” fouls. To be hooked by the animal soul is so easy. The true path demands recognition and dealing with human tendency to choose wrongly, even to stay stupid, to doze or drug.

     But, by grace, we taste the divine. By discipline, by obedience, by following a guide, by seeking after knowledge and by surrender of selfish power, a person recognizes the true, the eternal, joy, peace, love. . . 

"The Eternal Now"

How to start when “there is no beginning; there is no end—all my life’s a circle.” Into this living moment, now, eddies the past, the ones who have passed over, also the unspoken and the wished-unsaid. Across the mirror dances foresight, prophecy, dream images not yet enfleshed. And all this already writ: the Paradise poems, the book of Job, the Four Quartets, “the horse who scents the living grass…will ever after run.”

The sole justification for tapping out again what has already been given is because. The moving finger has its own revealer. The Prophet’s recorded message says over and over again that the words had been delivered before and before that. And still the spring graciously bubbles forth with drops recovered from the ocean. The only reason praises, slips aside one more veil. One glimpse of the Beloved, a whisper, even in a dream, if that, drives the caravan oasis to oasis to paradise. Or it is. It is enough. 

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Finding or even Making the Glint

        While the “path of attraction” might sound, well, attractive, deep commitment gets more difficult when the sweets don’t show up in the daily in-box. The day-to-day dealing has more to do with tending the garden and making the fertile soil instead of expecting raindrops and roses. The moisture for the sweet-smelling, the eye-appealing, the tasty attractions comes from tears as well as from the beneficent source of blessings. Or perhaps, more likely, the tears are gifts that bring growth, that make the heart sensitive to glints otherwise invisible in life’s pathway.

        Surely one of these developments in tending the garden has to do with the nature of longing. Blessed are those that thirst, not those who are drunk, not those whose treasuries are stuffed. I recently enjoyed reading an interview that Krista Tippett did with Sylvia Boorstein especially in the featured line: “Where is it written that you’re supposed to be happy all the time?” Boorstein credits her grandmother for instilling this “Talmudic turn of phrase” as a turning point from her childhood petulance guiding her toward “the beginning of my spiritual practice that life is difficult.” 

        To live consistently on a path of attraction needs reassurance that longing, in its nuanced nature, is a good sign, often not an easy one, but still true. I find bittersweet comfort in David Wilcox’s song “The Break in the Cup” (from the album Big Horizon). Paradoxically, as Wilcox tells, it’s the break that “holds love” and more understandably that leads “to the waterfall,” to the source.

        Good stories, such as the "Visit," deserve to be told over and over because living in the paradox of “are you here because you want to be or because you have to be?” is continually resolving in the renewal of garden of a heart that longs for the source.

        When we tell a good story, when we touch upon the inarticulate edge, an incompleteness, nostalgic, seeps in. Most narratives skirt this feeling or dash past it with superfluous action, violence, sensationalism, laughter, and so on. But the well-tended garden builds soil that sustains thirst, perhaps even welcomes it because it’s the remembrance of the source. The heart that longs moves toward love, the depths of it.

To Tell the Truth

To telI the truth: that’s the essence of Good Stories. The phrase marvelously carries a double meaning [see Note 1 below] that swirls into one—but only by sincere seeking, by grace, and in the fleeting moment of translation. In addition to the obvious expressive act, telling can mean discernment; for example, “I can tell how a story is true.” And most magnificently, truth is told and discerned in the embodied life. Increasingly, when I really want to know whether to believe something or someone, the key comes through integrity. It’s the old acid test of walking the talk.

In addition to the goal of Good Stories, to-tell-the-truth focuses the mission of schooling, of religion, of home and office. And as writ across the face of America, we have a long path ahead because we’re finding ourselves far too much mired in “fake news,” intentional distortions, and downright lying. 

Of course, to tell the truth pushes us to the edge of capacity. It’s a wonder that a single word is spoken in court. If one is seriously attentive to the injunction to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” who can presume to such knowledge? Especially if the book of Job has been taken to heart, we must admit our inability to know at a deep level that plumbs into human suffering and into the nature of justice.

And yet there resides at the heart of human nature, sometimes in hiding, the need to know. The pathway toward truth is perilous, especially in the shadows from the tower of ego-inflated presumption; but equally, if not more, in the chasms of despair, fearful of reaching enough light to live by. Regarding the former, most anyone who has spent much time near the temples of religion or in the ivy halls of academia can testify to the arrogant and oppressive crusades by persons who act and proselytize as if they possess THE truth. Margaret Atwood and many others have long tried to caution us: "The true story is vicious / and multiple and untrue…”

How easy, then, to collapse into despair after colliding with persons unworthily holding positions of authority who manipulate, lie, and corrupt. The illusion of making and accepting fake-news must be dispelled in order to know that becoming great (again?) cannot be approached until persons live out the contrite confession that goodness comes before greatness and that goodness depends upon sacrificing the oppressive ego, the intolerant ambition, and the arrogance of imposing THE truth.  

It’s in good stories that the capacity to tell the truth is forged. As noted in recent posts, Martin Buber and Karen Armstrong urge us to re-see the stories of the Bible in order to gain discernment, to receive continuing revelation, as well as life-affirming insight. Even the beginning of Genesis can be re-seen and understood in a liberating way. Perhaps the two contradictory creation stories invite humans to search for continuing revelation in addition to prescriptions to live by.

Given all the troubles, why do we strive for the truth? For many of us, a driving force is expressed in the line: “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free!” Sometimes a familiar phrase opens up through a newer translation as when Jesus was telling those who “had claimed to believe in him. ‘If you stick with this, living out what I tell you, you are my disciples for sure. Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you’ ” (Jn 8:31-32, The Message, 1993, NavPres).

Should we then conclude that if we do not know the truth, we remain in captivity? The answer appears to be “Yes, but...” If we do not strive toward the light, we remain in darkness; and although freedom might look like the obvious choice, there’s a big reason why persons might not choose to move toward knowing. Remember the saying: Ignorance is bliss? Knowledge carries with it the responsibility to act. As phrased in James:

As it is, you are full of your grandiose selves. All such vaunting self-importance is evil. In fact, if you know the right thing to do and don’t do it, that, for you, is evil. (The Message, 1993, NavPress). 

The consequences of failing to live into the light saturate the stories from the Bible, the message of the Qur’an, and perhaps define any sacred text.  For example, Muhammad Asad’s translation and commentary, The Message of the Qur’an, features a phrase “give the lie.” This wording and the referenced activity connects with “deny the truth.” Asad elaborates on this in his notes to Surah 74 (see especially Note 4 on p. 1229).

After elaborating the tragic consequences of the patriarchs in Genesis, Karen Armstrong concludes with the poignant truth about knowing:

But the inescapable message of Genesis is that blessing and enlightenment are not achieved by acquiring facts and believing doctrines. Genesis gives us, as we have seen, no coherent theology but seems to frustrate our desire for clarity at every turn. Instead, knowledge means self-knowledge and an understanding of the mystery of our own being. We also have to recognize the sacred mystery of our fellow men and women. . .Other human beings remain as opaque and mysterious as God—indeed, they can reveal to us the essential mystery and otherness of the sacred (pp. 118-119, In the Beginning).

To tell the truth depends on knowing truth [duh], especially in the engagement with its mysterious sacred side. Our susceptibility to fake-news comes, I believe, in the limited range of knowing. How much of love can be known by only reading romances? As the varied tales of beauty and beast invite us to see, it’s so easy to skim along on a surface level as if that’s all there is. The treasure of knowing, the revelation of and transformation into real beauty, comes through the crucible of personal experience. Book learning, like news reports, has much value but the refined gold gets tempered in the risky spaces of life, especially where passion leads.

Every seeker of truth needs a practice of truth-telling. My path, very surprisingly, opened up into natural horsemanship, into story telling, and in the strange interconnection of these two. Those of us who attempt “True Unity” [see Note 2 below] in horsemanship embody approximation. Only in fleeting immediacy is the gift of balance experienced with the thrill and grace of presence. Truth continually realigns from being ahead or behind, tilting left or right, lifting too much up or down, as well as holding between the arrogance of presumption and the diminishment of selfhood joined in relationship. To tell the truth brings exhilaration linked inextricably with humility.

        It is humanly impossible to sustain perfect alignment with the dynamic acrobatics of a spirited horse in dressage; but by grace and by devoted discipline, the presence of true unity is tasted, giving a breath-stopping glimpse. For me, this encounter links to the magic of good stories, the “once-upon-a-time” dimension, where “the two worlds touch.” As Mircea Eliade articulated the gift of myth [see Note 3 below], this experience redeems the profane world through contact with the eternal, the sacred. And that’s how we tell the truth.

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Note 1. Merriam-Webster gives a baker’s dozen, including:

1 :  to let a person know something :  to give information to * I’ll tell them when they get here.

3 :  to find out by observing * My little brother has learned to tell time.

11 :  to see or understand the differences between two people or things * Can you tell right from wrong?

12 :  to see or know (something) with certainty * It’s hard to tell if he's serious.

Note 2. “True unity” is one of the key terms associated with “natural horsemanship” and other approaches to the human-horse connection that aim at increasing a respectful relationship. Ray Hunt is often referenced (Think Harmony with Horses: An In-Depth Study of Horse/Man Relationship. Bruneau, ID: Give-It-A-Go Books, 1978), and the term is used in Tom Dorrance’s title (True Unity: Willing Communication between Horse and Man.  Bruneau, ID: Give-It-A-Go Books, 1987). More extensive background on “natural horsemanship” can be found in: Miller, Robert and Rick Lamb. The Revolution in Horsemanship and What it Means to Mankind. Guilford,CN: Lyons, 2005; and Miller, Robert.  Natural Horsemanship Explained: From Heart to Hands. Guilford,CN: Lyons, 2007. An example of my application of natural horsemanship to teaching-story can be seen in:

http://dochorsetales.blogspot.com/2016/03/good-stories-move-us-from-literal.html. 

Note 3. From http://www.bytrentsacred.co.uk/index.php/eliade-sacred-and-profane/2-sacred-time :

“Eliade introduces his phrase illud tempus, to refer to the time of origins, the sacred time when the world was first created.

Religious man accessed illud tempus whenever he ritually recited his cosmogonic myth, thereby reactuating the creation of his world. In various cultures, this gave an approach to the healing of the sick, for by being taken ritually to the time of origins, the sick could be reborn without their sickness.

More generally, religious man needed to enter sacred time periodically because sacred time was what made ordinary, historical time possible.”

Going Where Teaching's Only What's Already Known

Daffodil in decaying leaves and snow.

Why does the good book begin not with one account of creation but with two? Why open with apparently contrasting, even contradictory, stories of our beginning and our nature? Karen Armstrong says that the stories in Genesis “seem to be warning us against any simplistic conception of the divine, which must always elude our limited comprehension…[God] frequently appears to be as ambiguous, contradictory, and dubious as they [humans] themselves” (p. 13, In the Beginning). 

In E.A. Speiser’s examination of Genesis, “the point here is not whether this account of creation conforms to the scientific data of today, but what it meant,” “not whether the statement is true or false, but what it means” (p. 9, The Anchor Bible Genesis). In his introduction, Speiser focuses the point: “The history of the biblical process is ultimately the story of the monotheistic ideal in its gradual evolution” (p. xlix).

Might it be that we are given the two accounts because the dissonance offers us the engagement with our distinctive human inheritance: the capacity for wonder. We are meant to search out our meaning, “my beloved, . . . work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). Martin Buber on Genesis: “The perception of revelation is the basis of perceiving creation and redemption” (p. 10, On the Bible).   And it is in story that we build the capacity for the work of wonder in the play of making meaning out of likeness, of parabolic instead of literal, out of that which acclimates to our evolving consciousness.

Why tell good stories? 

Among the varied reasons, a favorite of mine muddles around the paradox of powerful teaching: “You can’t teach persons something they don’t already know.” Paradox might be the proper container for our genetic complexity because it contains opposites. Since teaching, at first glance, is directed at what isn’t known, how does it also depend on what is already known? 

The function of analysis, with breaking into opposites as a prime example, drives toward deeper understanding. If we wish to further our knowledge of teaching, then, exploring this mystery of the paradoxical known/unknown promises tracking of the secret. And, after the analysis, if we believe that the whole is greater than the parts, we’ll need story to restore our broken Humpty Dumpty because all the king’s men and horses in the academy’s hegemony of scientific analysis can’t put the world of genesis together. But story can. On story’s terms. And that includes the holding of paradox and the love of parable.

  Idries Shah plays with all this. In Seeker After Truth, Shah blends several sources in order to discuss “How to Learn What is Already Known” (pp. 92-94).

• Referencing al-Ghazzaii: “The question of divine knowledge is so deep that it is really known only to those who have it.” So the paradox has to do with a very special kind of knowing.
• Bahaudin’s eighth counsel: “Be prepared to find that certain beliefs are correct, but that their meaning and interpretation may vary in accordance with your stage of journey, making them seem contradictory to those who are not on the Path.”  Capacity for paradoxical thinking includes tolerance for changing meanings and for apparent contradiction.
• It also requires going alone and being rejected. Shah takes the tolerance for ambiguity on into dealing with invisibility and being devalued: “true mystical teachers may be ‘invisible’ to some people in the sense that such people cannot realize their worth. .  . What they are teaching, and its methods, may be imagined to be some mundane activity, even” (p. 93). Remember the teaching, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown” (Luke 4:24).

We could simply say that the answer is that there is no answer. As T.S. Eliot eloquently and perhaps frustratingly put it: “Except for the point, the still point,/ There would be no dance, and there is only the dance” (Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”). Paradox, for one who chooses to engage it, means searching without full closure. It affirms the process, the longing, and therein builds understanding, that and tolerance.

Good stories give the playground, the stuff for exploring. Not THE answer. For a human who gives answers denies the authentic source and displaces the inner direction of the secret. Good stories help us laugh in the human condition. Good stories model the character of loving, of losing, of redemption.