Truth-Telling

Maybe fifteen years ago, the Thoroughbred that was teaching me to ride better was called the Truth-Teller. He kept leaning in; and while I fussed that my cues were saying to stay out on that imaginary perfect circle, the coach insisted the horse was doing exactly what I was telling him to do. Many times later, around and over again through a decade of riding, my inner horsepower now makes a clearer, more accurate reading on our balance, more aware of degrees of pressure, stillness, softness, and tilt, as well as clearing our mental and emotional states. All this makes for telling the truth.

Sometimes with just a glimpse of a person in a position of leadership, an extremely unbalanced, hypocritical condition jumps out, glaringly obvious. I wonder how others fail to notice it. How can so many persons support someone who repeatedly imperils the future of their children? Recognizing the vital role played by compassion, I’m trying to remember my experience when I just didn’t get what the Truth-Teller was making abundantly clear. 

The gift of discerning truth and the continued development of moral sense depend on dedicated commitment to peace, justice, and love. Also, the path includes some difficult aspects. Suffering, tolerance of uncertainty, and trust in a higher power must play a crucial role in becoming truth-tellers. Our world shows so much failure to face the truth: denial of addiction, cheating, false labeling, staying on the surface of skin color instead of moving deeper to know love, listening to praise instead of heeding the inner divine, on and on. What will it take to make a commitment to truth?

Sometimes, “white” lies are called “telling stories,” meaning the person is fibbing or making something up for deceptive purposes or for fun. Yes, it’s wise to recognize that all stories are not good stories. And we should know that not just any person can tell a good story, in both senses: 1) discerning truth from lies and 2) composing an embodied truth-narrative, telling a moral tale. 

But we are “wired” for story. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it in After Virtue, “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth” (p. 216). The moral dimension of the history we compose can be best understood, many of us believe, as a Narrative Covenant (e.g., David Damrosch; also see the volumes on hermeneutic phenomenology as well as archetypal psychology).

Genesis 1 says we are made in God’s own image. I believe in the divine gift; some call it genius. A gift needs to be nurtured. Moral sense can be tended by good stories.

The Good-Stories-Experience

Good Stories, like this iris, illuminate a doorway—one otherwise easily missed; 
they transport us over the threshold of destiny.

       The purpose of Good Stories is to engage the power of the word. 

       Well, that’s one way to say it. Any web of words invites trouble, like “a murder of crows.” In this case, we’re invoking several potent 4-5 lettered ones: “power,” “word,” “story,” “good.” Such word-combos risk entangling us in confusion, making us frustrated in not securing the single right answer, and thereby cutting us off from the strength to act with conviction. We’re moved further instead of closer to the integrity of being and doing. 

        Because of these dangers, we need stories we can play with; but we have to make it serious play, like Vivian Paley tells so wonderfully, for example in Wally’s Stories and in A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play. Good Stories requires not just any tale but ones that carry deep truth and moral relevance. 

       And by “story” we have to go way beyond dead words on a page; we have to compose a dynamic flow of images that allow the participants, each individually, to meet up with, even to be confronted by, a chance to be touched by his and her destiny. It’s when we make that kind of live-story-experience that we’re in position to change worlds. Perhaps it’s better to say that we’re readied to have our world changed. 

       Good Stories draw us into a space, cognitive and affective, that transcends classroom walls. If we prematurely explain the power of narrative with terms like “hermeneutic phenomenology” (which happens to be one of my favorite phrases), we’re likely to push persons further from the needed encounter. The value of technical terms comes after having tasted the divine nectar where insight breaks open like the total mind/body lift-off when a horse responds to the rider’s thought, like when an imprisoning false belief disintegrates in the presence of deeper truth about the nature of love or inner peace or the compassion that dissolves a wall of separation. 

       This taste experience is birthed not in the technical term nor in the analysis of literature but in the personal encounter in story. For example, the narrative participant resonates with a character almost magically transforming, as in the namesake Hermes’ shape-shifting. The person feels that the story models in a beyond-words way a significant world-making turn. This experience with story is, of course, hermeneutic phenomenology; but the cognitive work needs to be scaffolded upon a powerful embodied experience such as that offered in Good Stories.

       All this has been explained long ago. The theory (e.g., hermeneutic phenomenology) is not new but it’s going wasted unless and until we reinvigorate the experience. For example, I could have been reading Richard Palmer’s Hermeneutics, publication date of 1969, way back in grad school. Almost fifty years ago, Palmer stated the problem quite clearly: 

Literary interpretation, by and large, is still generally seen as an exercise in the conceptual “dissection”... Students in literature classes are sometimes even told that their personal experience of a work is some kind of fallacy irrelevant to the analysis of the work. And professors, gathered in huge conventions, ritually bewail the fact that their students find literature “irrelevant”; but their technological conception of interpretation, with its undergirding metaphysics of realism, actually promotes the very irrelevance they ineffectually lament.“Science manipulates things and gives up living in them,” the late French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us. (pp. 6-7)

      But if I had been assigned Palmer’s text in grad school without the hermeneutic experience involving a good-story engagement, the words likely would have spun around in my head without animating my being. In other words, they would have remained an academic exercise, possibly extending thought but almost certainly ending up disembodied. Explanation, fine as it is, isn’t enough.

      My initial impactful Good Stories experience came a decade or so after grad school through the hermetic fire spun by a masterful storyteller. The storytelling event, crucially, was also given in a context significantly infused with artistic interpretation and with translation into the tapestry of meaningful life. Proper incarnation of any important term (such as “power,” “word,” “story,” and “good”) depends crucially on articulating meaningful experience into nuanced explication through passionate storytelling.

       I believe the experience of Good Stories is much needed today because I see not only students but also their teachers still doing the conceptual dissection that Palmer names and it is still devoid of “living-in.” I believe the Good-Stories-experience builds an embodied consciousness and the awakened conscience that produce capacity, urgently needed today, to discern truth-tellers from lying manipulators. 

       Through Good Stories, we can make schooling so that words and stories transport us from "stupid" across the threshold into the affirmation of life’s purpose and destiny. One participant wrote at the end of the course:

Good Stories helped me grow as a person and develop more goals that I have set for myself in the future. I thought that these stories were stupid, but then came soon to realize that by connecting them to moments in my life, they are actually told to teach me life lessons that I will carry along with me forever.

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.