What are the favorite stories you tell yourself about February? Do they include dreary, bitterly cold days with you trying to get warm after a seemingly endless wait for a bus? Do they offer adventures on the slopes with a strikingly soft powder under your skis and vistas of amazing grandeur? Are they full of ice dams on the roof or ice sculptures in Copley Square? Notice with gentle interest and curiosity which ones you dwell with, repeat again and again, or try to avoid.
As the light continues to grow each day of our journey through February, can we become aware of what stories we hold up to the light of God, and which ones we try to keep in the dark or run from, to which we may again offer “no room in our inn”?
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are our “narratives.” Narratives come from many sources. Some from our families of origin, repeating verbatim or paraphrasing the things our parents, relatives, caregivers, and other authorities used by them to describe us as we moved through our daily lives as children. Some come from the culture of which we were (or currently are) a part. These narratives tell us what was valued as success, how we were to gain popularity, what constituted fame and fortune, what was going to rescue us. These sources seem endless, each vying for our attention and validation as the way we were to make the most sense of our experiences in the world. What stories are you truly living by?
The practice of prayer and meditation asks us to explore these narratives in light of God’s love and justice. Who has authored our narratives? Are God’s values of kindness, justice, hope, and peace at the center of our stories? Is God, who loves us more than we can even love ourselves, being consulted on any of the stories endlessly being played over and over by us day after day?
Make no mistake, some of the narratives on which we spend most of our time ruminating or perpetuating have long since reached their expiration date and need to be released or transformed into other stories. Like milk that has soured, continuing to drink these in can make us ill and endanger our souls, offering no true nourishment. We need other stories to live by in order to be healed and made whole.
In prayer and meditation, we begin to explore the landscape of our narratives, asking God to guide us into truth. In the growing light of God, dare we meet our narratives head-on? These stories are so full of preoccupations and obsessions, the stuff we are always telling ourselves deep down only we don’t realize it until we take some quiet time for ourselves. When we finally stop to be in silence, these preoccupations are unveiled. In our spiritual practice, we are asked to look them in the face and treat them as parts of us clamoring for attention. These stories and feelings are not to be avoided. Rather these desires, resentments, memories and narratives that keep on insinuating themselves into prayer are the very things we need to pray about.
For example, most of us, when we try to be quiet to pray or meditate, start obsessing about our “to do” list. That may be an opportunity to pray about the big lie we were told as a child—that we were only valuable when we were meeting other people’s needs, or when we were achieving some impossible task perfectly. This story is telling us about our bondage. So we need to place this story before God, who yearns to help us imagine what life would be like being freed from this burden, free to take time out with a clear conscious, to simply rest in God as God’s beloved creation.
Perhaps what we can do in our prayer and meditation practices is note and write down all the things that seem to “get in the way of my prayer” and then ask the Holy Spirit to show me how these items are actually a “way into prayer”. We are thus inviting God to transform our old, worn out narratives, opening the way to grace, to love, to being valued for our very being as created ones in this world of God’s making. We may begin to recognize God’s love of us comes by grace alone, freeing us to love others with this love we are first given by God.
Maybe we can share some of our new narratives with one another as we re-author the stories of our lives. The chains of our bondage to other authors are broken and we are released to live into the new narratives that we author with God, stories of amazing grace, stories of freedom, forgiveness, justice, hope, and of new life springing from the ashes of the old narratives from which God has released us. We pray, “O God, free us from a past we cannot change, and open us to a future in which we can be changed” (UCC Book of Worship). Let us share our joy, our freedom, and author with God the stories of a new world, one in which death itself is not feared, and hope is born anew out of the very things our old narratives would have us avoid or fear. In all of this, our thanks is to God, the author of freedom, hope, justice and love, in whom we find our refuge and strength, the source of our true joy, which passes the world’s understanding. Thanks be to God!