Good Story - YOUR Story?

A good story is one that involves you, that draws you in; it becomes your story. Were you there in that desert? Did you smell the dust in the air; feel the rough ground through your thin sandals? Or did you realize that after forty days without food, you might have stretched your ethical principles a bit to turn that stone into bread?
Do we know the pain of hunger? Is there anything that we ever wanted so badly that we have literally ached for it? Do we want something that badly now? Would we stretch the truth to get it? Would we cheat a little?

Francis Shen came to live down the street from us in the city. He had emigrated here from China, just after Mao Tse Tung died. He saw me trying to fix my car and asked if he could help, and joined me under the hood. Soon I realized that he was a mechanic, and asked him where he had learned the trade. His one-word answer shocked me: “Prison”. I felt an involuntary shudder of fear slip from my left shoulder to the small of my back, aware now of my closeness to this man, this ex-con, under this hood. “Prison”, I asked? “I was in prison for twenty-eight years in China; I was a diesel mechanic there.” twenty-eight years, I thought! Murder? What had he done to be in prison that long? “Francis, may I ask why you were in prison” I asked carefully. He looked at me as if I should have known. “For being a Catholic!”
I was stunned to realize that Francis was one of those about whom we protested when I was in the third grade, sending letters to Mao asking him to free the Catholics from the prisons. I had thought it was Catholic propaganda. In the intervening years, I had grown up, gone to college, found the love of my life, had three children, and worked for ten years in a job I loved. Francis had lived in a prison camp and worked on trucks. I learned from him and from others I met through him that all the Catholics had to do was say that they would follow Mao; just to say it. Twenty eight years for carrying a “Legion of Mary” card in his wallet, and continuing to say that God came before Mao. Say the words and you can go home.

Would I have said the words? Would You?

Francis made this Good Story my story. When I heard the words of the devil say to my hungry ears that I could turn that stone to bread, I began to imagine its gray roughness turn brown and smooth. I began to smell it, and tears came to my eyes. In a good story, we begin to feel that we know the characters; they become parts of our life. And often we find that we identify with one of them, we begin to think that we and they are the same. I was no Jesus. I was not even Francis. In this desert story, it’s pretty likely that we would want to identify with Jesus, but I can understand the devil’s logic here. Come on, Jesus, be practical. Be sensible. I think of Francis, and imagine that Legion of Mary card in his wallet, and those soldiers taking him to prison as a young man.

I never get to the parapet of the temple, to wonder whether I’d give in; I never get to the round-the-world invitation to power. I’m stuck with that stone, and the way I’m turning it into bread.

You?




FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.