His Story, Your Voice

Lent is a time of unwrinkling, returning to our whole-iest selves, by engaging our desire and our will within the sacredness of the Jesus story. Sleeping with Bread – practicing a nightly Examen – was offered as a first tool for Lent, working on our will when it is at rest.
A second tool is seeing the Jesus Story not as prescriptive, but evocative, not as blackboard, but as door; it is to see the Gospel as Story.  This second tool frees us to discover our deepest desire.

The Gospels are stories written long after their subject had died, written by some of those who could not forget him so that the story could be shared with others. The power of a story is that it involves us. The word involve comes from the Latin root volvere meaning to roll. Our word “revolve” means to roll over and over. involve means to roll us in. The good story wraps around us, takes us in, embraces us.

A good story embraces us like a good mother. To a good mother, each child is wonderful, and each child is different; each child grows differently, needs different nurturance. A good mother’s embrace makes the child know its worth. What makes a mother good is not how the child feels about the mother, but how the child feels about itself. What makes a story good is not that we understand the story, but in reading it, we understand ourselves.
With a story, meaning is something we make, not something we find. If we were to spend ten seconds making swirls with a pencil on a piece of paper and ask an observer what they see, they might look not at the paper, but at our face, trying to read on our face what we are looking for. They might search for our answer. But children might be more likely to look at our swirls like clouds, and feel comfortable to say “I see a bunny” or “I see a mouse”. Children have the native imagination and courage to find their own answer - the truth that arrives to them in their imagination. Seeing the Jesus Story as a tool for our own “unwrinkling” - growth and healing beyond constrictions and traumas – can be difficult for some of us who have been frightened by the Bible as prescriptive, as judging, as constricting. Some of us have lost the child’s freedom to make meaning. All of us have, to some extent, learned to answer questions with the answers that are expected of us to avoid criticism or sanction. That’s why we look at the face of the questioner for clues to what they are looking for, for the “correct” answer. We will look at the Jesus Story as evocative. The word is from the Latin ex- meaning "out of" or "from" and vocis, meaning voice. A good story, like a good mother, calls our voice from within us.
In this particular 40 day lenten journey, we will use the Jesus Story from the Gospels like the embrace of a good mother. In the safety and warmth of that embrace, we can find the courage to open doors, to find meaning for ourselves. In the nurturance of that experience, we can find ourselves lengthening, unwrinkling as we grow beyond constrictions and traumas. We may find, as more and more of our interior doors are opened, that we do indeed live not in a tight little self, but an interior castle.

Tomorrow we will be offered a first embrace of the Jesus Story, his own 40 days in the desert after which the length of Lent is patterned. The gospel of Luke, Chapter 4, verses 1-13. (click for a link)  Please read it with your imagination.  Let it roll you in, wrap you up.  It is a story, not a problem. Don't try to figure it out, try to enter it.  Read it again and again until you begin to sense it.  Feel the heat of the desert; look down from the high places. Smell the dust in your nostrils and taste it on your tongue; listen to the voices, and to the wind.  More on this tomorrow.  For those who will be going to a Catholic church on Sunday, this is the Gospel that you will hear again; for all of us, it is a story we will know.