Finding faith in the maelstrom: Storytelling as a source of hope

These are slides from a lecture I gave at Boston College in 2019, BEFORE the pandemic lockdown.

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Finding faith in the maelstrom: Storytelling as a source of hope

Introduction [title slide] (10 October 2019)

Thank you so much.

Thank you to the STM for this invitation.

It is a rare privilege and pleasure to stand in front of you tonight.

I want to begin by acknowledging with our Jewish friends, that we have just come through the
high holy days of Yom Kippur. I would also like to acknowledge the land upon which we gather
this evening.

[land acknowledgement]

I would like to acknowledge that the land we are meeting on today is the original homelands of
the Mashpee Wampanoag [(MASH-PEE WAUM-PAH-NOG), Aquinnah Wampanoag (AH-QUIN-
NAH WAUM-PAH-NOG), Nipmuc (NIP-MUCK), and Massachusett tribal nations. I ask us to take
a moment of silence to acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced removal from
this territory, and to honor and respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to
this land on which we gather.

[pause for silence]

[finding faith slide]

When I first started to think about this lecture, more than a year ago, I floated a number of
titles past my fellow religious educators, seeking to discover what might have resonance.

Over and over the sense that we are caught up in a maelstrom kept coming forward. There is
something about the particular set of contexts in which we find ourselves that resonates with
the metaphor of a maelstrom. Words such as

[words]

turbulence, tumult, turmoil, disorder, disarray, chaos,
confusion, upheaval, pandemonium, bedlam, whirlwind all come to mind.

Our church – particularly for those of us who are Roman Catholic – remains caught up in the
turmoil of the sexual abuse crisis. Our government and politics in the US are caught up in
ideologically driven polarization. Our world is on the brink of climate catastrophe, leading to all
manner of refugee crises. The list is long, and I could go on.

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[blood spatter]

We are being buffeted on all sides by events, ideas, actions that pressure us into fear, anger,
outrage. I could give an entire lecture focused solely on how it is that digital tech has
contributed to this maelstrom, but here I want to invite you to consider this image,

[maelstrom]

and to note the light at the very heart of it. As Lin Manuel Miranda once sang “In the eye of the
hurricane there is quiet.”

I am convinced that now more than ever our contemplative practices hold power and resilience
amidst this maelstrom.

We need to find ways to listen more carefully, to open ourselves up to the still point which
creates room for us to hear God. Religious educators need to be at the center of this work.

That’s what I want to talk about tonight. Finding the still point in the center of the maelstrom,
through hearing, sharing, creating more intentionally, our stories. I am firmly convinced that
there is hope in the midst of this whirlwind, hope to be found in the midst of our fear and our
anger. Yet that hope requires careful disciplined listening – to God, to ourselves, to each other.
It requires new practices and the retrieval of ancient ones. It requires a different kind of
curriculum – one that I think might appropriately be named martyria.

But before I get there, let me begin by situating myself, and highlighting some dynamics of the
contexts we inhabit.

[my context]

My primary appointment is at a seminary, where we are preparing pastoral leaders, and I also
teach in university and K12 school settings here in North America. I speak tonight from those
contexts, and hope that I will ignite your curiosity, and evoke your own experience as we
engage these challenges, but I am not seeking to be prescriptive or definitive.


[60 seconds slide]

Digital media shape the world we live in. And we no longer live in a world in which young
people are guaranteed the option of growing up within a faith-enriched space. Our
socialization, our religious formation if you will, takes place far more often and for many people
more strongly, in the midst of digital cultural flows.

A key concept which has emerged within digital culture studies is something which
anthropologist Michael Wesch has identified as context collapse.

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[context collapse]

I imagine you all know, as religious educators, or more broadly as people of faith, how
important context is to meaning.

Yet in many of the places we inhabit today, context is collapsing. Perhaps you’ve had the
experience yourself of saying something clearly in one setting only to have it picked up and
tweeted out in another, absent the original context and thus absent or even contradictory of
your meaning.

For some people, a primary response to this challenge has been to retreat from digital media as
much as possible, to hide behind the figuratively closed doors and strong walls of like-minded
settings. I think of some of my Lutheran friends, whose favorite hymn – A Mighty Fortress is Our
God – has become their slogan for such a retreat.

[context collapse photo]

But here’s the thing: I believe God is continuing to be present in all that we are and see and do
and breathe. I was thoroughly “caught” by the Jesuit prayer to “see God in all things.” I have
spent much of the last 20 years since I studied at BC, attempting to do just that – and in the
process I have come to see how essential it is to learn how to see context, how to build context,
essentially how to “recontextualize” faith.

Story is at the heart of that process. We know who we are in part by the stories we tell
ourselves, and the stories others tell about us. We know who we are in relation to God, in large
measure by these stories we share.

[slide building context]

Building context requires storying faith.

I think this is probably an old insight here at BC!

I know I have been deeply shaped by the scholars here at BC.

[photos of my teachers]

Thomas Groome, of course, taught me much about the shared praxis of faith. Mary Boys helped
me to deepen that understanding by inviting me to notice the ways in which we, as Catholics,
have told our story in ways that have been deeply destructive to our Jewish neighbors. Brinton
Lykes helped me to notice that we can open ourselves to justice and listen more deeply to
stories told through photovoice, through images. John McDargh encouraged me to hear the
stories of other traditions in resonance with my own. Roberto Goizueta reminded me that a
universal story can be found most evocatively in a particular story. MaryAnne Hinsdale taught

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me the power of theme-centered interaction as a context builder for stories. And Shawn
Copeland kept me faithfully in the Catholic community by modelling how dissenting stories and
radical presence can shape our communities.

Each of these scholars has been thoroughly steeped in and are responsive to how we story our
faith.

[context is essential]

Context is essential in this process.

Consider this image:

[2d picture]

in 2d you can see how shining a light from one angle will convince you this is a square, and from
a different angle, that this is a circle. Both perspectives are true, in limited ways. Seeing this
image in 3d makes that clear. Yet the whole of this image is much more. Even now, we are only
seeing a drawing (a 2d representation) of a 3d cylinder.

We are seeing, knowing truth, but it is – and can only ever be in our humanness – an
incomplete truth.

[context is essential]

Context is essential – and context is collapsing.

The advent of digital media – and the metaphors that we use to make sense of them – have
caused us to fall into specific epistemological traps ever more quickly.

[the trap of objectivity]

The trap of objectivity – which believes that reality can be known fully by careful observation,
and all knowledge is out there on the “world wide web” to be discovered and consumed – the
trap of objectivity leads us to the hubris of human power.

[the trap of subjectivity]

The trap of subjectivity – which believes that reality can never be known apart from our
individual perceptions, and which leads us into believing that we can and must rely only on
what our experience tells us – the trap of subjectivity leads us away from transcendence. Given
the ever smaller target markets into which digital media draw us, algorithmic enclaves can trap
us into a form of relativism which can easily create “others” whom we denigrate, deny, and
eventually even to whom we deal death.

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[third way]

We need a third way, a path beyond either a concrete materialism which refuses
transcendence, or a naïve relativism which centers on individuals.

That path leads through story.

[stories key to context]

Stories are key to context.

In the firehose of information that is sprayed at us everyday, and in the midst of the rancor,
polarization, and even hatred found there, how are we to know which stories to listen to? How
are we to know which stories have value?

For most people the answers to those questions begins in whether or not they believe they are
being manipulated. Is a story authentic? Does it come from someone they trust? Then perhaps
it’s credible.

But the problem is that when we move quickly – which digital media are wired to do – we often
do not ask basic questions. And moving quickly also means we rely on past experiences to focus
our attention, often in ways of which we are entirely unaware.

We know from media scholars that three dynamics have shifted rapidly in the midst of the
maelstrom we call digital media:

[three a’s]

authority, authenticity, agency.

We know from scholars who study narratives, that a key element in whether a narrative is
engaged seriously is the extent to which it “rings with authenticity” – if it does, then it can feel
authoritative to people.

[authenticity shapes]

Authenticity shapes authority.

But so, too, does something we might call agency. Agency is the ability to make things happen,
and it is deeply wound up with power. As Irshad Manji has written,


[manji quote]

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“power is the capacity to set expectations about what should be and to translate those
expectations into what will be.” (2600).

Some of our most powerful stories have to do with personal agency.

Of course, in a world dominated by the fracturing of stories, by the collapsing of contexts, often
that agency is only understood in individual terms, and even then, only in terms of the kind of
consumption it affords. Can you buy something? Then perhaps you have agency. Can you give
money to a candidate? Then perhaps you have agency.

But what can we actually do in the midst of the maelstrom? What kind of agency might we have
in the sexual abuse crisis? How far does personal agency go in terms of climate catastrophe?

[what kinds of agency]

The stories that are far more rare have to do with collective agency. Think about the
organizational structures we have built that have to do with a community doing something
together.

Churches. Schools. Fire fighters. Legal processes that use juries. Unions within businesses. Co-
ops. All of these institutions are finding it harder and harder to make a go of it across the US.
Yes, there are some communities that still have robust public schools, and some communities
with large churches, but there is much less of such shared agency all around us.

And of course also much less representation of it. Think for a moment of the last several movies
you’ve gone to, or the last several shows you’ve watched streaming.

[pause here]

How many of story representations involved collective agency on the part of the main
characters?

Here are some of the shows I’ve been watching:

[images from tv]

Jane the Virgin
Carnival Row
The Good Place
A Discovery of Witches

Even as I say these titles I am struck both by how little they represent collective agency – and
also by how each of these shows has some element of religion in it. Ok, I’m a religion scholar, of

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course shows with religious themes might appeal to me – but aside from the Good Place, which
is ostensibly about heaven but really has almost no religion in it – none of these shows is about
religion. And yet… each of them tells stories in which a force more than human is active in some
way. And each of them offers examples of people with religious beliefs and practices, some
more malevolent than others. They hold a nascent, just emerging sense of something beyond
individual agency, but what kind of transcendent agency is it? Mostly a mysterious force with
little to commend it to us.

Let me summarize:

[summary slide]

authority, authenticity, agency – but in particular agency that is individual, rarely collective, and
even more rarely representing transcendent agency.

We live in an era of context collapse.

We live in an era where agency is understood in very individualist terms.

Can you see the conundrum?

[question slide]

So much of what we want to teach in religious education pushes back against these dominant
stories.

[wants slide]

We want to invite awareness of relationship with transcendence. We want to shape practice in
collective ways. We want to “give people access to a religious tradition, and make manifest that
tradition is always in the process of transformation.” (yes, Mary Boys’ definition, my favorite)

So how are we best to do this amidst the maelstrom?

We need to walk a third path – neither objectivism or relativism, but rather one of relational
knowing. This is the path which Parker Palmer long ago labelled as a “community of truth.”

[community of truth]

Whose are we? God’s. We know as we are known by God. It is God’s agency to which we need
to witness.

[love truth slide]

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This is a relational form of knowing. Not a relativist one, but a relational one. Not an objectivist
one, but a relational one. And as religious educators we must be alive to what it means to
educate within this relationship, and in practices which strengthen our awareness of and
reliance on God.

This is a difficult challenge for many reasons, but for one in particular in the midst of digitally
infused spaces, and that is that being God’s means we must acknowledge God’s agency.

Part of what is so seductive and engaging about digital media is that for many of us it’s a place
of great creative personal agency.

[participatory media give us agency]

Unlike thirty years ago, when to publish or broadcast something globally you needed enormous
capital, now with just a few hundred dollars (an amount still beyond many people) you can float
something out into the world globally. I grew up with vinyl records, and learned how to make
mixtapes using cassettes. But back then copying from a record onto a cassette degraded the
music in the process. So while I had some agency in making a musical landscape to inhabit, it
often lacked clarity.

Today I can not only create playlists with global reach, they have digital clarity, with no
degrading from one copy to the next (which, tangentially, is a huge issue around sharing of
ideas and copyright, but that’s a lecture for another day).

[paintbrushes]

Even more so, I can take music I love and combine it with images and words and share them
out into the world. (boston marathon: https://vimeo.com/64473000).

It is in these spaces – spaces of music, of image, of text, and increasingly (given VR and AR
capacities) of movement – that people are coming to know themselves and each other.

There is enormous promise here, but enormous peril as well.

As Michael Wesch, the anthropologist I mentioned earlier notes, we live in an era in which
digital media invite an expansive engagement with human being, a kind of freedom to connect
unlike any we’ve ever experienced – but it is also a space in which the public performance of
hatred is being honed and extended.

[context summary]

Context is essential, but context is collapsing. We know relationally, and we need to know
within a relationship with God.

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How are we to teach and learn in ways that support learning context more deeply, and
recontextualizing?

[Curriculum of martyria]

Most of you are probably familiar with Maria Harris’ lovely articulation of five forms of
curriculum in religious communities: kerygma, koinonia, didache, leiturgia, diakonia. I want to
remind us of yet another kind or form, that of martyria.

[Greek words]

You can see the root of that word in our word for martyr, but I’d ask you to focus on the heart
of what martyria is – that is, witness, or testimony.

We need to inhabit this kind of curriculum more than ever in the fraught places we find
ourselves. In the midst of context collapse, in the midst of the maelstrom in which we are being
tossed, in order to find the still point at the center, in order to listen for God more effectively,
we need a curriculum of martyria. We need witnesses and testimony.

And when we talk about witness and testimony we need to talk about trauma.

[quote]

“Trauma is described as an encounter with death. This encounter is not, however, a literal
death but a way of describing a radical event or events that shatter all that one knows about
the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it.” (p. 4)

The ongoing crisis of child – and adult – abuse in our church is trauma.

Climate catastrophe is trauma.

White supremacy and white nationalism are trauma.

Sometimes we forget – at least, those of us who live in the privileged places of white middle
class culture frequently forget – that at the heart of Christian witness is an executed God.

[quote by Rambo]

“Divine love is revealed at the point at which it is most threatened.” (Rambo, p. 68 of 173)

Theologians have begun to explore how trauma invites differing interpretations of scripture.
Shelly Rambo, in particular, has offered a profoundly thoughtful engagement with the work of
Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Gospel of John. She invites us to consider the period between

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the crucifixion and the resurrection – what many of us call “holy Saturday” – that time during
which, as the apostle’s creed notes, Jesus “descended into hell.”

[hell]

In contrast to the traditional interpretation of what it means to be a witness, and to testify –
much of which has focused on the witnessing to the resurrection of the Christ – she invites us
to ponder that earlier moment in the paschal mystery, to remain in that place. She then asks us,
to consider whether witnessing in that place of remaining might be understood as sustained by
the Spirit.

[quote]

“Trauma is described as an encounter with death. This encounter is not, however, a literal
death but a way of describing a radical event or events that shatter all that one knows about
the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it… Witnessing the suffering that
remains involves encountering the ways in which death pervades life; it entails attesting to the
temporal distortions and epistemological ruptures of an experience that exceeds a radical
ending yet has no pure beginning.” (p. 15)

In the work I do on dismantling racism, on finding places and ways and moments in which we
might encounter each other across vast diversities and systemic oppressions, people tell me
that the most powerful thing I can do is see them, hear them, believe them.

[I see you]

I see you, I hear you, I believe you.

These words are powerful when we are listening to people who have been abused in the
church.

They are powerful when we embody them in listening to people experiencing police brutality.

They are powerful – in the words of our indigenous partners – when we can see, hear, and
believe beyond the human and into deep creation.

What we hear is painful, often painful beyond our ability to be open to the hearing. And that is
the work of the Spirit as well.

Rambo describes a middle place of remaining, a place in which the utter abandonment of Jesus’
descent into hell is not forgotten, or too quickly moved through.

This is a space of silence.

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It may even be a place of such silence that God’s word in Christ is silent there.

This is the place of which Rambo speaks when she invites us to see that

[Rambo quote]

“Divine love is revealed at the point at which it is most threatened. God experiences, within
God’s inner life, the forsakenness of those in hell.” (p. 84)

Speaking of the Spirit as breath, Rambo reminds us that:

[Rambo quote]

The Spirit’s “exhale and inhale, if interpreted from the middle, suggest a movement that
exceeds death and yet precedes the event of life that resurrection narrates. This remainder of
divine love. This breath powers a testimony to what is unknown, unaccounted for. This breath
powers witness to what is unsaid, unspoken, and inaccessible through language. Witnessing in
this space between death and life, those who stand there experience the inarticulable terrain of
middleness. Witnessing what cannot be contained within speech, they demonstrate a unique
relationship to language.” (p. 119-120)

When we find ourselves in this place, when we open ourselves to what Parker Palmer has called
the “tragic gap,” our hearts will be broken.

The only question might be: will they be broken open, or broken into shards?

I think it is no coincidence that in a world which is swirling in pain and oppression, in
catastrophic climate shifts, in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence, in a world
thoroughly suffused by trauma, that into this world Pope Francis speaks a word of mercy.

[pope francis]

Younger people know this world well. And as we consider the statistics – rising suicide rates,
high unemployment and indebtedness, fewer and fewer young people interested in religion –
now is the time to think about what the core of our witnessing is really about.

Banal expressions of disembodied love have little place in witnessing. So, too, cheery voicings of
hope.

But there are ways of witnessing, processes of testimony, expressions of what O’Neil Van Horn
calls “dark hope” that can be evocative for people today.

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A first step is learning to listen carefully – to ourselves, to each other, to all of Creation – and
this is where a curriculum of martyria emerges. This curriculum is one of testimony, testimony
from the heart of the maelstrom.

[Testimony is]

As Chopp notes “Testimonies describe the real in ways that require people to see these events
that reason and theory do not count, do not authorize, do not signify. Testimonies challenge us
to reimagine theory as the language that serves the fragments, the uneasy nature, the words
against words in order to describe the real.” (64) (Chopp)

Really seeing, really hearing, really believing - - those are central to testimony.

[testimony needs support]

And testimony of this kind needs to be supported by a curriculum that invites it – which means
a curriculum of relational knowing, a curriculum open to finding the still point at the heart of
the maelstrom.

I want to note, at this midpoint in my lecture, the lyrics of a song we recently sang in my
worshipping community, a song written by Bex Gaunt and Adam Tice. Listen to these words:

[lyrics]

Faith abides through honest questions
Faith grows strong through doubt and fear
Faith finds grace in imperfections
Faith abides for God is here

Hope delights with expectation
Hope makes hidden pathways clear
Hope inspires resilient action
Hope abides for God is here

Love will not leave us forsaken
Love receives each falling tear
Love restores what death has taken
Love abides for God is here


Bex and Adam are quite young, as composers and poets go, but they are naming here a key
element of what it means to know God -- God is here. Precisely at the heart of our doubt and
our questions. God is here in the midst of our pain. And the reality that God is here means that

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we can inhabit our questions, we can face our fears, we can – as yet another hymn puts it – ask
to be “shepherded beyond our wants, beyond our fears, from death into life.”

We can and we must educate in ways that invite critical consciousness, that help us to name
the brokenness in our midst – whether that is a church which refuses to ordain women, a
church which remains deeply divided by racism, a church which has abused countless numbers
of vulnerable people (children and adults alike) – and in doing so we must also educate in ways
that witness to a God who joins us in the midst of our pain, a God who poured Godself into the
world, who became incarnate in that most vulnerable of human beings –

[jesus as refugee]

a child born in a stable, a child born to a dark skinned, unmarried mother, a child who became a
refugee – this is the God who poured Godself into our vulnerabilities, and draws us through
them into love.

Our contemplative practices can help us to do this. They are now an essential element of the
curriculum of martyria.

At the still point of the maelstrom, in the quiet at its heart, there we encounter God. But there
our words often fail us. As Maggie Ross notes, we need to learn the practices of silence.

[ross quote]

“The basic message of those who have done the work of silence consists in this: if self-
consciousness makes us human, then its elision opens the door to what was once called
divinity.” (Ross, 1)

[ross quote]

“The choice for silence or noise, for carefulness or carelessness, is ours in every moment. To
choose silence as the mind’s default in an accelerating consumer culture – a culture that
sustains itself by dehumanizing people through the unrelenting pressure of clamor, confusion,
and commodification – is indeed a subversive act.” (11)

But of course we are thoroughly surrounded by stories, by imaginings, by noise.

[bringhurst quote]

Ross, quoting Robert Bringhurst, writes that “[Narrative] means much more than telling stories.
It means learning how to hear them, how to nourish them, and how to let them live. It means
learning to let stories swim down into yourself, grow large there, and rise back up again. It does
not – repeat, does not mean memorizing the lines so you can act the script you’re written or
recite the book you’ve read.” 45

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Part of why I believe it is so difficult for many people to find themselves in religious community,
particularly institutional forms of religious community, is that there are so many stories out
there already in which we can experience this kind of process. We can immerse ourselves in
powerful stories that swim down into ourselves, grow large, and rise back up again. The
challenge in the midst of trauma, in the midst of the maelstrom, is that many, many of these
stories appear to be more experientially effective at eliciting the resonance of this kind of dark
hope than do our Christian narratives.

We can no longer dwell only in the quadrant of theological imagination that takes as central the
dominant framing of Christ’s life and redemptive power as one of atonement or sacrifice. We
need to express what we feel, what we hear, what we believe as we journey through holy
Saturday. We must witness to the Spirit – to the drop of love that comes from the wounds of
Christ’s crucifixion. We must tell the stories of at-one-ment.

[at- one-ment]

Trauma brings with it broken memory, and experiences that may not be able to be expressed in
words. To be broken open, instead of only into shards, we must be able to lean into healing. We
must bring to religious education a curriculum of witness, of testimony, of martyria – but this
witnessing must be authentic. It must dwell in the silences, it must find ways to offer testimony
that are beyond words.

It is, of course, ironic that I am speaking to you about silence. So perhaps now is a good
moment to take a minute of silence and simply breathe.

[minute of silence]

As Rambo notes:

[Rambo quote]

“Witnessing demands a relationship to life that exceeds the boundaries of logic. Instead,
witness requires an imaginative capacity—a capacity to imagine beyond an ending, to imagine
life where it is not, in face of the impossibility of a future.” (167)

Many of us – particularly those who inhabit dominant spaces – have no practice with this kind
of witnessing, or even with the kind of listening that can bring it to the surface.

I have spent much of the last decade – and particularly the last two years – working to help
people find ways to listen to each other. Without practice, without even any representation of
what it can mean to listen, how do we expect anyone to be able to do so?

[Cautions about story]

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A curriculum of martyria, of testimony, of witnessing, is at heart about story. But we have to be
careful and thoughtful about our stories.

As Bell, et al. make clear, stories can fall into at least four categories –

[kinds of stories]

Stock or dominant stories (which often silence all others), concealed stories (told in the
interstices of dominant ones), resistance stories that begin to break the hold of the dominant
stories, and counter stories.

A curriculum of testimony seeks to break open the dominant stories and invite the concealed
stories into open air.

[break open the stories]

I believe that is what has happened, or at least is beginning to happen, as we listen to the
stories of abuse survivors in the church. As we listen to the stories of all creation burning in the
midst of climate change. We are beginning to hear the concealed stories.

Now we must build resistance stories, and ultimately draw on the counter stories of the Gospel
of Jesus Christ.

When you are living in the middle, in the remaining, in the holy Saturday of not knowing, it can
be incredibly comforting to step into a space in which your every bias is confirmed, and your
beliefs are never questioned. But living fully in a world as complex as ours is, living with the
intention of justice and mercy, does not lead to comfort.

Rather, a deeper comfort, a darker hope, arises from seeing the edges,

[Anderson and foley]

seeing the parabolic in the heart of the mythic, to use Anderson and Foley’s words.

Several years ago I had the privilege of hearing Msgr. Fisichella, the President of the Pontifical
Council for the New Evangelization, speak. I was deeply moved by his emphasis on
accompaniment, and on the necessity of listening closely. I took careful notes, because I was so
moved by what he had to say. Among other things he said:


[fisichella quote]

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Pope Francis speaks of pastoral conversion, what does this mean? It means something
about changing the lives of our communities, which have become more or less
bureaucratic community to a missionary-minded community.

It needs to be a church that is outgoing first, not asking people to come to us, but to be
outgoing, on the way outwards.

We are reaching out to everybody without excluding anyone… I emphasize this because
often we do exclude certain ones, we make a judgement, whereas it should be
welcome, welcome should be the first criteria, the first principle by which we act.

The church is becoming aware again that it is missionary in nature, apostolic, and the
church wishes to exclude no one.

Our communities need to become a community of persons in relationship with each
other, who are able to walk alongside people, pointing out and I would say searching
together for the meaning of our lives together.

One of the aspects of the kind of accompaniment of which Fisichella speaks and to which we
need to attend – particularly those of us who inhabit positions of privilege in various hierarchies
of power – is that listening is about vulnerability.

[listening as vulnerability]

When you ask a genuine question, when you express authentic wonder, you are situating
yourself in a stance of openness. You are making yourself vulnerable to learning.

Yet we are immersed in so much trauma – whether that comes from displacement, from
oppression, from war, from the climate – again, endless possibilities, but trauma is an
experience from which people often learn how to avoid vulnerability.

The deep shame of our church right now, the reality that we have perpetrated evil in the name
of hierarchical order, in the ways in which we have not listened carefully to children, let alone
to women and men who have been abused as adults – this deep shame means that we
continue to perpetuate trauma throughout our spaces.

[move into relational knowing]

We need to find ways to move into relational knowing that draws on our authentic pain, that
listens carefully to our trauma, and in the midst of that remaining hears the voice of the Spirit
offering hope.

Here is where agency is so essential – and not simply because our culture celebrates personal
agency so strongly, but because planted deeply within us is a yearning for collective agency and

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for agency resting in God. Our primary forms of agency right now have been about
consumption, but we can turn to different expressions of agency.

Gracy Olmstead wrote recently, in reflecting on climate catastrophe, that

[quote]

“The act of creation is opposed to the act of consumption: The latter suggests that everything
exists to serve our needs and appetites, but the other reminds us of the value and goodness
inherent in things themselves, and how creation encourages stewardship and responsibility.”
Gracy Olmstead (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/opinion/children-climate-
change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)

[how can]

How can storytelling be a source of hope amidst the maelstrom? It begins in an act of creation,
rather than consumption.

[confessions]

We confess God first and foremost as Creator, of all that has been, all that is, all that will be.

We confess Jesus as God sharing Godself into the world, pouring Godself into the finite,
fractured, human contexts that we inhabit.

We confess the Holy Spirit as advocate, comforter, source of our belief.

[create share believe]

So – God -- create, share, believe.

And we know in religious education that this is a reciprocal, mutual, indwelling process. We can
enter this circle as religious educators through any of these doors – but far too often we have
confined ourselves solely to the portal of belief, and we have worried about getting our beliefs
right.

Orthodoxy.

Or, as some scholars have noted, believe so that you might belong.

And yet, and yet, we are learning that inviting people to create, inviting them to find ways to
tell their own stories, and then to hone them in a circle practice, amidst communal sharing, and
adding layers of meaning with sound and image – when we invite people to create in this way

18. 18
they slow down, they focus, they attend to their story in ways that are incredibly fruitful and
incredibly powerful.

Indeed, doing this kind of creative work inevitably shapes belief. And once you’ve created
something you care about, you want to share it.

So an entry portal for religious educators that takes the curriculum of martyria seriously in this
day and age, needs to begin in creation. It needs to begin in learning the processes that help us
to slow down and focus, to attend, to contemplate what is being birthed in our midst.

A word of caution here: we are not God, and we do not create out of nothingness. The process
of sharing one’s story, of listening to other stories, needs to be carefully shaped so that we are
indeed able to listen deeply.

I want to offer two streams to participate in listening deeply – a stream that listens carefully in
the midst of popular digital cultures, and a stream that listens carefully within our own
creativity.


[part 3]

When we turn to popular culture we need to turn with exquisitely tuned ears, ever mindful of
the spaces in which we are listening. Far too many of us live a rushed, ever busy, overwhelmed
kind of day-to-day life. We access our news via our so-called smart devices, we turn to our
friends and our social media streams for authoritative interpretations – and yet we rarely
question the confines of those streams.

Scholars are helping us to see that the very algorithms behind these digital spaces are leading
us ever more deeply into polarization. The goal of most digital streams is your attention. If you
are not paying for that stream, if it’s free digital tech, then YOU are the product. And these
algorithms generate revenue by evoking anger, fear, outrage far more effectively than when
they privilege beauty, awe, love.

But we can be more intentional about these streams. Again, a lecture for another day (in terms
of engaging social media), but here I want to invite you into a short exercise in listening to
popular culture. Television commercials are often great resources for this kind of listening,
because the best of them are crafted by enormously creative artists, and they seek to evoke
some of our deepest yearnings. Of course then they want to attach those yearnings to the
agency of consumption, but we can listen more deeply.

[listening in pop culture]

We can ask – what is the yearning here? And then we can offer a different response, a creative
response, to that yearning.

19. 19

Try this one: Watch this commercial, and think about what it’s evoking.

[show #eattogether]

Now, for just a few moments of silence, think about whether there is a biblical story, a liturgical
practice, or some other explicitly religious connection you can make to this commercial story.

[pause]

Perhaps later in Q&A we can talk about this, but for now I’ll note that on the back of the
handout there is a process for working through this kind of listening, along with a link to a
number of commercials that work well with it. Over and over again I’ve used this kind of
exercise to invite people into a different kind of creative listening, a different kind of testimony,
amidst popular culture.

[curriculum of witness]

So this is one exercise in a curriculum of witness, of testimony, of martyria.

But there is another stream that is, in my experience, even more powerful and deeply
connected to the dark hope I mentioned earlier.

That is a stream, a form of this curriculum of testimony, tied to our own very personal stories.

[focus slide]

Decades ago the Center for Digital Storytelling was birthed in the midst of the community
theater movement. I have my own memories of what can come to life amidst community
theater – and indeed Frank Rogers, whose book Finding God in the Graffiti is on your handout,
explores at length how to engage in that form of religious education – but here I want to note
that CDS noticed how profound it could be to take stories birthed in the midst of
improvisational community theater, and record them, adding images and music to them.
Layering meaning upon meaning upon meaning, opening up the complexity and depth of
human experience.

Digital storytelling, understood in this very specific way, is a

[quote]
“a workshop-based participatory media practice focused on self-representation.” (1 vivienne).
This is a kind of storytelling that creates spaces in which people listen very closely to their own
and each other’s stories, helping to bring them to birth, and then sharing them out into ever
wider spaces.

20. 20
I want to return to something I mentioned earlier, when talking about trauma. In the quiet
spaces, in the still spaces, in the broken-hearted near silence of remaining, in the profound
anguish of holy Saturday, comes a whisper of dark hope, comes a drop of love from the wounds
of Christ, comes the Spirit to sustain our hope. As Shelly Rambo reminds us – “divine power
and presence take the form of witness” (7%)

[god sees us]

God sees us, God hears us, God believes us.

In the midst of the trauma that is climate castastrophe all around us, Joanna Macy has long
lifted up a word of hope in this midst of despair. Her words come back to me now in this way:

[macy quote]

"We are changing all the time. You become what you love. You’re always asked to sort of
stretch a little bit more. But actually, we’re made for that. There’s a song that wants to sing
itself through us. And we’ve just got to be available. Maybe the song that is to be sung through
us is a most beautiful requiem for an irreplaceable planet, or maybe it’s a song of joyous rebirth
as we create a new culture that doesn’t destroy its world. But in any case, there’s absolutely no
excuse for our making our passionate love for our world dependent on what we think of its
degree of health, whether we think it’s going to go on forever."

— Joanna Macy in an interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. Macy is author of Active
Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy.


We can remind each other of this, we can listen for the song that is being sung within us, and
learn how to share it out just a bit moe.

Telling our stories in this way – finding the song that wants to be sung within us – is at the heart
of digital storytelling as a source of hope. I want to offer one example here, to make it more
concrete. This is a digital story that was created in a workshop during a Religious Education
Association meeting. Anabel Proffitt, the creator of this story, has given me permission to share
it, and I offer it to you as an example of what digital storytelling as a form of faith formation,
digital storytelling as a source of hope, can look like:

[show wonder bread]

This kind of testimony is born in careful attention to one’s own story, then honed through
participation in a shared story circle, then shared out into a wider world. This is a form of active
contemplation. It is a process part of the curriculum, of testimony.

21. 21
Just as I do not believe it’s coincidence that Pope Francis is speaking so often of mercy, a
response to painful testimony, it’s also no coincidence that Franciscan Richard Rohr’s daily
devotions are so widely shared. Here is a quote from one of his pieces two weeks ago, this is
from Catherine Nerney:

[nerney quote]

“This kind of mutual interdependence I sense to be true. We live in and through one another.
We become ourselves only in and through a process of mutual inter-becoming. It all began in
God’s own creative, self-giving love. Much deeper than the inevitability of my [physically]
resembling my earthly mother is the reality of my core identity, the core identity of all who bear
the same family resemblance, a unique but related face of compassion—the same divine Love
has birthed us all. God will never be dead as long as we’re alive. [2]” rohr quoting: [2] Catherine
T. Nerney, The Compassion Connection: Recovering Our Original Oneness (Orbis Books: 2018),
12-13.

The song that wants to be sung through us is a song that is interconnected, interdependent. I
want to close this evening by having us sing together. I realize that this is a risk – precisely
because of context collapse I have no idea if this is song will resonate with anyone here. But it’s
a song that has been floating through my heart the whole time I’ve been working on this
lecture, and it’s a song we’ve been singing in liturgy at my church a lot lately. It’s also written by
the young artists I mentioned earlier, Bex Gaunt and Adam Tice. So I hope you might risk
singing it with me, now, as a reminder of God’s presence in the midst of the maelstrom:

[lyrics]

In the morning, in the evening, God is holding you, holding you.
In the daytime, in the nighttime, God is holding you still.

[refrain]
Anywhere you may go, God will go with you.
Anywhere you may go, you are God's child.

In the mountains, in the ocean, God will carry you.
In the forest, in the cities, God will carry you still.

[refrain]

In the good times, in the hard times, God will stay with you.
In your waking, in your sleeping, God will stay with you still.

[refrain]
Anywhere you may go, God will go with you.
Anywhere you may go, you are God's child.

22. 22

[slide of ty]

Thank you!

[slide for Q&A]


[56.14.29]