Stories help us re-member

As a preschooler, I attended story hour at the local public library. In a colorful basement, I gathered with other children and sat snug on a carpet rapt with attention for the adult who read aloud from a colorful story book in front of us. After we heard the story, we talked about its message and then we made a craft to integrate its ideas and lessons. We played and sang and danced, perhaps moving the story from our minds into our bodies. We ate a snack and said, “thank you.”

I can see now that each story hour was a bit of a secular liturgy all its own: a formative type of celebration, blessings and community building. God wasn’t named explicitly, but God was honored by the truths told and the care communicated. The stories formed me and the other children. The stories were reverenced and so were we, the little children.

Stories make each one of us, and as a community, in our gathering and remembering — in the integrating and celebrating — we are made into One. I learned this long ago as a child in a public library. And I hope to help enliven this in reality in modern Church life now.

During every Eucharistic liturgy at a Catholic Mass — the ritual that is, for us, a prayer of connection, unity, nourishment and adoration — we hear the words “Do this in memory of me.” The Eucharistic prayer is a type of storytelling: the priest proclaims what happened long ago when Jesus Christ celebrated his Last Supper with his friends, how he provided the instruction to gather as community regularly, to bless bread and share bread and wine. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus said on that holy night long ago (Luke 22:19), and now, today, in every sacred and ordinary moment, Christ beckons to do much in memory of Him.

member (n.) c. 1300, “body part or organ, an integral part of an animal body having a distinct function” (in plural, “the body”), from Old French membre “part, portion; topic, subject; limb, member of the body; member” (of a group, etc.

Online Etymology Dictionary

Together, during the Mass and within life as community, we are re-membering Christ’s body. We are uniting different parts together, each of us members, each of us alive with active and important memories. Memory. Members. Bodies blessed broken and shared. One body made whole. One body, given for all. We all are part, and we all are given.

Through acts of service, love, care and mercy: we give of ourselves, time and talent. We become a collective of collaborators building Christ’s reign of peace and justice. It costs us our time, wealth, passion. We take risks for the greater good, uncertain of the outcome ahead. This is one way we re-member the body, we unite as one.

There is another way, a way often overlooked, that also helps us to be whole. When we gather and serve, we must share our stories. When we tell our stories, we are vulnerable and take risks, just as we do when we serve and advocate. We open ourselves up and share for the sake of the other. Storytelling makes us into community and makes us One.

As Cole Arthur Riley has written in This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us, “We must relearn to embody a holy story exchange. Memory is not just to be held but to be told, and this is especially true in a world where we are so often refused the right to tell our own stories. Part of the power of remembrance is in the recitation … There is healing in the telling. Traditionally, Western Christianity has replaced Christian habits of storytelling with singular and all-encompassing testimonies of a person’s conversion to faith. This is sad to me. We must recover a habit of very specific story exchange and shared memory if we are to have robust liberation.” 

Yes, there is a power in the story telling, in the re-membering that makes us into One. And in the “story exchange and shared memory,” each participant is required to be open. The teller and the listener can both do the dance of receptivity, of exploration and discovery. We can delight in hearing how another remembers a shared experience — delight in the expanse of consciousness. We can surrender to the opening allowed toward healing and liberation, to how memories honored invite newness to arrive.

Storytelling is more than childs play and is meant to be beyond an hour. Storytelling is human and community building. Let us remember to re-member and become One.