Hold These Stories With Care

When small groups meets in the congregation where I serve, we often use some simple “covenants of presence” that help us in our time together. One of them has to do with story telling. It affirms that “we all have a story” and that we need to “claim authorship and learn to tell it to others.” As we grow in our ability to do this, we also remember how families and communities have sacred stories within them that need to be told. Here in Vancouver, B.C. one of the most obvious signs of this is the presence of numerous totem poles throughout the city. Archeologists and historians confer that people of the First Nations have been carving poles such as these for at least five thousand years, and every one of them tells a story. This should come as no surprise to us. Jewish and Christian communities have also been telling sacred stories for thousands of years, and images have often been a powerful way to share these with the public. In the church where I worshipped on Sunday, one stained glass window told the story of Jesus as the Good Shepherd and another one depicted St. Paul preaching on Mars Hill in Athens. In that setting, it struck me that they were simply Christian totem poles made by artists from Northern Europe. But Christians who brought stories such as these to the Northwest many years ago made a terrible mistake. When they saw the totems carved by people of the First Nations, they thought that the poles, themselves, were the objects of pagan worship. So, they set out to destroy as many of them as they could. Of course, these people who came with sacred stories of their own should have known the difference! And, destroying the poles did nothing to destroy the stories they proclaimed. A descendant of the First Nations people who has started coming to worship in an outdoor church in Vancouver told his new pastor that the most important thing about sacred stories is that we hold them within us in a place where they can’t be erased. In fact, he questioned why she needed to read from the Bible each time they gathered for worship. “Don’t Christians hold these stories within them?” he asked. He went on to say that when one is gifted with a story there is always the expectation that it is held in trust. That brought me to the “covenants of trust” again, where we encourage each other to “hold these stories with care.” I have always liked them, but now these simple covenants hold even deeper meaning for me.