Stories

   O Lord, you have searched me and known me … Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.                                                                                                                                             Psalm 139

   Years ago, when he served as U.S. Senator from New Jersey, Bill Bradley told a story about his father, Warren. Mr. Bradley spent one year in high school but still managed to work himself up to a position as president of the local bank in the small, Missouri river town in which the family lived. This was during the Great Depression, and then as now, countless families were struggling to keep up with their mortgages and hold on to their homes and farms.

   In his story, Senator Bradley said that it was his father’s greatest source of pride that during that awful time, he never foreclosed on a single property.
    I imagined that was possible seventy or eighty years ago because the local banker knew his clients, the homeowners and farmers whose mortgages his bank held. He must have known well, in deep ways … known their stories and the stories of their families. When a crisis arose, the banker called upon that great well of stories to discern the best possible solution to the issue at hand.
   You can almost imagine the conversation between Mr. Bradley and his clients. Banker and farmer sitting across the table from one another, committed to finding a solution that met the needs of both people. The banker’s what can I do to keep you on your farm balanced with the farmer’s what do I need to do to stay on it.

  Conversations like this seem to be in short supply these days. Solutions to problems become more elusive because the parties involved are too often disconnected from one another’s lives. The mortgage on a farm is less likely to be held locally; and the shared stories that made resolution possible in Warren Bradley’s world have no place in our world.

  It occurs to me that communities that take the time to share stories, especially the deep stories of our lives, the stories that speaking to meaning and value, these communities understand that simple organic truth: we are connected to another, bound up in one another’s lives, and our well-being as individuals is entirely dependent on our well-being as a people gathered in neighborhood, community, nation and planet. When that sense of interdependence begins to fray, things fall apart.

I spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho, in southern Africa. One of the many things I found remarkable about village life there was the sense that people were bound together and that their survival depended upon their willingness to give up something of their own for the well-being and wholeness of their neighbors. They did not always like each other, but they knew they needed each other.

  People rooted in one place for generations have a sense of that. It certainly not ideal in every way, but those of us who are more transient can benefit from the practices that hold village life together: the understanding of shared well-being, of connection and mutuality; the commitment to a common good. They remind us of the deep commonalities that link us together. As a church, we need to find more and more ways of sharing our stories … in worship and in fellowship, in prayer and in study.

  The beautiful words of the Psalmist comfort us with the knowledge that we are deeply known by God. They also challenge us to think that God not only promises closeness and presence, but that the resolve of God is for us to be closer to one another as well.