The Power of Story and the Healing of Creative Work
To keep track of these lives we live
– Frederich Buechner
is not just a means of
enriching our understanding…
but a truly sacred work…
Our secrets are human secrets,
and our trusting each other enough
to share them with each other
has much to do with the
secret of what it is to be human.
In Frederich Buechner’s book, Telling Secrets, he tells the story of his father’s suicide when he was ten years old. He explores how this event followed him though his life, and how our ways of remembering can be either a hindrance to our healing, or a catalyst for it to happen. It took a crisis in his own family many years later for him to realize that his entire life he had been aching to tell his whole story, yet afraid to, and how carrying it untold had only left its shadow on the shoulders of his own family.
Memory, he writes, makes it possible for us both to bless the past, even those parts of it that we have always felt cursed by, and also to be blessed by it.
He goes on to say this: Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.
It’s not a long book, but it’s full of gold. I won’t take the time to explore it in greater depth today, but I’ll leave you with one more quote from it, where he writes about the importance of taking the time to remember our lives, and how this enriches all of human experience. He calls it “this kind of rich human compost.” I love that word picture.
He writes: We believe in God – such as it is, we have faith – because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just a window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost. The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most human, most ourselves, and if we lost touch with those moments, if we don’t stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with God too. -Frederich Buechner, Telling Secrets
Carrying our old stories, old wounds, old secrets – this silent trudging through time while holding our pain is what unwittingly places it upon the shoulders of those around us, and those who come after us. I explored this theme a little in a previous essay, Too Afraid to Cry, Too Shy to Dance. Robert Bly’s poem, My Father’s Wedding, is also a stunning exploration of this. But what I wanted to talk about today was the healing power of story-telling.
The Power of Story
The complex events that launch us into existence, form our childhoods, and mark our adult lives are like the strands of many balloons. We grasp a strand from time to time, and analyze it. Psychoanalysis is an invaluable healing practice. Carl Jung’s work in particular, and his explorations of human archetypes and symbolism, are a source of endless fascination for me.
But another way healing can come is through story-telling. A story, if it is well-done, can hold the complex and varying strands of existence together without dissecting them or explaining them. And out of that gentle, story-telling hand a wordless understanding begins to flow. A different kind of understanding perhaps, but healing nonetheless.
Creative works are born out of a need to tell a story. Stories shared bring connection. Connection brings healing.
Think of songs. During certain seasons of our lives, a song can touch us. We listen to it again and again. And again. And then we eventually move on and forget the song. Until years later we hear it again. And in a second, we are taken back. To what? To a remembrance of the technical musical arrangements of the melody, or the theories regarding the meanings of the lyrics? No. We are taken back to the story we heard in that song that illuminated our story. We remember that piece of our story.
The Pieta can be analyzed for Michelangelo’s technical skill or the source of the granite if you like, but it is its story that captivates us. It’s the wordless story of motherhood. Sacrifice. Grief. The unseen tears of her life. Of Michelangelo’s life.
In Rembrandt’s painting, The Prodigal Son, it’s not the shades of paint or the qualities of the canvas or even the skill of the painter that made it a masterpiece. Perhaps it was a story he was remembering; perhaps a memory that he never shared; perhaps an unconscious memory. Something flowed through his hands into that painting. That something is what speaks to us. That is what spoke to Henri Nouwen, who wrote about how his unexpected encounter with this painting launched him onto a spiritual quest that forever changed him in his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son.
But it’s not only famous pieces of art that tell our stories.
The most humble things hold stories.
Before factories, before the Industrial Revolution turned our normal ways of producing and selling and buying on its head, we made things with our hands. Clothing, lamps, blankets, and chairs. Or we raised the things that produced them with our hands. Grain and bread. Cows and milk. Chicken and eggs.
Sometimes words are too much or not enough to touch whatever it is that is bothering us. But in the midst of quiet work, as our hands are busy making something, wether we think of it as creative or not, a sudden illumination dawns upon our consciousness. We pause, hands in the dishwater, or in the garden dirt, or on the handle of the paint roller, and an understanding of our existence washes over us. In the most everyday, mundane work of our hands there can come a sudden understanding regarding the confusion of relationships, or a breakthrough moment of healing from past trauma.
There’s an element of understanding our stories, our existence, our people groups, and our pasts, that comes to us through quiet work. Does this vital, human element of our existence not flow through the object itself? Sometimes, perhaps often, stories are carried and told through the things we make, in many little ways.
When I wrap myself in a blanket that someone has knitted, their spirit and their stories unintentionally weaves through the strands, flowing from their memories through their hands and into the yarn. I feel them, and they let me know I’m not alone. When I hold a hand-made pottery mug in my hands, when I sit in a chair that a carpenter’s hands have sanded and stained, when I wash a box of strawberries that have been tended by a neighbor, picked by their children, and set out for sale in a wagon at the end of their driveway, I feel their stories.
We have an innate understanding that we were created to share and hear stories.
Live the life we have with creativity.
I don’t idealize lifestyles of the past that were often harsh and difficult. We don’t have to return to old, difficult, time-consuming ways of living. We embrace modern technology for the incredible gifts it offers. But we need to keep hands-on creativity in our lives. For our own health. For the way it shares our stories with others, which can illuminate healing for them. For connection.
In the words of Ansel Adams, the famous American landscape photographer:
Life is your art.
An open, aware heart
is your camera.
A oneness with your world
is your film.
Your bright eyes
and easy smile
is your museum.
-Ansel Adams
What did you love to do as a child? Paint if you love to paint. Write if you love to write. Learn pottery, or crochet, or carpentry, or a musical instrument, or sewing, or simply start a small garden. A handful of pots on a patio is a garden. Any creative work that you love brings incalculable worth and dignity to your life. It brings healing, joy, and light which then flows out into everything you do.
Do it only for you. No need to do anything with it, or to monetize it. Its worth is beyond money. You need connection, not fame. And if it brings you to only one other like-minded person, that is priceless.
Stories re-soul the world.
Our body recognizes and responds to the high resonance levels of things that come from an authentic heart. And likewise, our body recognizes when something has low resonating energy. We recognize the life-givingness of things done with love and creativity, wether that’s gardening, knitting, or composing a song. We recognize stories. Stories in all their forms re-soul the world.
Margaret Atwood said, “You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built in the human plan. We come with it.”
So tell your story. If not in words, let your hands tell your story. The world needs it, but more importantly, you need it.
Stories have been used
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
to dispossess and to malign.
But stories can also be used
to empower,
and to humanize.
Stories can break
the dignity of a people.
But stories can also
repair that broken dignity.
