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This week I’ve been swimming in stories! Thanks to the magic of the internet, which quickly delivered a stack of new books right to my door, I was able to immerse myself in the stories of artist and writer Brian Andreas. He is the creative artisan I mentioned in last Sunday’s meditation, and is known for his colorful StoryPeople. One after another, Mr. Andreas accompanies his characters with stories that heal, stories that bring laughter, stories that are for pondering, stories of peace and imagination, stories that dive into the depths of one’s soul and then resurface with gifts for the living. I feasted through all eight of his books of stories—sometimes laughing out loud, other times wiping a tear from my cheek, and was reminded of yet another master storyteller, Rachel Naomi Remen.
Dr. Remen is internationally-known as a pioneer in the holistic and integrative health movement, coming to that place as both a medical clinician and herself a patient. Seeing the practice of medicine as a spiritual path, Dr. Remen serves as clinical professor of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and is also Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. Her books are compilations of wisdom stories, gleaned first from her Jewish mystic grandfather, from her own 50+ year journey with Crohn’s disease, and from the thousands of cancer patients she has cared for over the past 30 years.
Dr. Remen begins her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom with these words.
“Everybody is a story. When I was a child,” she writes, “people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don’t do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other’s stories once again. Most of the stories we are told now are written by novelists and screenwriters, acted out by actors and actresses, stories that have beginnings and endings, stories that are not real. The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending. They are a front-row seat to the real experience…Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life’s kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people’s stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories…”
Dr. Remen continues,
“The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone’s story matters. The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage. Most parents know the importance of telling children their own story, over and over again, so that they come to know in the tellings who they are and to whom they belong. At the kitchen table we do this for each other. Hidden in all stories is the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story. The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God.”
Dr. Remen concludes,
“In telling [these stories], we are telling each other the human story. Stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us and weave us together as a family once again…”
In a few moments, I will invite you to turn to another person and share a story about a family meal, or a kitchen table conversation you once experienced. I hope that the buzz we create together with our own real stories will offer each of us a new piece of wisdom, a new insight, perhaps even will lead us to the One table around which our stories reveal the One story. So please be thinking of which kitchen table or mealtime story you would like to share with another.
First, as we prepare to come to our own family table once again, two more storytellers accompany us. Jesus of Nazareth, known as a partier, a bit of a rabble-rouser, was once invited to the home of a big shot in town to have a meal on the Sabbath. But this was not a casual social occasion for Jesus, for here, in the home of a leading Pharisee, the other legalists were, as scripture says, “watching him closely.” In first-century Roman-occupied
Palestine
, with both Jewish and Roman customs prevailing, eating was, of course, a significant event. A guest was accepted as an equal, and would be watched closely to see whether or not prescribed norms of etiquette would be followed. Little at a meal such as this would be left to chance. People noticed where one ate, with whom one ate, whether one washed before eating, and where one sat to eat. All of these matters determined and were determined by one’s social position. For a guest to follow prescribed protocol was an unspoken honor to the host. To ignore social custom resulted in the public embarrassment of both host and family. So it is fair to assume that Jesus accepted the invitation to dine with the leader of the Pharisees, knowing full well that he would be on display and expected to perform according to established social etiquette.
The kitchen-table wisdom offered by Jesus at this particular meal, however, was nothing the host expected, and certainly contrary to what he would have wanted. First Jesus heals a diseased man right in front of the diners, and then has the audacity to ask those leaders sitting around him, “Did I do wrong to heal this man’s suffering on the Sabbath?” Their silence revealed much about their own kitchen table wisdom. Jesus pursues the point by asking further, “If your own child fell into a well, would you wait till Sabbath was over and the restrictions lifted to pull them out to safety?” More silence. We can imagine the host squirming…all he wanted at his meal was a lively, but esoteric, conversation. Instead, this Jesus talks about real life through real-life stories of a really ill man and very real sons and daughters.
Then Jesus tells a story to those seated around this feasting table…a story of a wedding banquet, one of the most obvious places where social etiquette still reigns supreme. In his story of a wedding, Jesus tells the listeners to reject the place of honor and instead go and sit down at the lowest place. In so doing, cause your host to rethink his or her own prejudices about class and place and social custom. Jesus is not talking here about feigned humility as a strategy for greater recognition. On the contrary, humility is a quality of life open to persons who know that their worth is not measured by recognition from their peers but by the certainty that God has accepted them as they are: warts, talents, and all.
Further making the same point about the quest for recognition, storyteller Jesus admonishes, if you yourself are the host or hostess at a meal, don’t follow custom by inviting only those of like privilege. Leave off the guest list precisely those most often invited: your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, and your rich neighbors. Rather, invite those whose names will never appear on any “A-List”—the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Members of this “B-list” would never expect to be included in the social occasion of a first-century meal, would never anticipate being treated as an equal to the host, and their stories would never be enjoyed as kitchen table wisdom, for to do so would be to violate many deeply-held purity laws and social customs.
Rachel Naomi Remen’s words cut to the truth of Jesus’ own brand of kitchen table wisdom: “Everybody is a story… Sitting around the table telling stories is…the way the wisdom gets passed along… The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone’s story matters…At the kitchen table…[we discover that] hidden in all stories is the One story….[At the kitchen table these] stories touch us in our place of common humanness, awaken us, and weave us together as a family once again…” God’s etiquette manual, you see, would never consider ignoring or omitting the stories of anyone, least of all God’s own daughters and sons.
Suffice to say that Jesus was not the model guest…but he was the model storyteller. And in his stories, Jesus redefines etiquette, by God. In God’s etiquette manual, dinner invitations are sent only to the poor, the lame, and the blind…and no one is to assume a place of honor by entitlement. With God as the gracious host, a place at the table is made for each person’s story, and those stories become the ground out of which our faith is nourished and grows stronger.
The story from the book of Hebrews delivers on a different platter the same menu of inclusivity. As God’s daughters and sons, the meal we dish out is to be one of mutual love, hospitality to strangers, remembering those who are vulnerably dependent on society’s rules and regulations—the prisoners and those who are being tortured. Those of us who have seen the images of Abu Ghraib and of
Guantanamo
, or who have worked with any of the group of
Redlands
’ parolees, cannot lightly pass over the author’s words in this passage. We are not to serve prisoners or those being tortured as if they were inferior to us, but we are to act “as though you were in prison with them…as though you yourselves were being tortured.” This is a heavy requirement and an obvious reversal of most human etiquette manuals. Remembering prisoners and those tortured, in this context, involves much more than mental imaginings. Christianity requires us to walk with them in their suffering, to be somehow present to them in their isolation, and to support them with prayer and resources. At the very least, it means extending the circles of chairs around this family meal table to make a place for their stories and their needs. This is etiquette, by God.
[to table] Here, at this table, we find a level playing field. Here all stories are fruitful sources of kitchen table wisdom. Here each of us becomes part of the One story as we dare to tell our own story. I invite you now, as did Jesus centuries ago, to tell something of your story to another person. Listen to their story and the wisdom it contains. Share with wild abandon your own story about mealtimes or kitchen tables. Listen and hear the wisdom in this place. A bell will signal our move from storytelling into thankful prayer.
[stories…Buddhist singing bell…prayer of thanks]
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