What's Your Story?

I am part of an online class where class members write stories about their lives and experience. Being witness to these stories as they develop is an awesome thing. I show up everyday to receive the words as they rise like incense. The page seems to me an altar. The stories are like medicine, healing both writer and reader.

I see an astonishing movie, Sweetland, a delicate unlikely love story. Told through extraordinary photography, it is inspired by the line, “Let us hope that in this world, we are preceded by a love story.” The story onscreen mingles with the stories of the women in my class and alongside stories imagined of my rural grandparents and my parents who after 65 years of marriage are shriveled in stature but not in passion for each other.

Sobbing as people exit the theatre, I seek to convince my Sweetheart, Chip, I am not crying at the concluding scene but at something deeper, something primal, catching me off guard.

My friend Judith calls the next day. Speaking about relationships in her life and from her many years of a counselor’s perspective, she says, “Stories prove the power of love and how it can heal and how relationships are eternal, they never end, they just change form.” It is a holy fragment torn from the holy places in her life. I quickly grab a pen to write it down. I treasure it like balm poured out. I remember words written by a friend, David Kopp, enclosed within a small brass box, given on my birthday long ago. It is cut with holes to match that particularly vulnerable time:

“The closest we might get to sorrow is when we cradle this small box of dreams, perfectly cut with holes. The wind blows through. We wait. Then God drifts in to brood in every corner. He listens to stories we might have told; trembles at the severity of these his own gifts, to think such bleeding hands could hold them up like incense in his courts.”

I wait. God is brooding in the corner.