I collect children’s books; and regularly re-read and enjoy them. One year almost thirty years ago, I sent my oldest friend’s first child a favorite holiday book. It was called Babar and Father Christmas. 3-year-old Emily loved the book. She asked her mother to read it on Christmas night, and then every night, for the rest of December, into and through January, February and March, and right up through her birthday at the end of May. By the time I sent another book, Katharine hated Babar, Pom, Flora and even Zephir the monkey.

I suppose even a good story can be heard too many times. But stories are how we make meaning of our lives, and the lives of our loved ones. We tell stories about each other, about ourselves, about people we don’t know. It is amazing how our own stories change as the decades go by—our memories are not accurate. But the impact of a good story cannot be over-estimated.

In the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion group in Rockport, we have been telling each other stories that fall under the two categories of Unity and Division: We tell stories that unite, and we tell stories that divide.

What is remarkable about the process is that after the story is told and discussed, we ask one another to create an alternative future to the story. So, for example, in one story, a high school girl (me) asked her friend, Alan, to a high school dance. When my best friend’s mother found out, she asked her daughter, “Couldn’t Susan find a white boy to invite?” We were surprised and upset about it. But neither of us had been raised to confront an authority figure so we didn’t confront Kath’s mother about it. It was an early experience of witnessing an authority figure not acting like a good grown-up! It was also an early example of seeing a good and thoughtful person acting like someone who is neither.

In the story, neither of us talked to the mother about why she said what she did. But on our alternative future, we talked about what we could have said or could have asked to 1) understand someone better, 2) not put them on the defensive, while 3) discussing why their thinking and their statement were hurtful and wrong.

These alternative futures will help us have the difficult conversations that so many of us want to have, we just don’t know where to begin. I will keep you posted. In the meantime, please consider your own stories that unite and divide; someday soon we will have a worship service on this theme, and you may want to participate.

See you at Cleaves street, or on the zoom screen soon~
xoSusan