The Power of Story

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We humans are creatures who learn through stories. Jesus’ parables, Aesop’s fables, the tales of the Brothers Grimm – we remember these tales not because they teach universal truths but because they do so by giving us characters who remind us of ourselves: the unforgiving servant, the grasshopper who fiddled while the ant toiled, Cinderella. You can tell me that pride goes before a fall, but I’m more likely to remember the lesson if you speak of a party at which a person takes a seat of honor only to be humiliated when told to move because the place was reserved for someone more distinguished.

I was reminded of the power of story today when I spent my lunch hour glancing through the latest issue of “Living City,” a magazine published by Focolare Inc. The first article in the magazine that caught my eye was about Frederick Douglass’ trip to Great Britain in 1846.

Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. As a child, he witnessed his aunt being whipped until she was covered with blood. Not too many years later, he himself was subjected to physical and psychological abuse in an attempt to make him more submissive. Instead, he escaped by undertaking a perilous journey to the north, where slavery was banned. Arriving in New York, “I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions,” he wrote.

He went on to become a famous abolitionist and noted orator. I first read about him when I was a teenager. His autobiography opened my eyes to the horrors of slavery in the United States prior to the Civil War. Even as a middle-school student I knew that slavery was bad, but that abstract concept became real to me through Douglass’ first-person account of being subject to every impulse of his owner, of being whipped, of having the wages for which he worked automatically given to his master, of being sold as property.

At a slave market, “men and women, old and young, married and single were ranked with horses, sheep and swine … and all were subjected to the same narrow examination,” he wrote.

To me, slavery is an abstract concept; Douglass’ description of people being sold like animals moved that abstraction into an atrocity so real that I can’t help but be appalled at the fact that it was once legal in this country.

While I knew the outlines of Douglass’ life, what I didn’t know until I read the article by Fr. John McNerney was that after publication of his autobiography, Douglass traveled to Ireland in 1846, where “I was not treated as a color, but as a man – not as a thing, but as a child of the common Father of us all,” he wrote.

 This story of Douglass “is a message for our times …,” Fr. McNerney concludes. “It entails an enlarging of the human heart to the reality of who our neighbor is.”’

The reality is that our neighbor, regardless of his or her color, station in life, sexual orientation, disability, age, national origin or any category that I instinctively notice, is above all else a child of God.

Once I see that child, I need to hear her story, a reminder that came from another of the magazine’s articles. In his essay, Fr. David Rider tells of attending the reception of a couple who were celebrating their wedding anniversary. The husband had asked the priest to try to talk his adult daughter into returning to the Church.

As he tells the story, Fr. Rider sat next to the young woman. He asked questions about her work and her fiancé; trying, as he put it, “to love this young woman without any agenda or ulterior motives, not even one as noble as her return to religious practice.”

After about two hours, during which Fr. Rider spoke not one word about religion, the young woman suddenly said she wanted to return to the Church. The priest offered to hear her confession, and they went out to the parking lot for the sacrament. The next Sunday, the young woman attended Mass and received the Eucharist.

Somehow I think that wouldn’t have happened if Fr. Rider hadn’t first been willing to hear her narrative. By sharing her history with an attentive audience, the young woman came to realize a truth about herself. And for me, Douglass’ words were a powerful reminder that I must never reduce any person to a means to an end. All of which shows the power of story.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie.mischel@dioslc.org.