Dreams to Sell

"All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players” wrote William Shakespeare (As You Like It). It is an insightful comment on human nature. Whether we know it or not, we all live a story of our own telling. We are all the hero or villain of our own play.

These stories that we tell ourselves control our lives to a large degree. They literally tell us who we are. If we believe that our lives were intended to be successful, wealthy, adventurous, or creative, we will find a way to realize that story in some way, despite all the obstacles in our path. We have an “inner steersman” who finds a way to navigate the course that we set for him. We set that course by the story in which we choose to live. If we believe that our story is one of the victim, or rogue, or if we believe that we have bad luck and that things never turn out for us, if we believe that we are meant to fail or that we are basically no good, the inner steersman is obedient and non-judgmental and will blindly follow whatever path we lay down for him. If this is true then the stories we tell ourselves are vital – the stuff of life. We should be very careful to examine the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we put ourselves in. They have a way of coming true.

Once laid down, the stories that we believe in are hard to change. When we believe we know who we are we will do almost anything to avoid destroying that self image, of undermining the story in which we are the players. Without that story we are nothing, only a piece of leaf being carried along on a mindless stream existence. Without our stories our lives are meaningless. Thus our stories are supremely important to us. They define who we are.

If we honestly look within ourselves we may find that we don't much like the story we are in or the role in which we have cast ourselves. The question is, once we discover that, what can we do about it? It is not an easy question.

Fortunately, it is not a question that we have to answer on our own. In fact, it is not a question that we can answer on our own. This is emphasized in the 12-step recovery program. Their “Higher Power” or “God, as you conceive him to be” is the source from which this change comes. The program works to the extent that it helps us take an honest look at the story we are telling ourselves and then take action to start living a different story, the story of being in recovery.

In the best sense, religion is trying to do much the same thing. It is telling us a story about who we are and why the world around us is as we see it. Religion tries to tell us how to live into a different story, in a different role. As I have observed the unfolding of this dynamic in my own religious tradition, I have found something rather disturbing. People are all too often intolerant of any story but their own. In a way this makes perfect sense. If our stories are what give meaning to our lives, we feel threatened if anyone suggests that there is some different story that is also meaningful. Our either / or culture works in terms of black or white. Either our story is right or it is not. Either their story is wrong or it is not. We over generalize and assume that if a story is right for us then it must be right for everyone else. And if a story is not one that we could live then we are convinced that it is wrong for everyone else as well.

It seems that in various forms there are two stories competing with each other. In one story we live in a careless, dangerous or even hostile world. The strong survive, the weak die. In this story the only thing that matters is power in all its various forms; money, control, knowledge, strength, skill, cunning. In this story the end justifies the means and that end is the survival of the fittest. Look around and you will find that most of our world subscribes to this story. If we are honest with ourselves we will find that this story drives most of what we do every day. This is the story of the world, the explanation for the human condition. It seems inevitable, right, proper.

But it is not the only story. There is another influence in the world that whispers to us of a different way. The very structure of dramatic stories revolves around a “hero” who must sacrifice him or herself for the good of their community, for something larger than their individual life. We admire such people and identify them with the role they play in the story, literally the “hero.” At some level we recognize that there is a better part of our nature that operates according to a different principle than that of greed, avarice and the self-centered grubbing for more and more power. We call that principle “love.” We admire love. We would like to live a love-centered life. But our survival instincts tell us that it is not safe to do so and therefore we make only token gestures towards living our ideals. We are afraid to write for ourselves the role of the true hero.

These two stories are manifest in our approach to God. We try to fit God into one story or the other. In the first story God is the ultimate power and authority. His way of running the universe is based on his right to decide how things are to be and on his power to enforce his will. In this story the explanation for the things we see in the world is that we have disobeyed and offended a powerful and jealous God who is punishing us for our impudence. The solution to our difficulties is in finding a way to escape the punishment of a wrathful God, either by perfect adherence to his law so that we do not have to face punishment. Or, discovering that we cannot actually do that, we tell a story in which God can be bought off, his justice satisfied by an alternative payment of our debt, his wrath assuaged by the suffering of another.

But there is another story. It is a story best understood by looking at the life of Jesus Christ and understanding what he told us about his Father and his way of running the universe. In this story God is love. In this story he has the best interest of all of his children at heart and works tirelessly to set things right. His way of running the universe is to take upon himself the sacrifice necessary to accomplish that task. In this story the reason for the condition of the world is that we have rejected the principles of self-sacrificing love upon which God founded the universe. Instead have bought into the lie of the Enemy that God cannot be trusted, that he does not have our best interests at heart. In this story the world is as it is because we have chosen to live in a story of cutthroat competition. The evil that we see in the world is not punishment but simply the natural consequences of our choice to live out of harmony with the law of love. In this story it is God himself who absorbs the effects of evil and sets about healing our wounds.

Jesus said that his mission was to “show us the Father,” to tell us what God is really like. So when we see him healing the sick, rescuing and forgiving a prostitute who was about to be stoned, holding the children on his lap and telling them stories when all the religious leaders had fled in terror, when we see Jesus willingly submitting to the death of a sinner in order that we might know the malignity of sin and the love of God, in all of this we are seeing what God himself is like, how he feels about his human children, and how he is dealing with the emergency of evil.

These two stories are not incompatible. We do not have to choose one or the other. Our broken nature wants to say that one is right and one is wrong. But that is not the case. How can that be? It is because not all people are the same. If everyone lived the same story what a boring world we would have. People have different stories. They need different stories because their backgrounds and experience, temperament and inclinations, hopes and dreams, aspirations and weaknesses are all different. God speaks to each person in a story that they can understand, a story that uniquely fits who they are and where they are and where they need to go. One size does not fit all when God helps us tell our stories. When we insist that everyone's story match our own we are requiring that God tell someone else's story in the context of our own. We are, in fact, dictating to God how he must work in someone else's life. “Well, of course if you put it that way...” is a humorous reaction when our stupidity is stated in an obvious way. When we put it that way it does seem pretty silly that we should insist that our story be the same as everyone's story. They are not. They should not be.

It might be easy to conclude that it really doesn't matter what you believe, what story you tell yourself might not seem important. We have already seen that our stories mold our lives, that we will march into the guns rather than abandon our story of ourselves as a dedicated soldier protecting family and country. The same is true of the story that we tell ourselves about our relationship to God. It makes a difference what kind of God we serve – just ask the followers of Moloch who believed that their god required that they place their children in the outstretched hands of a red-hot idol. It makes a difference if we tell ourselves that we are in a story with a powerful, strict, authoritarian God who's offended sense of justice and wrath at the offense against his rule requires that he punish all who disobey. It matters whether we believe that we are in a story with a God who is the embodiment of the self-sacrificing love which he created as the foundation for his universe. The implications of such stories seem so self-evident that they hardly need to be elaborated. But perhaps we could simply note that as someone said “It is a law that we become like the person that we worship and admire.” Or, in terms of this construction, it matters what kind of a God rules the stories that we tell ourselves.

Does that mean that the powerful God story is “wrong”? No, it doesn't. There are times when that story is the story we need. If we are terrified of the world around us we need to have a strong God who can kick butt and take names. Anything else seems weak and ineffective, not what we need. Snow tires are appropriate on one's car when one is driving in the snow. A cast is appropriate when our leg is broken. A highchair is appropriate when we are children.

The trouble only comes when our story no longer matches our situation. That happens all too often in life. We learn a story when we are small, often because we need it to survive, and then we use that story all through our lives, whether it is appropriate or not. We put snow tires on our race car and wonder why it does not perform well on the racetrack. We hobble around with a cast long after God has healed our broken leg, then wonder at the ingratitude and disobedience of those who have obviously rejected their doctor's advice by taking off their cast and walking free. We can't understand why the highchair doesn't fit us very well and doesn't work the way it used to. But we doggedly cling to it because we once learned that it was best if we ate in a highchair with a spoon and sippy cup. It is small wonder that the apostle Paul was exasperated over the inability of some members to “grow up” and start eating solid food instead of drinking only milk (I Cor 3:2, Heb 5:12). “When I was a child I spake as a child, I thought as a child... But when I grew up a put away childish things.” (I Cor 3:11)

It is past time that we all took a good look at the stories we are telling, about ourselves, about God, about others. It is hard work to examine those stories and change them. It is hard because we are often unaware of our story. Sometimes the only way we can catch those stories is by taking a look at the path our lives have taken. We tend to blame others, and God, for what has happened to us. There is such a thing as chance. Things do happen that are beyond our control. But if we are honest with ourselves we come to understand that it is not the things that happen to us but how we deal with them that charts the direction of our lives. It is not which way the wind blows but how we sail our ship that determines where we end up. And that is the clue to the story that we tell ourselves. I submit that we always arrive at the destination we set for ourselves in our story. It may not always look as we expect. But we arrive at the destination that fulfills the story we have chosen.

It is the same with our picture of God. It is a law that we become like the person, or God, we worship and admire. If we are drawn to a God of power and vengeance we will grow to crave power and to become vengeful. If we see God as harsh, exacting, loving only those who measure up and demanding payment for transgressions against his authority, we will become harsh and exacting ourselves, only giving our love conditionally. It is true that “the judgment with which you judge others is the judgment that you yourself will receive.” (Matt 7:2) If we worship a harsh judge we will judge ourselves and others harshly.

It is also true that if we accept the example of Jesus, if we believe his witness about what his Father was like, then we will start to become like that ourselves. It may be painful, for as we see what God is like for we will undoubtedly start to understand how unloving we have been. It is not easy to see the vast difference between God's ideal for us and our true condition. But Jesus also said “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) When we come to know the truth about our heavenly Father's love, that will eventually set us free. For if God accepts us as we are, unloving, selfish, greedy, and cruel, then we can feel safe to let him start working in us to correct those defects, to remold our characters into the image of his own character. In God's love we can feel confident that he will truly remake us in his own image.

The choice is before us. In the words of Joshua to the nation of Israel, it is time that we “choose this day whom you will serve.” (Joshua 24:15) Do we prefer the God of Power? Or do we prefer the God of Love? Are we willing to learn that the greatest power of all is in love? Or do we want to cling to our own power and try to control the universe and make it fit our specifications? It really is up to us.

I will end with a little poem that hung on the wall in our home as I was growing up. In bygone generations girls would demonstrate their sewing skills by creating a “sampler” of stitch work, often with a picture or poem sown into cloth. This was one that my mother did as a girl. It had been framed and always hung near the door of our house wherever we lived. I have since discovered that it is part of a larger poem called “Dream-Pedlary” by nineteenth century author, Thomas Lovel Beddoes. (http://www.bartleby.com/101/667.html) It puzzled me for a long time. I am only now beginning to understand.

If there were dreams to sell

Merry and sad to tell

And the crier rang the bell

What would you buy?

- Mark Merizan