Finding God and Health In The Experience of Storytelling

I love it when science documents the benefit of one of life's little pleasures. First there was the antioxidant value of dark chocolate, followed by red wine. Recently I learned that laughter -- even if it's fake -- decreases stress-related hormones. Now we learn that storytelling may have health benefits.

A University of Massachusetts Medical School study recently found that storytelling may have positive effects on patients with high blood pressure. For at least one group of low-income African Americans followed in the study, listening to personal narratives helped maintain lower blood pressure as effectively as more medication. The study found that participants who watched videos of stories drawn from their own community and told in patients' natural voices fared better than those who watched generic, how-to videos about stress reduction.

Does that surprise us? All the world's religious traditions hold stories at their core. While generic how-to messages usually make us tune out, stories grab us. They bring us in, trigger empathy and sometimes cause us to redirect our steps. I know I've found myself riveted to the driver's seat for an extra moment during a slice of NPR's StoryCorps. And it happens to me every once in a while on Sunday morning during the "joys and concerns" part of worship. A real live person tells a little story. Suddenly, I'm upright in my pew, all ears and attentiveness. Recently an older gentleman launched with this line: "God visited us last night at 11:59 p.m. He doesn't have a name yet, but our grandson has safely arrived." Just that small dose of story slipped in sideways had a profound effect on my week, causing me to ask where God might visit me in the days ahead.

This makes me wonder: What would happen if we welcomed stories more regularly into the places we come hoping for healing of our bodies, souls, family lives, communities and world? What if we went a step further and invited deeper listening, asking people to turn off the switches of our information age in favor of a quiet, contemplative moment of holy listening?

I've been eavesdropping on an unscientific experiment with storytelling and holy listening lately. As a self-appointed spy for hope amid the mainline denominations' well-reported decline, I've been looking at congregations who are stirring up a greater capacity for people to be authentically present to one another. This experiment -- part of The Fund for Theological Education's Calling Congregations initiative -- seeks to establish listening congregations as places that might foster a deeper connection to younger generations, especially millennials who tend to have little or no use for organized religion. Authentic connection is a key desire among churched and un-churched, young and old alike who are hungry for lives of meaning and purpose. When people are invited into a safe space to tell their own stories, a mystery unfolds that kindles the authentic connection many people seek. Sometimes it feels as if one of Jesus' parables is getting re-enacted before our very eyes.

Here are a few glimpses of what I've seen:

• A pastor named John from Dallas began encouraging parishioners at his African Methodist Episcopal church to tell each other stories -- on occasion and in safe spaces, such as the renowned class meetings of John Wesley, founder of Methodism. Wesley would ask: "How is it with your soul?" The question gets updated to sound a little less 18th-century: "How have you experienced God this week?" Or "Tell me about a time recently when you got totally caught up in loving what you were doing?" Shortly after introducing this idea among leaders in the congregation, Pastor John walked in unannounced to a ministry group's visitation at a local retirement community. He found the room vibrating with the energy of old stories revisited, told, honored and pondered anew in light of God's story.
• A laywoman at a Presbyterian church in South Carolina went to a retreat focused on creating space to listen deeply to one another's stories. She told me that, for the first time in her long life as a churchgoer, she had found what she'd been craving. "It was the opposite of small talk," Amy said. "Only on rare occasions in my life as a church member have I been able to share somebody else's story and have somebody else share in my story. This is Church. But you don't get this sitting in the sanctuary."
• During a girls retreat, a teenager named Cat told a story to a group of her peers, who then joined in wondering about images of God in the story. At the end of the session Cat said, "The opportunity to talk about my life in a safe space feels different. God is like a safe space where I don't have to watch what I say and feel." One of the other girls in the group said "Wow. We can do this for each other."

Dr. Thomas K. Houston, lead researcher in the University of Massachusetts blood pressure study, says, "The magic in stories lies in the relatedness they foster." What the people in the congregations I'm visiting are learning together about storytelling has major implications for shaping the church-that-is-becoming. Maybe, as churches, we could decide to sidestep the generic how-to messages. What if we find ways to welcome the stories of people like us, similar "patients" in these "hospitals for the soul" that church can be? What if the art of storytelling and holy listening could be honed as a spiritual technology, a practice at which people of faith can get better and better, so that we might offer its healing potential to some broken places in the world?

Placing personal narrative at the center of faith formation is a time-honored way of doing church. It was the source of the oral tradition we now hold as sacred Scripture. Women used it in the 1970's as the path to raise consciousness about patriarchy and chart a course for liberation. The black church has a rich tradition of welcoming personal narratives into worship.

The churchly name for storytelling is "testimony" and congregations have been experimenting with new ways of embodying this practice. Lillian Daniel, author of Tell It Like It Is, offers this definition: "A testimony is your spoken story about how you have experienced God, offered in the context of our community worship." After a Lenten experiment in welcoming weekly moments of such storytelling in worship, her congregation kept right on doing it, finding that "The practice of testimony strengthened the bonds among us as a community and drew us closer to God as individuals and as a community."

Margaret Ann Crain found a similar kind of storytelling at work among teenagers in a church in Evanston, Illinois. In this multicultural church teens regularly stand up during worship, at potlucks and in everyday conversation to tell about a "God Moment" experienced on a mission trip. Crain found that naming these God moments came quite easily for teens raised in this church, where practices of storytelling have been intentionally fostered over the past decade and everyone -- from children on up -- gets "a chance to start telling their story and connecting their story to our community." In the words of one of the pastors: "Telling story and connecting story is what we do."

Fostering relatedness through storytelling could become part of our daily diet of small pleasures. As dark chocolate, a glass of red wine and laughter are good for an individual body, so may storytelling be an antioxidant for our corporate body, a balm for the ailing heart at the center of many of our congregations.

Dori Baker is scholar-in-residence for The Fund for Theological Education's Calling Congregations initiative and a designer of VocationCARE, an approach for congregations who want to nurture young leaders for the church and the world. She is an author and editor of the new book Greenhouses of Hope: Congregations Growing Young Leaders who Will Change the World. www.doribaker.com

 

 

 

Comments

[thunk]

06:29 PM on 03/01/2011

It seems to me there is a distinction between testimony and story telling. Story telling to me is a well developed art form requiring a certain skill. It is not casual unstructured testimony about one's life or experiences. That aside I generally agree. Sharing personal experiences and ideas within a group is a very powerful thing in any setting, religious or otherwise.

[Robert Hagedorn]

05:10 PM on 03/01/2011

Snakes generally don't talk human language and grocery stores don't sell knowledge of good and evil fruit. But these facts don't mean the story is a lot of baloney. Do a search: The First Scandal.

[freethinker-52]

12:48 PM on 02/28/2011

but of course religion started out as story telling myths.

[ThinkCreeps]

03:42 PM on 03/02/2011

I don't see very much having changed during its subsequent existence.

[flyby777]

12:29 PM on 02/28/2011

Scientific studies? So, I am to believe that stories about the magical guy in the sky will lower blood pressure.

[Alexander Nelson]

02:17 PM on 02/28/2011

Its not that you believe in a magical guy in the sky. Its the faith that their is somthing beyond the world that we know. For if we all knew God existed then why would we need faith?
The mainstream religions have failed. They have just ruined the water with their lies for anyone that has the truth.

[flyby777]

07:55 PM on 02/28/2011

I'm curious as to what you mean by" mainstream religions have failed". I agree with you as some of the most criminal acts that I have seen have come from "Christian organizations". My question is sincere and I am interested in your comment about "something beyond the world that we know". I would assume you are speaking beyond Christianity but am interested in your viewpoint. Conservatives and their "moral majority" have gone a long way in souring many. Taking away women's rights and, at the same time (many) favoring the death penalty. I am not a Christian myself and have become somewhat disgusted with the "moral majority" rhetoric.

[Phlan]

07:21 PM on 03/01/2011

You have to have faith to believe what you know in your mind and heart just simply isn't true.

[alterego55]

11:58 AM on 02/28/2011

This is my story (part 1).

I woke up yesterday and discovered 133 C St. SE, the residence of a handful of Christian Congressmen who use the judicial and legislative branches to manipulate our democracy and further the Christian agenda. Zoned as a "church" with 12 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms, the Christian activist Congressmen residents get a 75% discount on rent, which they don't have to claim as income or as campaign contributions.

I also discovered that Christian political diploma mills such as Liberty University and Regent University were turning out Christian legal and political activists by the hundreds every year. I found out that the Bush administration kicked out some Department of Justice incumbent appointees mid-term, and replaced them with 250 grads from Liberty and Regent passing up far more qualified grads from Harvard, Yale, etc. Attorney General Gonzalez got in a little trouble for that, but not too much.

Just before lunch, I read how South Dakota Christian activist legislators are close to enacting a law that considers the killing of an abortion doctor as "justifiable homicide". Reading further on, I found out Kentucky was passing legislation to teach creationism as a science in public schools, and going to give a $40 million tax credit to a Christian developer to build a Noah's Ark theme park which will promote creationism over evolution.

Shortly after dinner, the evening news said Christian activist politicians were in the process of defunding Planned Parenthood. I had to turn off the TV.

[jokerdanny]

11:02 AM on 02/28/2011

really? science says storytelling is good? ok. what does science say about people who believe that wild ridiculous outrageous un-provable tales are true...like stories that describe a talking snake who convinces a woman into eating a magic apple?...science calls those people delusional

[whirlpool]

03:46 PM on 02/28/2011

Well the thing about stories is that you can take different things from them. For instance to me Eve was the first scientist talking to the animals, getting to know the animals, exploring the place. Of course god not liking scientists decided to kick her out. Then he gave Adam the incompetent the job of naming the animals which he totally botched which is why there are so many unnamed species down to this day that the taxonomists are working on.

[somsoc]

10:40 AM on 02/28/2011

As a famous Bavarian in the 1930's said, "Let me have a child before he or she is but eight years old and they are mine for life."

[Bruce Wilson]

01:27 PM on 03/01/2011

Actually, I believe that it was first said by a Spaniard a couple of centuries earlier.

[Herkv]

10:04 AM on 02/28/2011

It isn't science that gave us antioxidants - it's Madison Avenue. They're good, but just not that good.
So, you're right about storytelling - after all, that's where gods came from in the first place.

[William D Simpson]

08:22 AM on 02/28/2011

Ther is only one story that has within itself the true revelation of GOD, and the power to transform a life. The Gospel of Jesus Christ...
http://wsimpson.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/evangelical-christianity-in-america-today-is-a-generation-of-people-whom-god-does-not-know/

[el sistema]

11:10 AM on 02/28/2011

Makes one wonder why there are so many other religions and atheists. The power to transform isn't that powerful apparently.

[Enock Zamora]

08:07 AM on 02/28/2011

Story telling is indeed a source that can connect to the heart in which children connect to as well as adults. Sufi storys like Ali Baba & the Fourty Thieves, or Sinbad the Sailor etc. are all old Sufi storys and connect to many of us and are to be understood on seven levels. 'The Conferance of the Birds', by (Attar) is a poem and an allegory of life which children would love to hear or told from a parent or 'teacher'. Telling storys is memorable to children as is laying on the grass with them and looking for things in the clouds as they float by, or making angel's in the snow with them. We are all children then!

[Pratitya]

09:52 PM on 02/28/2011

And then there are the Ashiks of Central Asia.

[New Yorker]

07:58 AM on 02/28/2011

. . . Never Reluctantly !

[New Yorker]

07:56 AM on 02/28/2011

When you connect the Dots of 'witnessing' and story telling, you are experiencing the living God. God is not dead, as the atheists keep telling themselves, but they have ceased listening, and they drown Him out in their incessant blather about whatever they are peddling that day, science, the inquisition, the pedophile priests etc. God has not abandoned any of His children, even those so filled up with themselves they allow no room for God. The experiences of life create wedges where God slips in, often unnoticed at first, and then the crack begins to widen. The death of a loved one, the stress of a tough job, the exhaustion of a young parent caring for a difficult infant, and every other imaginable consequence of modern life is a potentail to find God when he helps us through the difficulty, or as happened to me uses it as a transformative action to something better that we usually can't yet see ahead of us.
Once we begin to feel the love of God, we respond. God is in our original programming. It dates back to Adam & Eve, we got saddled with their sin to be sure, but we also got their terrible disappaintment at losing that close relationship that allowed them to strole through the garden with God, and have a conversation. We yearn for God in our very being, it only needs to feel the spark of God to reignite. It is why saints suffer eagerly for God, never

[ninetailedfox]

06:29 PM on 02/28/2011

I happen to be a non christian but not an atheist. I do feel like all these christian articles are over the top. I could listen to the news for evidence of a possible theocracy, but it seems like Huff Po is halfway there.

[somsoc]

08:32 PM on 02/28/2011

An atheist would never say any god or goddess is dead because that would be an acknowledgment of the ridiculous childish concept of such a being to begin with, get real.

[Thee Purpleroot]

11:30 AM on 02/28/2011

It dates back to Adam & Eve, WTF???
Why would anybody lisiten to the homewrecker EVE???
What about Adams "first" wife Lilith???
If you want to tell a story make sure it is the whole story...

[Haunted Leg]

03:58 PM on 02/28/2011

Christians reserve to right to pick and choose which of their of rules to follow. They also reserve the right to forget their own nearly infinite crimes against huumanity. Those are just the rules.

[ninetailedfox]

07:49 AM on 02/28/2011

You think story telling lowers blood pressure? I say it depends on the story. I was raised into christianity, Ive watched people fight over who has the right interpretation of Jesus, Ive seen families broken apart because of christianity. Ive met my blood relatives, my mother and aunt wouldnt even speak to each other because each believed they had the right interpretation of christianity. They then told me I was a theif, a liar and I needed Jesus, and at the time, I was a devout christian, I decided christianity wasnt right for me, and I met my husband almost a year after I deconverted. To top it off, I almost got beaten to death by street preachers. Hows that for lowering the blood pressure hmm?

[shadowgirl52]

10:34 AM on 02/28/2011

Amen ninetailedfox. When my brother died my bible thumping nephew would not tell me where the funeral was because I am not a christian. These beliefs set up a superiority in some that is not very loving nor is it even human. These are empty and weak. They always seem to need something outside of themselves to be ok. Sad!

[stuoverit]

09:55 PM on 02/28/2011

Eh, I don't think your brother minded that much. Funerals are for the living, though it is sad and petty of your nephew.

[Morcat]

12:19 PM on 02/28/2011

Sad, maybe they should have told more stories.

[ninetailedfox]

07:46 AM on 02/28/2011

When you realize christianity may not be true, please tell me how that lowers the blood pressure:)