If You Don't Own Your Story...

If you don’t own your story, …

     Father Basil

We sat there talking long past each of the meals had ended, the last ones remaining in the dining room, long after everyone else had gone.  We could have sat there for many hours more.  Through three meals we listened, we shared, we learned and we were inspired.  We soaked in his wisdom.  We were lifted by his amazing generosity of spirit and his grace.

His generosity of spirit and grace.

When we find those gifts in others we know that we have found something priceless, something simply life-giving and life-affirming.

If you don’t own your story, …

He certainly owned his.  And he shared so much of it with us as we ate those meals together.  He is 80.  He’s lived a very full, diverse life – in the theater, as a cook, a teacher, a priest, a counselor, a moderator of 12-step addiction recovery programs.  He has served others with abundance – in prisons, those with AIDS, students, people who are dying, others in pain, countless people who live with loneliness and poverty of spirit.  He still does.  And even though his body and age prevent him from going some places, from doing certain things, his mind and heart enable him to keep giving himself in ways that astounded and astonished us.

We had no idea what to expect when we went there this week.  Two days to spend in a Benedictine abbey.  Just what would we do, how would we feel, what would it be like?  We didn’t know.  But still we felt moved to go.  We wanted to spend time apart – reflecting, planning, reading, listening, walking, being inspired.  Two days isn’t a lot of time.  But we didn’t want to take too much time away from our families.  We were simply looking for a short respite from the hard work we have been doing together.  A Benedictine abbey seemed to be a good place to do just that.

This abbey was absolutely the right place at the right time for us.

Father Basil was very interested in what we do together.

It is needed so much.  Bless you for what you are doing, what you are offering.  People need to tell their stories.  They need to own them.  Understand them. 

What he meant and what we talked about is this –

It is hard to grow when we don’t know what we need in this life.  It is hard to know where we need to go when we don’t know where we’ve come from.  It is hard to be healthy when we haven’t allowed whatever pain and brokenness is inside to be heard and released.

He understood it inherently.  In his more than half-century of caring, of listening, of shepherding others toward healing Father Basil “got” what we have made a covenant together to do.  He got the importance of providing a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere for others to share, to unburden themselves.  He got that our cultural tendency to shame, to condemn and to vilify is not an answer to our problems.  He got that we have to allow each other, give permission to each other, to express ourselves and all that we carry within us freely and without fear in order to find relief from whatever keeps us from being whole.  He got that people need to be met where they are and as who they are.  He got that we all have a story to tell a story that needs to be told for our own well-being.  He got that nothing in our lives, nothing about our story is ever wasted or irrelevant or unimportant.  He got that we are all inherently valuable and worthy of love and respect.  He got our work.  He got it because he’s been doing the same work, in his own unique and special way, throughout his abundant career.

Sharing those meals with him breathed new life back into our spirits.  Not that we were depleted.  Not at all.  But his understanding and his experiences only reaffirmed in us the inherent value in our mission.

If you don’t own your story, …

Those two days earlier this week only reinforced our resolve to keep on listening, to keep on being a safe place, to keep on offering compassion and grace, to keep on enabling healing and wholeness to take place.   To encourage the stories to be told, to be honored and to be owned.

If we don’t own our stories, well, then we can never be fully who we are meant to be – whole and healthy and strong.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash