"Tell You a Story"

What if - your imaginary friend were real? And people as different as Moonies and Unitarians knew the same hymns and sang them together while they traveled in a foreign land? What if - we could all go to the peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb? And we told each other these stories because we realized that we needed them to stay alive?

Stories cover the gap between fantasy and reality. They awaken our imaginations to new possibilities. They give us hope when our vision fails us. They ask us “what if?” when we are stuck in what is.

From the parables of Jesus to the creation myths of every culture, stories help people fashion spiritual traditions. Stories transmit intuitive truths, in colorful and even fantastic form. They build a narrative bridge between the known and the unknown. They hover between what is and “what if,” making use of paradox and ambiguity to show us something we cannot know any other way.

Stories remind us of who we really are, and what the world can really be. They embody ideals. They capture mystery. They show us the surreal quality of everyday life. And they provide a subversive challenge to our assumptions about what is real.

In the story I read earlier in the service, Ruthie’s parents keep telling her that Jessica, her imaginary friend, is not real. Their pronouncements are printed in great big bold letters on the page, conveying the full weight of parental authority. But the story proves the parents wrong, as Ruthie meets her first real friend, whose name is Jessica, their first day of school. The child navigates the path from imaginary to real without missing a step. And so the story demonstrates how the mystery and wisdom of childhood are tamper-proof. I love children’s stories because they are a simple but powerful means of communication. We remember them and what they teach us. Long after you - and I - have forgotten what I said in a sermon, we remember the really good story that went with it.

I also love children’s stories because I enjoy how children react to them. Children have a wonderful sense of the absurd, and so do many good children’s stories. Perhaps you remember "A Tale of Three Ralphs." It’s about parents who name all their children Ralph in an effort to overcome difference and treat all their children exactly alike. Naturally this strategy leads them straight into trouble. Of all the stories I’ve read over many years, children seem to like that one best, despite - or perhaps because of - its sophisticated message.

Children love humor. They also seem to have an appetite for grim, dark fables, more than I do, and stories in which justice is meted out without mercy. And they show no mercy for sappy outcomes or plot contrivances that underestimate their intelligence. I’ve seen that too.

I was on one of my regular runs to the children’s book store recently, when I realized how important these stories have become for me. I enjoy the time with the children and that’s one good reason why I value the stories as I do. But I also like the stories just for themselves. They reach me on a level I do not readily access other ways. And perhaps because they do, they help me write my sermon and construct our worship service. They have become, as Catherine Farmer, our Director of Religious Education, suggested to me recently, our “story for all ages.” Which is what we now call it.

Stories show us how many ways we can speak the truth. They use unpretentious language and colorful images, making them accessible to children and adults. They don’t require scholarly footnotes or scientific research to document their claims. And because they are stories, they don’t need to tell us everything. They are not comprehensive explanations, just stories.

The children’s literature we use in our Sunday service can be either secular or religious, and any source is fair game. I have noticed, over the years, how these stories, whatever their origin, are the only mythical element our religious sensibility can tolerate. There is a reason for this.

Our tradition, especially the Unitarian branch of it, first articulated itself in the early nineteenth century with its emphasis on the role of reason in religious understanding. Reason overcame ignorance and superstition; reason gave rise to scientific discovery and social progress. Reason was the test of truth, and the source of wisdom. William Ellery Channing, a prominent Unitarian preacher of the time, gave voice to this point of view and applied it to reading the Bible. He declared, “Need I descend to particulars to prove that the Scriptures demand the exercise of Reason? . . . Recollect the declarations of Christ, that he came not to send peace but a sword; that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood we have no life in us; that we must hate father and mother, and pluck out the right eye; and a vast number of passages equally bold and unlimited.” He made an important point, which he enlarged by adding that Unitarians “feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon [the Bible] perpetually.”

Never mind that these are stories, that Jesus spoke in parables, and that many reasonable Christians and Jews have successfully used scripture the way we use "A Tale of Three Ralphs." Our “bounden duty” has haunted us ever since, as generations of Unitarian Universalists have exercised our reason perpetually, critically, and all too often, humorlessly, without the help of stories. We have assumed that intellectual stimulation comes from following a closely reasoned argument or a long string of ideas or statistics, but not from the imaginative leap between reality and fantasy.

If ours is a religion of reason, we might have argued, then fantasy has no place in it anyway. But the problem is not with fantasy. The problem is how to use stories and to understand in what sense they are true.

William Ellery Channing had good reason to be concerned about the uncritical reading of scripture, just as we do today. We all know the kind of damage people do when they interpret stories from the Bible or other sacred texts as if they were true in a literal sense. This is the problem and danger of fundamentalism.

But today we also know that stories of all kinds play an important role in transmitting values, teaching lessons, and showing us how to live. We appreciate stories because of what they can give us. As Barry Lopez writes, “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them.”

Our relationship to our stories does not end with our consumption of them. We ought to care for them, as Barry Lopez writes, “and learn to give them away where they are needed.” We might add, and find out what they mean to us. Understand that they have power we need.

Barry Lopez went so far as to say, “Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” The story I read earlier - a true story, from Meg Barnhouse - is the kind of story we need if we want to stay alive today. She writes about traveling to the Taj Mahal on a bus filled with interfaith pilgrims. This unlikely group of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Moonies spent the long bus ride comparing their beliefs, telling about their loved ones, and singing.

What an amazing image she makes, of the Southern Baptists singing their “blood hymns,” as she calls them, on the bus. “We had a fine time,” she writes, “and we got applause from the Sikhs who were sitting behind us with their long beards, white turbans, and curved daggers on their belts.” The Sikhs reciprocated with their songs, and soon the bus echoed with songs and chants from every faith tradition it contained.

“These days,” she concludes, “when I hear about the peaceable kingdom where the lion will lie down with the lamb, when I read about the clamor of nations struggling toward peace, I think about the day . . . when Christ and Shiva clapped for each other and sang in harmony on a dusty road in a turquoise bus hung with marigolds.” It’s a story about saving the world, nothing less. And we need nothing more than we need that.

What if - the Southern Baptists and the Muslims could get on that bus right now? What if - we can call into being that imaginary place where people are at peace with their differences? What if - we listened to the stories that tell us this can happen because it did happen, once, to one Meg Barnhouse as she rode a turquoise bus on a dusty road from New Delhi to the Taj Mahal? And as we listened, we just knew that the story told us a truth we had known all along, and though it isn’t exactly what isright now, it will be, if we believe in it, and take good care of it, and remember that sometimes what we imagine does indeed become real.