Storytelling as Religion
By: Rachel Avery Conley
Tags: Storytelling, Religion And Spirituality, Listening, Religion, Spirituality

Storytelling as Religion

Finding Divinity in Stories as an Adult

“Mom, what religion are we?” piped up the little voice from the backseat. I had just told him his Monday was free from third grade because of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah. “Are we Jewish? I thought church was on Sundays.”

“Ummm…” I took the moment to breathe and wondered — how do I age-appropriately communicate the intense spiritual journey I was on, which involved reading literature from every religion, but not finding one home in any? “Both Mommy and Daddy were born into a Christian religion. We still believe in a higher power, a God or gods, a universe, but for me at least, the details on which religion is the most true is a bit fuzzy. I think they have all beautiful stories we can learn from.”

“Like myths?” came the next inquisitive question. And I marveled at his ability to make connections so fast.

And then we were off, discussing the details of each religion. Through all of this, I reflected again at his ability to cut through what I was saying and bring it back to the story as myths. But, then again, it made sense. That is how we teach children, using parables to illustrate points, even complex math lessons in elementary school often have a narrative associated with them to help illuminate the why.

When do we lose that as adults? Or at least when do we stop calling them stories and start calling them other things? Is it because they are only for children that we lose the ability to also learn from them?

Story Medicine Circles

For me, as an adult woman, I found such healing the first time I stepped into a formal story medicine circle. These modern get-togethers have their roots in indigenous cultures who would gather to tell stories. Building on the special magic that these societies found would happen as they come together as a community to share stories and nothing more. Sometimes these would involve everyone and sometimes they would be broken out into traditional gender expressions. The modern ones I gravitated towards were usually open to womxn and people who identify as feminine.

I have duplicated this experience now many times, as a participant and as a host, and it’s one where the feeling of mending something I didn’t even know was broken never wavers. Hearing other’s diverse and deeply personal stories brings out a sense of belonging in me. A reminder that we are all here having a shared human experience, just that the details are different. The truth that sometimes the things that are the most personal are the most universal.

In these story healing circles, I heard accounts of being a daughter, a friend, a lover, a parent. A young woman facing terminal cancer in her 20’s. A woman with school-aged children recounting her childhood escape from a repressed country on a raft, accompanied by the image of the silent wails of her mother as her baby brother died in her mother’s arms, but they couldn’t make any noise. An elderly white woman who walked to the first class with the first enrolled black woman (and her police escort) at her southern college, and the slurs and hate they received on that walk. Some tales recent, and some as far back as half a century, but ones that could all resonate with now at some level.

The ones I attended with only womxn had a freedom to them. Freedom to speak and hope to be more understood. But it got me thinking about the parallels I had felt when attending Al-Anon meetings, and perhaps the stories were the power in AA and other group therapy programs as well, gendered or not. That, unlike traditional religion, we were finding story in each other. Instead of being told who God is, we were allowed to find a higher power in the parables of others. We could connect the divinity of ourselves to the divinity of another person by hearing their tale and relating it to ours in a way that we couldn’t do alone.

Listening as Alchemy

I found the listening was the most healing part of the story medicine circles. In that space, during that time, unless we were the one speaking, we were tasked to just listen. Nothing more, nothing less. If we chose to share, great, but no pressure. At the beginning of a gathering, everyone closed their eyes, and the ones who might possibly want to share raised theirs, then the organizers would divide the time we had with the number of possible speakers and set a time limit for each story based on that. The speaker's seat would be empty and we would sit in silence until each person felt called to stand up and share. There would be a one minute and a time ending warning for organizational purposes, but everything else was just done organically. People really stayed within time to respect all the ones that may come after. The only expectation was to listen, and not to comment.

All judgments, biases, thoughts were held inside, and because it was a group of people, the energy stayed high. That felt significant because unlike a one-on-one conversation (even with the best, trusted listener in the world), you didn’t have to interpret body language or other non-verbal cues. It felt safe to be heard. It didn’t matter how you were heard, just that you were. Any misunderstandings or interpretations were held by the listener, silently, for there was no response or even applause after. I found the magic to be in the silence.

The alchemy of the story happened in the moments after when the storyteller was heard and as the listeners reflected. It felt the same as the filled silence that happens after a moving piece of music — especially in live performances — end. When you can still almost hear the instruments echo in the deafening silence. Only, in these circles, the instrument is voice, the melodies words.

I imagine that that moment, that silence, feels different for everyone, but it is shared in that it is there. It exists in the non-existent.

And before the silence can lose the magic, the next person would have shifted into the chair and began their story. At the end, without comment, we would be prompted to get up and join hands and just be. The energy of the sharing and the listening weaving a thread of togetherness among us.

Finding Faith in Storytelling

Those circles felt like the most perfect metaphor for life, stringing together one seemingly unrelated story to the next. It is where I found the most religion, the most divinity. So when my child summed up my admittedly awkward explanation of my belief in the aggregate of religions to be THE religion by using the word “myth”, I breathed out a “Yes”. He had connected for me the sanctity of storytelling in a way that I felt but didn’t see until then.

And in that moment, he and I had our own story circle of the most sacred kind — the one between a parent and a child. I said a silent note of gratitude for all those womxn who shared in those earlier circles, all the humans who shared in the Al-Anon meetings I attended, and all the moments I had with my own loved ones listening to their fables, especially my group of parents and grandparents. Grateful that I could recognize the power of fairy tales — real or imagined — and find divinity in this story at this time.

Photo by Rene Bernal on Unsplash