A new story

‘Until the lioness tells their side of the story the tale will always glorify the hunter’, is an old African proverb and it is a wonderful reminder for me to listen to the truth in someone else’s story. Another way of thinking of this, my life experience cannot dictate how another person responds to the circumstances of their life. 

Even though I can relate to addiction, having faced my own binge drinking habit, I don’ have the capacity of life experience to know what it is like to be addicted to more harmful drugs such as heroin or cocaine. I cannot know what it is like to face the double trauma of mental illness and addiction even if, through life experience, I may understand addictive behavior. 

I can bring only my life experience to bear on my own reactions and decision making. My experience is no one else’s even if it “intersects” along a common line based on location and environmental influences. 

This behavior of making ones experience the norm becomes destructive to the collective when groups then gather and create a ‘norm’ by which all of life is calculated. If the hunter creates not only the story, but creates a normative story, based on their life experience, by which all of life revolves, then anything, anyone, or any group that operates outside of that ‘norm’ is deemed to be the wrong way and even less than. 

Jesus is telling a new story.

What happens when the story or narrative we have been told begins to be challenged by the truth in someone else’s story? When this happens do we lose our ability to hear? Do we move from listening to ignoring? Even worse do we work at shutting down the alternative narrative because it goes against our perceived ‘normal’? 

Let those with ears hear the new story.

This concept of listening for the truth in someone else’s story, listening for the lioness to speak, may help us to live a more compassionate life based on empathy for others. This is the first step towards creating and sustaining the Beloved Community that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of.

When we release our grip on the concept that our life experience is the barometer by which all things are calculated, then the barriers we build to protect our ‘way’ of life crumble. By allowing these destructive barriers to crumble, in a real sense, we are opening our hearts to the realities of those who live a different life experience. 

Jesus was telling a new narrative of God by which the Divine was not located in the empire or the golden castles or golden temples of his day. God was located within all of creation but especially, by way of the new heaven and new earth, within those marginalized or the put asides and put outs of the day. Jesus was telling a new story and giving voice to the Love of God instead of the domination of God based on the domination of the Jewish and Roman authorities. 

Jesus is telling a new story. 

With our listening, spiritual ear we can hear this new narrative of God among us, for us, and with/within us. Jesus is teaching us that the realm of God is in every heart and soul. The divine spark that created everything that is, is also part of who we are. No system of domination can contain that spark.

This new way of seeing God’s presence within all of creation unbeholden to anyone or any system, is a new story told from the point of view of the dominated and the oppressed. In other word’s Jesus is telling the story of the lioness and we must decide who we are going to listen to. 

This new way of seeing and telling the story of God challenges our ears so much so that we may not want to hear the story that Jesus tells. Listening to this new story from Jesus requires that we put aside our own proclivity towards owning the narrative of life based on our own particular experience. 

If the first step towards taking an active part in the building of the beloved community is empathy, then we must listen to the new story that Jesus tells.