Rather than asking “is that true or is it a story?” let us ask: How is what is true a story? How do stories lead us to truth?
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True Story
Rev. Joe Cleveland
January 12, 2025
Imagine that you are at a UU worship service. Imagine that during that service a minister preaches a sermon and as part of that sermon, they tell a story. Now imagine that the service has come to an end. People are gathering and milling about getting a coffee or something to drink. People are grabbing cookies and other munch-ables for themselves. It’s a moving, active crowd. In the middle of that crowd, someone goes over to the minister and tells them that they really appreciated the sermon they gave. Can you imagine that? Imagine that you are hearing one of the best sermons you have ever heard in your life! Wow! This is so amazing!! No wonder that person went over to the minister to complement them on the sermon. Then the person asks the minister a question. “I really liked that story that you told to illustrate your point. It was very vivid. But can I ask you, did that really happen or was it just a story?” The minister is thinking and their mouth opens, but before they can speak another person swings their arm down between the two and says, “Don’t answer that! It doesn’t matter if it happened or not. All that matters is whether or not the story is true.”
One thing that is basic to the practice of Unitarian Universalism is that we search for truth. Last week, I said the world is made of stories. In a world that is made of stories, how do we find what is true?
It was interesting this last week to hear so many stories about Jimmy Carter. But all of them seemed to agree that Carter was an admirably moral and honest person. I learned about the “Crisis of Confidence” speech he gave when I was barely a teenager and too young to take any note of it. But in that speech he said many things that still seem prophetic: He said that “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the new media, and other institutions.” He warned against us taking a selfish path forward. He said, “Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom,” the mistaken idea that freedom means, “the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others.” Going that way would result in the fragmentation of our society he prophesied.
I have a bunch of new stories about Carter, which means that the truth of who he was feels quite different to me than what used to feel like the truth about him.
And while the eulogizing of Carter was going on, last week was also a week for stories about the mob of insurgents emboldened and encouraged by the sitting President who then forced their way into the capitol four years ago, trying to stop the certification of the election, convinced by the lie that the election was “stolen.” And there, I’ve told a story about that event, and one that I will assert is a true story.
We humans have an amazing capacity for imagination. We can see patterns everywhere. It’s how we are able to look at clouds in the sky and say, I see a duck or a bear or a person with an umbrella. We don’t like it when we are not able to see the pattern. We’ll make things up to fill in and complete the pattern and believe they are true. When we see a pattern, when we tell a story, we believe that it is true.
In her beautifully written book Brown Girl Dreaming, the writer Jacqueline Woodson tells about her love for stories when she was growing up. And the line between truth and story was blurred for her.
Jacqueline Woodson. Brown Girl Dreaming.
believing
The stories start like this—
Jack and Jill when up a hill, my uncle sings.
I went up a hill yesterday, I say.
What hill?
In the park.
What park?
Halsey Park.
Who was with you?
Nobody.
But you’re not allowed to go to the park without anyone.
I just did.
Maybe you dreamed it, my uncle says.
No, I really went.
And my uncle likes the stories I’m making up.
… Along came a spider and sat down beside her.
I got bit by a spider, I say.
When?
The other day.
Where?
Right on my foot.
Show us.
It’s gone now.
But my mother accuses me of lying.
If you lie, she says, one day you’ll steal.
I won’t steal.
It’s hard to understand how one leads to the other,
how stories could ever
make us criminals.
It’s hard to understand
the way my brain works—so different
from everybody around me.
How each new story
I’m told becomes a thing
that happens,
in some other way
to me . . . !
Keep making up stories, my uncle says.
You’re lying, my mother says.
Maybe the truth is somewhere in between
all that I’m told
and memory.
Imagine you had a daughter or a sister or a young friend like Jacqueline. Would you have been encouraging her to keep making up stories? Or would you be warning her that she has to stop lying?
It’s not an easy question. I would love it if it were true that stories could not ever make someone into a criminal, but I’ve seen it happen. We saw it happen to a whole mob of people four years ago.
And yet, I don’t want to discourage storytelling, really, because I believe that a story that is fiction can tell the truth. One of my favorite writers, Ursula K. Le Guin, often felt like she had to defend the writing of fantasy and science fiction stories. In an essay called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” Le Guin wrote,
“I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of [the faculties of a mature human being] is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grown-ups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children … And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.”
And why did she believe this?
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.
The freedom that Le Guin is saying that we’re afraid of is not the mistaken idea about what freedom is that Jimmy Carter warned us about. The introduction to a new edition of a book of Le Guin’s essays says,
As much as we in the West have emphasized the sovereignty of the individual, the good life isn’t lived alone, but in flowing conversation—and Le Guin’s conception of liberty is, in particular, not solitary, static, or stable, but communitarian, dynamic, anarchic.
In Carter’s speech, he wants people to follow “the path of common purpose” and urges us to recognize that we have a “common destiny.” He wants us thinking in terms of more than just one person, more than just ourselves. He wants us thinking about everyone. To preach that we have a common destiny is a very Universalist story to preach: where we are going? we aren’t going there alone. We are, all of us, going there together. That’s how the Promised Land is reached. As Robin Wall Kimerrer puts it in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “All flourishing is mutual.”
I believe that is the truth. I believe that is a true story, “All of our flourishing is mutual.”
How do I know that’s true? I believe I’ve seen it. But then, if there’s a story that we cling to, we can see it everywhere and to the exclusion of everything else.
And there’s the hint that I take: Exclusion. The Buddhist teacher David Loy says that a “way to evaluate a story is by its consequences when we live according to it. The most important criterion for Buddhism is whether it promotes awakening.” The most important criterion for Unitarian Universalism? Try this: Does living your story make your world bigger or smaller? Does living your story make your sense of community and connection bigger or smaller?
Here’s what I believe: Stories that build walls or silence or attempt to erase other voices or any part of the earth, it is false to the truth of human thriving and false to the truth of the thriving of our world. If a story is making your world bigger, if it is making your community and your experience of connection bigger, then it is true.
So it is. May we tell the story.
Resources
- Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. United States, Penguin Young Readers Group, 2014.
- Le Guin, Ursula K.. The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy. United States, Scribner, 2024.
- Jimmy Carter. “Crisis of Confidence.” speech delivered July 15, 1979. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/
- Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. United States, Milkweed Editions, 2013.
- Loy, David R.. The World Is Made of Stories. Wisdom Publications, 2010.