Human beings are storytellers. Part of the philosophical tradition that informs yoga, and is particularly a feature of Kripalu Yoga, the practice I study, is this question of tat and sat, trying to attend to what is true and real. What are the stories we tell? How true and real are they? What kinds of suffering arise when we act as though something is true and real but it is not? I could, for example, tell myself the story that I can practice yoga like I did in my twenties, a story which can lead to great unhappiness as I live with both more arthritis and neurological disease that I didn’t have in as great a degree as then. Or, I could tell myself the story that I can’t practice yoga at all because my sense of balance is erratic at best, and then have unhappiness in my body from muscles that could be used and are not and fascia that isn’t gliding and stretching as it evolved to do and grows stickier and stiffer. Both stories can create suffering. What seems most true and real at this moment is that I can practice yoga asana, pranayama (breath practices), ethics (yamas and niyamas), one-pointed concentration and meditation, and that these will look and feel differently than how I practiced decades ago, just as one day differs from another.
As I try to understand how stories shape my life, I find it helpful to ask what a story serves. Perhaps that story was once protective or encouraging. Perhaps that story was always harmful but I accepted it for what seemed good reasons at the time. Perhaps the story needs a little reshaping, reframing, and adapting to serve the now. A great deal of literary and religious scholarship examines how we reshape, reframe, and adapt stories to changes in our world. Floods resculpt the world from what it was to a new shape: the stories of flood narratives follow. The world dries and develops a new form, river ways and floodplains becoming deserts: the flood narratives change, becoming more metaphorical or allegorical.
This week, we reach the Book of Deuteronomy, which begins by retelling the story of the Israelites. Why is there this need to retell the story in a different way? Consider what the Babylonian exile does to the story of the Holy granting a homeland forever. For a people in exile, the story needs to change, to one of continued promise and to being remembered, and, also, to the idea that home is possible in some future generation. Scholars reading Deuteronomy observe that the story seems reframed and retold for folks surviving in exile and in other places authorizes Josiah’s religious reforms, dating the reform sections to about the 7th century BCE and the historical narrative section to the time of the Babylonian exile. In other words, baked into the Torah are multiple tellings, frames, and views of the same story, reflecting our need to adapt our stories depending on what we are facing. (Indeed, this is a feature of the Bible, and why I don’t teach or study the Bible as a single unified book but as a library of texts, some of which agree and some of which conflict, and that includes Christian Scriptures and well as the Hebrew Bible.) Part of how we define ourselves is through the stories we tell. For example, when one tells the story “make America great again” there is an appeal to some golden age that never was except, maybe, for a few wealthy white guys. When we tell the history of exclusion and slavery and lack of rights, and the long, often bloody fights to be more diverse and more inclusive, we are addressing another history with different moral centers. Ancient historiography doesn’t bother to tend to the social location of the authors or expected readers/listeners; that tends to be something we have to study and assess and poke away at for ourselves. So we want to read for the differences.
This week’s reading (Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22) begins with retelling the story of the passage away from Mount Horeb (or Sinai, or Pisgah) toward what will become the people’s lands that they seize from others already there. Interestingly, the Holy seems to kick the people off the mountain for staying overly long, like that sacred mountain was going to be their homeland and they weren’t going further to another promised land. Moses speaks of how leadership was assigned and leadership’s duties (omitting the whole story of his father-in-law’s involvement that we have heard before), and then the travels from one inhabited land (not wilderness) to another. There’s still the rebellion, the sulking, and the punishments of those who rebelled and sulked still are not to make it to the promised land. That’s when the people turn and march off into the wilderness. The wilderness is spoken of directly as a seasoning ground, a place of punishment, a distance from doing what the people so badly want, creating home. For a people in exile, that story gives meaning to current suffering. We don’t need to literally be exiled; many of us today feel alienated, frightened by, or in danger where we are living. Approaching this time as a seasoning ground, a place of growth and testing and change preparing for the future can give us needed direction, meaning and purpose. Later, when the people are really truly ready, they march through and conquer one land after another. Some of that readiness is as a military unit, ready to lead and follow. Some of that readiness may be in trusting the Holy. Deuteronomy has Moses summarize the story just before the people are to head off to battle with Joshua to finally claim their land. But the many, many other themes of becoming a free people are missing from this retelling. What can be justified from this remembering of the story of seeking home? What can encourage us if we’re feeling alienated, frightened by or in danger of where we live right now?
A people once without a homeland might fight to gain a homeland. What takes a much longer time to tell in other versions is condensed. What Numbers spends story after story telling us of how people mumble and rebel and yearn for the fleshpots of Egypt is swept up into a few more succinct chapters. If this was written for those in the Babylonian Exile, it is a reminder right from Moses’s lips: you are not forsaken or forgotten and you will be called again to a place you can know is your home; the covenant is not broken for this is how we once lived as we sought to find our place in the world. That’s a powerful promise and a powerful covenant in a time when most folks thought gods were supremely local and/or defeated by invading armies and their gods. It is still a motivating story if we feel displaced, dispossessed, in exile and still trying to live faithfully. On the sacred mountain, out in the wilderness, trekking through hostile lands, we are still in covenant with the Holy and still the Holy’s people. Unlike Leviticus and Numbers, Deuteronomy is less about the making of a free people than the ways of being a people in exile and a people embracing Josiah’s religious reforms.
After a week with more mass shootings driven by toxic stories, stories generating more suffering, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can add to trouble. After a week with many tending the wounded, planting and caring for the land, working for greater equity and kindness, offering one another help to their cancer treatment or to have food on the table, and giving generously to bring more hope and compassion to bear in community after community, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can increase care, play, compassion, hope, and love. But we do have to choose which stories serve the world we want to live in. Personally, I prefer the world with increasing care, play, compassion, hope, and love. That is a world directly answering those stories generating more suffering, more fear, more rage, and more hopelessness with alternatives that nurture life and well-being for all. Choosing that, day after day, decision by decision, can be difficult. But for me, easing suffering and finding more joy and hope for all is a good story.
So take some time this week and reflect on the stories you tell of your people, your communities, your homes, your belonging, your covenants, your faithful promises. How have those changed over time and in differing circumstances? How has the story’s fundamentals remained but the interpretation and the emphases changed? We human beings are storytellers and meaning makers. How do we shape and how are we shaped by the stories we tell and live? How easily do we reach to justify violence when we are afraid or angry? How easily do we reach for compassion when we are suffering? How might we feel caught in a story that doesn’t help us survive right now? How might other people’s stories be affecting us, adding to suffering, drawing us toward actions we might otherwise never consider?
