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2008-03-04 issue:

A family is a story

Real Families column

by Gerald Shenk

Print Article

Democratic and Republican primaries stirred up a sensation in Virginia last month. I had fun watching the animated speeches of the candidates. They spoke with passion about changes they will bring if elected. Most poignant for me was when Barack Obama talked about hope. In his own words, he clarified that “hope” isn’t an ethereal feeling but what real people do to change things, even at great personal cost. And he illustrated this from his own family story, among others.



All of us have families, of one sort or another; we are profoundly formed by our families. How often, I wonder, do we reflect on which stories we tell and why?

We do tell stories. We use them to remind each other of awkward moments, of problems faced and solved, of tests that came unbidden and brought out the best in us.

There was that great snowstorm of 1958, when my dad was lost and found. There was Hurricane Hattie in Belize in 1961, when my dad hit his stride organizing relief and reconstruction. And there were those heifers my grandpa flew over the Andes to help Mennonite farmers in Paraguay after World War II.

“Good woman anyhow.” That’s what a tramp called my grandma one day during the Great Depression. He had come close to the house, inspecting the garden in hopes of a meal. He was wishing to find onions, but my grandma said, Sorry, she didn’t have onions. She did provide him a meal, as was her custom. And though disappointed about the onions, he declared her a “good woman anyhow.” It became part of family lore. The quiet courtesy of her characteristic humble service stays with us.

I realized after some summer reunions that each family system I participated in was processing stories in a form of risk management. How do we handle illness? What do we tell ourselves about human frailty? Where do the joys lie? How do we respond to setbacks, insecurities and defeats? Is our outlook for the future basically hopeful or gloomy?

We use stories to rehearse our working values, to capture moments when extraordinary meaning shines through the routine realities of our lives.

We may be the family that experienced great loss, but we celebrate the toughness that comes with survival.

We may be the family that often runs short on time or money, but we celebrate the track record of generosity and care for others.

We may be the family where disease struck suddenly, out of the blue, and we grieve it together and continue to struggle with how to make sense of suffering in the providence of God.

In each case, you have to know this story to understand how this family works. And you have to keep reciting the story to keep it working.

Storytelling creates a world of resilience. Knowing our stories, we can face the unknown. Reciting our stories, we sustain the world and populate it with wisdom from those who no longer reside among us. Recounting perils of the past, we summon up new resolve to handle the challenges of the present. We also sketch some shape for the future.

Mary Douglas, an anthropologist I studied with at Northwestern University, spoke of groups and cultures as organized around concepts of risk and danger. When you select your danger, you are choosing the shape of your culture’s response. Different patterns unfold from stories of fear rather than stories of hope and courage.

Our political order, our financial realm and even our entertainment world are all defined by stories. Corporations, political parties and marketing schemes push competing stories onto our field of vision. As people of God, we must have stronger stories of our own.

God stories draw their strength from the power of love, forgiveness, suffering accepted and endured with honor, and joy in worthy causes. If we tune to ancient wisdom about families named from God, we will cherish our identities and the story markers that remind us who we are while welcoming others into the Great Story as well. We will honor their stories, too, since as children of God we all bear the imprint of an original family, whose creator is God.

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (Deuteronomy 26:5). We recite this as part of our offering in worship, acknowledging that God brought us to this place, and the life we have here is a gift from God. We rehearse this story to place our present in its proper framework. Gratitude is sketched into the narrative, modeled and trained as response that shapes character. And hope, as always among God’s people, is born and born again in the real stories of our families.

Gerald Shenk teaches at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Va. His forthcoming book, Hope Indeed! Remarkable Stories of Peacemakers, is set to appear in June from Good Books.

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