I begin with Mary Oliver’s poem, stanza 6 from The Leaf and the Cloud.

I will mention them now,

I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love

nor lack of sorrow.

But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them—one, two, three, four—the kiss of courtesy,

of sweet thanks,

of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.

May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

I will not give them the responsibility for my life.


In her poem Oliver notes four people who cared inconsistently for her. Through their action or inaction Oliver was hurt. But she is not wedded to them; she declares that she will not carry “that iron thing” they carried, their bent, painful ways. She will bear the responsibility for her life. Oliver is ready to move on, to walk in her own power. How will she do that?

In the The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth Gerald May says that we can come to the place where “we know who we are, what has been happening in the darkness and are awake to love” (182). In this state we experience growing freedom and energy liberated from attachments that restrained it (183). May goes on to say that we no longer pray to God, but find that we are keeping God company in what God is experiencing with us.

This is our new dawn and the brightness of this day may appear to us as a bright cloud. May tells us that “The reason of the obscurity” . . . .“is to keep us safe so we don’t stumble because we think we know where we’re going” (194-95). Have you ever had such an experience? I recall talking with Jesus about my future. I sensed Jesus standing at my back with his right hand on my left shoulder, showing me where to look. It was as if I were in a cloud. Sometimes I try to make out what is there.

Trusting in the power of the Passion of Christ, we are no longer trapped in old ways. We are free. But free for what? How does a former prisoner adapt to freedom? What does a responsible, grateful, joyful life look like?

In the 23rd Psalm we hear David announce that the Lord prepares a table for him in the presence of his enemies. Do we want this? What will it require of us to eat at that table knowing that those who have hurt us are present? Can I become part of a new compatible relationship with the one who wounded me? Gerald May encourages me when he says that true compassion is the essence of creation: if we remain free from our ego attachments, compassion will arise directly and spontaneously within every situation. (184) “Here actions and feelings flow from a bottomless source within us (185).

I believe that we are made for the story we are in and that there is more good than bad in everyone’s story. But we are not to spend too much time analyzing if I really have had more good than bad. Perhaps you have heard that “God writes straight with crooked lines.” So let us just know that as we attend to our story with our best effort and faith, God is alive, well and acting on our behalf.

We are to live in the moment, right? People tell us not to live in the past, nor to project our cares into the future. Live in the moment, only in this moment can I experience grace, or have faith, or move those mountains. But in order to live well in this moment, I do need to be aware of my context in order to respond and act with efficacy.

Sometimes a word comes to me as I am writing and I am not quite sure what it mean. This happened just now with “efficacy.” So I looked it up. Efficacy refers to the power of capacity to produce the desired effect. So efficacy does not just mean the ability to respond, but to respond in a way that I desire! Acting in this self-aware way requires that we be persons of agency, persons who are capable of exerting power on our behalf.

In Isaiah, one of my favorites verses declares: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat . . .. Eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:1). In John 7:37-38, Jesus says “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” We are familiar with the petition “give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s Prayer. (Mt 6:11)

We recall Jesus saying saying “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). At the last supper, Jesus tells his disciples to “eat this bread and drink the cup” (1 Cor. 11:26). In scripture eating and drinking call us to the table where there is good food ready for us to enjoy in good company. So how does one come to the table? I believe that coming to the table of the Lord is a process of becoming conscious, of coming to know ourselves as we are known.

A few years ago through prayer, I had a sense that I was standing at a sideboard. Over time, I became aware that there was a table in this room and in fact, there was an empty place at the table for me. Since that time, I have been practicing coming to the table of the Lord. This has required me to accurately describe what is on my plate. Imagine the plate is a metaphor for the realities of my life experience found in my relationships. I could not actually “eat” what was given to me, until I named it. I noticed there were things that had been sitting on that plate for a long time, waiting to be named. Once named, it was as if the Risen Lord transformed the contents of my plate into something edible. The work I have done to name and accept the rough contours in my life has bonded me to the Risen Lord and to those in the body of Christ on the earth today.

At first it was very difficult work. Now, there are still times I cannot understand why something needs to be on my plate, but I have become more aware deep within that I am well fed. If our stories are found on our plates, what is on your plate?

During a recent workshop I attended, our facilitator asked the group if three or four of us would share a time of great darkness in our lives and explain how our experience of that dark night or impasse changed our understanding of God. A few of us did, and afterwards one man observed that by hearing the stories he believed that the group had a more profound experience of God. The telling of a few sad tales, did not disturb our faith, rather it connected us to one another more deeply.

One of the blocks I believe that often face us, as we even unconsciously begin to consider changing our patterns of relationship through forgiving is the sense that “it is too late for us.” But I challenge that one-dimensional thinking. What if bringing this part of broken creation to the cross is your earthly task? What if bringing your experience of pain is the primary action God desires of you?

Of what value can my broken heart be to God? I have sometimes likened my experiences with sin and its hurtful patterns in families as bits of a burst balloon. I have never met anyone who wanted that garbage. But now I know that God does not judge my damaged moments as garbage. These are the bits of life that God uses to create something beautiful. So I have been practicing giving and trusting God with my disappointments and in those acts, I am being regenerated from the ground up.

Each of our lives is telling a story. We are characters in one another’s stories. And hearing a story truthfully told brings clarity even as it grounds us.

Here is the shortest story I’ve heard: Grandma loves Ella. This story contains all of the necessary parts of a story: “a speaker, a listener, an action, a message and a heart on fire.” (9). In Tell Me a Story: The Life-shaping Power of Our Stories, Daniel Taylor tells us that “We live in stories the way fish live in water, breathing them in and out, buoyed up by them, taking from them our sustenance . . . We are born into stories . . . . stories make it possible for us to be human” (5-7).

Some suggest that the human brain attempts to process experience in narrative form. How else do we make sense of life? We integrate what might at first appear as separate events into a meaningful whole. There is width, depth, and height to our lives. When we make connections between things we discern the stuff of our story.

So what do we look for? According to Taylor “Anything that reveals or explores our humanity. What matters, among other things, is a human encounter with and response to pain, happiness, evil, boredom, love, hate, grace, violence, goodness, greed, God, laughter, spite, and on and on” (17). Human emotion leads us into stories.

Taylor also says “If you cannot convincingly articulate a plot for your life, you are living a broken story” (3). If I am living a broken story why would I want to tell it? We tell our stories because, broken stories can be healed. We tell our stories because we are never so whole as when we feel understood” and we tell our stories, broken as they are, to allow us to reshape and reinterpret our patterns of existence (Josselson 108).

Seven years ago, I began to comprehend what my story is. As I know it and tell it, I find that I more easily connect with others. With accuracy and increasing gentleness, I am able to be understood and to create new patterns for my life.

People have experiences across the spectrum of possibilities from good to neutral and all the way to bad. Learning to talk about neutral to good experiences can be challenging enough. But it can be difficult to find words for bad experiences, especially for children when their cognitive abilities to make sense of it have been overwhelmed. Taylor declares “Deprive children of their stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions and their words” (7). One of the responsibilities of adults is to assist children in telling their stories. Sometimes the child we assist is the one within.

It all sounds like a lot of work, especially if we have not kept up with our stories as they have been unfolding. So, again, why bother? When we are willing to linger with painful experiences, we can learn to stop them from occurring again; we can change the course of the future. Reflective conversation is required to gain wisdom from our pain. “Stories do not require happy endings, but they must hold out the possibility for things being different than they are.” (20). The suffering from irrational behavior can come to an end.