MCM: Seeing life in a storied fashion

Examining traditional medicine in Zambia

Liz, you have worked with refugees at Montreal City Mission, with copper miners in Zambia, in the non profit sector in Boston and now you are teaching theology at Boston University. What’s the most important thing those diverse experiences have taught you about the role of story telling?

Story telling goes on constantly, individually and collectively. This is the way we make sense of life. One of the big things I have learned concerns how story telling passes a sense of coherence down through generations—helps us understand why things happen, what our roles and responsibilities are and so forth. When stories collide (as they typically do across cultural boundaries, for example) or when long-told stories disappear from memory, then we confront really big life questions. Answers to these questions are typically taken for granted but they form the bases of our ‘storied’ understanding. So when the foundations of our stories are shaken, it affects what we do and how we subsequently, though subconsciously, retell our tales.

Rev. Daniel Velez-Rivera (Latino Ministry in Salem Mass), Paula, Liz

You once wrote that in the West, the Enlightenment split the world into sacred and secular spheres and we have simply assumed ever since that’s the way things work. How can story telling create a more holistic understanding of what makes us tick?

Along with the sacred/secular split, something else the Enlightenment did for Westerners was train us to think in categories, or chunks, rather than in the more organic manner that story telling employs. Scientific methods that the Enlightenment inspired rely on breaking problems down into categories or chunks for analysis. There is nothing wrong with this. But when we approach everything this way, we miss details that cannot be quantified or measured. Trying to see life in storied fashion can help fill in some of the gaps.

In a recent talk on the future of mission work, you mentioned the importance of the narrative approach. What exactly is that approach and how can it be applied in an urban mission context?

The best brief description of the narrative approach that I have heard was given by my South African doctoral advisor. He said that everything we experience or do we place within a context that has a beginning, middle, and end. Extending that idea to urban mission sites such as MCM, perhaps whatever happens can only be authentic when the beginnings, middles, and endings of all the stories swirling about (those of refugees, staff members, government officials, and so on) are acknowledged and appreciated even if genuine understanding is lacking.

Dona Fish - symbol of fertility

In the age of reality TV and social media, we eem to know more and more facts about everyone – instantaneously! How does this new context impact the age old art of story telling?

Current patterns do have a tremendous impact on the art of storytelling. Social media and reality TV are communicating their own stories and also training people to think in qualitatively different ways. But, while technology may seem all pervasive to North Americans, it’s important to remember the global context. Facebook, for example, has about 800 million active users while there are now 7 billion people on the planet. What stories animate those other 6.2 billion people? How will our disparate tales and ways of thinking interact during the 21st century? What can we learn from each other?

You recently published: What Price for Privatization? Cultural Encounter with Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt. What are you working on now?

My present research project is something quite different. I’m editing a series of letters written between my grandparents who were involved in starting small Christian schools throughout the American midwest and south. The letters are historically valuable for the insights they contain about education as Christian mission and about life in the nineteen-teens and twenties. It’s a labor of love and a tribute to my forebears.