The Power of Stories to Change the World
Rev. Diane Rollert
Unitarian Church of Montreal, October 23, 2022
This sermon began with a reading of a version of the Indigenous creation story of Skywoman, from Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
A synopsis of the reading: “In the beginning there was the Skyworld.” Skywoman fell from the sky into the water and was saved by the animals. They dove to the bottom of the water to bring her mud. Many failed, until Muskrat gave his life to bring the earth she needed. She spread the earth onto the back of Turtle and this became Turtle Island.
“Like any good guest, Skywoman had not come empty-handed. The bundle was still clutched in her hand. When she toppled from the hole in the Skyworld she had reached out to grab onto the Tree of Life that grew there. In her grasp were branches—fruits and seeds of all kinds of plants. These she scattered onto the new ground and carefully tended each one until the world turned from brown to green. Sunlight streamed through the hole from the Skyworld, allowing the seeds to flourish. Wild grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere. And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island.”
Reflection
Think of the creation story you grew up with.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her.”
Think of that. The story of Adam and Eve. A story that, in its interpretation and application over centuries, did in fact change the world. Think of the beginning of the biblical creation story, the part where God tells Adam to name the plants and animals, a story that has often been interpreted as an invitation for humans to exercise dominion over nature. Think of the curse of banishment and scarcity Eve must face, for daring to seek knowledge.
We live in a world shaped by stories that say we have the right to extract all the resources the earth has to give, to rob Mother Earth of her abundance. Then we tell ourselves stories of scarcity that force us to stand in opposition to each other for whatever resources are left. These are the powerful stories that shape the world we inhabit.
History, they say, is told by the victor. A friend of mine — well, actually, my husband — is always saying that the politician who tells the most compelling story is the one who wins. Sadly, not all those stories are kind or inspire compassion. Instead, stories filled with fear and hatred have put many a politician into power. We’re witnessing this at a shocking rate in recent years, but it’s nothing new.
Our brains are wired to respond to stories. “Stories are wondrous. Stories are dangerous,” writes Indigenous writer Thomas King. But for whom? It all depends on where you’re standing. You or I may find the story of Skywoman to be wondrous. But it can also be a threat to the status quo, a threat to how we have constructed our world. We can laugh it off or we can take it as a call to wake up. If enough of us wake up, things might start to change.
A dangerous story can be wonderfully powerful. That’s why fascist governments imprison writers and artists whose works tell stories that move hearts and threaten regimes. Those regimes then support storytellers who provide a constant, blaring version of their chosen reality.
We are confronted daily by hateful stories that divide us. We are being conditioned to trust no one, to believe that some of us must be losers while a small few are allowed to be winners. We’re being told that we have nothing in common with those who are different from us except for our mistrust of each other. If we protest, we are told we are naive.
I am starting to explore the work of writer adrienne marie brown, whose work is focused on helping activist movements to heal and become sustainable. So often our stories are about the powerful individual who saves the day. This she says, is how activist movements often fail. When the leader is assassinated or burned out, everything crumbles. At the same time, myriad nonprofit groups, doing good and important work, get pitted against each other, believing they must fight for scarce resources rather than join forces. We are failing at relationships.
adrienne marie brown offers us a new story, something she calls emergent strategy. Like Robin Wall Kimmerer, she draws knowledge and hope from the natural world. We align ourselves with the image of the “king” of the forest. Lions and tigers may be powerful, but they are quickly becoming extinct. In contrast, she says, consider the many organisms that survive because of emergence, a complex way of co-existence that arises out of relatively simple actions to create something new and lasting.
Think of mushrooms, whose mycelium grows underground in thread-like formations to create the largest organism on earth. Think of ants or bees functioning as a collective, or starlings moving in synchronized patterns to form a murmuration, or dandelions and their resilience.
It all comes down to the small connections that build relationships. Our attempts at activism fail when we get too focused on output, and not enough on building trust. You have to move at the speed of trust, adrienne marie brown says.
A while ago, I took a workshop based on her concept of emergent strategy. Our facilitator wanted to see the 90 or so participants morph into a connected, emergent relationship by the end of a three-day program. We were to somehow figure out how to move together like starlings in a murmuration, or bees swarming in a hive.
We failed miserably — or maybe we swarmed together in misery, depending on how you look at it. We were on Zoom, and we were trying to do something in the span of a few hours when we
had no space to create relationships. Instead, we were building up a feeling of distrust. I walked away so frustrated. Only now am I realizing, “Ah ha! We weren’t moving at the speed of trust!”
I contrast this with an experience I recently had in this congregation. A group of us who participated in a program called Beloved Conversations have been meeting for nearly a year now. Our hope is to bring the Beloved Conversations approach to anti-racism work as a spiritual practice to our wider community by looking at different areas of our congregational life. Back in the beginning, when we started working together, we crafted a covenant with each other. It took a lot of time — even though we’re a pretty small group — and I wondered if the covenant was too unclear or too much all over the place.
Then we kind of forgot about it, until this past week. When we pulled that covenant out of storage, I found myself feeling incredibly moved. I won’t read it to you now. But here’s the thing: it took time to adjust, to build trust, to feel that we were mutually committed to this work, to realize we were starting to emphasize our relationships over “getting something done, anything done.” We are just beginning to move at the speed of trust.
We are living in a critical time and, yes, we need to move fast. But change will only be sustainable as a community if we really pay attention to the relationships, if we move only as fast as we can build trust with each other.
I believe that we really can write a new story together. We can see the abundance that is there for us in the natural world, we can move away from the individual story to the collective, to the emergent, but only if we commit to building trust, one day, one step at a time.
adrienne maree brown’s work suggests that if we work together building trust as a community of activists and lovers of the world, we can be change and effect change. In the end, she says, it’s all about love. Which is exactly the starting and ending point of the story.
“Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude.”