After an exchange of greeting with the Uber driver I was ready to do a deep dive catch-up on my emails. He had other ideas.
The gregarious wheelman quickly moved into a regurgitation of the day’s local headlines. This was followed by an unwavering statement of commitment to the particular political narrative of his source for the news.
Without hesitation I pivoted the conservation as I inquired about the miniature baseball on his keychain. What followed was a great chat about the neighborhood daily pick-up games with friends, his multi-generational inherited love of the Yankees, and his dream of going to a World Series. It was a passionate personal narrative of his love of the game.
Shortly after the driver dropped me off I found myself in a small group of colleagues. Not long into the friendly exchange the person next to me began to share with me a highly assumptive narrative about our keynote speaker.
I had a long history with the speaker and was caught off guard by how they were describing the person. “How do you know the speaker?” I asked. “Not personally, but it’s pretty obvious…” they replied. Without hesitation I suggested, “You might want to seek the speaker out and ask them to share their narrative with you.”
Theologian Richard Rohr suggests that there are three important stories: My story, Our Story and The Story. My story is my personal narrative based both on my experiences and how I understand them. No one else has authorship over my story. Our story is the collective narrative of a family, community, culture based on the collective experience. There are often varying degrees of interpretation of Our story (just listen to a family reminisce about a family vacation!). Finally, there is The story which is the larger narrative of collectively who we are as humanity…the people of God.
At the heart of respecting the dignity of every human being is to let someone tell their My story; to listen and learn about their Our story and to embrace that all are interwoven in The story.
“My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak…” – James 1:19