As I sit and compose this blog post for Liz Warren’s Sacred Storytelling class, I can’t help but wish for the divine revelation, the inspiration and guidance that seems to be a part of the sacred storytelling tradition. After all, it is All Saint’s Day. As a former Catholic, I know that’s when the saints swirled all around us to give us advice and more. But alas, I don’t believe in divine intuition. Maybe gut instinct, but that’s evolutionary biology.
There is the divine joy that comes from sitting in a storytelling circle like ours and being enthralled by classmates who are endlessly creative and mesmerizing storytellers. And not only that, there are reading assignments that provide me with endless opportunities to explore what the sacred means to others.
With topics ranging from myths that define cultures and communities, to personal narratives of the sacred and/or divine, these reading assignments have been nothing short of fascinating: Structure, Metaphor, and Iconicity in Koyukon Shamanistic Stories; By the Sweetness of the Tongue: Duty, Destiny, and Devotion in the Oral Life Narratives of Female Sādhus in Rajast ; Dumezil's Three Functions and Indo-European Cosmic Structure and Stories of Migration: The Anishinaabeg and Irish Immigrants in the Great Lakes Region. The broad range of themes introduced us to the concept of sacred in all its guises and iterations. But I remain detached, an onlooker, curious about what is thought of as sacred. But not often moved by it. And yet.
There are those times of grace that are simply unaccounted for. The moment you lock eyes with your newborn infant. The time you knew someone was going to show up, and they did, but it was a mystery how. The times you get out of the way of yourself and allowed gratitude to take over. The way the sun can look late on a spring day, and the smell of orange blossoms wafts through the air and you are lifted out of yourself. Are these part of the sacred that I read about in these marvelous essays, in the captivating stories my classmates tell? Humans are meaning making creatures. Stories of origin, of mystery, of faith, connect us to what is greater than ourselves. But what that is, I do not know.
And yet. There is grace. There is mystery. There is understanding. There is love. All sacred to me.
Leave a Reply