One of the unique aspects of being human is the role stories
play in our lives and have played as far back as the human story is told.
Stories inspire, enlighten, connect, delight, warn, admonish and surprise. We
need them with an urgency that resembles hunger. Not merely entertainment,
stories can save lives or turn us into killers.
In 1955, when I was thirteen, I went to the Museum of Modern
Art in New York to see a photo exhibition that has haunted me ever since. Its
theme was “The Family of Man.” The curator, Edward Steichen, brought together a
vast sequence of photos that not only asserted but demonstrated that, for all
the diversity of culture, skin color, local economy and development, varieties
of religion and differences of clothing, we are indeed one human family bound
together in love, pain, labor, awe, anger, gratitude and death. I bought the
exhibition book and have hung onto it through many moves, returning to it ever
since as if it were a Bible without words. Taken as a whole, the collection has
as its golden thread the radical us-ness of being. It helped me understand that
beneath our separateness is our unity. It’s about the “our” in the Our Father.
Among the images that I especially love is one of an old
African storyteller in a fire-illuminated hut. We see him at the top of a
circle of young people, boy and girls who are listening to the old man with
absolute attention and wonder. The storyteller’s eyes are wide open, his mouth
a perfect O, his eyebrows arched high into his forehead, his hands raised above
his head, all ten fingers outstretched. If he were telling the story of Jesus’s
life, this might be the moment when the disciples discover the empty tomb.
