The Power of Storytelling

I was fortunate today to encounter a few folks involved with a great project: Operation Homecoming

What struck me was the power of these stories, told by soldiers and their loved ones, to transform and perhaps even heal some very large wounds. Too often, especially in these times, our stories are mass-generated news bytes that serve only to tell us only one perspective, if any true perspective at all. These stories are by no means illustrative of every one's version of war, but in fact that is where there power lies, in these stories that depict human emotions, fears and triumphs, as singularly important in many different ways.

I kept thinking back to my own experience with war stories, in my own family. My Aunt Maureen spent time in Viet Nam as a Navy Nurse - and we never spoke of her experiences in my family. Keith Walker wrote a book about her and others, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 Women who Served in Viet Nam. I never really knew of her personal accounts until I read this book, many years later when I was in college. Looking back on her chapters today when I returned home from Newburyport, I wondered what the sharing of her experiences was like.

For me, the most meaningful seminars, retreats, encounters, have always involved some sort of personal storytelling. It is only on this level that I feel I can connect with the "little stories" that make up the bigger ones. Parker Palmer references this phenomenon in his wonderful essay Evoking The Spirit in Public Education....

I can illustrate this point with a story from my own education. I was taught the history of the Holocaust at some of the best public schools (and private colleges) in the country. But because I was taught the big story with no attention to the little story, I grew into adulthood feeling, on some level, that all of those horrors had happened on some other planet to some other species. My teachers—who taught only the objective facts without attention to the subjective self—distanced me from the murderous realities of the Third Reich, leaving me more ignorant, more ethically impaired, more spiritually disconnected than authentic education should.

I desperately hope that future projects like Operation Homecoming will serve to create connections, and reconnect us with the personal stories of our fellow humans in their darkest moments. Only then can we begin to make decisions about war that truly consider all of us in such powerful ways.