Rejecting the Single Story

Have you ever been judged by someone who didn’t know you, someone who knew a single story about you? For me it is almost always about being a pastor. You’re a pastor? I didn’t know women could be pastors? You don’t look like a pastor. That was a good sermon for a woman.

Was the single story about you because… you are a lawyer, you are gay, you don’t have kids, you never married, you’re divorced, you are retired? This is where comedians get their best jokes, right? From single stories about others.

Have you ever misjudged someone else because you knew only one story about them? For example, it’s easy to go on a mission trip to Appalachia or Pine Ridge, or even downtown Racine, and assume because we are “helping” them that they are uneducated, unintelligent, and backwards. The blessing comes when we reject the single story and listen to their stories, discover who they really are as people, what their challenges and successes have been, what they are proud of and what they believe.

When Jesus returns to his hometown as a prophet with followers and wisdom and abilities, people are skeptical, and they find he is “too much for them” (The Inclusive Bible). Other translations say, “they took offense at him.” Why? Because they only knew one story about him and weren’t ready to embrace another story. The Jesus they remembered was the boy, one of Mary’s children. Maybe they remember the trouble he got into with his brothers, or how he helped his father work, or how his bar mitzvah went, or when he got left behind at the temple when they traveled there for Passover. That was their last frame of reference for him, and this new confident, authoritative, charismatic preacher was a persona they were unfamiliar with and skeptical of. Who can really blame them?

Yet, had they rejected the single story and opened their minds and hearts to see and hear this grownup Jesus, there was much they could’ve have learned and received from him.

As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi, an author from Nigeria said in her TED Talk, “The Dangers of a Single Story,” “Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity… When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place [or person], we regain a kind of paradise.”

What kind of paradise to we regain? A haven of understanding, respect and compassion for one another.

In her talk, Chimamanda tells about leaving Nigeria at age 19 to attend university in the United States. Her American roommate was shocked by her. She asked where Chimamanda had learned to speak English so well and was confused when she told her that English is the official language of Nigeria. The roommate then asked if she could listen to some of her “tribal music” and was very disappointed when she produced her tape of Marian Carey. The roommate also assumed that she didn’t know how to use a stove. Chimamanda said she realized that her roommate’s default position of her as an African “was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity.” Her roommate, she noted, “had a single story of Africa, a single story of catastrophe. In this story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way… no possibility of a connection as human equals.”

It is our responsibility to learn to identify when we are speaking or acting out of a single story, and then we must learn to broaden our understandings, to seek multiple stories, angles, perspectives. It can be to our detriment and the detriment of the world if we don’t.

Buddha once said, “Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it."

Consider the controversy about the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics on July 26. They kicked off the start of the Summer Games with athletes gliding down the River Seine and performers reenacting historic moments.

In one scene, drag queens and dancers lined a long table in an image that was to reflect a scene of the Greek Gods. Thomas Jolly, artistic director of the enactment described the scene, "There is (Dionysus), who is at this table. He is there because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology, the god of wine, who is one of the jewels of France. And the father of Sequana, the goddess who is related to the river, the Seine. The idea was to have a Pagan festival linked to the Gods of Olympus.”

“We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that,” he said. “In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

But people around the world got up in arms because they thought it was a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. It’s a classic example of people only knowing one story and not even pausing to consider that there might be a different story for a different culture. There might be another picture of a different dinner table. Maybe the man in blue was, wow, actually representing someone else! Maybe the woman with the crown was a goddess, not a slam on Jesus by portraying him as a woman, or maybe even a man in drag, which might be considered worse.

And, while the truth of the scene was revealed, many people refused to believe it, and chose to cling to their single story, their wrong assumption.

Before we jump to conclusions, before we make assumptions, we need to ask ourselves if they are based on a single story and we must have the intelligence and confidence to do the research and possibly be wonderfully wrong.

There’s another category of single stories we need to reject… the single stories about ourselves. Think about it… is there a childhood story you tell yourself that you can’t shake? Maybe something your parent said, or another adult you looked up to. Maybe it was something a friend said that they didn’t even intend hurtfully, but you’ve carried it ever since. Maybe there were bullies that teased and harassed you about something? Maybe a team you didn’t get on or a game you didn’t win? Maybe a mistake you made that haunts you?

Does being called four-eyes and being an awkward, kind of plain kid become the ugly duckling story I tell myself? Does not making the high school varsity soccer team become the loser story I tell myself? Does my mom dying when I was 17 become my abandonment story?

What we tell ourselves about ourselves matters. If we continue to nourish single stories about ourselves then we will get triggered when we feel stupid, when we feel rejected, when we are teased, when we screw up, or when something bad happens.

I could get triggered by someone walking out in the middle of a sermon, or by not getting a part I auditioned for at the theater guild, or when I’ve stuck my foot in my mouth, or when I forget a meeting, or when I screw up a lead part playing keyboard, or when my kids don’t respond to my texts, or Julie greets the dog more affectionately than she does me, or… I can come up with all kinds of stories!

But none of us is a single story and to relegate ourselves to it, especially the negative ones, is exceedingly harmful to ourselves and to our relationships.

The key to rejecting all single stories is to get curious… get curious about our feelings, get curious about other people, get curious other religions, other places. Perhaps our curiosity will lead us to paradise.

Love & Light!

Kaye