The first time I visited Elizabeth was the first day she knew she had cancer. She was 13 years old and a new member of my confirmation class. Over the next four years—her last four years—I spent at least one afternoon a week in her hospital room or, when she was home, in the family room that served as her bedroom. The faith story she told me over the course of those four years was one of hope, realization and restoration. Hers was the sort of storytelling that Jason Santos hopes to encourage in his article “Creating Storytellers.”
My time with Elizabeth was not heroic in any way. In fact, it often felt like I was out of place. We rarely talked about God because she wouldn’t let us go there. But Santos affirms my ministry as he proposes that, “one of the greatest gifts I could give young people was the opportunity to tell their stories.” This was certainly true for my relationship with Elizabeth. But it is also true that, if I wanted to hear her faith story, I had to be patient. I had to wait until the night she died.
Does Santos prescribe patience in creating storytellers? I’m not sure. In his article he suggests:
Our faith stories are filled with holy moments—those places and times during our lives when it is as if God reaches down from the heavens, breaks through the atmosphere and makes a personal connection with us as individuals.
He seems less interested in listening to a faith narrative than he is in coaxing out the Cliff’s Notes, which leads to the question, What kind of storytellers do we hope to create?
The most popular stories of today are built around “moments.” In her smash hit, The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins preys on our emotions as she runs us through the dramatic world of Panem. The storyline is thin, but the feverish pace is addictive. What do we do to our young people if we insist that they tell their faith stories with this model in the background? What do we tell those who don’t feel like the Katniss Everdeen, Collins’ stunning hero, of the faith?
Great stories weren’t always written this way. Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, for instance, is a chore to plow through. Yet, when it comes to Dickens, a reader’s patience pays off. Pip, Dickens’ young hero, exposes us to a story filled with deep characters, odd language, charming twists of fate and unsettling tragedy. Come to think of it, Pip’s tale is quite like the story of a contemporary teenager.
The Dickensian approach to storytelling sets priority on depth of character over spiking plot line. If we take this approach in cultivating the faith stories of our youth, we will make time to appreciate their depth, allow space for new language and listen when their faith feels untidy.
If we cut corners, they will just tell us what we want to hear. Our young people want to please us. If we insist on our language, our timeline and our “moments,” they will develop a less than authentic story to meet our needs.
Santos’ primary thesis, that a role of the youth worker “is to provide opportunities for young people to see themselves as storytellers through their own faith stories” is best lived out as the youth worker invests not in the episodic but in the everyday. As Andrew Root suggests:
The incarnation is not about influence but accompaniment. It is not about getting us right but bearing what is wrong with us, so that we might find that we are only right in the embrace of a God who loves so much to be with us![1]
We engage our young people in faithful storytelling and, in turn, faithful living when we are willing to set aside our hopes for a holy moment and listen to stories that require our patience.
After four years of steady visitation, I was called to Elizabeth’s house on the night she died. They say that it’s normal to have a burst of energy just before you die, and this was true with Elizabeth.
Even with the oxygen mask covering her face, she was talking, and the first thing she said to me was, “I need to be right with God.”
“Lizzie,” I said. “Don’t carry that. You were always right with God.”
Her mother invited me to sit beside her.
“Nothing will separate you from the love of God,” I told her. “God loves you now and will love you always.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me and around the room and, in a sentence, gave her faith story. “God has given me hope and answers. I know I am going to go to heaven.”
Elizabeth then went around the room and said her goodbyes. When she was done, we held hands, prayed and offered the Lord’s Prayer. Then she went. She went with a peace I cannot hope to describe. That was a holy moment. Maybe the holiest I have ever experienced.
That’s the thing about holiness. It is sublime, for sure. Once you’ve experienced it, you’re not a hundred percent sure you really want to experience it again. Moving in and out of stories of holiness is life giving and dangerous at the same time. As we invite our young people into this foray, we will be wise to take it slowly.
Start where Santos starts. He says, “The first step in learning the power of becoming a storyteller is acknowledging that there is a story worth telling.” Can we accept that this first step might take longer than we are prepared to wait? For some, it will take a lifetime. Are we willing to wait that long?
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