To Tell A Story

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Bob Patrick

Characters. Action. Movement. Trouble. Surprise. Change.

I taught a “foreign language” for 32 years to teenagers. The language was the ancient “dead” language of Latin. For the latter half of my career, our Latin program became very popular and one of the largest Latin programs in the U.S. We did that by telling stories. 

In Latin, in the simplest ways, we introduced characters (stuffed animals donated to me by members of UUCG became these characters). These stuffed animals did things (action). These stuffed animals went places that we named in Latin (Starbucks, Kroger, the theater, to a football game). At some point, we used the word “eheu!” which is Latin for “oh no!”  And we learned some words for various kinds of trouble or problems. Always, always, always, the trouble was followed by a surprise “babae!” As a result of the character doing things, going places, experiencing a trouble which became a surprise, change happened for the characters.  That part of the story was timed to occur just as the end of class bell, with students complaining that they wanted more of the story–which would take place the next day.  And the next.  And the next. They always wanted to come back for more.

Students never had to memorize anything. They never had to study for a test. They just had to show up and listen to and engage in the story. In Latin. Our failure rate dropped to zero. Our retention rate soared. All of this, with a dead language. All of this because of story.

Because our brains are built around storytelling. We come alive in the midst of our own stories. We tell ourselves stories all of the time, to soothe ourselves, to make meaning of things, to explain a past event, to find our way forward, to stand firm in who we are, what we cherish and how we understand ourselves and our being in the world. 

We can enter into a story about ANYTHING, whenever we want to. Pick a topic, simple or complex, joyful or frightening. Who is involved? What have they been doing? Where are they going with all of this. What obstacles have they run into? What surprising outcomes did they experience? How did it change them?

And, we can make this very personal. I am a character in this story. This is what I am doing. This is where I think I’m going. Here are the troubles I’m encountering. The surprises I’ve encountered, so far, are these. Here is how they are changing me. 

Make some time today and notice your own stories. 

~Bob Patrick

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Storytelling

Posted on January 3, 2025 by admin

The act of telling stories gives us the chance to share and explore adventures with others. It can also be a way of solving problems, and without question can be a way of interacting with

other people. Storytelling is among my most cherished past times. Telling stories helps me feel connected to people and their love. With an eventful life of travels, athletic pursuits, professional accomplishments, and rich family histories I have a treasure trove of subjects to present.

We have a lovely dining room decorated by Carol, with track lighting and a table that has extensions to vary its size according to the number of guests. Dinner parties have always been a vehicle for making friends and a platform for my stories. We enjoyed such parties in the many places that we have lived: Hawaii, Montana, Zuni, Albuquerque, and Atlanta. Through the years of telling stories, I have discovered my sense of humor. I experience so much joy in making people laugh. It might not come as a surprise to know that in high school I was the class clown, and in my college fraternity, I was nicknamed Showman.

Over the years, I have come to see that music and art are compatible friends with storytelling. Each in their own right is a way of telling a story. These days, I feel like I have entered into a very creative time in my life. Over the last couple of years, I have produced over one hundred colored marker and acrylic paint pieces of art. I’ve had a burning desire to be a performing musician. The UU Sweet Muusic band is a dream come true, where I have an opportunity to play my percussion cajon, and perhaps down the road my harmonica and trumpet. Each of these acts of art and music making are additional ways that story and its gifts come forth in our lives.

What kind of story teller are you?

~Bruce Leonard

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Your Life Is A Rich Story

Posted on January 2, 2025 by admin

Ernest Hemingway was a masterful writer, celebrated for his simplistic and direct writing style. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author is most famous for his novels and short stories. However, he is also widely associated with the apocryphal six-word story:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Whether Hemingway actually wrote this famous flash fiction doesn’t matter—the story itself is a powerful reminder that a great story can be small but say and mean so much more.
A great story doesn’t require action-packed adventures in exotic locales. Nor does it need to
include life-saving heroics or grand deeds. A great story can be incredibly short. Quiet. Subtle. And perhaps even overlooked.

Our lives, too, are stories. Some are long. Some are short. Some are grand. Others, unknown.
Just know that however your story unfolds, it is beautiful, powerful, and magnificent in its own
unique way.

-Ryan Peterson

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Shades of Story

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Bob Patrick

Happy New Year! And welcome to not only the new year and a new month, but a new theme for us to explore together. Our theme for January is “Living Love Through The Practice of Story.”

At first glance, I was inclined to think of this as “the practice of storytelling,” and while I love to tell my stories and I bet you do, too, not all of us are gifted storytellers. Wait a minute, though! This theme is not about the practice of storytelling–alone. It’s about the practice of story. As we explore what it means to practice story, I think we will find that each of us is gifted in one of the many shades of story.  Here are some possibilities.

Do you know a gifted gardener? When you look at their gardens or receive fruit, vegetables or flowers from them, isn’t it clear that their gardens tell a story?

Do you have favorite musicians whose music, whether instrumental or vocal or both, you have at your fingertips to play all the time? Isn’t pretty clear that their music tells a story?

Have you, during these holidays, enjoyed the baking and cooking of someone who is talented in the kitchen? Isn’t it clear that their wonderful culinary delights tell a story?

I’m just getting started, but I’m also running out of room, so let me quickly suggest some other shades of story. Consider the traits, characteristics, practices and personalities of people that we value in our lives–living, dead, famous, unknown. Don’t the qualities in them that we admire tell a story? In fact, when we consider our beloved dead, don’t those considerations often invite us into telling their stories and stories about them and stories of why we admire them?

Human beings are not only story tellers. Our brains are set up to function best in story mode. Just let someone say “let me tell you a story” and both physically and metaphorically, we all lean in. 

That’s what this theme invites us to explore: the myriad ways that we all tell our stories and look for and listen to the ways those around us are telling theirs. 

Jeff Goins offers this insight into story which, coincidentally, is pretty much how I understand spirituality. I close with his words as we begin this new work.

Story is where we came from. Story is where we’re going. Story is what connects us and binds us to each other. It is in the story of humanity, amongst love and fear and failure, that we make meaning of our lives.

~Bob Patrick

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Sacred Presence–Who We Are

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Bob Patrick

What is your relationship to Jesus these days?  It’s a question that comes up, surprisingly NOT at the door from someone wishing to proselytize me into their religion, but from Unitarian Universalist friends. Christian and Christianity are words that belong to a religion that I am no longer a part of. But, to be honest, Jesus is a different story. 

Jesus is a presence, and that presence is mediated through the stories of him and about him.

When I was in seminary, I remember encountering a way of seeing Jesus that was radically new to me. I had grown up with the “atonement Jesus;” that is, the Jesus that was here to pay for all human wickedness so that we might be acceptable to God again (atonement Jesus was a creation of St. Anselm in the 11th century). Atonement Jesus was built on the notion that human beings are born evil and on human fear used against people to keep them under the control of Church leaders. Fear of eternal damnation was what we faced, according to the atonement Jesus approach, and we had to do whatever was required by atonement Jesus to avoid it. 

But,there was, long before atonement Jesus, another story about Jesus. This was “iconic Jesus.” Iconic Jesus is the Jesus who shows us who we are (because we have forgotten). Every story he tells is a story about who we are. 

When we see him taking action by feeding hungry people, or restoring broken families, giving children his full attention, healing untouchable lepers, elevating women, gentiles and Samaritans to full human status, and chasing money changers out of the Temple, he is showing us how to be who we truly are with one another.

When he turns water into wine, when he shares bread and wine and calls them his body and blood, when he tells fishermen how to catch more fish, he is showing us the beloved community that we are. 

When he faces misunderstanding, judgment, and death, he is showing us the unconditional love that we are capable of for ourselves and each other–even our political enemies.

Jesus reminds me of who we are. That is my relationship to Jesus, and really, to any other being who becomes that kind of window into who we are. There are many like Jesus.

Unitarian Universalism has provided me the sacred space to reforge this relationship to Jesus that traditional Christianity would not have allowed me. This community, UUCG, in particular, has created that kind of safe and sacred space for me for 20 years now, the sacred space of holy presence, of a beloved community. 

~Bob Patrick

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Every One–Sacred Presence

Posted on December 30, 2024 by Bob Patrick

It’s happened to me, again,  twice this year. 

The first time it happened was in 1987. After a very long day of trying to induce childbirth, Lydia ended up in a surgical unit having a C-section to bring our first child into the world. Because of anesthesia complications, they had had to put her under completely, and with events happening quicker than I could keep up with, they said to me as I sat next to her: “stand up daddy!”  I did, and they placed this child into my arms. I distinctly remember the first time I looked into her eyes and had this outrageous sense run through me:  “She’s already somebody!”

It happened twice more with the birth of our second daughter and then our son. That first look into their eyes and being shocked to EXPERIENCE the living presence of a brand new human being who was clearly already someone of their very own. 

Twice this year, it’s happened again, only this time, the child being placed in my arms was our grandson and then our granddaughter. And, it’s so clear that I am in the presence of a human being who is already someone of their very own! Words fail my attempts at conveying the experience of that already-present-presence of each child as they arrive here in our arms and lives. We do not make them into the people they will become (though, sadly, in so many ways, we do try to do that). 

As I’ve watched my children grow up, and now watching grandchildren even in their earliest days, it is clear to me, again and again, that they arrived  as beings of their own. The adults in their lives do not have to try and make them into anything. They are ours to care for, to love, to honor, and to witness as they show us who they are. 

All of that reminds me, when I encounter you, and others along my path, to be still a moment, to look into each one’s eyes, and to witness the Presence that each is. Right now, in the world that we live in, nothing may be a more important practice of presence than to witness Presence in each human being. 

Babies have reminded me of this eternal lesson.

~Bob Patrick

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A Few Moments of True Presence

Posted on December 27, 2024 by admin

When I go on vacation, I often wonder about the houses I see. What would it be like to live in that house? To wake up every morning in the middle of this paradise? To walk out of my front door into this beautiful, scenic place?

If I can come here on a vacation and feel so at peace and present having my morning coffee on the porch overlooking the ocean, how great must it be to live like that all the time?

But that sense of being so in the moment probably has more to do with me being on vacation than the specific place.

I try to keep that mindset once I get back home. Look out at the trees that I drive past every day and really try to see them. Try to imagine being here on vacation. Being present and seeing the view outside my bedroom window for the very first time.

It’s only something I can keep up for a few minutes at a time, mainly because I am not on vacation and have actual things I need to get done. But it’s still a few moments of peace. A few moments of true presence.

~Aline Harris 

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