I sit on a committee at West Hill United Church which has as its mandate the implementation of recommendations from a Future Search process (brainstorming/visioning/dreaming) which the church undertook more than a year ago. We are exploring such things as ways to enhance the programs we offer, greening the building, and making the worship space more useable.
In retrospect, I see that visioning workshops have an inherent limitation. If you conduct your brainstorming, as we did, by descending to a basement auditorium, effectively retreating from the world, then you are limited by the group’s collective experience. The world is full of possibilities already realized. These can serve as models or can seed more imaginative exploration.
(Im)possibility is a mental barrier more often than a physical barrier. We have seen this in sports. The four-minute-mile was once thought impossible. But following on Roger Bannister’s 1954 run, many others were also able to break the four-minute-mile where before they wouldn’t have bothered even to test their assumptions about this possibility. Recently I enjoyed the opportunity of seeing a possibility realized in terms of envisioning and renovating sacred space, and like the runners constrained by their own assumptions, I feel released from limiting barriers I have been carrying around inside my own head. I have permission to consider possibilities that I would previously have dismissed.
While in Edinburgh, I visited the Scottish Storytelling Centre and met with its director, Donald Smith, who gave me a tour and, fittingly, recounted something of the Centre’s story. For more than a decade Donald Smith has served as director of the Storytelling Centre and clearly has a passion for the recovery and nurture of Celtic oral traditions. You can learn more of the Centre’s story on its website. But the Centre needed a home, and under the auspices of the Church of Scotland, a perfect space was developed and opened two years ago. The home of John Knox was amalgamated with the Netherbow Gate roughly half the way down the Royal Mile. The subsequent renovation produced a stunning edifice that presents a modern façade in the midst of ancient (by North American standards) buildings.
One of the great advantages of the building is its situation in relation to the buildings around it. Because it incorporates the old city gate, it juts out towards the street. If you approach from the west, you walk directly into the entrance of John Knox’s house which now serves as the Centre’s bookshop. If you approach from the east, you are greeted by a walkway up alongside a glass front which is home to the café. I enjoyed an excellent lunch there as I gazed out over the street—one of the busiest in the city. People felt free enough to use the space for any number of reasons quite apart from dining. Mothers nursed their infants. A small group sat down for a chat. And the girl at the table next to me used it as her base of operations to fill out job applications and to draft cover letters.
The café opens out into a large common area—the storytelling court. It’s a warm and open space with wooden floor and light wood paneling on the walls and natural light streaming in from overhead. One wall displays paintings by local artists (not all stories are told in words). On the opposite wall are recessed shelves of cubby–holes for books and objects related to storytelling. Ancient stories sit on the top shelf; more recent stories, on the lower shelves; current stories, those most accessible to the youngest listeners, sit on the lowest shelf within easy reach. The whole shelf is hinged and can swing out into the room, cutting the room in half and creating a more intimate space if needed. There is (of course) a storytelling chair and it sits before a large glass window which overlooks a garden.
Immediately beneath the storytelling court is a hundred seat professional theatre—The Netherbow Theatre. As he was showing it to me, Donald stepped onto the stage and slid back a section of the wall, like a pocket door, revealing windows and a glass door opening out into the garden I had seen from above in the storytelling court. The garden itself is well–suited to storytelling with a low circular wall where people can sit together in the round.
But the highlight of the visit (and I almost feel foolish for admitting this) was my climb up the stairs to ring the old city bell at one o’clock. Yes. I got to tell the time for the City of Edinburgh and rattle my head a bit while I was at it. For an instant there was a childlike quality to my experience. I lost myself in it. And maybe that was exactly what I was supposed to feel. Standing beneath a clear blue sky I looked out over the Royal Mile down to the foot of the road where the Palace of Holyrood House and the new Scottish Parliament stand. I was oblivious to the history and politics that this view implied, and instead, was swept up by the beautiful sunlight and the wonder that seems always to grip me when I encounter a place which is vastly different from my own home.
A month has passed since my visit and I have had an opportunity to read one of Donald Smith’s books—Storytelling Scotland: A Nation in Narrative, along with a chapbook titled “Truth and Value” and another by the poet Tessa Runsford titled “Truth and Beauty.” Since my return I’ve also attended another Long Range Planning meeting at West Hill United Church where I briefly introduced people to the work of the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Now, with time to reflect, I’ve identified three broad themes from my encounter which I regard as readily transportable.
1. Mission. Donald Smith sits on the Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council which is the official oversight body for the Scottish Storytelling Centre. The challenge for a visitor like myself is how to conceptualize the Centre’s work as mission when there is nothing overtly religious about the activities it sponsors.
2. Narrative. What is the meaning of narrative? How does it function? What is its role in community? I encountered elements of narrative which were place– and time–specific, like the recent creation of a new Scottish parliament after nearly 300 years, talk of a re–emerging Scottish Enlightenment, and the ongoing struggle to affirm a Scottish identity. But there are elements of narrative that transcend place and time? Are there lessons from my Scottish encounter that can be transposed to the Canadian context?
3. Physical Space. Like the narratives we share and the paintings we hang on our walls and the plays we mount in our theatres, the buildings where we gather also carry meanings. How do we read the stories embedded in the physical spaces we use? And can we shape our buildings in ways that more richly reflect our stories?
Mission
How can the nurture of storytelling as a valid end in its own right promote the goals of a church? I had expected that Donald Smith would be eager to share his thoughts on this given his role in both the Centre and the Church and given, too, the impression he conveys that he has thought deeply on the matter. While he was definitely eager to show me the Centre’s newly renovated home, he was decidedly vague on the matter of its institutional connections. However, I sense that “vague” in this context is a strength and might better be understood as “subtle.”
I pursued my question further in Smith’s writings, first in his book, Storytelling Scotland: A Nation in Narrative. There was little in it to suggest an overtly religious dimension to the storytelling project. In fact, in what is a copiously footnoted volume, I found a single note hinting at a theological underpinning—a reference to Don Cupitt. For the most part, it concerned storytelling as a vehicle for recovering disappearing cultures and traditions, and as a tool to help entrench a sense of national identity—stories may hold some clues of what it means to be Scottish.
Canada faces similar issues. Like Scotland, the real power lies south of the border. And while our powerful neighbour is benevolently disposed towards us, there is an endless cacophony from the south that overwhelms us. When we internalize catch–phrases from its TV shows, and sense of style from its advertising, and when we purchase its products and eat its fast foods, then we begin to wonder if there is anything at all distinctive about being Canadian. Like the Scottish, we are filled with self–doubt, we moan about our beleaguered national identity, and we nurse an inferiority complex as expansive as our prairies. Not surprisingly, we most often point to our storytellers as evidence of our distinctive Canadianness, to Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje and Mordecai Richler. Our voice may be distinctive, but coherent? What have the Celtic tales of Cape Breton to do with the imaginative life of an Inuk in Iqaluit? Or Joy Kagawa’s stories of Japanese–Canadian internment in British Columbia to do with Mordecai Richler’s Jewish Montreal?
Storytelling Scotland‘s focus on nationalism and its reticence on the religious dimension may also have to do with a given in the Scottish context which would be unthinkable in Canada. The relationship of Church and State is vastly different in the two countries. My impression is that nobody in the Church of Scotland questions the validity of its role as an instrument in shaping national identity. This is borne out by the Scottish Storytelling Centre’s sources of funding. Minutes of the Mission and Discipleship Council, 16 April 2008 note:
• £170K had been allocated from the Lottery Commission;
• £151K from the Arts Council;
• £22,500 from City of Edinburgh Council; and
• £23K from the Scottish Government to support the festival programme.
Contrast with the Live Green Toronto Community Investment Program which offers $25,000 grants for greening initiatives but excludes “[o]rganizations without a clear demarcation between religious and community service functions at the program and budget levels.” On its side, the Church in Canada is leery of incurring obligations to State. Even the United Church of Canada, which initially aspired to become a “national” church, jealously guards its independence and often asserts a prophetic voice over and against State. What may pass for obvious in Scotland could gain no traction in Canada.
It is in Smith’s chapbook, Truth and Value, a succinct essay of eighteen pages, that I found the articulation of a theological ground for his storytelling project. His point of entry is epistemology. We are knowers. Religion is a deep knowing. He cites Anselm of Canterbury’s dictum: fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), but both fides and intellectum are conceived more broadly than in their medieval context. Fides is not the prescribed belief in exclusive truth claims; instead, “faith presumes doubt and uncertainty; otherwise it is meaningless.” (Do I detect a doffing of the hat to David Hume, Scotland’s favourite atheist?) Religion expresses its knowing through myth (not “myth” in its trivial meaning—fictitious—but as a narrative mode for the transmission of deep truths). And a religious knowing also grounds itself in everyday life.
If knowing is what defines us as whole (spiritual) beings, then the primary function of religious institutions is to facilitate education (in the broadest sense of the word). Smith is concerned about the risks posed by a globalisation that views education as an instrument in the service of economic efficiency.
“Education is first of all for learning and then for the uses of learning.” He envisions a Scottish curriculum: “The learning methods employed would be critical enquiry and analysis, balanced with aesthetic perceptions across all areas in order to encourage imagination, empathy and creative design. Such perception requires skills of appreciation and expression which enable individuals to actively shape and re-order. Passive recipience fails the overall purpose of active understanding.”
In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth proposes two modes of narrative expression—showing and telling. “Truth and Value” is telling. Storytelling Scotland is showing and it is through showing that Smith illustrates what he means by sound pedagogical method. Citing R. F. Mackenzie’s A Search for Scotland:
I was a schoolteacher in Fife for sixteen years and tried to communicate to the pupils (sons and daughters of miners, factory workers, forge workers, linoleum workers, motor mechanics, shopkeepers) an awareness of this parcel of earth on which they had found themselves. In the summer term the school chaplain, the Rev. Robin Mitchell who was the BBC’s bird-man, took the pupils on country walks through Keil’s Den and over to Pitscottie. For the first ten minutes they listened to him as he drew their attention to wood anemones and the pink-tinted samaras of the elm and the song of the robin redbreast (a ‘wee trickle of notes’) and then they assumed independence and began to ferret things out for themselves. They once discovered a dozen pheasant’s eggs cooked in the ashes of a tinker’s fire that the tinker had covered over and forgotten or disowned. They were enjoying the freedom of the countryside. ‘Freedom is a noble thing’, said Barbour, the father of Scottish poetry. ‘Freedom makes man to have liking.’ The pupils, freed from classroom pressures, became different people, relaxed, smiling, reacting more sensuously to the natural world. Sometimes in their exuberance they hardly noticed Mitchell but it was he who had noiselessly pulled back this gauzy curtain and let them into a new world. He was unobtrusive, an enabler. (186–7)
As Bernard Lonergan observed in Insight, we are born with an “unrestricted desire to know.” Too much telling dampens our innate orientation to the world. True learning requires more showing. It is open–ended. It suspends the teacher’s anxieties about prescribed results. In Ontario, we have a curriculum designed to turn our children into productive participants in our global marketplace. So said our minister of education at my daughter’s grade eight graduation ceremony (see “Graduating in the New Economy“). Aping a corporate–style accountability, our teachers now have to tick boxes on report cards demonstrating that our children have learned specific units of “knowledge” and have acquired prescribed skills—creating Excel spreadsheets, graphing linear equations, composing business letters. But I’ve never yet seen a teacher held accountable for nurturing a love of learning or a tick box on a report card that said “student successfully stared in wonder at the sky.”
If religion is grounded in each person’s unrestricted desire to know, or in faith seeking understanding, or in the nurture of our capacity to wonder and to be filled with wonder, then there is no question of a valid mission for the Scottish Storytelling Centre. I would hazard to guess that the Centre is more effective than a traditional church in meeting these goals, and does so precisely because it is more inclined than a traditional church to engage in showing rather than in telling. Ironically, showing makes it harder to detect the mission. Traditional church, on the other hand, spends a good deal of time telling us all about what it does, but far less time actually doing it. In retrospect, Donald Smith’s reticence to state explicitly the Centre’s religious underpinnings is unsurprising; he was showing, not telling. (On Wayne C. Booth’s account, maybe “storytelling” is an oxymoron.)
Narrative
During my tour, one of the words I heard my guide say on several occasions was “community.” Storytelling brings people together in community. More than that, storytelling brings about and is representative of a particular kind of community. There is an egalitarian element to storytelling community. Everybody has a story, and while it is true that some are better than others at spinning a yarn, or have a greater knack for turning a phrase, and while some prefer to tell their stories in song or paints or film, nevertheless even those who think they have no storytelling gifts participate by finding something of their own stories in those of others. We participate even if only by being drawn along. And those who tell the story do so, not so they can assume an honoured position before their listeners, but in the hope that their story will be retold. I’m not offering a psychological account of narrator that subordinates the ego of the storyteller, nor an aesthetic account of the narrative that elevates the value of the story. Instead, as I view it, the story is one square in a broad patchwork quilt of experience that wraps around us all.
Many have thought deeply about the nature and purposes of narrative. I wish to add only two observations—both in relation to narrative as a pedagogical tool—an enabler of knowing. First, I see here a strong affinity for Lonergan’s epistemology. Narrative falls within the category he describes as common sense knowing. It isn’t a scientific knowing; no one can prove the truth of a tale. But a tale told in an authentic voice stirs us and we can’t help but say something like: “There was wisdom in those words.” Or: “I was moved to feel something deep in my bones.” Lonergan would say there is no less legitimacy in common sense knowing. And like other forms of knowing, it is cumulative. Our stories are the cumulative and shared repository of our lived experience. Just as a single story draws a thread through time, so the cumulative body of our stories draws a thread through our shared experience.
The second observation is that storytelling shakes us out of our traditional forms of communal organization. Structure is more diffuse; the distinction between leader and follower is more difficult to delineate. Stories well up from the ground and resist our efforts to impose them from above. As a pedagogical tool, storytelling is inherently anarchic (I use the term anarchic in its formal etymological sense—leaderless; for further reflection on this approach, see my review of Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization). Storytelling shifts the locus of power within community. Who has authority? Who validates a given narrative? Who determines what counts as true?
When storytelling unfolds under the wings of Church, what happens to the communal organization of Church? Traditional church entrenches itself against the anarchic methods of storytelling and the unexpected truths that it births. The United Church of Canada has struck a Task Group on the Meaning of Ministry with a call for responses by October 15th, 2008. The accompanying brochure cites three prevalent models of ministry which inadvertently comment upon the prevalent views of how church community is organized. Ministry is understood as i) an office “in which the pastoral leaders stand as inheritor and communicator of the church’s tradition”; ii) a profession, with focus on education and competency; and iii) a calling “where an inward summons shapes character and spiritual depth.” All three descriptions assume that ministry stands in hierarchical relation to the church community. (The etymological root of the word “hierarchy” is “temple leader.”) Storytelling can radicalize the experience of spiritual community without destabilizing it. The only member of the community who gets left out in the cold is the one who presumes to lead it. Anarchic ministry becomes a collective endeavor arising from a sense of purpose already embedded in its sense of itself. “We are the people who …” “We know this to be true because we have listened closely to one another’s stories.” From these, a community begins to weave a narrative, freed from its dependency on “expert” knowers.
Physical Space
But it is the physical space itself which tells the tale:
• the way it juts out into the street, interrupting people’s walk down the Royal Mile;
• the place it provides for people to share a meal;
• the bright and open common area;
• the garden, an oasis in a desert of buildings;
• the book shop and library;
• the exposed stonework and wooden beams, remnants of other buildings that once stood on the site;
• the theatre.
The story of the building is consistent with the mission and narrative of the Scottish Storytelling Centre. It encourages community. Its warmth wraps around you and feels safe. While aspiring to meets the needs of and reflect the world of its 21st century users, it is honest enough to preserve something of its past in things like the old city bell and the old wooden beams of John Knox’s house.
To see how unusual this space is, consider all the things the building does NOT say:
• it does not have a chancel which raises an elect few above the masses (in fact, in the theatre, the audience looks down on the performers);
• there are no pews to regiment the masses into neat rows which force them to stare forward at the leader;
• it has no pulpit from which a designated authority speaks at the masses;
• none of its symbols recall a feudal model of social organization;
• there is no dark ceiling making us feel closed in, but has windows instead that let the light stream down and let us gaze up at the sky;
• it has no nursery where small children are stashed away to prevent disruptions;
• there is no specially designated place where one collection of stories, bound in black, is elevated above every other.
This is a place where my spirit could feel at ease.
Learning Lessons
Returning to my own community, I find myself preoccupied with the question: how do we transform our space to reflect our story? and how do we transform it to ensure that our story continues to tell itself in vibrant and enriching ways? Our long range planning committee has already resolved to move in this direction. Hopefully, the pews will be gone by the early fall, and we will have committed to a plan of action to reduce our carbon footprint. But what of the feel? When a stranger visits, will s/he say: “This is a place where my spirit could feel at ease?” Will there be warmth? Will there be light? Will there be openness? Will it draw strangers in and ask them to stay? And most importantly, will it assure them that their stories will be heard?