Celebrating Stories: God and Buffalo Bill
Two years
ago, I took a Cannon Valley Elder Collegium class on Buffalo Bill, taught by Bob Bonner, a friend of
mine. Buffalo Bill has
always been an important person for me.
I looked at Buffalo Bill from the perspective of a Westerner, since I
grew up in California and worked as a cowboy on a ranch in Wyoming. Yet a number of the written sources for
the course on Buffalo Bill were written by men who were Easterners. Same topic but fascinatingly different
perspectives!
I saw Buffalo
Bill as a Westerner, like me. He
lived in my life, so to speak. In
my mind he was an embellished embodiment of who I was. Whereas some of the East Coast writers
looked at Buffalo Bill at a distance, across the frontier, as they wrote about
his life. For them, at least it
seemed to me, Buffalo Bill was not a part of who they were. Buffalo Bill was a dashing and
talented, external figure who they found to be important enough to study and
write about.
At first, as I realized this difference in how different
people looked at Buffalo Bill, I was a bit bothered. But as the course moved along, and especially because the
instructor himself was from Wyoming, I grew to understand that although there
were differences among scholars in how we saw and understood Buffalo Bill, the
important thing was that we were all “talking” about the same issue – the story
of Buffalo Bill in our own lives.
As it has turned out, this revelation has been, for me, grounds for
celebration.
During a recent
weekend I revisited this story of turning differences into celebration.
Stacy, a
former student in my department at St. Olaf College was visiting Northfield to
hear her oldest daughter play the violin in the St. Olaf Christmas
Concert. This very intelligent
woman is now a Christian Counselor living in Texas and she and I had been
having an ongoing conversation on email about how people saw God and how that
played out for them from a psychological perspective.
Stacy approaches the topic of God’s work among us from the
perspective of an evangelical Christian who sees God as not only an important
part of herself, but as a fundamental source of all she is. Whereas I see God as more of an
external figure – but yet a part
of my world as I explore human emotions and behavior as a route to a better
understanding of how to enable older adults feel that they still matter.
During Stacy
and my coffee-conversation the weekend of the Christmas Concert, the memories
of my course on Buffalo Bill reappeared in my mind. The more I thought about the comparisons, the more I
realized, again,
that centering on our
somewhat differing views on knowing God, does not aid our understanding.
To ask others how God plays out in our
lives is to talk and listen to stories; a multitude of broad ranging
stories. We all live storied
lives, and our primary means of knowing God and Jesus comes from the stories of
the Bible. In conversations we
each bring our perceptions of how the stories of God that come to our mind fit
the stories of our own life experiences – and vice versa! As we connect our narratives into a
co-authored version of a larger story, we gain perspectives on how God lives in
the lives of people all around us.
For instance,
if two people are having a discussion about the role of religion in their
lives, one may read the words in the Bible literally, whereas the other may
read them contextually; One person
may focus on God’s love for herself, whereas the other person might explore
God’s law for the way he treats his
conversational partner, a neighbor, as himself; One person may seek the mystery of God,
whereas his conversational partner may marvel at how God created each of us so
that believing in Him is possible. But these differences are not opposites, as
I tried at first to pretend in my course on Buffalo Bill; they are alternative
ways of answering common questions.
These
differences are not in competition with each other, the two conversational
partners are, presumably, both on the same journey. Differences are not a matter of faith being external or
internal, faith is necessarily both, concomitantly. The differences between these two conversational
partners are not in conflict, they form a whole picture of God in the lives of
people -- together.
Our
differences are a part of our respective stories – our stories of ourselves
with God. Each of our
stories encompass our current recall of our lifetime of experiences plus
imagined futures. Thus, when we
share our stories of ourselves with God, it is not like describing the features
of a new cell phone, we are sharing our ways of knowing, thinking and
feeling. We are describing ways
that shape our joy and our experiences of difficulties. We are describing what it is that
we notice from among an enormous array of possibilities we encounter in daily
life. We are, frankly, describing
a part of what is meaningful to us about getting up in the morning.
Because God
can live in and among us all, the more we choose to join with others to talk
and listen with openness, honesty, trust and respect for alternative ways of
understanding God, especially if there are differences among us, the more we
can truly understand the nature of God through the stories of people’s lives.
When we
understand the storied pictures of God through conversations with others, we
draw closer together – as neighbors, and that is worth celebrating!
I enjoyed reading your article! Excellent!
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