On Telling a new Story

I have waited a few days to comment after the Ferguson, Mo., decision was made in the hope that full-on alienation might not take over the streets of many cities. It did. I hoped that clear voices and many prayers might make their way to the forefront of the media perspective. They didn’t. Instead I found a now-familiar cynicism (which I promised I would never indulge in. I Iost.) rise in me , along with a deep sadness that our answer to Rodney King’s plaintive question: Can’t we all just get along?...would still be no.

Unfortunately the Ferguson situation is the latest in a variety of scenarios that can arrive anywhere at any time. This time it is black-white-police in nature, but it can show up as any contrived configuration because I think we are still unwilling to give up the old stories that go back to a tribal mentality, years of compressed thinking bound into a collective mind set. We know them…Black people are (insert story): White people are (insert story); Cops are (insert story); Latinos are (insert story): Women are (insert story)…and they are endless and leap up when triggered into tribal response.

We needed the stories for self and mutual discovery. We needed to hear facts we did not know. What we forgot was that facts are not truths and that the generalizations we made from them are not true…and never were! There are many, many people, often quietly living their lives, who have risen out of the stories and see themselves as part of a living Whole. At times like Ferguson, their voices are not wanted. They don’t fit the mob mentality.

I believe the stories were needed; they enlightened, but now they trap us in limited beliefs. If we cannot step out of them and create a new song, we will carry a bleeding, unhealed place in us wherever we go, a rage-full place just waiting to be triggered into action.

It is more than blackness or whiteness or any other “ness” that keeps us unhealed. It is our unrelenting attachment to tribal thinking, to old stories that can never bring us into a new place. It is time and past time for the creation of a new story, one that is centered in more spiritual truth, one that recognizes the sacredness of all humanity in a world that needs our love so much.