Like you, I come from a family of storytellers. My guess is that is not a presumptuous sentence. We all have stories. In my family there were stories told so often they are indelibly etched in my brain. Stories so real that for years my father’s childhood friends were the age of my friends, frozen in time. There are stories I heard my dad tell so many times I could lip sync them by the time I was twelve. Stories that made my brothers and sisters and I groan as he began them — as my children still groan when I begin some of mine — stories for which my siblings and I would gladly give up ice cream or beer or one of our progeny to hear him tell one of those stories just one more time. Okay maybe not the ice cream, but you get the idea.

There were stories of adventure – my maternal grandfather coming as a youngster on the boat by himself from Ireland with instructions pinned on the inside of his coat – and stories at once amusing and captivating — my paternal grandfather playing the piano in the saloons of Butte, Montana, making bets he could play any song a customer could name.

There were stories of my parent’s childhoods in the 1920’s: my mother disregarding her father’s emphatic instructions not to play with her girlfriends near the recently cut down backyard tree, and her sure enough falling smack dab on that still sharp stump, running into the bathroom, locking the door, and stuffing a soon bloody washrag in the hole that opened up when her kneecap flipped open like a submarine hatch. And despite our grimaces and “oohs” and “icks” we would eventually ask her to show us the scar and tell it again.

There was the immortalized story of my father and accomplice getting kicked out of summer camp for stealing the apple pies left by the camp cook to cool on the window sill and its delightful ending describing my father and friend sent home on the back of a truck, only to see not just the camp fading from sight but my dad’s parent’s car passing them going the opposite direction as they headed toward the camp to pay a surprise visit to their son. Oh oh.

And the stories of our own childhoods and adolescents remain, connect us, still bring sadness or delight and revised versions. There were tales of frightening neighbors, and a frightening story of a garage we passed on our way to the ballfield where a girl was murdered. Tales of tragedy and hope, of the one-armed boy my dad drafted to be a pitcher on his Little League team. Stories of human frailty and failure and shame that lay buried for years, but also as many if not more stories of births and birthdays and kick the can and game winning shots and summer vacations playing late night games of Hearts. There were stories of mishaps and quotidian mysteries that had no statute of limitation and so continued to make our stomachs hurt from laughter: my mother chasing my hysterical sister around the house with a fake rubber snake or going to a Come-As-You Are Mother’s Breakfast at the Catholic Church dressed in a beautiful coat and high heels to be met by her friend’s disapproval and criticism and accusations of party-pooperism only then to take off the coat and heels to be decked out in my older brother’s sleeveless striped pajamas cut-off-at-the-knee.

There are tales of incidents and accidents now stretched and immortalized like apocryphal fish stories. And there are tales become memories of moments and events more beautiful and special now because of how commonplace they were. There are stories of trips to Alki Beach with siblings and friends crammed in our station wagon with our feet hanging out the back window, waving our toes to the cars behind us at the stop light, then playing the simple game of “In-or-Out” whereby each passenger still-breathing shouted out their guess of whether the fire engine would be in or out of the fire station, or about Saturday trips to the dump, or our winter Sunday ritual of Mass, ice skating, and hot chocolate at the Seattle Center.

There are stories of such pathos they still break my heart: my oldest sister having come home to spend time with my dying mother needed to fly home to her husband and children. After saying goodbye to our mom who sat in a wheelchair facing down the hallway to the exit, my dad walked my sister down the hospital corridor. My sister agonized each step of the way weeping and wrestling inside whether to turn around one last time. Feeling the more compassionate thing to do was not to turn and face her mother eye-to-eye and thus acknowledge what each knew but neither could say, she walked down the long hall knowing my mom was watching her first born child for the last time.

When you come from a family of eight there are a lot of stories. Thank God. And when your parents die young as mine did and before you have children of your own, you use stories not just to introduce them but to make them as familiar and alive to memory as possible. I have passed these stories on to my children, as their mother has passed on stories from her side of the family because, though we are more than our biographies, we live and move and have our being in some real and tangible way in these stories of melancholy and mystery and mirth. We also suspect their meaning is not outside them – “the moral of the story is” – but only known and frequently left unknown in and through the telling of them, the living of them, the integration of them into the stories that we each alone and all together continue to write with our contingent and precious lives.

One way I’ve come to understand what I do for a living, and especially what I have done for life all these years is to say, “I tell stories. And listen to stories. I listen to stories and hold the stories of others as they entrust them to me. And I tell stories so that they might find their stories inside the stories I tell. ” One of the graced works I have been fortunate to participate in off-n-on for nearly 30 years is listening to people’s stories as a spiritual director or guide — what my Irish forebears called an anam cara (that is, soul friend). It is a great privilege and I take it very seriously as I try very hard not to take myself too seriously. I’m a slow learner, so I’m just beginning to get the hang of it.

I realize more and more that I listen to stories for the same reason I tell them. As I have listened to stories and gathered stories and learned from great storytellers from Jesus to John Shea, I know that stories are essential to human becoming and their power is real. We tell stories to recall and make sense of the past, to find out who we are and who we are in the process of becoming, to discover what we are to do, to bear witness to what is true, to work out our salvation, to participate in the mystery of life, to connect and commune with others, to bear the pain, to help us see in the dark, to understand our experiences more fully, to prolong the ecstasy, to share the joy, and to give us hope.1

When I am prone to discouragement, when I bemoan how little I have to show for the life so generously given to me, I find some solace in the conviction that there aren’t many things more sacred or important or awe-inducing than, on the one hand, to tell a story that moves another person to laughter or joy or compassion or a new insight or self-acceptance or a sense of awe, or, on the other hand, to have been confided in by another person who dares to offer me the unfinished and ineffable composition that is their life. I know the power of story, stories honestly, enchantingly, vulnerably, or passionately told and then reverently received and delightfully held like a newborn baby.

We think we live by air, by water, by food, by love. But the absence of story will kill as surely as the absence of breath. If we can’t story, we can’t breathe. And so, on Tuesdays, I will simply help our spiration by passing on a story, maybe one you’ve heard before, maybe one you need to hear again, maybe one you’ve never heard, maybe one that will comfort or disturb as needed, or one that will irritate you like the sand in a shell that houses a pearl-in-progress. Who knows, maybe it will inspire you to take action or make you smile or cry or remember a friend or give thanks or wake up and choose to collaborate with the grace of the present moment.

I will end with a famous Hasidic story. In the Preface to his book The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel tells this story to which he adds his own coda. I think it’s a good place to start these “Tuesdays with Story.”

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted.

Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: ‘‘Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer,’’ and again the miracle would be accomplished.

Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Lieb of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: ‘‘I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.’’ It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: ‘‘I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is ask You to redeem us, and this must be sufficient.’’

And it was sufficient.

God made humans because God loves stories.

1 See John Shea’s Stories of God: An Unauthorized Biography.