We Tell Stories...
“We are Loved, It is Enough”
Ever since I was eleven years old my summers have been riddled with salty bay water, sand filled sneakers, and campfire stories. These picturesque memories were set to tune the tune of hymnals and centered the one thing that is so often the center (explicitly or not) of the stories that we tell: God. For ten years I both worked at and attended an Episcopal summer camp that resides on the Rehoboth Bay in the tiny town of Lewes, Delaware.
It was here that some of my very first conceptions of what makes up a story began to evolve. Our drop off days would entail myself and nine other girls scattered around a fold up table, anxiously inquiring about who each of us were prior to stepping into this very moment.
“What state are you from? Are you in school? Do you play any sports, have any siblings at camp?”
We constructed our new found friends through the stories they presented us with and began to piece together who we would be friends with and who we would not. These first impressions and collections of introductions regarding our own identities quickly set the tone for the overnight experience of the next two weeks to follow.
There was one interaction in particular one summer at the drop off-table that left my thirteen-year-old self scrambling for answers. For the first time, a girl with brunette hair plopped herself down next to me and introduced herself as Natalia. She did so in the most British accent possible. I figured she must have been joking. How could someone all the way from England end up in a state that is so often affectionately called “Dela-where?” She informed me that her mother used to live a few states over, and that Rehoboth beach is often where she resides with her family over the summers.
We continued our days getting to know each other underneath the pine trees and sharing meals together over a fire. We shuffled our thirteen year-old bodies into the chapel each morning repeating the Lord’s prayer in sync and sharing gratitudes of the day. When we lay our head down at night in our shelters made of splintering wood, we would unload all that has been on our mind, finding comfort in the lack of electricity and the isolation of the woods.
“My dad left three weeks ago. I found him cheating on my Mom in our home, and I was the one who had to break the news to her. My life has been in constant chaos and uncertainty since.”
My friend Natalia’s voice quaked through her English cadence. The hour that unfolded afterward I kept quiet as she unfolded her past month as if she was delicately taking apart an origami crane. I hung on her every word, desperate to be a good friend and eager to find solace in her stories and my own.
Natalia and I quickly became best friends, and were inseparable for years to come. After her parents divorce, she moved to America to finish the rest of high school and we spent the following four summer counseling together with the same age groups of girls that we were when we had first met.
Prior to the pandemic hitting, I was hired to become the Christian Education Director for the summer of 2020. I grew up Episcopalian and found God in poems and trees more than any church I had ever been to. However, camp was special. It allowed myself and others to tell stories and be vulnerable in ways that were rife with connection and safety.
This led me to ponder, What is the role of God in the stories we tell? Over the duration of this course we have delved into exploring the concept of meaning making. How does it happen? When does it occur, and with who? Is it important? In McAdams’ (2011) book chapter on Narrative Identity , it is described as
“is the internalized and evolving story of the self that a person constructs to make sense and meaning out of his or her life.”
As someone diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder I have poured over instances of trauma in my life and desperately searched for some sense of meaning, in order to make sense of the negative experiences that have happened to me.
A common phrase that is used as a almost a blanket way to create meaning making, particularly in Christianity, is the expression,“everything happens for a reason.” I personally believe this statement is complete and utter bullshit. A professor of Theology at the Duke Divinity school, Kate Bowler, wrote a book about this exact sentiment and articulated my feelings on this trope so well. In 2017, while pregnant with her first son, Bowler was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Much of the congregation of her church's response was all the same when they heard this tragic news. They all repeated in a multitude of ways, “everything happens for a reason.”
For the person who is experiencing a trauma, this phrase becomes a burden. It provides no comfort, and only more questions. The phrase leads us to wonder,
“Did I deserve this? Do we need to suffer to know God? Why me?”
In her book, Bowler writes,
‘Everything happens for a reason.’ The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. Because of my aversion to Brussels sprouts. I mean, no one is short of reasons. So if people tell you this, make sure you are there when they go through the cruelest moments of their lives, and start offering your own. When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason. (p. 63).
She lets us know that when someone is suffering, the worst thing you can do is tell them there must be a reason - or in other words: to make meaning when there is none.
This sentiment of “everything happens for a reason” and Bowler’s critique of it has sat in the back of my mind throughout the entirety of the course. In the Sales, Merrill, and Fivush’s (2013) research article about making meaning of trauma, they note that
certain types of narrative meaning-making language may reflect ongoing and unsuccessful efforts after meaning, and, may be more similar to rumination than to resolution. Additionally, they support claims that for certain individuals from challenging backgrounds, efforts after meaning might not be psychologically healthy.
I believe that with trauma this finding is most certainly true. Searching for the “reason” that everything happens leads to more rumination, feelings of unworthiness, and hopelessness. Rather what we need to do in the cruelest fact of suffering is acknowledge what Bowler is able to put so succinctly,
God is here. We are loved. It is enough. (p. 87).
As I think back to my friend Natalia and our community spilling the familial chaos in our lives, I remember what was so special regarding the beginning of that friendship. It was scaffold by not a trust in God, but rather a trust and belief in the other. God was and continues to be merely a witness to the traumas and joys that make up our lives. Natalia and I listened to one another and didn’t seek to create reasons as to why at thirteen we were dealing with fathers who could care less about their own daughters. Instead of ruminating on the painful truths that purvey our lives outside of camp walls, we were able to meditate on the joys of the present. S’mores, crushes, feeling the first lick of fire on our calves. We didn’t need a reason to enjoy these things, they just were.
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