The Seventh Story (and the Stories before the Seventh)

The following came to me in today's e-mail from Richard Rohr.  I wanted to remember it, and these days, creating a blog post is a way both to store ideas digitally and to be able to find them again more easily than my older way of printing and storing paper.

Practice: The Seventh Story

According to CAC faculty member Brian McLaren and our mutual friend Gareth Higgins, six narratives have been driving forces in human history:

• The first was the story of patriarchal domination
• Oppression provoked the emergence of a revolution story
• Others simply withdrew, believing in the righteousness of their own group, called to an isolation story
• In the purification story, all the troubles of a powerful group were blamed on a minority  
• Some people retreated into trying to possess as much as they could: living by an accumulation story
• Some people began to define themselves by what they had suffered, developing a victimization story  

However, Brian and his friend Gareth Higgins recommend a “Seventh Story.”

But in The Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists. Love is.

We are not [rulers] of “our” domain, but partners in the evolution of goodness. As René Girard wrote, “What Jesus invites us to imitate is his own desire, the spirit that directs him toward the goal on which his intention is fixed: to resemble [Love] as much as possible.” [1]

The Seventh Story invites us to be participants in a great play about the evolution of the story of love. To be friends, not enemies, no matter what anybody else is doing. Not us versus them. . . .

Many of us are so immersed in the six stories of separation, selfishness, and scapegoating that some decisive action is required. . . . We invite you to the following commitments:

1: Pay attention. Alongside considering the wider world, pay attention to your soul, your neighborhood, your local and regional stories, and find others who do the same. Nurture your personal well-being and that of your community, otherwise you will neither thrive in a challenging world, nor be useful to the service of the common good.

2: Don’t pay attention. Don’t fund the six stories of separation, selfishness, and scapegoating: withhold your attention and the money you steward from any media outlet or public figure that uses fear to build an audience. . . .

3: Seek mentors who will help you discern a personal sense of calling to the common good. Your gift is connected to your wound, and the world’s great need. Serving from the place where these three intersect is the best way to heal yourself, and offer healing to others.

4: Tell the truth. In a world of competing information sources, seek wisdom above propaganda. Enlarge your frame: see the whole world as your home. Learn the difference between headlines and trendlines.

5: Learn spiritual practices that heal and offer resilience: clearings, accountability, shadow work.

6: Open yourself to seeing things through “the eyes of the other.”  Seek a friendship with someone with whom you disagree politically. Look for things to praise in others, even when they vote differently. Learn about building equitable community in which everyone has a fair stake. Don’t contribute to polarization.

7: Join or help start a circle of friends committed to the Seventh Story. Don’t journey alone. Encourage others to do the same.

[1] René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Orbis Books: 2001), 13.

Adapted from Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins, The Seventh Story: Us, Them & the End of Violence (Brian D. McLaren and Gareth Higgins: 2018), 124, 171‒173.