Watching a young person grow into a productive adulthood is one of the deepest pleasures in life.
I’ve witnessed this process in my godson, Jerome Krug, as he’s moved from a devout teen into seminarian on the road to the priesthood. Jerome has a blog, To Love and Be Loved. His insights and ability to express himself with the written word have developed as he’s matured.
I want to share a post that he wrote recently because it expresses one of the key insights of living in this life. “These are the days of our stories,” Jerome writes, which is another way of saying that our time is now. Solomon referred to it as “our days in the sun.”
The life each one of us is given is its own story. The things we do with our time become the living witness of who we are, what we value and what or who our gods may be.
A question that grows out of this is, when you come to your day to die, what do you want to have done with your life? What do you want the story of your life to say? What do you want to have used your self, your “time in the sun,” to have accomplished?
From To Love and Be Loved:
As they talked about all these things, as they told their stories, I had a simple yet remarkable realization that has been ringing in my ears and my heart every moment since: these are the days of our stories…these are the days of my generation’s stories. This is the time that we will bring to those who follow us.
The story is central to the human experience. Story is a part of every Catholic liturgy, a part of every family gathering, a pastime of the young and of the old, the point of Facebook and Twitter and cave paintings, of Scripture and of biographies. The story tells us what we cannot forget about where we have been and what we have done and the things we have gone through.
Stories become a powerful force forming a sense of what matters to us and leads us to seek messy, real, discursive truth instead of black-and-white, comfortable, tamed “truth”. In the story we learn not only who we are but also Whose we are; in the story of our lives and the lives of the many we discover Providence as real and moving and calling and challenging.
These are the days of our stories.
My generation is thirsting for story: for the stories of our elders and ancestors, for the stories of our God and His people, for the stories we live today and tomorrow and the tomorrows to come that we long never to forget. Storyteller and theologian John Shea says, “Our greatest sin is that we forget.”
May we be a generation that never forgets. May we never forget where we’ve come from, where we’ve been, where we’re going, what we’ve overcome, who we are, Whose we are!
These are the days of OUR stories.
Let us drink deeply from the cup of each day. And everyday drink from the cups of days past, years past, lives past. Drink deeply of today!
Telling the stories of today to the people of tomorrow will save our souls, will integrate our sins, will heal our hearts, and will grow our love of self, of others, and of Other.
Drink deeply of every today, for these are the days of our stories. (Read similar posts here.)
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