You Belong to a Story

This week one of the Catholic Church’s leading writers, Fr. Robert Barron, rector of the Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago, was appointed auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It was big news for those of us who follow and admire Father Barron’s work.

Coincidentally, I had just finished reading one of Barron’s early books, The Strangest Way: Walking the Christian Path (Orbis, 2002). Ordinarily, I don’t let my religious interests stray onto the pages of this blog, but there is a line in this book that seems so appropriate to the entire memoir venture that I felt moved to write about it.

Barron’s thesis is that living the Christian life involves three “paths.” Only the third path is relevant here: Chapter 3, Realizing Your Life is Not About You. Whatever its religious significance (charity, service, mission, being part of the “mystical body of Christ”) this path is one that I think most memoir writers find themselves on, sometimes to their surprise.

You think you are going to write your own story; and you find that it is not yours.

In a paragraph describing the reading of Scripture at a Catholic mass, Barron writes of the congregation in the pews: “As they listen to the Word in the liturgical assembly, Christians realize . . . that they don’t tell their own story—as the modern mythology of freedom would have it—but rather that they already belong to a Story and that their freedom is authentically discovered in relation to that narrative.”

This is a beautiful and densely packed statement. “Authentically discovering” your freedom goes beyond the mission of this blog; it is the part about “belonging to a Story” that I think is relevant here.

The “modern mythology of freedom” does lead us to think—especially, if I may say so, it leads younger memoir writers to think—that we make our own lives and therefore our own stories. Such “modern freedom” has modern consequences: isolation, loneliness, alienation.

What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of the (older) memoir clients with whom I have been privileged to work over the past 30 years is something different. That something usually begins in gratitude, for the gifts received as children from parents and grandparents, from education and culture. This sense of having received before one has done anything can make one realize that one was born into a story already being told. Our lives, lived and recalled in memoir, are then nothing more or less than the passing on and embellishment of this larger story.

I like to say (even if it isn’t literally true) that the only thing people ever remember about me is that my great-grandfather founded the Cream of Wheat Company in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1892. Once they hear that, people want to know more, not about me but about Cream of Wheat!

By the time  I tell them that my grandfather and father ran the company after Great Granddad, and that we moved east when Cream of Wheat was sold to a New York company, I realize once again that I was born into a story.

Your story is different than mine, but it probably involves a family that was in existence before your birth (!), a place or set of places, values and traditions, and so on, all belonging to the people, the loved ones, who helped bring you into being.

Writing my memoir is a way of telling their story. Norman Maclean speaks of them in the final lines of his autobiographical novella A River Runs Through It. He writes:

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”