TRANSCRIPTION of Story Stones 2 –  PROMISE

I’m TinaO from TinaOLife and this is Story Stones, an hour of deep listening and learning together. 

I am a storyteller, a listener, and a holder of spaces where we can connect with the Story of Us. 

My work is rooted in Myth, Mysticism, and the Christian Tradition. 

Myth and story as the guide.

Mysticism as the path.

And the Christian Tradition as the living footsteps.   

I’m an artist, a writer, a mom, a runner, and a poet. My faith is in the space between us, where two or more are gathered, my trust is in the Mystery and my practice is listening and communicating from there. 

That’s me. 

Okay… so what happens in this hour?

Every week we listen in to a word, and it is a listening. It’s not a telling. I’m not here to tell you anything. That’s not my job. The word becomes the invitation and the gateway which you can open with your softening, to hear in the way in which you hear, and be nourished, in the way you are nourished by your connection, and it’s the connection which is the practice we are building together. 

And it’s your connection to an understanding of what you may call God, or the divine, or consciousness, or the universe, or the cosmos… I suggest the ‘name’ isn’t important, and the connection is. The name: God can be gateway IN for some, as an understanding of love and safety and home, and for others, a gateway OUT because alot of pain and suffering has happened in the name of God, and I don’t want to pretend that isn’t true. 

And I invite you to remember that the name of God isn’t the same as an experience of God which is the divine Mystery. An experience with that mystery is the connection point where we feel met.

In this space I try to be inclusive by using language that is as broad as possible because I’m not attached to a name, I am anchoring this hour together to an experience of a God-connection. That is the pointy end of my ‘ship’ as it cuts us through the water.

And I invite you to use your ‘word’ for God, or to try on this acronym of GOD as the Good Ole I Dunno, or The Mystery if it feels safer for you,  because faith doesn’t happen in what we know, it happens in what we don’t know and yet can feel rested within.     

This is a weekly practice of our connection through the gateway of a word, or a story stone I choose through the readings of my week. That is all we do here. 

This week the story stone is promise. 

There is music: 

This week it’s a piece by Antoine Bradford called promises, and a classic  by John Denver. I have a story stones playlist on Spotify so you can find it later too. 

There is a kid’s conversation and reading:

This week we’re taking a peek at an Inuktitut story, originally held in an oral history, or library, and now in a kid’s book by Michael Arvarrluk Kusugak and Robert Munsch called A Promise is a Promise. 

There is a bible reading:

This week we’re listening into Matthew 5 – from The Message, pieces from the Sermon on the Mount. 

There is a Buddhist perspective from Pema Chodron’s book: The Wisdom of No Escape. 

And a beautiful poem by Sara Teasdale called: Since There is No Escape

All of this is crafted as an invitation and exploration of the word: promise. 

So… shall we begin. 

SOUP

Get comfortable, grab a glass of water or tea, or a bowl of soup, this soup happens to be: a blend of red pepper and tomato soup  by Pacific Foods, to which I’ve added some spinach, some cumin and for the non-veggies out there, some sausage. Yummmm yummmm yummmm….  

Let’s settle in.

I light this candle to remind us that no matter where we are, or what the story is inside our heads, or the story we are currently living, we are never alone. The mystery of our being and how we are held in this space and time, is always with us. We are loved.

INVITATION TO LISTEN:

Let the story of your morning go. It is not of this moment. Let the story of what you think this is going to be go… it is not of this moment. And let yourself be. Listen beyond the words in your head. Open up to listening to the space itself. 

MUSIC

I invite you to listen to the words of Antoine Bradford: Promises on Spotify.

The story stone we are listening into today is the word: Promise.

What is a promise?  Why do we promise things? What is the heaviness and the weightlessness of that word? What are we invited to experience within a promise?

Let’s start with something a little interesting: something kids might understand: 

FOR THE KIDS

This comes from Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak with Robert Munsch 

Kusugak is a celebrated storyteller and author who grew up in Repulse Bay, NWT which is now known as Nunavut. He grew up living a traditional Inuit lifestyle and is the author of twelve children’s books. 

This book A Promise is a Promise  is kind of a scary book, to me. It’s the story of a little girl who is warned not to go fishing between the cracks in the ice in the ocean because a creature Qallupilluit lives under the ice.

Do you think that’s true? 

So why would that story be told?  Let’s read a little?

You can listen to the whole recording of  A Promise is a Promise by Robert Munsch and Michael Kusugak from a readers theatre performance of the story here:

This is one form of a promise. If you do this…  I promise you this could happen… It’s a warning. Where does it come from? 

My favourite scene in this story is the part where Allashua is tucked in bed with her parents and getting warmed up after falling in the ice and she says… I went to the cracks in  the sea ice and her dad says: Ah, ah, not so smart. I called the Qallupilluit nasty names… and her dad says: “ah, ah, not so smart at all…’ 

There she is with frozen lips, crying and feeling pretty bad because a promise is a promise and she broke her promise: she did go to the ice on the ocean. She even challenged the promise her parents warned her about, called it names, and basically dared it to come out… doubting her parents. There she is, probably feeling really awful about what she’s done, and what do her parents do?

Take her to bed, make her some tea, hold her and say ‘ah, ah… yes,  that wasn’t so smart was it?’. As you read on in the book, they don’t lecture her. They don’t blame her. They don’t cast her away or make her feel really  bad – No… they help her, and there’s this great scene where the mom and the dad dance for Qualliliput, even invite them into their house and feed them… 

Now it’s a myth, and as in all myths, there’s always all sides of a story. The ‘darker’ sides the ‘lighter’ sides, and everything in between, and this is a story just like that. 

Life is never as simple as a one-sided promise.

This Inuit story of Qallupilluit is two-sided. It teaches us about the promise of being loved unconditionally, and the promise that there is danger out there. As the book says on the last page:

A Qallupilluq is an imaginary Inuit creature, somewhat like a troll, that lives in Hudson Bay.  It wears a woman’s parka made of loon feathers and reportedly grabs children when they come too near cracks in the ice. 

The  Inuit traditionally spend a lot of time on the sea ice, so the Qallupilluit were clearly invented as a means to help keep small children away from dangerous crevices.  

What promises make you feel like Allalusha or like her parents all tucked up in bed, safe and warm and protected together?

Here’s the thing about listening to a reading, or a story:  in the words of mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw, who says: you can’t trap a story, you can only track the. I invite you to listen… to let the words of each reading wash over you and let what is speaking to you speak… no more, no less.

READING

Empty Promises

Matthew 5 33-37 “And don’t say anything you don’t mean. This counsel is embedded deep in our traditions. You only make things worse when you lay down a smoke screen of pious talk, saying, ‘I’ll pray for you,’ and never doing it, or saying, ‘God be with you,’ and not meaning it. You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true. Just say ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong”

Love Your Enemies

Matthew 5 43-47 “You’re familiar with the old written law, ‘Love your friend,’ and its unwritten companion, ‘Hate your enemy.’ I’m challenging that. I’m telling you to love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst. When someone gives you a hard time, respond with the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal? Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.48 “In a word, what I’m saying is, Grow up. You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. Live generously and graciously toward others, the way God lives toward you.”

Pema Chodra’s: The Wisdom of No Escape
This next reading comes from Buddhist teacher, author, nun and mother, Pema Chodron, an American born Tibetan Buddhist and ordained nun who has written several dozen books and is a  teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. This excerpt comes from her very first book: The Wisdom of No Escape.

“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.”

SERMON

Creator…. God…. Universe… Mystery… As I move forward into the story of  PROMISE today, I thank you for complexity, for individuality, for the promise of acceptance, for the one-ness of us, and the place where we can all meet. 

I acknowledge the story of us that was here before we got here and the story that of us that will be here long after we’re gone.  May the words of my mouth hold your mystery well and be in service to the unfolding of the story of you in us. 

The reading from Matthew comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Even if you’ve never read the bible,  you’ve heard about the sermon on the mount. Okay… so it’s probably a pretty big deal? 

Why?

Within the Sermon on the Mount, at the very beginning we hear the Beautitudes. Ahhh I just love that word: Beautitudes. Lots of oooooh sounds in it. And sounds matter. Just as the Om sound is considered one of the oldest vocal sounds in existence and is considered to be the original, primordial sound, or a mantra of creation. In some sacred circles, the oooh or HU sound said to lead one to transcendence—to God realization and enlightenment.

Last week we listened into the words bless or blessed and blessing which came from the beautitudes. This week we go further into the Sermon on the Mount to listen as Jesus completely changes the rules of morality as they were once known. 

He takes on the commandments and humanizes them. He digs under the narratives we have put on top of them, and instead says: listen ‘When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.’, he says: ‘You don’t make your words true by embellishing them with religious lace. In making your speech sound more religious, it becomes less true.’  And then he says, after challenging us to love our enemies, and reminding us that God (creator, source, universe) gives the sun to warm and the rain to nourish everyone, regardless: if good/bad, nice/nasy; to Grow up. Jesus says: You’re kingdom subjects. Now live like it. Live out your God-created identity. 

He takes the promise of fear which happens when we’re commanded to do something, because what usually happens after a commandment… The Or Else statement. 

Do this or else…

Going back to Allashua in A Promise is A Promise “Don’t fish through the cracks in the  ocean… or else Qallupilluit will get you”. 

Jesus takes away the fear from the commandments and instead simply says: Grow Up. You are kingdom subjects. You do not  need fear or consequences to motivate you, simply live as the God-created identity you are.

The sermon on the mount challenges the usual ‘or else’ promise and offers us a new one: ‘you are loved’, just like Allashua’s parents when they’re all tucked in bed together. 

The hardest line for me in this Matthew reading is: When you manipulate words to get your own way, you go wrong.

How many times have you had the experience of having your ‘words twisted around’, or maybe even had your ‘words used against you’, or worse had an experience where you sat in silence where only ‘part of the story’ was being told. 

Yuck right?

Okay, so I get it.  

And there are times when this happens by mistake, where the person recounting the story simply misunderstood the situation, or had their own version of events which was true for them, just not true for you. That’s the easy peasy application of this piece of scripture, especially where Jesus tells us to ‘love our enemies’. Well that’s easy if we just assume they were having a different experience, and so we’ll just give them some grace and  be done with it. But that’s not what I hear in this scripture. I hear the last line: GROW UP. Live the way God lives towards you. 

Live the way nature lives towards you.

All of these examples feel like and ick. 

So let’s take the hierarchical structure out of the God statement and see what happens.  

Live the way consciousness lives towards you.

Live the way love lives towards you. 

Does nature manipulate?

Does consciousness manipulate? 

Does the energetic frequency of love manipulate?

No.

We do. 

Because we get freaked out. We get hurt. We get angry. We get protective. We get defensive. We get offensive. We get tactical. We go unconscious with our pain and we manipulate. 

There is no faith in manipulation. 

There is no faith in control.

The only true control is faith.

For some of us it’s what we talked about last week when I offered: laying it down. For others it looks like co-creation, and group vs. individual connection or consciousness, still others, faith is a complete surrender or submission.  

None of these are wrong, or more right than the others, because  the one thing they all have in common is acting on the promise of the action of faith.

And yet most of us are Allashua, standing on the shore, ‘testing the waters’. She throws insults out to the mystical Qallupilluit to see if it comes, and when it doesn’t, she thinks, ahhhh… see…my parents’ promise was wrong. 

Their ‘or else’ was wrong. 

And don’t we do that all the time?  Oh we human beings. We are wired for short cuts aren’t we? 

Maybe I don’t have to get 8 hours of sleep.

Maybe they’re wrong and I can eat that processed… whatever.

We even head out there sometimes and search for new promises so that we can have what we want. 

You know, like those stories of “My aunt Vera lived to be 102  and she smoked and drank for her whole life…” 

We start living by the promises we acquire so we can have what we want. 

Those kinds of promises usually sound like: ‘yeah… but that doesn’t apply to me because…’

It’s a slippery slope. 

In Matthew, we are challenged, we are called, we are seen and told to grow up. Oh mannnn easier said than done.

The only promise I know for sure for sure, so it’s truly a promise I can count on is:

1.  We are born – LIFE
2.  We die – DEATH

So this third promise in this promise triangle that we keep hearing about, and yet testing consistently is the promise of LOVE. 

That’s the third side of the promise triangle.

The promise that we are loved.

The promise of who we feel when we live from love.  

The promise of the abundance of love. 

And yet… you can’t prove it.  

You can’t measure it. 

You can’t count on it happening. 

Unless you remember it, and build a life practice around it. 

And for this, I bring us back to Pema Chodra’s offering of: What if there is no escape? What if the only thing we know is that we live and we die. What then? 

Her story talks about the tigers above and the tigers below, and clinging to a vine which a mouse is gnawing at. She is going down. And yet she looks over and sees a beautiful bunch of strawberries. Then just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. She suggests: this might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life. 

There IS no escape. 

When we grab the strawberries, not as a way to hide from the tigers, or bargain with them, or control them, or pretend they aren’t there, but simply to enjoy a strawberry… that is also as true as the tigers – we are in the moment, and in that moment, we are the parents cuddled up around Allashua saying: “yes… I see the tigers, and yes, I am here with you”. 

There is no escape. 

There is DEATH.

There is LIFE.

And there is LOVE. 

I recently had a pretty nasty experience where I felt very insignificant, crushed even. 

There were tigers above and tigers below and the only way I could find the strawberries was the whisper to myself: 

I love you

I love you

I love you

I love you

And this is the practice I offer you.

Simply find a place in your day that is super insignificant, and something you do all the time, like pee… yep… pee… why? Because you do it at least 3x a day, and probably 6-8x per day. 

Here’s the radical invitation:

Every time you pee, as you’re washing your hand, I want you to look in the mirror and say to yourself: I love you, I love you, I love you.

That’s it. 

And I know it sounds weird… but that moment I had a few weeks ago where I literally felt like I was nothing… I went to the bathroom, and without even thinking about it, I said to myself: I love you, I love you, I love you. And in that moment, I came back into my body, and I found the strength I needed to take the next step.

There are three parts to the promise triangle.

I promise you are alive. 

I promise you will die. 

I promise you can love you.

I want to promise that you are loved by the mystery, by God, by the Good Ole I Dunno… and I will, but in the moments where you are drifting, one of the ways you can come back is by reminding yourself of the love you have within you. 

And you do. 

From there, the Good Ole I Dunno connection happens. 

You stay soft.

Your heart is soft.

Your thoughts are soft. 

You are the child in the adult in the wisdom.

You are growing up.

So let’s talk about the third point of the Promise Triangle, and for that, let’s listen to Sara Teasdale: an American lyric poet with a confessional style of writing. She died in 1933 and most of her work deals with love and death and the spiritual beauty of the natural world. 

This is Sara Teasdale’s poem: Since there is no Escape

Since there is no escape, since at the end

My body will be utterly destroyed,

This hand I love as I have loved a friend,

This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;

Since there is no escape even for me

Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:

The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea

And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—

Since darkness waits for me, then all the more

Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore

In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;

In these few hours of light I lift my head;

Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead

If there is any way to baffle death.

What do you hear?

“Life is my lover… there is no way to baffle death”

And there isn’t. 

We are promised this one life, on this human plane. 

We are promised this one death, on this human plane of existence.

Is there more than what we see here?

Maybe. Probably.  

But the only promise we’ve been given is right now, in this place, by this ocean, on this earth, under this sky, with these people.

This is the only promise we’ve been given to do with how we will. 

We can be motivated by fear and the ‘or else’ statements. 

We can be motivated by love and the promise of unconditional love.

We can be motivated by no escape and the invitation of the strawberries.

What I know for sure for sure, is the promise of this one beautiful lifetime and the love we all have access to, always and forever. 

A love we can feed to ourselves:

as nourishment instead of dessert, 

as gentleness instead of armour,

as faith instead of proof…

Then a promise really is a promise, and we can be Allashua, and always come in from the cold where we are loved, held and cared for. 

And may it be so.

I will close on a song that always reminds me of my mom, who wore Chantilly perfume and one day after our mom had passed, as I was listening to this song with my sister Edna, she looked at me and said… Do you smell that? It smells like mom. 

Love knows no time, no plane of existence, no boundaries. Love is the promise. 

The song was:  

Sunshine on my shoulders 

looks so lovely

Sunshine in my eyes 

can make me cry

Sunshine on the water

looks so lovely

Sunshine 

Almost all the time

Makes me high….

MUSIC

I invite you to listen to the words of John Denver: Sunshine on my Shoulders by John Denver on Spotify.

BENEDICTION…

You are loved by the mystery.

You are held by the mystery.

And you are known by the mystery. 

Listen

Listen 

Listen  

Let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.….

See you next Sunday at 2pm…

This is TinaO’s Ministry of Story. She is a sacred-listener in a divisive time, cultivating safe containers for real change-based connecting and conversation. She is a Storyteller rooted in Myth, Mysticism and the Christian Tradition. To Tina, communication is a spiritual practice of listening and following the living story of us. 

Her faith is in the space between us, where two or more are gathered, her trust is in the Mystery and her practice is listening and communicating from there. 

If you would like to receive her weekly Story Stones Sessions in your inbox,  click here to have it sent to you.