Little Stories of Christmas and the Big Story of God’s Love

Alejandro García-Rivera is highly regarded as a professor of theology who mentored more than three dozen graduate students and directed more Latina and Latino theologians in their doctoral dissertations than any other scholar.¹ He is even more known for his own impressive production of theological works.² One of García-Rivera’s most frequently-cited claims is his insistence that what he calls the “little stories” of everyday life reveal the “Big Story” of God’s love for humanity, and indeed God’s love for all of creation. García-Rivera’s initial development of this insight was in his first book, the 1995 work St. Martín de Porres: The “Little Stories” and the Semiotics of Culture. That volume examines testimonies from the beatification process of San Martín de Porres, the son of an African mother and Spanish father in colonial Peru whose life, deeds, and holiness are narrated in the fascinating testimony accounts. Employing the semiotic method and insights gleaned from thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Eugene Genovese, and Robert Schreiter, García-Rivera explores the interrelations between the “signs, codes, and messages” of the Martín de Porres testimonies to uncover the “cultural text” of colonial Latin American societies. He contends that the “violent and unequal encounter of cultures” is a core sociohistorical dimension of the colonial cultural text that witnesses for San Martín’s beatification sought to subvert through their storytelling.³

Many who admire such scholarly analyses, as well as García-Rivera’s mentoring contributions, remain relatively unaware of his publications in popular pastoral and theological journals. A key concept underlying many of these publications is the relation between the little stories and the Big Story that García-Rivera addresses in the St. Martín de Porres book, although in that work, and in subsequent treatments of the concept, he does not limit the relationship between the Big and little stories to a single definition. Rather, he employs these terms as a wide-ranging metaphor to reflect on the interconnectedness between the everyday elements of our lives—what Latina and Latino theologians call lo cotidiano—and the larger realities so powerfully revealed in ordinary life, if we but have the eyes to see them. For example, in St. Martín de Porres, García-Rivera contrasts the Big Story of the “Old” and the “New World.” He avows that in the era of colonial conquest, the European concept of humanity revolved around reason, while in the Americas, testimonies such as those about the life of San Martín revealed deeper truths: the uniqueness of each human person as a creation of God and our innate longing for communion with one another and ultimately with God. Thus, the little stories San Martín’s admirers told about him corrected the Big Story of European conquerors and conveyed the biblical Big Story about human creatures and our vocation “to know and love God.”⁴

At the same time, in the St. Martín de Porres volume, García-Rivera also associates little stories with a people’s popular faith expressions. In a subsequent article, tellingly titled “Listen to Catholicism’s Little Stories,” he further articulates this devotional dimension. He notes that “the little stories of popular devotion have a charm and profundity that somehow reveal the ‘Big Story’ of the Church. The little stories of the faithful reveal the profound imagination of the Church. And in that imagination, the Big Story of our faith is visualized.”⁵ In a word, for García-Rivera the little stories of our lives are windows into the big stories that shape our existence, and the ultimate Big Story is God’s boundless love for human creatures and for the beautiful world of God’s creation. Though God made each of us as unique creations, our commonalty is that each of our lives is a wondrously exquisite microcosm of that ultimate Big Story.

Part of his genius is that García-Rivera was a master of unveiling the Big Story in the little stories of people’s...