The Grace in Listening to Another's Story: A Theological Reflection on Oral History in the Classroom: A Homily for Veterans' Day 2010

Would the juniors here please raise your hands! My prayers are with you over these comings months. I hear from my colleagues in the History Department that you are now embarking upon that annual rite of passage for St. Andrew's Episcopal School juniors known as the "oral history project." While our seniors are slogging their way through the college admissions process, and nervously awaiting its results, you will be hard at work learning the craft of history firsthand.

For you underclassmen who may not know what this is all about: the "oral history project" at St. Andrew's is a many month long project during which juniors are asked to identify ordinary living men and women whose stories are worth recovering, to go out and interview these men and women, to capture their stories on tape or digital media, and then to distill these stories in an official interview transcript and presentation that students then share with the community. Through the project, you learn not only about history but how to do history. ²

The basic insight of the oral history project is that history is not just about the great men and women of the history books: the kings and queens, presidents and statesmen, and warriors and diplomats. Nor is it just about the great events like wars and elections and natural disasters and stock market crashes. History is also about the seemingly little people: the ordinary folk who in mundane and often imperceptible ways participated in and witnessed key events in our national history. Their stories matter too.

While the primary aim of the oral history project is to teach you how to do history, my message to you this morning is that there is a deep theological value in the project as well. The God of the three Abrahamic faiths—of Christians, Jews, and Muslims—is a God who knows and cares deeply about every single human being and every human being's story in all of its unique detail. One of the great and wonderful mysteries of our faith is just this: our God knows and loves each one of us, just as we are, in all our radical particularity, in all our difference. He does not allow our stories to be forgotten.

We hear this time and again in the Bible. In today's lesson, Job laments: "O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book!" (Job 19:23). For those of you who know your Bible, you will remember that Job is that great figure in the Bible who is plagued with one personal disaster after another, whose faith and devotion to God are tested by extraordinary suffering and loss. Job does not know why he is suffering, he does not understand its meaning, but at least he wants someone to hear his story.

In the Book of Job, we are given no easy answer to the problem of suffering. Indeed, it is precisely because the book explores the depths of human suffering with such poignancy and insight, while refusing to whitewash the problem with pious answers, that the book has for centuries had such a profound impact on Western culture. But notice this fact: although Job's suffering is not explained in the Bible, his plight and his relentless search for meaning are shared in the telling and interpretation of his story. Someone did in fact bother to write Job's words down, and, as he so desperately wished, Job's story was indeed inscribed in a book.

Perhaps one of the theological lessons of the Book of Job is that while the ultimate significance of human suffering is for God alone to know and to reveal in His own time, we as His people are in the meantime called to share with one another our various stories of struggle, to give voice to our diverse attempts to find meaning in them, and to bear one another's burdens in the process of weaving our narratives together...