My Story is Your Story
Day 17
Buechner concludes Chapter 3, The Laughing Room of Maya Angelou, by telling one final story about his time with Angelou.
“The other thing Maya Angelou said that moved me was when the two of us were being introduced [at the event at which we both spoke]. I had given my lecture first, which was based, as I said, on my spiritual autobiography, and after I was done, this fellow introduced Maya, saying, “Ms. Angelou will now get up and tell you her story, and it will be a very different story from the one that you have just heard from Frederick Buechner.” As he said that, Maya Angelou, who was sitting in the front row and shaking her head from side to side, got up, and she said he was wrong. She said, “I have exactly the same story to tell as Frederick Buechner.” I was very touched by that because in so many ways, what stories could be more different? I’m a man and she’s a woman, I’m white, she’s black, she grew up in dire poverty while by comparison I grew up with riches, though God knows we weren’t rich, and yet she said it’s the same story. And what she meant I think is that at a certain level we do, all of us, with all the differences, we do all have the same story. When it comes to the business of how do you become a human being, how do you manage to believe, how do you have faith in a world that gives you 14,000 reasons every week not to believe, how do you survive—especially surviving our own childhoods as Maya Angelou survived hers and we’ve all survived ours—at that level we all have the same story, and therefore anybody’s story can illuminate our own.
“And that’s the only reason I have, the only justification, to tell you my story. Who gives a hoot about my story? But you can give a hoot about it because also it’s in many ways your story.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p53.
To help you reflect…
Reflect on the stories of other people’s lives that have made an impact on you. They could be stories told by people you’ve met or they might be stories you’ve read or they might be stories you’ve seen presented in films. Notice any themes.
Consider that these stories are also your story. What might they help to illuminate in your own life’s story?
