Hi friends - After seeing Avatar: The Way of Water I'm thinking (again) about transformative storytelling, moving beyond "us" versus "them", and offering creative alternatives to polarisation and violence; I'm also thinking about the struggle, imagination, and grace of stepping into being a transformative storyteller, and how every single person reading this essay is invited to the same. Some further thoughts on Avatar below, and then an invitation.
There's some lovely stuff in The Way of Water - the most obvious being the visual splendor and invitation to dive into some of the most welcoming aquatic environments I've seen outside the real thing. There's no lack of clarity about filmmaker James Cameron's desire to have the audience take our stewardship of the ecosystem seriously, as well as how selfish egotism drives so much rapaciousness: The Way of Water features a substance that stops humans aging, so it's merely an inconvenience that the bad guys have to kill an ancient, glorious, and peaceful creature to get it.
Also, Avatar's portrayal of tension and relationship between two different tribes on the miraculous planet of Pandora is a valuable provocation to think about how we need to enlarge our sense of "us". If only it had the clarity of its own convictions to follow them to the end - because the way Avatar deals with its antagonists is pure redemptive violence. It seems to be saying that yes, of course we should try to transcend "us" versus "them" behavior, but in order to get there, we really need to kill a lot of "them" first.
I don't want to make the folks who made Avatar into a "them" - Cameron and the thousand or so other people who devote their gifts and skills to that cinematic universe have made a film that is often incredibly beautiful, and not entirely without compassion for enemies. It also does something rare in action movies by featuring a community rather than an individual at the heart of the matter; and recognizes that heroes often suffer, finding no easy comfort. But it still follows the mythic/ethical tracks of separation and violence laid down before any of us got here, and doesn't critique them or offer an alternative to the story that the way to resolve violent conflict is (mostly) to kill the bad guys.
It's possible that the further Avatar sequels will evolve in the direction of challenging redemptive violence, propose a less lethal strategy, or more fully embrace what it would mean to let go of "them", because there is only us. It might even go as far as what Charles Eisenstein suggested in his gorgeous book The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, that a character representing the humans oppressing the Pandorans might somehow find themselves looking around at their exquisite world and being overcome with its beauty enough to lay down their weapons. Instead of being killed or beaten into submission, they might convert to Reality (which is to say a commitment to radical love as a way of life) through the act of simply becoming grateful. I hold out the possibility of future Avatars heading that direction partly because I see the seeds of such enlightenment in the two Avatars that already exist, and in interviews that Cameron has been giving; but even more so in his earlier film The Abyss, in which the myth of redemptive violence is overcome - literally - by love.
These things aren't superficial matters - the substance of the stories we tell really does shape our lives, from the smallest detail of how we get up in the morning to the most ungraspably large dimensions of religion, politics, culture, war and peace.
We're all witnessing multiple stories in any given day, and we're all storytellers too. Some of us have a growing sense that we are called to become more conscious about the stories we're telling.
Some of us do it for a living, as writers, musicians, film and TV makers, religious or community leaders, employers, therapists and spiritual directors, bakers, chocolate makers and people who lead others on hikes in forests.
But whether or not storytelling is part of your job, if you're aware that the how and the what of telling and living a better story is part of your purpose, I want you to know that our Porch Gathering in March is intended to help you connect with ways of thinking, doing, and being that will deepen your capacity to imagine the story that you are called to share. We'll be gathering 100 or more people to reflect on how to tell and live a story that is more true, and more helpful than the ones that so often dominate. This will be story medicine - both in terms of the need to heal the stories we tell and to be healed from the damaged stories we've heard. We'll have activists and therapists, writers and musicians, people who love running up mountains and folks who are most at home in a rocking chair. We'll talk about changing our cities by the stories we tell, moving beyond the tyranny of the story that says vocation is a fixed "blueprint" of what we're "supposed" to do with our lives, and pay some attention to the light-giving "cracks" in our stories too. (And among other things we'll be screening one of the movies that most understands that you can't kill your way to peace; but that you can tell such a story in the form of an action movie that is also deliriously entertaining.)
The practice of learning and sharing a better story can be lonely, especially when stories of separation, self-centeredness, and scapegoating are so well-funded and loudly told. But the most profound stories often began as the smallest; the wisest and most integrated storytellers are frequently to be found far away from the limelight. Indeed, you can't become wise without becoming small; the message with most life-giving meaning for the world must be forged in hidden places; that which is most worth shouting from the rooftops must be tested by inner silence first.
We do, however, need companions on the journey - though we're not trying to build an army of "nice" storytellers to defeat the Goliath or Godzilla of market-driven ones. What we're doing instead is convening a community of people who sense the call to question our cultural stories when they are not life-giving; and who recognize that one of the stories worth questioning is the myth that something must be popular or "big" in order to be true.
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If these words call to you, then I want to invite you especially to the Porch Gathering. There are stories to tell, imagination to be awakened, good work to be done. We need each other to support the process of discerning a more true and more helpful story, and not only how to tell it, but how to live it. Details are at www.theporchgathering.com.
Thanks friends - whether or not the Porch Gathering is for you, my heartfelt wish for you in 2023 is simple: wherever you are, may you step into a story that is more true, and more helpful; weaving and being woven into a community that imagines a more peaceful, connected, and whole life for everyone.
