Sharing Circles

The real reason we are here

During the years when I was part of Unitarian Universalist congregations, an activity that I found to be the most satisfying was something called “covenant groups” or “chalice circles.”

Groups of 6-8 people committed to meeting once or twice a month for approximately two hours each. Agenda topics ranged from the simple (humor, best loved books, travel experiences) to the profound (forgiveness, money, aging). The agenda was comprised of quotes and readings. These led into 3-4 questions that each attendee was invited to respond to in turn.

Why I found this appealing

Over time, the people in my covenant group became some of my closest friends. I got to know them in 3D through knowing their life journeys. I am sure they got to know me in the same way as well.

I had grown up in a society where I had daily interacted with people of differing ages, education levels, and socio-economic classes. These interactions had taken place as a result of the lifestyle, even while I was fully engaged in my family, education, and job.

In contrast, my everyday life as an adult in America was, in current lingo, optimized to focus on family/work commitments. I imagine most people experience some version of when they have a young family. But my situation was more extreme because I lacked a social network of parents, siblings, relatives, college friends… people with whom I shared a past and expected to share a present and a future. This had led to what I came to see as a one-dimensional and artificially texture-free life. Self-focused and disconnected from the human condition.

My covenant group filled this lack and made it possible for me to feel less atomized.

Storytelling

Maybe all it was, was a hunger for stories. To know others’ stories and to tell my own. And, through some alchemy to feel seen, enriched, supported.

In my day job, I was creating websites for surveys (designed by psychologists) that were meant to help corporate employees become more self-aware and therefore more productive at work.

One survey was about the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state of a person. While most of the survey questions were on the usual 5-point scale, one section was entirely comment based. It was called the Storytelling survey and it had two or three simple questions of the kind “The high point in my life so far has been:” It was an invitation for the survey participants to get in touch with their inner lives and articulate what mattered to them.

I occasionally reviewed the data because, as a personal project, I was trying to find the major themes in the tens of thousands of data points/narratives available to me. I consistently found myself affected by the responses to this question. People wrote with feeling and nuance. One of the most common responses to the question about the high point of the person’s life was “the birth of my child.”

(As an aside, the short survey section that children in the 10-18 age range were invited to complete asked a question about their relationship with their parent. The most common theme was “I would like to spend more time with mom/dad.” This was poignant to me. These two sets of responses taken together provided a snapshot about the state of corporate employment in the country and its effect on families. Unfortunately, neither my employer nor our client was interested in such a meta analysis.)

Over years of working with this survey, I came to realize the importance of storytelling for self and for others. When we tell our stories we become visible to ourselves and can affect those who engage with our stories. In turn, we feel more connected, and transformed even, when we come in contact with others’ stories.

When it came my turn to create an agenda for the covenant group, is it any surprise that I chose Storytelling as the topic?!

My storytelling agenda

Welcome and Opening Thoughts 

• Welcome to this gathering! We have come together to create a sacred space where we can step aside from our everyday busyness and concerns, and spend our brief time together in companionship, reflection, and wonder. 

• Throughout history, stories have served to pass on cultural and practical knowledge from one generation to another—think fables, myths, tales around the campfire, or stories around the kitchen table. Today’s meeting is an invitation to share our own stories. Events, experiences, or encounters that left a mark. We hope to learn from our own reflections, and from the thoughtful exchange of our thoughts and experiences with each other.

Statement of Intention 

• Let us honor everyone’s privacy. 

• Let us respond with appreciation, never judgment. 

• Let us make sure everyone has a voice in the conversation.

Sharing and check-in, followed by group responses and support

• How have you been since we last met? And how are you today—spiritually, emotionally, physically?

Thoughts to guide today’s session 

• It has been said that next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling—Kahlil Gibran 

• Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more living—Madeleine L’Engle 

• Results repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story. In fact, stories seem to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence— Jonathan Gottschall 

• The most basic and powerful way to connect with another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words—Rachel Naomi Remen

Sharing and deep listening

After each person has shared, we will have a minute of silent reflection. Then we will respond to the speaker. This way, each speaker will get deep listening and full engagement. Tell a story about:

1. something that happened to you as a child

2. something that happened to you as an adult

3. a time when you changed your mind about a person or about a deeply held belief/value

Gathering

This is our time to supportively respond to something another person said or to relate additional thoughts that may have occurred as others shared.

Closing 

• Each story is a piece of us, a gift to the world. May each story we heard today help us become more connected to ourselves and to universal humanity. May our search for community with each other deepen our perception of ideas and forces that are both within and greater than ourselves. 

Conclusion

I am no longer a member of any Unitarian Universalist community. For a variety of reasons—mainly mismatch with their racialist narrative—I don’t expect to rejoin. I miss the many ways that being part of a faith community offered to connect with strangers who became friends. Book clubs, writing groups, movie clubs, dining out, circle dinners, all conducted under an umbrella of goodwill. Of these, I miss most the covenant group in which I participated for over three years.

I no longer recall the finer points of the stories that I heard during those meetings. But I do remember the people and their openness to being authentic and vulnerable. Like the contours that ocean waves leave on a sandy beach, the stories leave their contours on our souls. Or, as Maya Angelou eloquently put it:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other's cooking & to know each other’s stories & say it was good.

---

Photo 1 by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash

Photo 2: Real Reason Print (storypeople.com)