After almost twenty years in the trenches, there are three things I know about Stories.
1.Stories matter. They create power, incite wars, cause trauma, offer healing, feed despair, nourish hope. I am an evangelist for the ministry of stories, mapping their power in order to create a new narrative ethic of accountability. These last 17 years of work with promising leaders from Northern Ireland & Ireland, South Africa, Israel & Palestine, I know first hand the destructive power of old stories of hatred and the creative power of new stories of possibility. Being Half Welsh, half Irish and five/fourths Australian-(never good at math), its time for me to cherish the stories.
2. Stories are never innocent. They are pervasive, perverse, and always dangerous. Whose stories get told, heard and enacted, are all expressions of power. Equally, whose stories are censored, silenced or falsified bear the masks of oppression. Stories hold up our world because we story our lives into meaning, and meaning informs our choices and our actions. The public stories fed to us every day by governments, media, churches and corporations have turned out to be mostly lies. Yet the chance to unleash story power to inspire positive social change has never been more possible or more necessary. After 20 years in the field, its time to move narrative change into a 3.0 hyperconnected world and foster a renewed narrative ethic that treasures honesty over expediency, trust over trust funds, and need over greed. Human decency needs once again to be the coin of the realm.
3. Stories need to be harvested. My own included. 2014 is our time to sum up and share this body of work, by writing the manual-how to change the world by changing the stories. And boy, do we have work to do.! Not just the Middle East, but the economy, climate change, poverty, the environment, the economy, energy, immigration, health care, education. If ever there was a time for a new story and new leadership, that time is NOW. I am eager to meet other story-inspired people out there to help create a social movement for change where WE shape the stories that shape us, not the other way around. That means harnessing the power of stories to humanize, elevate, dignify, instead of pandering to the brands and demands of global capitalism that exploit, cheapen or degrade.
If you have taken time to read this, then consider yourself invited.