You know, we really need fairytales. We need songs. We need stories and poems and proverbs and other expressions of human creativity and experience. This is not extra – a bit of liberal arts fluff, as many claim with a patronizing smile. No, this is central to the development of what I call a compassionate imagination – the ability to imagine what life is like for someone else and to care about it.
As Europe bakes in record-breaking heat, as Italy reports a stunning 70% failure of its crops and food shortages seem imminent, we have elected leaders in this country who consider all of this somehow “extraneous” to the business at hand, which always seems to be making money. Money to buy cars and swimming pools. Money to buy politicians. Money to build a little wall and hide out from the dangerous world of dangerously poor people. People who are increasingly hot and bothered for literally very good reasons.
I sometimes think these people have had a heart-ectomy, but of course they are not alone. All of us have to give up little parts of our hearts just to live in this world in which the poor and vulnerable, the sick and small are kicked around by people with big advertising budgets and fancy slogans. We have to look away from suffering or we drown in sorrow.
But stories and songs remind us to renew our pact with life, with people, and with this world. They open us up to feeling and to using those feelings in a wise way to fuel our thoughts. They break down the illusions of difference between us and them and even between here and there.
Tarraingíonn scéal scéal eile, says the proverb: one story draws another. Stories ignore walls and differences and status. They connect, they float past the guard of the gated community, they swirl into our ears and hearts and draw us together.
This is not extra. This is life itself, embodied and distilled in human exchange. Without the development of that compassionate imagination, the plight of the sweltering Europeans is just something they’re enduring “over there.” And that leads to a failure of imagination about what is soon coming to town, my friends. There is a larger story being told on Earth right now, but we must be open to hear it.
When we close our ears to stories, we close our hearts to life.
PS – The beautiful woman pictured above is Peig Sayers, known in Ireland as Banríon na Scéalaíochta, the Queen of Storytelling. She was a woman of great heart, imagination, intelligence, and power.
