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by Brandon Beck

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

These lines are from the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, The Overstory by Richard Powers (Norton, 2018, 9780393635522). Indeed, fiction and story continue as tools of change. (Note that I am not indicating that fiction and story are the same or interchangeable but that they can overlap.) The news media played a role in the views of the civilian perspective on US involvement in Vietnam; an example of this is the publication of the AP photograph taken by Nick Ut of Kim Phúc outside Trăng Báng after a US napalm airstrike in April of 1963. This photo story changed minds in ways that arguments hadn’t before.

This method of storytelling is a Biblical tool to changing minds, as well.  In fact, Jesus’s constant refrain, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!” is echoed by Powers’s, “Listen. There’s something you need to hear.” And Jesus changes minds through stories – good stories – not by arguing. His followers go on to use that same model. The Bible is, itself, a collection of stories – stories of Creation, of History, of Theology, of Wisdom, of Prayer – a collection of the stories upon which we base what little understanding of our God we have. From studying these stories and telling these stories, we change our own minds and the minds of others along that proverbial “arc of the moral universe” that is “long, but…bends toward justice.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

As we take our experiences, tradition, scripture (and interpretation), and reason to the General Convention with us, I pray that we remember to tell each other stories and ask to hear each other’s stories. I pray that we listen to each other. There’s something we each need to hear, and it’s possible that any one of us could change anyone else’s mind about anything.

May we all be given just a little more of the gift of the Scribe as outlined in Sirach 38-39 – that powerful wisdom to discern, to listen, and to study – so our understanding of scripture, tradition, and reason truly form a three-fold cord of strength and beauty, able to be tied to each other in creating change and not frayed apart in controversy.

Amen.