Together we Create a Story

Life is what you make of it...
Psychologist Jerome Bruner was quoted in Gerard Hauser’s text, Introduction to Rhetorical Theory, arguing “the point that these culturally influenced cognitive linguistic processes that shape the telling of our life story also condition the way we perceptually experience, remember, organize, and ascribe purpose to the events of life,” (188). Bruner’s claim generated a question from my class peer Kenny McCray about the potential self-impediment of experience(s) due to our past encounters and understandings.
It is important to consider Hauser’s point of “rightness,” when considering the latent challenges that may be posed by our understandings; “standards of rightness apply to my life story as much as my account of last Saturday’s football game” (188). It is important to know what has value within your life. It is important to understand the core values that make-up the foundation of your life and how they were developed. Who were the people in your life that helped you grow into those values? What experiences did you have that either confirmed or opposed your beliefs, making them stronger, or opening the opportunity of change? In this sense it is imperative that one pays attention to stories and events that seem important to us, to remember, reflect and discern upon their impact within our lives.
However, as Kenny suggested there is a chance that by focusing too much on the life experiences and stories of our own lives, that we miss the opening to learn from another story. I traveled to along the coast of Italy, into Bosnia and Croatia for two weeks during my freshman year of college to study the evolution and significance of the Catholic Church and the Catholic faith. I traveled to Medjugorje, Bosnia where for over twenty-years now has been the site where six witnesses have testified the Blessed Virgin Mary appears to them to bestow messages of compassion, love, and hope.
As an individual who has struggled with faith, and organized religion I entered Bosnia skeptically, expecting to gain very little from the experience. Yet, as I stood on an ancient cobbled street in the pouring rain, against a hillside of uneven rocks and mud, amongst two-hundred people, waiting in anticipation for Vicka Ivanković, one of the six individuals to receive apparitions, I was overwhelmed. Vicka Ivanković delivered the message she had received from the Blessed Mother in Bosnian. Her message was translated into 6 different languages, English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Croatian, and Vietnamese. Vicka spoke about her experience of hiding as young child in the early 1980’s from political oppression because of the “Catholic messages” she had been receiving. She described the hope and sense of warmth that she received from her belief and faith in the church and the Blessed Mother. Although, I myself did not connect to Vicka’s message about the church, I gained an incredible perspective on the significance and need for there to be something in the world that people can look to for support and explanation. Even though I do not find explanation in the mystery of God and the Catholic faith, there are those who do.
Considering my own story in the hills of Bosnia, I believe that with an open mind Hauser’s “rightness” can be found in any story, and our personal “blinders” can be mostly removed. It is not always an easy challenge to be open to the story of others, yet life is what you make of it, and it is always more interesting when you are not the only character in it.