Pastoral Story Group Work
Koula Poulos, Jill Sutton: presented at
The 3rd National CAPS Conference, September 06
My background is Greek and as such, I share something with the Ngunnawal people. Just as our indigenous friends find life’s meaning in their narratives about the dreamtime, my father brought me up with the stories of Greeks who went on long adventurous sea journeys. He could barely read so he told us his stories from memory, over and over again. He told them in the way that, Rachel Remen[i], that famous physician and writer celebrates in her book ‘Kitchen Table Wisdom’.
Rachel says, ‘Most parents know the importance of telling children their own story, over and over again, so that they come to know in the tellings who they are and to whom they belong. At the kitchen table we do this for each other. Hidden in all stories is the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story’.
The Greek poet Cavafy’s poem ‘Ithaca’ (you see a few lines of it on the screen) reminds us to pray that our journey will be a long one, full of adventure and discovery. I regard it as great good fortune that I now run story-telling groups for people in aged care facilities who have all been blessed with long journeys and it is a privilege to be present at those many sacred moments when a story is shared and recognised.
This presentation will be in three parts. Firstly, I will continue to introduce my practice of pastoral story group work. Then I will give a few examples of my groups in action and I will finish with a development of the theory of my work, using some of the current literature on aging and spirituality.
What I call my practice of ‘pastoral story group work’ has grown out of my clinical pastoral education studies and work in counselling, welfare management and hospital chaplaincy. I had come to feel that, in one-to-one counselling, I was missing important opportunities to connect people with each other. I had noticed that, if we got together and shared a story in a group, people became much more open to me as individuals. I realised that it is when people feel most vulnerable, as they often do in a hospital ward or residential facility, that their deepest and most in-vulnerable understandings and truths become ripe and ready for sharing. I agree with the worker who said that, when insights are aired in a group, it is as though you open a window to let the sun shine in on them. I discovered that hearing stories not only brings healing, but that it can generate, in a group, what Remen has called a ‘deep trust of life’…a trust which evolves as we realise we are not travelling alone.
It is worth discussing here why I choose to begin with reading stories to a group rather than insisting on the telling of their own stories in their own words. I am certainly aware of Elizabeth MacKinlay’s good work on spiritual reminiscence groups[ii] but I find that a simple shared story helps people to get in touch with the universal themes they have in common. Elaboration of these stories with colourful personal details or insights seems best triggered by a story which is read out to the group first. As we near the end of our lives, our capacity to articulate our particular story may decrease but the recognition of commonalities in our lives through stories becomes more valuable. Even if a story is forgotten immediately after it is told, its sharing can become a sacred moment in the ‘now’.
I have chosen my collection of simple stories so that they can inspire almost anyone, whatever their religion or culture. We chat about our stories, jokes, poetry and we sing our old songs together lustily. I encourage people to get to know each other as they pick up themes or details in their own lives and I celebrate their diversity too. Residents are thirsty for gradations of colour in all the sense dimensions. They love the times when the budgerigar sits on my head while I’m talking, when the dog makes approving growls from under the table or when my friend’s grandchild does an impromptu fairy dance.
I am not afraid to project my story in a loud voice, so that hard-of-hearing residents claim they can ‘hear every word’. Having lived with a deaf father helps me overcome the reluctance of many educated people in our culture to speak up! As we know, some people who have lost their capacity to speak can still respond to a shared story with facial expression, a nod or by remaining in earshot. The sound and cadence of the human voice, telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, can be a great solace to most human beings. Many of us oppose the isolation of refugees in detention centres, and I sometimes wonder if it is because the frail aged are unable to tell us about their experience of loneliness that we remain deaf to their suffering.
Sometimes I feel that the provision of private rooms is like entombing old people before their deaths. One of my friends in an aged care facility sits in the corridor rather than in her room. She strains there to catch the stories of staff and of visitors on their errands and her greatest joy is a pair of socks the son of someone else’s visitor sent her. I love these corridors and public spaces so much I’ve included this slide to remind us of how we have an urgent need to be with each other in public. I find that there is more story-sharing where residents have easy access to a common area which becomes like the village square. Research shows that we communicate at intersections. How sad to find ourselves in dead-end rooms where there is a reduced opportunity for the incidental meetings which are the stuff of life. And, as we are finding, bad things can happen between carer and resident when there is no one to watch or remind us to be sensitive to their needs.
I have a friend who recently complained about this sense of alienation among residents in her response to a meeting about some plans for expensive aged care facilities. She pointed out to the smartly-dressed men who addressed the meeting that it was the care that was provided which mattered more than the style of their purpose-built residences. She reminded the meeting that these places were staffed mainly by women paid at the disrespectfully low rate of about $15 an hour. The only people who congratulated my friend for insisting on speaking up in this way were the tea ladies who served the supper. This slide is to celebrate the wisdom of tea ladies who know a lot about listening.
…But on with the second part of this presentation. Let me give you a few examples of the kind of transcending moments that occur in my groups. One day, I was telling a story about a boy on a fishing trip who asks his father if we can ‘ever see God’ and his father replied, ‘It’s getting as though I can’t see anything else’. This prompted Greg in my group to remember a droving trip, long ago with his father. As they lay looking up at the night sky and counting the stars his Dad had said that it was like seeing God. For a moment, in our mind’s eye, we all lay there with him, in awe of the shared beauty and vastness suggested by this image of stars which you now see on the screen.
After a story about a Greek grandmother being like a ‘bulwark’ despite losing all her offspring to far-off countries and never seeing them again, group-member Mary found new strength as she told us that ‘We all need to remember we are bulwarks and that we are in a line of steadfast people, all of whom have been bulwarks’.
After a Dale Carnegie story about his mother who had always said that she believed that things would work out in the end despite a chain of calamities, Hatty began to remember her own mother. She wept as she told how her mum had lost five sons in the war and then lost her faith and died in her forties. But, Hatty reassured me about the regeneration of her own love, focussed always on her children and grandchildren.
After the 100 monkeys story which is about the contagion of an idea when a critical number of a species has shared it, Ruth got thinking about war. She told the group that it made her think that wise old women should get together so that their impulse for peace might reach a critical mass too. Like the 100 monkeys she vowed that their sheer numbers could, in some way we don’t understand, ignite the action of women everywhere to bring peace to the world.
I tell a story about a man who repayed the kind offer of a glass of milk in his childhood with a life-saving operation when he grew up to be a surgeon. This triggered a conversation about the way we can never know the difference our small kindnesses might make in the long run.
People like my story about a group trapped in a lift on Christmas eve. They relaxed and shared their wine, cheese and stories for a whole five hours. This made group-member Margaret recall the London Blitz. She remembered how, as her neighbours hid underground, they felt much less frightened because they were all able to talk together. Perhaps Caravaggio’s famous painting of Christ’s friends, entranced around the table as he speaks to them, captures this magic of such shared listening.
The story retold in Remen’s book about the re-emergence of all the animals who’d befriended King Arthur when he was a boy is a favourite too. They came back to help him pull the sword from the stone. This reminded Margaret of the way her dead mother’s voice comes back to her when she needs strength or comfort. We talked about that ‘tuck in time’ when friends from the past all join us in the present.
I could go on, but I would like to spend some time sharing evaluative comments which show the value of these moments. Quite often my more articulate group members will explain to me that the initiative of the story-telling groups has transformed their lives in the nursing home… that they would now talk to each other about the stories after I had left and that they had suddenly became interested in how other people saw life’s dilemmas. One woman reports that she looks at people’s faces in the group and that they become radiant as they listen. Another woman has said she’d never been read to as a child. She told me, ‘I’ve never realised how wonderful this could be’. Joan confides, ‘I hope I can find some inner contentment instead of keeping everything in separate compartments’. Groups often ask when I will be coming back and staff have reported that previously agitated residents can be calmer after my stories. Martha had said to me that she thought that a story group wasn’t for her but after she attended she said, ‘I didn’t realise how wonderful it could be’. ‘We all sit here enchanted.’ Those were her words. .
One day I started a group of eight people by asking them to say what makes them feel blessed. Bob just responded that nothing made him happy and what’s more, he wanted to know why such terrible things happen in the world. Then as luck would have it there was some loud drilling in bathroom and Bob, in his gloomy mood, found in this irritating noise a metaphor for life. Things go wrong all the time, he said, and Maria added that the worst thing is seeing your loved ones suffer. I just let the general gloom hang over the group as we pondered life’s tragedies. Then, we shared some songs and brighter stories and, all of a sudden, Bob took an initiative…‘I know’, he said, ‘It’s life itself which is the blessing, that’s really it.’
As Judith Lee[iii] has reminded us in the words of Kierkegaard[iv], ‘being aware of despair is not something that is depressing… for it views each of us through the lens of eternity’s demand on us, that we be spirit’.
People sometimes ask me how I choose my stories and it’s hard to reply. They are usually short, about 500 words and they have a spiritual dimension, chosen with a multi-faith community in mind. They are often humorous and, as Elizabeth MacKinlay [v]reminds us, humour can bring with it ‘enhanced self-esteem and mastery’. More often than not the stories contain some simple colourful details that catch the imagination like a red piano or a blue hat. I re-use much of my material if it works well and people seem to like to recognise the old favourites. The stories usually have some potential for meaningful resolution which can be expressed in the cadence of my voice for those who can’t catch the sense.
Finally, to place my work in the context of some of the literature, I would first mention Michael White’s work with narrative therapy. As you all know, he is keen to use ‘texts of literary merit’ to encourage people to dramatically re-engage with their own life experiences[vi].
As Dostoyevsky suggests in Brothers Karamazov, there is nothing better than ‘a good sacred memory preserved from childhood’. He advises that, ‘If one carries such memories into life, one is safe to the end of one’s days’. An Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, puts it well as he concludes his musings with ‘And this I call to mind… and therefore I have hope… the compassions are new every morning’. These ‘memories’ don’t need to be real in the sense of factual, although they often are. As Ricoeur has explained, ‘we can alter our existence by changing our imaginations’ as we are always ‘groping our way toward the creation of new images’[vii]. It is my view that the images and meanings which we stretch toward in story groups not only confirm individual identity but also encourage us to become ‘prophets of our own existence’, as Maria Harris suggests in her book about religious imagination. I have included this wonderful slide of indigenous art to remind us of the way a shared image can transport us to a new and sacred space.
Sometimes I wonder if we should be talking about a new human right… the right to die among people who know some of our stories. If we die far from our childhood home, as my own mother did, we need other people around us with whom we have had some chance of sharing our stories. Perhaps Socrates didn’t mind drinking his fatal dose of hemlock because he had already taught his stories and philosophy to his friends who surrounded him.
I often recall the story of a friend whose scientific father had progressed far into his dementia illness. He was agitated about a research paper which was incomplete and below standard. He obsessed about it, long after he could speak grammatically, and in the end my friend took him out for a walk in the park in his wheelchair. She sympathised with his problem and then suggested that perhaps he and she could collaborate in fixing it up so it could be published. He was delighted and as they returned from their walk he turned around in his chair. He became confidential and said, ‘that would be very kind of you, as you see, I would really only be a sleeping partner in the publication… you would do all the work.’
I suppose my story groups are a short cut to ensuring that such residents at least have a chance of building the meanings for which they inevitably yearn… but I would love to see more participation from the staff in the activities of my groups. When I invited a staff member to join us as we sang a well-known song recently, he said, ‘O no, that’s not what I do and I haven’t got time.’ I know he is right, but I also know that, if we have not been connected to any part of a person’s story, it is easier to be unfeeling when working with that person. Technical expertise can often take priority over a readiness to engage in laughter and sharing.
But, many of us agree that it is not really that we have unfeeling employees in aged care but that we have inherited an unfeeling culture. We have a society which is collapsing under a terrible outbreak of ‘affluenza’ as Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss[viii] have called it. Nursing homes are the victim of this culture which expects some of its most important work to be done by underpaid staff who struggle to meet the regulations and financial restrictions of their governing bodies. No wonder the churches are increasingly withdrawing from this work and refusing to continue to sponsor residential provision in its present form.
Robert Coles[ix] has suggested that what makes us human is the telling of stories and recognising the grace of meaning which they bestow. Our conclusion is that we should not limit our precious tales to oblivion or to personal therapy sessions. Groups enable us to share ‘the abiding things’[x], as Bishop Burgmann called them long ago, and the more we share, the more grace we bestow on the people around us. As Judith Lee[xi] has explained, our dependency reminds us ‘that mutuality is the deepest of our needs’. Our tea-ladies know that we’ve all ‘been there’, even as they serve the next cuppa.
Thank you.
© Koula Poulos and Jill Sutton
[i] Remen, Rachel, 2002 Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal Pan Macmillan, Australia, ppxxvi-xxvii
[ii] MacKinlay & Trevitt, 2006 ‘Finding meaning in the experience of dementia; a learning guide’ report in CAPS newsletter, V4, no 1, June 2006
[iii] Lee, Judith, 2003 ‘A Village of Old Children’ J. Relig Gerontology, V15, No3
[iv] Thompson, Heather, 2004 ‘Spirituality of Later Life’ J. Relig Gerontology. V16, Nos3/4
[v] MacKinlay, Elizabeth, 2004. ‘Spirituality of Later Life’ J. Relig Gerontology. V16, Nos3/4
[vi] White, Michael, 2005 ‘Michael White Workshop Notes’ cited on 3/6/2006 at www.dulwichcentre.com.au
[vii] Harris, Maria, 1991, Teaching & Religious Imagination p4, 5, Harper Collins, NY
[viii] Hamilton, Clive and Denniss, Richard Affluenza
[ix] Coles, Robert, 1989, The Call of Stories Houghton Mifflin, Boston
[x] From Bishop Burgmann’s quote outside the Centre for Christianity and Culture
[xi] Lee, Judith, 2003 ‘A Village of Old Children’ J. Relig Gerontology, V15, No3
