AHSS Gift of Years: Tale-Telling (Lesson 14)

The Hasidim say, “For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest.” It is the distribution of that harvest to the rest of the human community for which we look to the elders among us. Old age is a treasure-house of history – personal, family, national, and world history. What do we do with everything an older generation knows in a culture that does not seek answers from that generation? Every elder in every community is a living story for the people to whom he or she will someday leave the Earth to guide as good, as better, than they did in their own time.

In the older member of every society lies the taproot of that society. It goes down deeper into the past than any others. The elders know where every idea has come from. And why. They know what it means – what it really means – to be family, to be citizen, to be free, to be enslaved. They know the difference between evolution and revolution. And, most of all, they know that there is room for both in the development of the world in which we live.

More importantly, is their ability, their call to pass those stories on to the later generations. Without the passing on of the stories, the young ones are a group without character, without tradition, without the living memory of how and why they came together in the first place.

Family tales are the parables of one generation handed down to the next. They tell us who we are and where we come from. Funeral rituals, the interment of ancestors, became the art form that preserved the values and ideals of the past in special ways. Funerals were a tribal event where the telling of the stories of those who passed away made family the bridge to both past and future. Not long ago, the deceased were laid out in the family homes. But, while it was prayer time for the soul of the dead in the parlor, in the rest of the house it was story-telling time for the living.

Children learned the history of their parents’ own childhood and came to realize what stood to be lost forever in one last breath if the next generation did not take responsibility for maintaining it. The lessons were immortal ones. The tale-telling of the older people became the catechism of the family. These were the life lessons meant to make us all stronger, wiser, and truer. These are the stories that become the living history that binds us together.

Only the old can tell the tales with both conviction and meaning. Only the old bear within their own bodies the truth of each story itself. Only they authenticate our right to live the story, too, in our own times, for the sake of our own children and history and people and nation.

Being tale-bearer is of the essence of growing old. The tale-bearers are proof of the authenticity of the past. They determine what truth will be for all of us. Their stories will carry us all into the days to come. The stories of the majesties of war and not its ghoulishness or the pain of childbirth but not the ecstasy they plant lies in the minds of young ones through omission. When any of us fail to listen to the stories being handed down to us, we lose the opportunity to hear the life lessons and must then learn the hard way ourselves.

Sister Joan says: “The burden of tale-telling is to think that by avoiding our responsibility to be part of living history we will stay forever young. By not telling those who follow us the stories of what it took to get here, we fail the harvest of our own life and the plowing days of theirs. The blessing that comes with tale-telling is the awareness that we have now done our duty to life. We have distilled our experiences to the point that they can become useful to someone younger.”

• Sister Joan writes about older people: “But more important even than their knowledge is their ability their call to pass those stories on to the later generations. Without the passing of the stories, the young ones are a group without character, without tradition without the living memory of how and why they came together in the first place.” What is one family story you heard growing up that instilled in you a sense of character, tradition, or history of your people? Share or log your stories.
• What stories or traditions are you passing on to the next generation? Explain why you chose these. Journal or discuss your answers.