STORIES TO LIVE BY

BY ROBERTWUTHNOW

“Zf we are concerned about transmitting ethical ideals

to the future, for ourselves and for our children, we
would be wise, then, to embed these ideals in stones.
. . .[P]eople remember the caring they have expen-
enced and recall these experiences by telling stones.
But stones do more than keep memories alive. Some-
times these stones become so implanted in our minds
that they act back upon us, directly andpowerfully. We
find ourselves acting them out. The characters in our
stones show us how to behave.

“F
RANKIE lies on a hill now. Toward the north is the hill
where Central High School looms and where her princi-
pal used to talk about heroes. Maybe three miles away to
the southeast is the house where she spent the first nine years of her
life-and that is on a hill also. And a way off beyond the environs of
Fountain City and Knoxville, bigger ridges stand purple. You might
imagine that Frankie was up there somewhere, waltzing; she’d always
loved to dance.
“She could be, too. Could have been dancing with her darling, and
snuggling delightedly with him in bed, running through life with all the
verve, perplexity, heartbreak and exultation of any young wife during
5000 nights and days of these past fifteen years.
“Except that something made her go back into that airplane cabin
eleven times, and eleven times was just one time too many.
“A crashed airplane is strictly for the stalwart men in asbestos suits
and masks. It is not for the petite little Miss Pretty-not unless she is a
Mary Frances Housley. Then she has such love in her heart that no
high-octane explosion can ever blast it out.”’
So concludes the heart-rending account of a young stewardess who
gave her life that others might live. Five short pages in a magazine
purchased at the supermarket, tossed in between the tomatoes and
canned soup. On the next page, as if to relieve the reader of these
weighty reflections, are humorous quips about neighbors and police,
haberdashers and traveling salesmen. But one would have to be
Robert Wuthnow is Professor of Social Sciences and Director of the Center for the
Study of American Religion at Princeton University. His research on currents in
contemporary American religion is reflected in his many writings, especially The
Restructuring ofAmerican Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (1988) and The
Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicalim, Liberals and Secularism (1989). His most
recent book is Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspectives on Religron in Contemporary Society
(1992).
‘MacKinlay Kantor, “A Girl Named Frankie,”Reader’s Digest (May 1966), pp. 86-90.

296
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 Stones to Live By 297
calloused to the quick not to be moved by the story of Mary Frances
Housley.

I
As we reflect on life in the twenty-first century, we surely must hope
that goodness and mercy, even of the extreme kind demonstrated by
Mary Frances Housley, will be preserved. Traditionally, it has fallen to
the church to pass on such ethical ideals. In the future, the social role
of the Christian will hopefully include the ethical life, a life of caring
and compassion for those in need.
But how can the ethical ideals of the past be transmitted effectively
to the coming generation? In science fiction, the future is depicted as
one in which chemicals, computers, hypnosis, and other means of
brainwashing are used to transmit the society’s ideals. Will the church
be replaced by these means?
Ethicists would, of course, say no. But ethicists pose a different, and
perhaps equally debatable, scenario of the future. Russell Hardin, for
example, suggests in his book Morality within the Limits of Reason that
we cannot transmit our ethical standards to the next generation with
effectiveness until we have grounded these standards more clearly in
the detached logic of rational utilitarianism. In his view, we must weigh
the goodness of various outcomes by applying the principles of
probability calculations and game theory, and make our ethical
decisions according to those considerations.2 Others have taken a
similar approach. Jiirgen Habermas, for example, pins his hopes for
the future of ethics on the ability of dispassionate people to thematize
their interests and communicate about these underlying themes in
rational terms.3
I have the greatest respect for these philosophers and their efforts to
save a place in the intellectual domain for ethical deliberation. But I
doubt whether this is the domain in which hard ethical choices will
actually be hammered out in the future. I do not mean that we must
opt for emotivism in favor of the intellect. How we think about ethical
questions is of enormous importance, but our thinking is less likely to
be shaped by the abstract claims of the philosopher than by the
concrete tutelage of the storyteller. Indeed, if we turn to other
philosophers, we find a growing recognition of the importance of
stories. Alasdair MacIntyre, of course, emphasizes the role of narra-
tive in creating communities of memory. Stanley Hauerwas extends
this idea specifically to questions of ethical commitment. He observes:
“We rightly discover that to which we are deeply committed only by
having our lives challenged by others. That challenge does not come

*Russell Hardin, Morality within the Limits of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
3 0 n Habermas, see my discussion in Robert Wuthnow et al., Cultural Analysis
(London:Routledge, 1984).

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298 Theology Today
only from without but rather is entailed by narrative that has captured
our live^."^
Others, also writing with a particular interest in the relationship
between religion and ethics, have arrived at similar conclusions.5 But
whether their claims are correct, and if so, in what manner, questions
remain that must be addressed in real-life situations. I will attempt to
demonstrate the power of stories as vehicles of ethical transmission,
not through a theoretical argument about their nature, but by
recounting from the lives of real people with whom I have talked how
they learned the great biblical truth of loving one’s neighbor as
oneself.6

I1
Stories of brave people like Mary Frances Housley are an extremely
important feature of American culture. They are simply more extreme,
more vivid, more heroic versions of the stories that are a part of
everyone’s autobiography. In talking with people who had learned the
value of caring, I discovered that everyone has stories to tell about the
compassionate people they have known, heard of, read about, or
admired from afar. They had read stories and seen films about famous
men and women of compassion, such as Mother Teresa of Calcutta,
Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. They also had moving stories to
tell about friends, relatives, and other personal acquaintances who had
shown them what it means to be compassionate. They had learned how
to care by being cared for themselves, and they had encoded these
lessons in vivid personal narratives.
For many of us, stories of being cared for take us back to our
childhoods, especially to our mothers. In the vestiges of our memories
lie images of goodness that can become powerful models later on. Our
mothers embody compassion. We remember how they cared for us,
how they cared for others. Their example makes us think caring is
primordial.
I remember vividly one elderly man who recounted the following
story from his childhood: “When I was eight years old I got typhoid
fever. I was in the hospital for five weeks. And, you know, my mother
only missed one night during all that time spending the night with me
in the hospital. That really stands out.” He said he had always thought

4Stanley Hauerwas, “Casuistry as a Narrative Art,” Interpretation 37 (1983), p. 380.

5For overviews, see Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989) and John C . Hoffman, Law, Freedom, and Story:
The Role of Narrative in Therapy, Sociefy, and Faith (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press, 1986).
6The accounts presented in the following sections are from in-depth personal
interviews conducted in several different parts of the country as part of a study of
individualism and altruism in the United States; all the names and other identifying
information have been falsified. For a description of the research methodology and more
detail on many of the characters discussed here, see my Acts of Compassion: Caringfor
Others and Helping Ourselves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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 Stones to Live By 299
of his mother as a caring person, but it was really that event that he
always recalled most clearly.
Similarly, a young man who spent many of his odd hours volunteer-
ing with the handicapped remembered the example his mother (and
sister) had set for him through a business she operated: “Back in the
sixties my mother opened an ice cream store right across from the city
hall. She had a spare room in the back, so she turned it into a teen
center where kids could come and hang out. My sister ran that. My
mother was the authority figure, and my sister was the friend people
could relate to. Kids would come to my mother with questions like, ‘I’m
pregnant, what should I do?’ And they’d come to my sister with
questions like, ‘I’m having trouble with my boyfriend, can I tell you
about it?’ Between the two of them, they really modeled what caring
should be about.”
Another young man described the caring he had experienced from
his mother metaphorically: “Her whole life was a smile.” For many of
us, the compassion we saw in our mothers is the inspiration for our own
caring, as parents, volunteers, or friends. Our mothers provide us, as it
were, with role models. But these models become operative for
us-they shape our ethical conduct-because we have encoded their
behavior in stories. The future of such conduct will undoubtedly
depend on the continuing power of these stories about our mothers.
“She is the most caring and the most compassionate person I have
ever known,” is how one woman, a leader in the Mothers Against
Drunk Driving movement, described her mother. “She cares about
people; she cares about children; she loves children; she makes sure
you feel good about yourself.” At that moment her train of thought was
interpreted by a loud cry of “Mommy!” from the next room. After
dealing gently with her son’s pleading, she resumed, describing how
much her mother’s example had influenced her own attitudes toward
child-rearing. “I hope I love my own kids the way she loved us. She just
spent lots of time holding us, loving us. She always said the housework
could wait, but kids wouldn’t; they just grow up on you. I really believe
that. What you do for your children when they’re little is so important
when they’re grown. So, you know, I just kiss my kids a lot and love
them and, you know, spend time with them and tell them lots of
stories.”
Fathers, I have found, are often the subjects of stories illustrating
compassion, too, although not as frequently, it seems, as mothers. A
young businessman who had followed closely in his father’s footsteps
recalled that his father had always tried to be scrupulously ethical, but
also compassionate, in the way he conducted business. One specific
story that stood out in his memory involved a man whose business had
failed. “ ‘What do you do?’ my father asked. ‘Let him starve or help
him get back on his feet?’ So my father found a way to get him back in
business. And the guy was overcome. He said, “at, how can I help
you? I’ll give you some of my best produce.’ But my father said, ‘Wait a

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300 Theology Today
minute. You don’t have to do that. Just be a good guy, you know, like
you’ve always been. You actually gave me the opportunity to do
something good.’ ”
Some people-the fortunate among us-are able to describe both
their fathers and mothers in glowing terms as models of caring and
compassion. A retired woman who spent time each week doing
volunteer work at the local library remembered the sacrifices her
parents had made for their children and the hard work that still
reminded her of how much they cared for her. They had been
immigrants and did not have much education, she said. “But one thing
they taught us as children was the importance of giving of yourself.
They always said the country has given you a lot, and you have to give
something in return. I think I’ve carried that since childhood.”
Another woman said simply that she felt very lucky because her
parents had showered her with warmth and affection.
But many of us are not so lucky. The caring we received as children
provides no model of compassion. It is something we would rather
forget, something we hesitate to mention. Our mothers did not show us
how to care. Neither did our fathers. We cannot turn to their example
to find stories of compassion or of other ethical ideals. And, as we look
to the future, we must recognize, sad as it may be, that this will be the
experience of a growing number of children in our society. Divorce will
leave its scars. Child abuse will leave its scars, too, literally.
This was the experience of Marge Detweiler, a woman now in her
late forties, divorced, who runs her own printing business. She is a
deeply caring person who does volunteer work, helps people with drug
abuse and alcoholism problems, and tries hard to be a witness to the
unconditional love she believes is embodied in God. But she can think
of nobody who exemplified caring and compassion while she was
growing up. Her father committed suicide when she was a year and a
half old. She describes both her mother and her grandfather, who lived
with her mother, as drinking alcoholics. “Since that was the only thing
I knew, I thought it was typical. I found out later, no, that it’s not.” She
says there was no physical violence, but she was subjected to a great
deal of “emotional battering.” Mostly, she just grew up being confused
about love and how to behave in order to receive it. She remarks, “It
was just hard to figure out why you were told one time if you do it this
way you’ll get loved, and then the next time that wasn’t right.”
Sometimes her mother tried to show love by buying her something. But
Marge never experienced that as genuine caring. Instead, she found
herself struggling to take care of others’ needs without really knowing
how to. She says, “Both my mother and my grandfather were very
needy people, and since I was the oldest child they did a lot of
depending on me to meet their needs, which was really dumb. No
wonder I was confused. No thirteen year-old can meet an adult’s
needs.” It was not until years later, when she became involved in
Alcoholics Anonymous, that she found the unconditional love she had

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 Stones to Live By 303
always wanted. Only then was she able to begin showing compassion to
others.
Here is another example: Janet Russo, a tough, outspoken woman
who spends time each week as a volunteer at a shelter for abused
women, admits that she has mixed feelings about her mother. The
caring her mother exemplified was not tender or warm or emotionally
involved. Caring for others mostly meant being strong, independent,
and responsible. She recalls, “Mom didn’t let anybody else do
anything. She was sort of a perfectionist who just thought she could do
things better and more efficiently.” At a time when most women did
not work outside the home, Janet’s mother was a busy career woman.
As a result, Janet remembers feeling more distant from her mother
than close. “There were many times growing up when I felt lonely and
not cared for,” she says. And when pressed to recall if there were any
times growing up when she especially felt cared for, Janet admits, “I
guess I’m a little sensitive in that area.” As she looks back on her
childhood, she believes she got so little care that she simply decided
she did not like being pampered and quit seeking the warmth and
affection most children experience.
If having warm, loving parents we feel close to and who cared for us
and made us happy as children is the recipe for learning compassion,
then people like Marge Detweiler and Janet Russo are the exceptions.
They violate the psychologists’ dictum that warm, loving people come
from warm, loving homes. So do lots of other people.
Jack Casey, a remarkable young man who has risked his own life to
save people and who spends many hours as a volunteer fireman and
rescue squad worker, says his father was an alcoholic and his mother
sued for a divorce when Jack was a teenager. “All my father ever
taught me,” Jack says, “is that I didn’t want to grow up to be like him.”
Elmer Benson, a retired broadcaster who works with Recording for the
Blind, describes his upbringing in similarly negative terms. His parents
were divorced when he was seven years old. For the next several years
he lived with foster parents and then was sent away to boarding school.
When he was fourteen, his parents remarried-to each other. But
Elmer stayed on at boarding school. As soon as he was old enough, he
ran away and joined the Navy. “It was a funny sort of existence,” he
observes. “I don’t know how I managed to turn out as normal as I did,
considering how fragmented and unconventional my upbringing was.”
In talking with other volunteers about the kind of caring they
experienced as children, I found that many denied closeness and
warmth as being part of their family experience. A middle-aged man
who spent much of his spare time doing church work asserted that his
family background was “a mixed bag with a lot of anger and
frustration; a lot of feelings of neglect and judgment.” A woman in her
late seventies recounted that she had never experienced much caring
as a child because, as she observed, “My father was about fifty when I
was born and wasn’t in very good health and my mother was just one

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302 Theology Today
notch below a professional musician, so she had a very busy life too.”
Another older woman remembered taking her dolls around to other
poor children during the Depression in the 1930s, but denied that her
sense of caring had anything to do with the way she was raised. Her
mother died when she was nine and she was shunted from one foster
home to another. “I can’t remember any particular time when I was
really cared for,” she said. “Sometimes it was just the opposite. There
were times in foster homes when I was abused. In fact, I remember a
bloomer boy saying to me one time, ‘How come you didn’t go wrong?’
because of all the things I had experienced.”
As it turns out, evidence from large surveys also fails to support the
idea that parental role models necessarily reinforce caring behavior. In
one national study, for example, respondents who said they felt very
close to their mothers and fathers were no more likely than respon-
dents who said they felt less close to their parents to have donated
money to charitable causes, given a donation to be used for a relief
program, donated time to helping disadvantaged or needy people,
describe themselves as generous, or say their efforts to help other
people were very important or very satisfying. The study did not
include more direct questions about parents’ caring behavior, but
closeness provides a reasonable enough proxy that some relationships
might have been expected.’
The effect of parental role models is also cast into some doubt by the
relationship between involvement in charitable activity and perceived
happiness as a child. Present happiness and involvement in caring
behavior are positively associated with each other. When perceived
happiness as a child is introduced into the equation as well, this
relation persists. However, the relationship between childhood happi-
ness and charitable involvement is statistically insignificant.*
But people can learn how to be caring even if they do not have warm,
loving parents who provide role models. They learn it from other
people and by telling stories. Some experience sticks in their memo-
ries. It is a vivid event that can be told and retold. In the telling it
becomes a symbol, a turning point. It shows that caring is possible.

7These results are from my own analyses of the data from a 1982 Gallup survey of the
American public. Respondents whose fathers or mothers were no longer living were
instructed not to answer the question. Support for using these questions was provided by
my in-depth interviews in which respondents who described their parents as caring also
tended to manifest feelings of closeness to them. Of the twelve relationships examined
(between six measures of charitable activity and closeness to each parent), only two were
statistically significant at or beyond the .05 level. Both of the significant relationships
were with the question about mothers. Inspection of percentage variations across the
four categories of closeness for each parent showed small and inconsistent variations on
all the questions. An examination of the joint effects of closeness to father and mother
also showed no significant patterns.
a three-way table involving the relationships between charitable involvement,
current happiness (very versus fairly or not very), and happiness while growing up (very
versus fairly or not very), both of the partial gammas for current happiness were
significant at or beyond the .05 level of probability; neither of the partial gammas for
childhood happiness was significant. These results are based on a national sample of
2,110 respondents interviewed in 1989; see Wuthnow, Acts of Compassion, for details.

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 Stones to Live By 303
Marge Detweiler is able to tell a story of becoming involved in A.A.
It is the event she recounts to tell how she became able to care. It was a
genuine turning point in her life. Janet Russo’s memory of her mother
as a distant, independent individual is tempered by her memory of
being in the hospital as a teenager to have her tonsils removed. She was
very frightened and alone. But she remembers a nurse who was
especially kind to her. For a long time afterward, she was moved by this
woman’s compassion. It was she who provided the inspiration for Janet
to enter nursing herself. And even though she eventually gave up
nursing, Janet feels she began to recognize her interest in caring for
others at this time.
Jack Casey, the rescue squad worker, experienced a lot of care from
the various scout leaders he modeled himself after as a child-they
filled some of the gap he experienced with his parents. The story he
feels most moved by, though, involves the care he received from his
friends when his parents announced their divorce. It was during
midterm exam week the fall semester of his freshman year. He
remembers, “My father came up to see me. I had no idea he was
coming. My sister called to tell me he was coming, but my stupid
roommate didn’t give me the message. So all of a sudden my father just
walks into the room, and I could tell something was wrong. He said,
‘Let’s go for a walk.’ And he told me about it, and we were both in
tears, and it was really a pretty big blow. I had no preparation for it.
Wham! It was right in the middle of midterms and I was taking a bunch
of killer courses. I had just gone through an emotional blow-out with a
girl I’d been in love with for a year. I was already in a situation that
would stress out a lot of people I know. Well, anyway, I had a big
problem set due the next day. Right! There was no way I was going to
be able to concentrate enough to do it. So this guy in my class who
found out about it told me just not to worry about it. He’d cover for me.
And another friend dragged me off to play pin ball and tried to help me
relax. He had no idea what to do. He had no experience with this type
of thing. We’re just not good at this kind of stuff-helping people who
are having deep emotional crises. He was basically a light-hearted
person, but when the chips were down, he was there. Any time in my
life, if I was really, really, really in a jam, he’s someone I’d call. I was
touched by the fact that he knew the chips were down and that I really
needed him.”
For Elmer Benson, the retired broadcaster, the caring he did not
receive as a child came later from his wife. Her example helped him
become more caring too. In his case the story that best captured her
caring was also a time of crisis, although one that he experienced
vicariously through the pain of a friend. He recounts, “Some years ago
a dear friend of ours, Patty, lost her husband to cancer and then, not
much later, she developed cancer herself. My wife, Mildred, was
always the first person to help out anytime she needed something.
Like, she’d say, ‘Let me drive you to the doctor.’ It didn’t make any
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304 Theology Today
difference that she had plans to do something else. She immediately
jumped in to help our friend wherever she could. And when Patty
realized she was running out of time and wanted to go back to England
to visit her family before she died, Mildred told her we would drive her
to New York to the airport. With anyone, Mildred is immediately there
to help if somebody needs an errand run or just a friend to talk to.
She’s great. She’s the perfect example of a caring, willing, self-
sacrificing, drive-you-crazy soul!”
Debbie Carson, a very interesting woman who worked for a number
of years with international women in her community and is now in
Africa with her husband serving as a medical missionary, had been
most impressed by the caring she received from her best friend. She
described her relationship with her parents while she was growing up
in qualified terms. She says, “My mother was always there and I always
knew she cared. She took us to the zoo a lot and on picnics. But she
wasn’t superinvolved with us. She let us be independent and go out to
play in the neighborhood. It was just knowing she was there and if we
got hurt we could come and she’s be there. Nobody showered me with
great amounts of compassion, but it was just nice as a child to be
secure.” Her father, in contrast, was more detached. Debbie admits
her relationship with him was not a very positive experience. “I feel a
lot of pain from the fact that my father wasn’t there. He traveled a lot,
but it was also just obvious that he really didn’t enjoy children. He was
the kind of person for whom work was everything and children were
just in the way. So he’d come home on the weekend and just shoo us
away. There just wasn’t any caring at all. If I ever had any emotional
needs, he just couldn’t relate to them.” More reflectively then, she
added, “I guess I’ve kind of blocked a lot of that out. It’s been more in
recent years that I’ve realized it would have been nice to have had a
father who cared.”
It was the friend, more than her mother or any other relative, who
showed Debbie compassion at its best. “Although I’ve had friends all
my life who cared,” she explained, “I’ve never really known anyone
like her who could just sense my needs and do little things for me. With
my second baby I was kind of ill, and she was in the hospital just down
the hall having her second baby, too, and that’s when our friendship
really became close.” Debbie described some of the things her friend
had done for her. “Here she was in bed, healing, and she was thinking
of someone else. She made this little handmade cutout with my
daughter’s name on it. Right after that, she wanted to keep my oldest
for me, and all through the last six years, raising these little kids, she’s
been there. She’s always willing to help. I’ve just never had a friend like
that. She really has an ability to care for people. As one of the guys said
once, with her around, who needs a mother!”
Debbie paused momentarily to explain that she and her husband
had been living in Alabama when she met this friend. One of the very

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 Stones to Live By 305
special times she remembers that vividly demonstrated her friend’s
ability to care was when she and her husband moved away, leaving her
friend behind in Alabama. As we drove off, she recalls, “We saw her
standing in the driveway crying her eyes out. It was the hardest thing.
We knew she loved us so much that it would be hard for her to see us
go. She was willing to make herself vulnerable.” And at this point,
Debbie’s story broke off. There were tears in her eyes and a catch in
her throat as she remembered her friend.

I11
We need to pause here for a moment to reflect on something
important about the relationship between stories and the moral
lessons we derive from them. In these examples the stories are about
moments of special need. They situate the story-and usually the story
teller-in a time of crisis. There is, as Debbie Carson says of her friend,
vulnerability. One experiences the pain of loss, the sorrow of need.
Someone else helps you through your time of need. From them you
learn what it means to be cared for. The story becomes an object
lesson, an experience you recount to encourage yourself to pass the
kindness along.
A young mother, whose children kept her busy enough that the only
formal volunteer work she had been able to do for several years was
helping with Vacation Bible School at her church, explained the
relation between experiencing a personal crisis and wanting to care for
others this way: “I went through a really hard personal crisis that lasted
for a long time. I had a friend who was willing to sit and listen to me
every single day. I was able to sit down and talk to her for, you know, a
couple of hours at a time. As I look back on it, I was probably saying
the same thing day after day after day. But she was willing to listen
anyway and helped me work through that particular crisis. In return, as
I’ve known people going through some crisis themselves, I’ve tried to
be there for them. Because of that experience in my own life, I’ve been
trying to be a better listener.”
In the American population at large, having experienced a personal
crisis yourself does appear to be associated with being a more caring
and compassionate person. Thirty-eight percent of those in a national
survey who said they had experienced a personal crisis, for example,
were currently involved in charitable or social service activities,
compared with only twenty-eight percent of those who said they had
never experienced a personal crisis. The former were also more likely
than the latter to have loaned money in the past year, donated time to
a volunteer organization, stopped to help someone with car trouble,
cared for someone who was very sick, given money to a beggar,
contributed money to a charitable organization, tried to stop someone
from using alcohol or drugs, visited someone in the hospital, helped a

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306 Theology Today
relative or friend through a personal crisis, and taken care of an elderly
relative in their home.9
Importantly, those who had experienced personal crises did not
differ from those who had never experienced a personal crisis in terms
of the value they placed on helping the needy or giving time to help
others. Thus, it appears that the effect of being able to recall a time
when one was in need is not so much to convince one of the importance
of helping others but to transform that conviction into action. Having a
story to tell about a time when one received caring, it would seem,
provides a lesson in the importance of actually taking action. It kicks
one in the seat of the pants, as it were, turning the vague thought that
“I should help” into an actual donation of time, energy, or money.
The other effect of having experienced a personal crisis is to realize
more clearly that helping others is a way of helping yourself. Those
who had experienced a crisis, for example, were twelve percentage
points more likely than those who had not had a crisis experience to
agree strongly with this statement: “By helping others, you discover
things about yourself that allow you to be a better helper in the
future.” They were also more likely to say that good feelings and
personal growth were important reasons for trying to be a caring
person.1° Receiving fulfillment from helping others, it appears, necessi-
tates identifying some type of deficit in one’s own life that can be filled.
Having experienced a personal crisis is one such deficit. It forces you to
admit being vulnerable. You recall being in need of help. As a result,
you have a space in which to put the gifts you receive from helping
others. You have room to grow. The experience of receiving care
shows you that you can also learn and grow stronger by caring. The
stories you can tell about your crises and about those who cared for you
help you remember the deficit so you can fill it up again.
Our personal crises, therefore, loom in our memories, providing
occasions for the telling of stories. They become a part of our
repertoire, like packaged goods that can be pulled off the shelf when

9The strength of the various relationships between those who had experienced a
personal crisis sometime in their lives and engaging in various kinds of caring activities
within the past year, as measured by the gamma statistic, were: loaned money (.205),
donated time to a volunteer organization (.181), helped someone with car trouble (.103),
cared for someone who was sick (.244), given money to a beggar (.104), contributed
money (.200), tried to stop someone from using alcohol or drugs (.355), visited someone
in the hospital (.205), helped someone through a crisis (.339), taken care of an elderly
relative (.149). These relations were statistically significant and of similar magnitudes for
men and women. These findings are also from the national survey I conducted in 1989.
‘“Gamma statistics summarizing the strength of the relations between having
experienced a personal crisis and each of the other items were: agreeing that helping
others causes you to discover things about yourself (.204), saying that becoming a
stronger person is a major reason to be kind and caring (.125), feeling good as a major
reason to be caring (.168), and receiving a great deal of fulfillment from doing things for
others (.155).
The relation between having experienced a personal crisis and seeing caring as a way
of becoming stronger was significant for men but not for women, while the relation
between having had a crisis and gaining fulfillment from helping was significant for
women but not for men.

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 Stones to Live By 307
company comes. We remember them because they stand out from the
daily routine. They are containers of emotions gone by. With the
retelling, we experience the feelings again. But we also gain closure.
Amidst the crisis itself, the conclusion remains uncertain. In the
narrative of crisis, the ending is under our control. It can become a
message of hope and inspiration, a directive, a connective tissue
linking action and outcome.
IV
Researchers who have tried to capture the essential role of personal
stories in our lives suggest that stories help us encapsulate experience
so we can remember it.” As we remember these experiences, our
stories also become part of our subsequent life events, shaping them,
and molding our interpretations of what is good and right. Psychologist
Jerome Bruner puts it this way: “Narrative imitates life, life imitates
narrative.” Adding: “In the end, [life] is a narrative achievement.
There is no such thing psychologically as ‘life itself.’ At very least, it is a
selective achievement of memory recall; beyond that, recounting one’s
life is an interpretive feat.”12
If we are concerned about transmitting ethical ideals to the future,
for ourselves and for our children, we would be wise, then, to embed
these ideals in stories. As the stories I have recounted here suggest,
people remember the caring they have experienced and recall these
experiences by telling stories. But stories do more than keep our
memories alive.
Sometimes these stories become so implanted in our minds that they
act back upon us, directly and powerfully. We find ourselves acting
them out. The characters in our stories show us how to behave. They
may even speak the words that we now utter from our own mouths.
Listen to Jerome Bruner again: “I believe that the ways of telling and
the ways of conceptualizing that go with them become so habitual that
they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying
down routes into memory, for not only guiding the life narrative up to
the present but directing it into the f ~ t u r e . ” Bruner
’~ has in mind a
primordial, all-encompassing, life-shaping influence. My research
shows that specific stories can also have a powerful effect on our ethical
behavior.
Jack Casey believes you cannot learn compassion from books. You
have to see it lived out in front of you. H e talks at length about the
things he has learned by watching his boss on the rescue squad. But
without realizing it, the most vivid illustration of his argument about
the importance of modeling was embedded in a story he told about a
particular accident to which he had been called. His narrative,

“For example, see Roger C . Shank, Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial
Memory (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990).
‘*Jerome Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54 (1987), p. 13.
131bid.,p. 31.

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308 Theology Today
however, began some years earlier: “Once when I was a child I had to
have five teeth pulled under general anesthetic. I remember the nurse
standing there and just saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be here right beside
you no matter what happens.’ And when I woke up again, she was still
there. That came back to me a few weeks ago when we had a man who
was pinned upside down in his pickup truck. I was inside trying to get
him out and gasoline was dripping down on both of us. They were using
power tools to cut the metal, so one spark might have caused us to go
up in smoke. The whole time he was saying how scared of dying he was.
And I kept saying, ‘Look, don’t worry, I’m right here with you, I’m not
going anywhere.’ When I said that, I was reminded of how that nurse
said the same thing and she never left me. Now, they always tell you
never to get yourself into a situation where you are risking your life, not
unless there’s a very good chance of both you and the patient being
okay. So I weighed the risks and I told the man I was going to stay right
there with him, and I did. And later he told me, ‘You were an idiot, you
know that the thing could have exploded and we’d have both been
burned up!’ And I told him I felt I just couldn’t leave him.”
Nearly two decades had passed between the time Jack‘s nurse held
his hand, promising she would not leave him, and the time he stayed
with the man in the pickup truck. But the memory was so powerful it
helped him legitimate risking his life. The memory was powerful, not
just as a vague recollection of having been cared for, but because the
story provided a script, the exact words, for Jack to use when he
became the care giver. Usually the circumstances are not as dramatic
as this. And yet the caring we receive may touch us so deeply that we
feel especially gratified when we are able to pass it on to someone else.
An elderly man who died only a few weeks after the interview he
granted from his hospital bed told of the impact having a stroke had
made on his life. Shortly after he retired from a long career in
government service he suffered a massive stroke that left him partially
paralyzed and seriously affected his speech. He had never before done
volunteer work, but when he recovered enough to become ambulatory
again he decided to try to repay some of the kindness he had received
by visiting other stroke patients. “You know,” he reflected, “having a
stroke does a lot of funny things to you, things you don’t expect. For
the first year after I had mine, I couldn’t laugh. Something would seem
funny to me, but instead of being able to laugh, all I could do was cry. It
was just a physical thing; since my muscles wouldn’t laugh, the
emotions came out as tears instead. Well, I used to just hate that. And
finally I got so I could laugh again. Well, when I started working as a
volunteer here at the Red Cross, I met another guy who had had a
stroke and he had the same problem I’d had. He couldn’t talk for more
than five minutes without having tears come out. So I told him about it
and told him he’d probably get over it like I did. And, you know, about
six months later he called me up and he talked for half an hour and

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 Stones to Live By 309
never cried once. It was just a little thing I did to assist him, but I think
it probably helped.”
Stories like this show the diversity of ways in which caring can be
shown. They define it, package it, so that others can recognize it and
emulate it. Here, it was possible to give compassion because the giver
had experienced exactly the same problem as the person for whom he
cared. The story shows the special, peculiar bond that may form
between the giver and the recipient. It defines the character of
empathy. The act of giving is itself quite modest, but it shows that even
little things matter. Indeed, the triviality of the deed helps the listener
to identify with the speaker. It becomes possible to imagine that our
small deeds too can be acts of compassion.
In other cases it may not be a specific episode that we reenact, but a
powerful experience that becomes a part of our larger story of
ourselves. A narrative about care received becomes part of our
autobiography. It supplies a way of accounting for our behavior. Care
received becomes a debt owed. A subsequent encounter with need
then becomes a time of reckoning. The individual who reaches out to
us touches our conscience.
The head of pediatric cardiology at a large university medical center
explained that her decision to help parents of dying children bear their
grief owes its origin to the director of pediatric cardiology under whose
supervision she worked as a young resident. It was he who reached out
to her when her own child died, showing her compassion, but also
touching her conscience in the process. “He came over to me the day
my baby died and put his arms around me, and I remember thinking,
he’s the only person who did that.”

V
What then is the role of Christianity in all this? An ethic of love and
compassion is of course central to the Christian gospel. The stories of
caring that we experience in our own lives are epiphanies. They
become part of the gospel message. When they are related to the
biblical tradition, they take on a larger meaning, an added historical
and sacred significance. When they are told in community, their power
is amplified. Other people hear them and are encouraged to love by
identifying with the characters in the story. The Parable of the Good
Samaritan is a vivid example. Stories in our own lives and the lives of
those we have known often make real the message of the Good
Samaritan.
One final story: Freddie Jackson Taylor is one of those remarkable
individuals who seems to be able to give and give without ever thinking
of himself. He is a black man, now in his late fifties. He remembers
feeling loved as a child, but his family was very poor, and there were
several younger brothers and sisters who needed more care than he
did. When he was in ninth grade, he quit school to help the family
make ends meet. Over the years, he worked at more odd jobs than he

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310 Theology Today
can remember. But he always had a soft spot for those less fortunate
than himself. At present he holds a job, paid for by United Way, that
puts him in daily contact with the poorest homeless men and women in
Los Angeles. Although he is nearing retirement age, he has managed
to save less than $500. Most of the rest he has given away.
What inspired Freddie Jackson Taylor to a life of service like this? It
was the example of a man he met many years ago, he says. “I never met
such a selfless man as Michael,” Freddie recalls. “I mean he literally
would give people the shirt off his back. I remember one incident when
he had been saving up money to buy this motorcycle that he had
wanted for a long time. He bought the motorcycle, but then the
Eastside neighborhood center got into financial trouble, so he sold the
motorcycle in order to give them the $800 they needed. I can tell you
hundreds and hundreds of stories about Michael, I mean, how he took
a vow of poverty and how he chose to live in a skid-row hotel for ten
years, and how, when I visited him in his room, his room was always
bare. He’d open his closet door and there might be a jacket hanging
there; he had nothing, just absolutely nothing, and he didn’t want
anything. I really admired him. He, he’s one of my heroes, Michael is.”
These are the heroes that should inspire us all. Their stories
encourage us to live lives of compassion, and more generally, lives
guided by ethical conduct. Let us hope their stories remain a vital part
of our culture in the century to come.

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