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I talked to Brian Cornelius, the Minister at Ottawa’s First United Church to explore the role narrative therapy has to play in religion as well as the reverse. Walking into his office on the evening of my interview with him, I’m first struck by the sheer number of books he has. They line the walls in book cases that stretch from corner to corner and are piled high between papers and filing cabinets. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many books in one place outside of a library, and I have to admit, I’m impressed.

One of the first things he tells me is that he is not a therapist but that he is willing to help people along their spiritual journeys and has had professional psychologists refer patients to him when they feel unqualified to talk about spirituality and theology.

Therapy vs. theology

Narrative therapy seeks to separate the person from the problem event in a conversation between therapist and client. The theory was developed in the 1980s by Michael White, an Australian family therapist, and his associate, David Epston. It focuses on changing the perspective of an event from “what happened and why?” to “what did you do and what strengths have you gained from surviving this?” What this means, is that in a session with a child who has been physically abused and who learned to hide under the bed, the therapist would try to help the child see his or her own resourcefulness and quick thinking. In doing so, clients redefine themselves and rewrite the stories of their lives.

Stories are a powerful force for driving home a message. Allegory and metaphor are essential to turning a story from a time-waster to a profound experience for the recipient. “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. This search for truth begins very early, according to Steven Walker, a registered systematic psychotherapist, who writes that fairy tales are “at some level a natural search for a world more ordered than [a child’s] current experience.”

Human life experience is almost entirely based on this search, Walker believes. The human mind takes the events of everyday life, strings them together and gives them meaning and importance. Sadly, a single event can be given such importance that the rest of a person’s life loses significance. The person becomes defined by that one event.  Narrative therapy strips away labels like “alcoholic”, “delinquent” or “victim” and brings focus to who the person is outside that one event, the “core” person.

“One of the things that attracted me to narrative therapy was that it grew out of family systems therapy,” Brian says, with his feet resting against the edge of a purple-clothed table and his chair tilted back. But, his research indicated, family systems therapy was too focused on problems and identifying dysfunction. Narrative therapy’s focus on the strengths of the person was, he says, an important insight into human nature.

Stories of spiritual direction

Brian Cornelius1 started investigating narrative therapy to better understand its connection to narrative theology. As a minister, he approaches the Bible as a series of stories, he says, each told for a specific purpose and to a certain end instead of a recitation of facts. The fate of Judas, for example, and the way in which he expressed remorse appears twice in the Bible and is different each time. The key is, apparently, in asking why the writer chose to tell the story in that way. This is narrative theology in a nutshell and it holds striking similarities to narrative therapy. “I used myth as a way of understanding my own world view and my own spirit journey. And I think that’s where narrative therapy can help narrative theology.”

How so? I ask, and he first explains that narrative therapy helped him understand “some texts” differently. One of those texts turned out to be the Gospel of Judas, part of research for his Palm Sunday sermon, on the subject of betrayal. His approach to the subject is certainly going to be interesting: “Judas... is identified as the betrayer,” he says, “and I’m not sure that’s how the character was understood in the earliest experiences of the church.”

When he was a child, he tells me, there was a missionary who told him that, to some to whom this man had preached, Judas, came out as the hero of the tale because they admired somebody “who didn’t simply give in to the power dominance.”

Brian Cornelius grew up in Kenya, on the shores of Lake Victoria, the son of two Pentecostal missionaries. “In the context in which I grew up, God loomed large,” he says, “you could become president of the world but it wasn’t as important as serving God.” He preached for four years at a Pentecostal church in Kanata before discovering that his beliefs and his church’s beliefs weren’t the same. “I was very unhappy,” he admits, “I was being forced to proclaim something that didn’t make sense to me.” So, no longer able to believe in those messages; he found that the United Church better fit his evolved beliefs and worldview and switched denominations.

“My parents, out of love, went overseas to save people from their sins because they believed that if they didn’t, God would send those people to Hell forever. And so that was a very loving act in their minds. I happen to disagree with them,” he says, and later agrees that before one says that the message of the Bible is love, one should define what love means. “You can’t look at the Bible as dogma or God’s word,” he says, nor even as truth. Here, he agrees with one of narrative therapy’s basic tenets: There are no essential truths. “I think the main message is being authentic and being honest,” he continues, and makes it clear that he approaches the Bible as a group of stories, because the Bible as the literal word of God makes “absolutely no sense. It’s contradictory.”

It is in looking at the Bible as a story, that “the truthfulness about human existence, about human relationship with the sacred is exposed.” It’s not quite the search for the meaning of life, but it’s clear that in both narrative theology and narrative therapy, the focus is not on finding out why things happened the way they did but on finding what this means for the people involved, the person these events have made you into and the lessons that can be learned from them.

It’s not the meaning of life; it’s the meaning of your life.