From early in grade school, I have had a fascination with history. In college, I had a history minor and majored in philosophy, which is also a lot of history. Then, of course, in seminary, we studied biblical and church history.

Through high school, my understanding of history was pretty romanticized. I looked at events, especially in American history, through rose colored glasses, with lots of emphasis on heroes and conflicts between good guys and bad guys. But then in college (oh yes, the dangers of “higher education”) I came down to earth and began to see history in more realistic, and honest, terms. From then on, what had been black and white became much more often various shades of gray.

And the more I learned, the darker those shades became. But don’t think that’s a commentary about me, or my view or experience of life. Because what I also learned was that history wasn’t about “life.” History is stories that story tellers create about the past to explain and influence the present.

I remember one day in a college European history class when the professor was asked what was happening with “ordinary people” at the time we were studying. Only half in jest he retorted, “History isn’t about ordinary people.” And, of course, he was right. We don’t want to learn about them. We want to know about the extraordinary people.

The distortion of that viewpoint, however, is becoming increasingly recognized. Most of us are now aware, for example, of how romanticized the history of the US’s westward expansion has been. Little is said about the thousands of “ordinary people”, many immigrants, who settled the plains and endured measures of labor, tedium, danger, poverty, and loss we can only imagine. And we are still only barely aware of the suffering, violence, cruelty, and injustice experienced by the land’s original indigenous inhabitants.

Instead, we imagine that the West’s story is told by the lives of a handful of generals and tribal chiefs, politicians and outlaws. We saw it in the movies! Yet these people were often less known to the ordinary people of the time than they are to us now. And this pattern repeats itself through all periods of history.

To repeat, history is not the past but stories we tell about the past. We think that ancient people made up myths about their past while we create history with objective facts. But our histories today are just as mythic, though longer and with footnotes. And less memorable, because it’s not the objective events and people that we are interested in but the stories we tell about them.

The Westerns of classic Hollywood can’t be made anymore. Immensely popular in their time, today such stories can’t be told with a straight face, or with integrity. Movies can still be set in the “old West” but they are stories of human character, good and bad. They can’t tell  “the story of the West” because now it would have to be too dark and too muddled to attract an audience.

Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I now live, has been embroiled for years in controversy over statues moved, removed, and tumbled. The conflict is the main reason our current mayor realized he couldn’t win reelection and so bowed out of the race. The town has been struggling to figure out how to tell its story, its history, but thus far without success. How do you tell a story in which the same characters are heroes to one part of the population but scoundrels to another? It can be done, but is it a story people want to hear?

Life is messy. Each of our lives are testimony to that reality. Yet when we do history, which is all about people’s lives, we are strongly tempted to do away with the messiness. We want to smooth the rough edges, intensify the colors and contrasts, hide the ambiguities, and purify the motives. We want the hats to be black or white, not gray. We want meaning and inspiration more than facts.

Recently, President Trump ordered “negative” presentations about the United States removed from national parks and museums. This is, of course, a reversal of a decades-long trend of presenting more honest and less idealized information about America’s history. We can’t “un-know” what we know yet this new policy is popular with many people. For a country to air its dirty laundry requires self-confidence, which is what the US and many other countries are now lacking. We live in a troubled world and one way to quell our anxiety is to retell each other old stories of past glory, facts be damned.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” observes a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. And that’s the problem with history: it’s a trap. It holds on to us and won’t let us go. History isn’t “out there” somewhere, on battlefields, in castles or other famous places. Nor is it in libraries or textbooks. It’s in our mind, which is why Faulkner was right in saying history doesn’t die but is very much alive, here and now. Because we all know how hard it is to change our mind.

Recently, my view of history shifted yet again, reflected in part by this Faulkner quote. One of the fundamental teachings of the world’s great spiritual traditions is that the only reality is here and now. Past and future are both concepts existing only in our mind. Hence, the truth of the paradoxical idea that the past isn’t actually past. History is an imaginary story world we often live in, to make sense of the present or to escape it. It can be about our personal past, or that of our family, our community, our nation, our race, or our religion. But it’s all in our head.

Our world is in a precarious situation and this is reflected in the increasingly chaotic state of many of its “great” nations. The problems we face, especially the climate crisis and growing economic inequality, are generally recognized and well understood. Yet our political systems are tied in knots when it comes to resolving them.

Our world has also changed rapidly and dramatically, in many ways for the better. But our old stories have not kept up. Our histories, the stories we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where we came from and where we think we’re going, no longer make sense for the world we now find ourselves in. As cherished as many of them are, they are preventing us from seeing who we have really become and seeing the world we live in as we now know it to be.

There is nothing wrong with stories so long as we recognize that’s all they are. The great spiritual teachers have always known that. But they have also known how easily we fall into believing them to be true, and the disastrous consequences that can follow. It seems that Jesus alienated many, including eventually many of his own followers, by not buying into their stories. That’s why he often taught with parables, rather than with familiar narrative frameworks. It’s why he spoke of the kingdom of God, rather than the kingdom of Israel or of any political entity. He was imagining a world without a history but with its people living in harmony and love.

We need a new history with new stories. But first we need to awaken to our true nature, to our inherent value and the inherent value of every person apart from any story. For our worth comes not from any story we tell about ourselves or that others tell about us, but from our being as incarnations of the spirit of God. When asked, we may tell many stories about our self. But our true self is actually a manifestation of the one Self that unites all of us and all of creation.

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