Mark Yaconelli - Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us

Praise for Between the Listening and the Telling: How Stories Can Save Us

In an era of self-serving stories, from car commercials to political brands, its easy to get cynical about narrative. But in Between the Listening and the Telling, Mark Yaconelli ushers us into rooms full of authentic stories, where facades fall and suffering and joy are metabolized. This is an immersive, elegant meditation, an offering of grace.

Kirsten Powers, CNN Senior Political Analyst and the New York Times best-selling author of Saving Grace: Speak Your Truth, Stay Centered, and Learn to Coexist with People Who Drive You Nuts

Many people can describe what they observe on the surface. Mark Yaconelli is one of those rare human beings who sees all the way into the deeper placesand rarer still, one who can find words to help our hearts grab hold of what is waiting there for us. During days when we can so easily drift from one another and from our better angels, he reminds us how we find our way home. For a world so afflicted with isolation and disconnection, this beautiful book is medicinal.

John Pavlovitz, author of If God Is Love, Dont Be a Jerk

Mark Yaconelli shows how our stories can form bridges to greater understanding and compassion. Between the Listening and the Telling will give you renewed hope and inspiration for how storytelling can bring people closer together. I highly recommend this book to anyone doing community work or leading organizations.

Mandy Yeahpau, director of social media, IllumiNative

I have spent my life around stories and storytellers, and Mark Yaconelli captures the vibrancy and necessity of the storytelling world. The beauty of this book lies in its perception, its acuity, its warmth, and its authenticity.

Lisa Consiglio, CEO and cofounder of Narrative 4

Scientists, artists, mathematicians, wanderers, dreamers, and the rest of us have been searching for meaning. Mark Yaconelli finds the answer in the heart of the one democracy that we all shareour stories. A lot of things can be taken from usour houses, our bank accounts, even our livesbut Yaconelli recognizes that nothing can take away the power of storytelling.

Colum McCann, National Book Award winner for Let the Great World Spin

Between the Listening and the Telling is vulnerable and moving, humorous and humble, beautiful and wise. Story by story, Mark Yaconelli reveals the ancient path that leads to greater love, hope, connection. If youre wondering in this time of alienation and divisiveness whether we still have a common humanity, then this book is for you.

Melissa Wiginton, vice president for Education Beyond the Walls, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Beautiful, inspiring, timely. Yaconelli invites vulnerability by being vulnerable, courage by being courageous, tears by revealing heartfelt truths, and laughter by being damn funny.

Max Gimbel, director of the Ford Institute for Community Building, The Ford Family Foundation

What a gift Mark Yaconelli has given us! Between the Listening and the Telling does more than tell about the goodness of stories; it shows us how our stories can make sense of difficult and joyous experiences, how stories can remove the separations between us and them. We can heal this world through stories. Mark Yaconelli shows us the way.

Tim Shapiro, director of the Indianapolis Center for Congregations

Between the Listening and the Telling

BETWEEN the LISTENING and the TELLING

HOW STORIES CAN SAVE US

MARK YACONELLI

BETWEEN THE LISTENING AND THE TELLING

How Stories Can Save Us

Copyright 2022 Mark Yaconelli. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Cover image: The Image Library/iStock

Cover design: Olga Grlic

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-8147-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-8148-7

Some names have been changed to protect individuals privacy.

To all the brave souls who have told me their stories, and all the brave souls who have listened to mine

Everything is held together with stories, he thought. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.

Barry Lopez, Winter Count

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

M ark Yaconelli is an unusual person, as brilliant as he is plainspoken. He is an activist and a homebody, a contemplative and a goofball, gentle in spirit and charismatic, funny, deeply articulate, and capable of both wonderful compassion and silliness. And he brings all these qualities to his new book.

I cannot imagine there will ever be a more critical need for a book such as this than now. It is an exploration of storytelling as a path to the strength and vulnerability and connection we will so desperately need to survive and come through these times. It is a profound reflection on storytelling as the path to community identity and renewal, for towns and cities and families who have experienced devastation. It is an account of his work teaching people how to make this transformative process available to others. It is an owners manual for the soul. It is like no other book Ive ever read.

As we struggle with the realities of injustice and inequality, the consequences of the pandemic, and the greatest environmental catastrophe of history, Mark Yaconelli offers personal experiences, practical guidance, and stories of resurrection. In this time, like no other, we long for hope and connection. Yaconelli shows us the psychological, spiritual, and logistical underpinnings of his work as an organizer of community storytelling events. Towns and cities frequently summon him following disaster or humiliation, both long term and immediate. By asking the right questions and listening to the answers, he helps people feel their humanity and worth again when these have been stripped away. He helps people cry and spew and laugh together. (And the laughter is so subversive!) These things heal us.

Here he is in his own words: We map our world in story. The world falls apart. We map a new world. Again and again we story our lives in order to situate ourselves: I am here, not there. I am here and long to go there. Once found, new possibilities emerge. Curiosity rises within us. We feel the pull to discover new countries, traverse new oceans.

How do we even begin this process of transformation when we feel crushed and overwhelmed, totally lost or existentially lonely? We show up. Mark has been convincing (and tricking) people into showing up to his workshops and retreats for decades. Twenty years ago, I witnessed him at an evening workshop in which he got several dozen adults and teenagers to stand up, mill around, and bump into each other while muttering, Mill, mill, mill. I milledwhich is SO not meand came to know the secret, intimate places that my bumpees loved most in the world. And I told them mine. I have since taken that exercise along with me to dubious Sunday school classes and skeptical writing workshops, with great success, laughter, occasional tears, and new friendships.

Through his work, Mark helps people begin to know themselves and their common values. He understands and teaches the great lesson: if people are going to be transformed, it has to come from love, from speaking to one another about the truth of what we have lived. Through the experiences and unique teaching ability he writes about so eloquently in this book, Mark shares the ways in which this truth-telling and trust become possible.