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SPIRITUALITY
The Perfect Rock and What It Told Me
What story can a rock tell you? Archaeology doesn’t count.
Today I attended a retreat at my church in which the presenter was Dr. Kathy Culmer, Ph.D, who gave a lecture and presentation called “Remembering Our Faith Stories,” on storytelling and the importance of remembering stories and history so we can learn from them.
Culmer is a fantastic storyteller whose doctorate is in fact in Biblical storytelling. I didn’t even know there was such a thing. Culmer makes a story come alive. She speaks in ordinary, everyday language and acts out each part. In the story of the Prodigal Son she is, in turn, the wastrel younger son, the joyful father, the disgruntled older son.
When we entered the room where she spoke, she had set up a table with a collection of what I would call road rocks laid upon it. Some of these were more like rock samples; you could tell they had been cut. A few were river rocks, which had been shaped into smooth ovals.
There were sedimentary rocks, some sandstone, and at least one rock that seemed to have pyrite inclusions. We were each asked to choose a rock, if we liked, and to describe what story it had to tell us or what relevance it had to our spirituality.