The Parallel Lives

This past week I listened to Craig Wortmann’s book, “What’s Your Story: Using Stories to Ignite Performance and Be More Successful.” Craig encourages readers to place their stories into a matrix of sixteen cells, four columns by four rows.

He identifies four columns, top to bottom: success, failure, fun, and legends. A success story is how a project succeeded. A failure story is how a project failed. A fun story is a joke. A legend story is a once-upon-a-time story, that of a hero.

The idea of a matrix appears too complicated, a spreadsheet to arrange jokes. Ronald Reagan kept it simpler. He wrote his stories on 3 x 5 cards and kept them in boxes. To write a speech, for example, to inspire, he withdrew cards from his stack.

Last time in these pages, I mentioned Jonathan Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon, “that all the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop considered himself a type of Moses who was leading his people, like Israel, to a new land, to build a new Jerusalem.

This is spelled out in John Barry’s 2012 book, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.”

Winthrop and his fellow Puritans believed the city on a hill should have a church and a state, and that the two should work together, like left and right hands. In essence, Winthrop wanted to build a theocracy, in New England, in 1630.

The Puritans expected the magistrates to support the church by compelling people to attend worship, to recite oaths, to pray prescribed prayers, and to tithe.

In recent days, I have begun reading John Barry’s book, “Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty.”

Although published in 2012, Barry tells the story of how the Puritans chose to leave old England to build a plantation on the rocky New England coast of Massachusetts.

In England, the Puritans wanted to purify and simplify their church. Hence, the title of Puritans. They wanted a rustic sanctuary, without stained glass windows and gaudy artwork. Also, they wanted the Anglican clerics to dress without cassock, cap, or gown.

King James I, his son Charles I, and Charles’s archbishop William Laud disagreed. Laud and his henchmen hunted the Puritans down, jailed them, and even tortured them. For these Puritans, exile to North American represented a better choice.

On February 17, 2023, David Remnick of the New Yorker podcast interviewed Steven Kotkin, history professor at Stanford, and biographer of Joseph Stalin.

Kotkin said, “Let’s think of a house with ten rooms, and let’s say I barge in and take two of those rooms. I wreck those two rooms, and I also wreck your other eight rooms. You try to evict me, but I’m still there wrecking your entire house. An excerpt about war and peace in the Ukraine.