Kevin Rudd's campaign was effective in telling three types of stories which helped to create positive emotions towards him and the ALP. These three types of stories are: Who am I? Why am I here? and My vision story.²

Kevin Rudd's first television commercials contained his 'Who am I?' story. We learned how Kevin grew up in outback Queensland, how his parents didn't even get a high school education and how he enjoyed going back to his home town and talking with the residents about what they wanted for the future. For many people in the electorate Kevin was just like us.

Kevin's 'Why am I here?' stories revolved around his focus areas of an education revolution, being a economic conservative, getting rid of work choices, ratifying the Kyoto protocol, and providing new leadership. And in talking about these focus areas Rudd set out his vision for the future--his vision story.

Rudd's campaign mastered the master narratives required to create the right emotions in the electorate. Interesting, however, both Rudd and Howard avoided recounting anecdotes of specific events and encounters as a way to illustrate what the candidates really value. I have been told by one political insider that both Rudd and Howard are worried the media will crucify them for using anecdotes as a mere trick to spin a particular message.

But we saw on election night how storytelling can be done with authenticity and impact when Maxine McKew gave a short speech on the news that she look like winning the seat of Bennelong. Maxine started by saying some general statements about the contest for Bennelong being on a knife edge, and how the seat will never be taken for granted again. Then she moved into storytelling mode, first remembering how she was at this town hall only a few months before and then recalling the many interviews she had done over the years and that some of the very special people she has ever met were actually in Bennelong, and this is where the mood changed as Maxine told three anecdotes.

I'm thinking of the 90-year old Sister Louise who's at St Catherines who I met just a couple of weeks ago. She's blind. But the day I talked to her she said, "Nobody is blind in heaven."

And I'm thinking of 6 year old Emily at Denniston East. She told me that she told her parents to vote for Kevin Rudd because Kevin Rudd would be a great Prime Minister for children. And you know, ... we need a great Prime Minister for children.

And I'm thinking as well of a boy called Ali who only recently completed his HSC exams, who—maybe Ali you are here tonight—who a few years ago was in a Pakistani refugee camp waiting for passage out, and Ali has found a safe home, and a welcome here in Australia ...

I'm sure many people felt goosebumps at the end of this speech--emotions were created.

We help leaders tell these types of stories, first by helping leaders learn how to find their stories (of course Maxine is an expert at this but we all can do it), then help them learn how to tell these stories and ensure at all times there is authenticity in what you say.

1. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.

2. Simmons, Annette. The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and

Religion and democracy, politics; church and state Thought For The Day - 1 February 2008 As Rudy Giuliani pulls out of the race for nomination, the American presidential contest is hotting up, and it's fascinating to see the differences between American politics and ours. But there's one historic feature of American politics that I think has relevance to us too. Back in the 1830s a brilliant young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited the United States to see how this experiment in liberty was working out. The book he wrote, Democracy in America, remains one of the classics of political thought. What surprised him was how religious America was compared to Europe. And what he wanted to understand was how religion and democracy can coexist. 'In France', he said, 'I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions', but in America they walked hand in hand. How did it happen? The answer, he discovered, was that religious leaders were careful never to get involved with party politics. They knew that politics is of its essence divisive. And if religion got too involved with politics, it too would become divisive. So religious leaders focused on strengthening families, creating communities and charities, building schools and encouraging active citizenship. It created what he called 'habits of the heart' that were so essential in sustaining a sense of the common good. A democratic society needs two things: a way of mediating conflicts, and a sense of shared identity without which there is no society at all. Politics, said Tocqueville, must focus on the conflicts, religion on shared belonging. He added, 'In proportion as a nation assumes a democratic condition . . . it becomes more and more dangerous to connect religion with political institutions.' Those are wise words, for America and for us. Religious organizations must never become pressure groups for this or that contentious item of domestic or foreign policy. Their task, and I include myself, is moral: to strengthen the bonds of human relationship and the sanctity of human life; and to teach us to love our neighbours as ourselves, especially today when our neighbours belong to so many different faiths. When religion becomes politicized, or politics becomes religionised, bad things happen, and we must avoid that if we can. It's a hard distinction to keep, and neither America nor we have always succeeded. But that remains the challenge. Politics speaks to our conflicting interests. Religion should speak to our shared responsibilities. That's how religion and democratic freedom can walk hand in hand.

Music, Faith, story: survival, amnesia

Credo - Love can teach us to listen to our enduring melodies

In his new book, Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks (no relative, alas) tells the poignant story of Clive Wearing, an eminent musician and musicologist, who was struck by a devastating brain infection. The result was acute amnesia. Wearing was unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds. As his wife Deborah put it, 'It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment.'

It's a heartbreaking story. Unable to thread experiences together, he was caught in an endless present that had no connection with anything that had gone before. One day his wife found him holding a chocolate in one hand and repeatedly covering and uncovering it with the other hand, saying each time, 'Look, it's new.' 'It's the same chocolate', she said. 'No', he replied, 'look. It's changed.' He had no past at all. In a moment of awareness he said about himself, 'I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It's like being dead.'

Two things broke through his isolation. One was his love for his wife. Whenever he saw her he felt intense relief, knowing that he was not alone, that she was there, loving and caring for him. The other was music. He could still sing, play the organ and conduct a choir with all his old skill and verve.

What was it about music, Sacks asks, that enabled him, while playing or conducting, to overcome his amnesia? He suggests that when we 'remember' a melody, we recall one note at a time, yet each note relates to the whole. He quotes Victor Zuckerkandl, who wrote, 'Hearing a melody is hearing, having heard, and being about to hear, all at once. Every melody declares to us that the past can be there without being remembered, the future without being foreknown.' Music is a form of sensed continuity that can sometimes break through the most overpowering disconnections in our experience of time.

There is something spiritual about music, and something musical about the human spirit. When the Israelites experienced redemption at the Red Sea, they sang. So did Hannah when she had a child. The Levites sang in the Temple. Every day, in Judaism, we preface our morning prayers with what we call 'Verses of Song' with their magnificent crescendo, Psalm 150, in which instruments and the human voice combine to sing God's praises. When language takes wing heavenward, it modulates from speech to song.
Mystics have gone further and spoken of the song of the universe, what Pythagoras called 'the music of the spheres'. This is what Psalm 19 means when it says, 'The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands . . . There is no speech, there are no words, where their voice is not heard. Their music carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world.' Beneath the silence, audible only to the inner ear, creation sings to its Creator.

And music may have something to do with the meaning of a human life. In 2006 Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster, knowing he was about to die, published a journal of his last year and called it The Enduring Melody. In it he spoke about life as a melody. In early times liturgical music – 'plainsong' in the Church, nussach in the synagogue – consisted of a single dominant chant, the cantus firmus, the 'fixed song'. Gradually this became ornamented with counterpoint and harmony, but it was the underlying melody that gave unity to the whole. So, said Mayne, we can sometimes look back on our life and hear beneath the harmonies and dissonances, the 'enduring melody' of who we are and what we have tried to be.

Faith, I suspect, is more like music than like science. Science analyzes, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God's song.

Oliver Sacks ends his account of Wearing's illness with the words of his wife: 'Clive's at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum'. I was deeply moved by those words. Love and music redeem our solitude, mending the broken connections of our lives. Faith teaches us to hear the music beneath the noise.