BBC Radio 4 2016-09-19

For the last two days, many people in Glasgow have been seeing things they'd never seen before.

This has not been due to ingesting illegal substances or overdosing on Scotland's national drink. It's because of the Open Doors weekend, organised by a local charitable trust, during which all sorts of buildings host people who are not their usual habitués.

So Calvinists may have seen the inside of a Synagogue, and Hindus may have visited a Mosque. Some people will have heard a talk about how Glasgow profited from the slave trade; while others like a woman I met will have been exhilarated by visiting the world's oldest music hall.

It has been a great weekend for learning new things. And every venue, tour, lecture or exhibition was free.

I ended up in a library where local people were telling stories. A reporter spoke of the dangers of interviewing people you'd never met (including a vicar who pointed a gun at him); and a man who had lived near New York told of how he had once jumped onto the late-night bus he thought he had missed, only to find himself on a seat behind Sydney Poitier in the middle of the shooting of a Hollywood movie.

Stories like these are great gifts. They enrich us through stimulating our imagination and exposing us to experiences we may have never had, but are yet threads in the ever evolving tapestry of human life.

I imagine than some may be tired of hearing that Jesus was a great story teller. What we are less aware of is that he was also a great listener to other people's experiences.

A foreign woman whose daughter was ill asks Jesus for help, and in the process tells him what it feels like to be the object of racist slurs. After listening to her, he can't remain unmoved. He heals her daughter even though they didn't share the same faith or nationality.

Another woman, probably at a dinner table, tells him how after she had cleaned her house, she discovered that a charm of great sentimental value must have fallen off her necklace. So she lifted every carpet, checked in every nook and cranny until she found the lost object and then opened a bottle of wine and called in her neighbours to have a party.

And having heard that story, Jesus decides to retell it verbatim with the implicit suggestion - which must have upset his male followers - that God was like that woman in the way he looks for us with yearning.

Photographs may illustrate what we have seen, but it is the stories we share which enable us to connect with others. When told well they may amuse, enlighten or even annoy us. But they won't leave us detached or neutral, neither when we listen nor when we tell.

First broadcast 19 September 2016