I recently returned from a gathering of my peers (fellow liberal Swedenborgian ministers) in beautiful Laport, Indiana. I was asked to give the talk to the local congregation Wednesday night. We had been fed and housed by the several generous, quiet, and amazingly kind ladies of this congregation as we listened, discerned, and upheld each other in love. This was the message, from our hearts to the whole congregation.
Joint worship at the close of “Peer Supervision,” October 24, 2012
John
12:24 “Timeless truth I speak to you: unless a grain of wheat falls and dies in
the ground, it remains alone. But if it
dies, it yields a great abundance.”
What do we do in peer supervision?
Do we discuss deep points of doctrine?
Do we explore the
deep underlying existential and theological implications of ministry in modern
western global consciousness today?
Nope.
We come for fellowship.
We come to listen and to heal. We come to share in the one community that really gets us.
So what happens in these meetings? A great deal of heart truth. What happens in these meetings? Listening, sharing, empathy, comfort, and
support; insight, respect, often tears, sometimes heart-wrenching sobs, and
always uproarious laughter.
And this was a point of insight for us --- that without
the willingness to go into our depths of sadness and struggle, we would not
also be opened to the moments of tremendous light. Unless we allowed ourselves to be broken open
by the love and safety here, we would tend to remain tightly bound in our need
to be strong. Pastors need pastors too. And
so here we find that when we let ourselves be supported by each other --- when
we let ourselves feel our deepest vulnerability, we rediscover our greatest
strength, which is God’s relentless, persistent, unconditional love,
experienced through each other.
Like the seed in the scripture falling to the earth, we must
surrender. We would prefer to hold on to
“life.” To feel strong and competent and
capable. It is much harder to look openly
at our fears and insecurities. It is
much easier to be strong. Who likes
feeling vulnerable? Yet through our
descent into the dark earth of vulnerability, God cracks us open, and THEN the
sacred and creative and the beautiful burst into life.
It is a universal truth of the human condition: that deep
in the heart of each soul is the terror of not being good
enough. Deep in each psyche lies the
fear of being innately unlovable. This
is commonly called shame, and every mistake we have ever made piggybacks on
this shame and seeks to convince you and you and me that we are somehow truly
unlovable, and that some day, someone will figure this out and the game will be
up. We will be rejected, “as we deserve.”
But guess what? There
are no throw-away people.
None.
Every single one of us is the absolutely perfect, bright,
and innocent soul that we were at the moment of our birth. Nothing has changed, except that we have come
to believe that we might somehow have lost our right to have love and human
tenderness and connection, because our culture tells us so.
So let’s just admit it right now. We all
have warts. We are all afraid of being just too broken to love. And we are all completely beautiful and full
of light! And only through our
vulnerability and heart-honesty, do we experience God’s presence among us, in
compassion, gentleness, healing tears, and then deep belly-aching laughter.
If we isolate and try to maintain the illusion of
strength, we remain alone. But when we
allow ourselves to die, and to let our pride go, we are open to finding true
intimacy and the abundant life of true heart-relationship --- which is the
kingdom of heaven.
We came to these meetings holding it together.
We leave whole and together.
We came needing healing.
We leave with such gratitude for this
congregation’s quiet, amazing support and hospitality.
First let me say that trauma is a continuum. Part of me doesn't feel legitimate naming myself as someone recovering from trauma, but enough friends and therapists have independently named me so, that I am accepting that.
Today is the Sunday of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. In the past I would have been planning or deep in the middle of cooking a big family dinner, complete with gorgeous autumn decorations and turkey. I would have enjoyed finding as many chairs as possible and getting creative with table arranging so everyone had a place. The older I get, the more this sort of ritual is meaningful to me it seems, and the more precious my family is to me.
My "broken" family.
Today I slept in and awoke with a headache (no, not an "Oktoberfest headache," the regular kind) and perimenopausal hot flashes, and discouragement. I thought I would be content this weekend because my girls all have their partners' family meals to go to, and my son seems just content to be home and spending time with me, and later his dad. I have plenty to keep me busy, including a backlog of graduate school reading, cleaning, and ironing.
Duh. I'm still a classic codependent, eh? "So long as everyone else is happy, I am happy." I didn't have a sweet clue as to what *I* actually wanted or needed. It didn't even occur to me that I might not be okay.
So, today I am inordinately sad (who gets to say what "ordinately" sad is?) that I am not doing a traditional meal with my kids, going on a walk in the autumn colours, and generally enjoying my family. Today looks like it will be a day of releasing more pent up sadness and loss and grief.
Yay.
It's okay. There is no statue of limitations on grief, no matter how much our culture (including me!) is uncomfortable with prolonged sadness. If "just being with and accepting" the sadness is what needs to happen today, so be it. God knows, I am not alone.
It's NORMAL to feel more deeply during holidays. It is NORMAL for the contrast between what is and "what should have been" to ache most intensely right now.
So I will cry some, write some, pray some, and be very gentle with myself today, and this too, shall pass.
In solidarity with everyone for whom holidays, for now, seem to be more painful than joyful: You are not wrong. You are not alone. You can make it through.
Alison
In my experience, healing from psychological trauma and childhood abuse includes re-experiencing the feelings associated with those traumas. Very often, key appropriate responses to such abuse is anger, grief, and tremendous vulnerability. How challenging it is then, in a culture that shames us simply for feeling these things or for feeling them "too long." When we combine that with our own aversion to feeling these things, I believe it is heroic indeed that we can allow ourselves to feel them anyway, with compassion, patience, trust, and faith in the process. There is a way out. There is a way through. Go gently with yourself today. Rev. Alison
I was sitting in my addictions counseling class yesterday reflecting on our cultural assumptions about what each other should and should not be able to handle. One classmate is working with a gentleman who has been so long trapped in the addiction cycle that he is a year (or two at best) away from death due to damage to his liver. He lost his family long ago, he lost his job; he has no self respect.
He has relapsed so many times and been told he is killing himself so many times that he simply "doesn't care" any more. I suspect that the pain of his existence---the pain of his "failure"---weighs so heavily upon him that escape from that pain by any means, including death, seems far preferable than trying AGAIN to show up in his painful, broken existence, to pull himself back together again for ... what?
It is so easy to judge someone like that. It is so easy to assume that we, in his position, would do differently.
I wonder. Would we? Would I?
I DO know that western society used to judge (and many still do judge) hyperactivity, obesity, depression, alcoholism, homosexuality, and other politically incorrect human traits as spiritual and moral failings. But now we see them as inborn traits, some to be accepted as is, and some that may require medical and/or therapeutic support in "correcting" them. We have come a long way from telling a depressed and suicidal person to "pull up your socks and get it together!" We have come a long way from judging to hell someone who succeeds in a suicide attempt. Their life was already hell enough already anyway or they never would have gone that far.
I have also seen myself be brought absolutely to my knees by life circumstances and what seemed like unbearable emotional pain. If I'd had the courage and opportunity, I would have killed myself. I certainly have repeatedly swan-dived into chocolate or ice cream or jelly beans or macaroni and cheese (etc) to escape the pain. That my method of escape from pain doesn't wreck my body as quickly or make me get in a car and kill someone is only a detail. It's a roll of the dice.
Here is my question: What if some traumas and circumstances truly are more that some people can handle? What if we just stop judging so much? What if the shame that drives us all to hide from each other and feel unlovable and abuse ourselves is a LIE?
"God never gives us more than we can handle" is a common platitude. Sometimes that message can give people the hope and chutzpah to get through a really tough time. But sometimes all it communicates is that if we are falling down and "failing" (nervous breakdown, poor choices, complete emotional freeze-up---you name it) WE are failures because "God is doing His part...."
I heard a wise minister say and I fully agree with him, "Actually, God frequently allows people to go through more than they can handle; it is just never more than God can handle."
That new way of phrasing it helps me SO much.
I have frequently felt like I was being asked to deal with situations, traumas, and information that was far more than I could handle. I have broken down several times. I know many people who have had nervous breakdowns, and those breakdowns SAVED them from continuing to try to deal with things that were untenable and unmanageable, but shame and "shoulds" and fear of looking "broken" made them keep trying.
All I know is that I'm still standing, or back standing again, and it isn't because I've handled life superbly. It is thanks to just enough support at just the right times. It is thanks to the fact that I haven't died yet, and that the human body and spirit is astonishingly resilient and capable of healing. It is thanks to a good start, and many amazing people along the way and a decent mind that processes information pretty well. I have been in WAY over my head, but I keep being set back on my feet, so I will keep trying.
Can you even imaging God saying to that poor broken man when he finally stands before his Maker, "Well done, good and faithful servant," because he had far, far more than we can possibly imagine stacked up against him, and what he did really was his very best?
For those of us overwhelmed by shame, the very thought can bring us to our knees.
"So
many of us feel a sense of broken-heartedness or disappointment in ourselves
for all the times we’ve tried
and
failed.
But imagine if every experience that you've had until
now led you right here into this perfect moment? What if it is all perfect? What if it is not--- as many of our
subconscious beliefs think--- that it is your fault, or you’re just not good
enough, or you’ll never figure it out, or you’re doomed, or whatever tape you
play in the darkest recesses of your mind; what if that is all a lie? What if all of those beliefs and all of that
evidence that we’ve stacked up against ourselves is just not true?" -Kristen Morelli
Today I begin again with new courage, to release my stories of being too broken to succeed, and I release my story that I should have accomplished this or that "by now."
And I choose to show up in this moment with the freshness and curiosity and hope of a child.
All I can do is my best in this moment, and I certainly do better when I release my backlog of disappointments and my stories of failure and my fear of being hurt and disappointed.
I call on the Spirit, or Divine Goodness, or God, or Higher Power, or my angels, or the love of my friends, or whatever there is that surrounds me with innocence and goodness; and I draw strength and hope and OPEN MY HEART AGAIN to life.
The human condition is simply to want to be loved, to know one is okay, to have enough, and to give what one loves to give. Old wounds and hurts and the resulting fear and mistrust block us from knowing and living from the deep realization that all of the former are TRUE regardless.
"What Is Your
Story? - How Our Life Narrative Impacts Our Journey"
Rev. Alison Longstaff
Aug 5th, 2012
Grand River
Unitarian Church
Opening note. If this sermon sucks, I blame the Olympics. Just sayin’
So, “Who Are You? Where do you
come from, and where are you going?” How has the journey been so
far? Easy? or difficult?
What is your story?
Do you wish parts of your life had
gone differently? If you could rewrite
the story of your life, what would you change?
Here’s some of my story. “In the year 1985, I married my good
Christian soul mate---my true love. We
had many healthy, successful children, a beautiful home, and lived happily ever
after.”
Oh, wait. That’s what it was supposed to be. Actually,
here is more like what happened: I was nearing graduation with my four year
undergrad. I had dated some, but had no
idea what a soul mate was or true love felt like, and time was getting on. So at
the advanced age of twenty-four, I picked the guy who was the best fit so far
and made the leap. We declared it “God’s
doing” and, “marvelous in our eyes,” (that’s from Psalm 118 --- for if you can
quote scripture, it legitimizes a thing) we had a fairytale wedding in a big
cathedral, and set off on our life together.
Anyway, according to the script I
was raised on, my job was to become a wife and start cranking out Christian
babies, so that is what I was going to do.
Married? Check.
Crank out babies? Okay. Going
in, I thought fourteen was a nice
round number for children, though I was ready to settle for a mere seven.
We had one, and reconsidered. Did
things ever look different in real life than they had in theory! Ideals, scripts, and formulas are all very
nice on paper, but introduce a colicky baby, money troubles, communication
challenges, thirty degree temperatures and no air conditioning in a top-floor
apartment in Toronto, and ideals might begin a slick and sweaty slide into
“time to re-think.”
We opted to use the rhythm method
while we re-thunk. Consequently, we were
pregnant within a few months. (Our
rhythm method coach looked at our chart and said, “Huh. That
shouldn’t have happened.”)
So, nineteen months after the birth
of our first girl we welcomed our second. In the next four years we struggled
along, buying a tiny house and doing everything we could manage to keep above
water. In that time I was diagnosed with chronic depression and medicated; it
turns out that my inability to cope and oppressive sadness was not, after all,
because I didn’t pray the right way or try hard enough. Huh. What
a relief!
It was a hard awakening to begin to
realize that I may have been handed a faulty package of goods in my upbringing,
especially when some others I knew, particularly an older sister, seemed to be
managing just fine with six, then seven, then eight kids, no money, and her own
marriage challenges. Ah well, I must
take ownership of the fact that there was something in my nature that wanted the security
of a “God-ordained” formula. “If I
simply prayed for it and did X, Y, and Z, my life would be blessed because I
would be following God’s will.”
So for many years I was caught
between my desire to do what I had been taught was God’s will for me and my own
misery. It took suicidal ideation to
finally force me to think for myself: I
was left deciding that either, a) I was a failure in God’s eyes OR, b) that
what I had been taught for all those years about God’s will, was faulty.
I get points for truly wanting to be
a good person, but oh, the bumps and knocks it took to jolt me off the path of
“righteousness”! I suppose sometimes
clay has to be pounded good and hard before it is malleable enough to work with.
As I approached thirty, my husband
and I had to decide if we would try one more time for a boy or if I would get
spayed then and there. We opted to try
one more time, and indeed got a boy! A very
unique boy---a boy who has taught us
worlds, brought much joy, and led us into the complex and challenging world of
autism spectrum disorders. Gifted,
magical, and very, very different, he was nowhere in my already seriously
altered script. But we struggled on, finally getting a great house with a big
yard in Kitchener, and the proverbial dog and two cats.
It was somewhere shortly after 911,
when my wusband lost his job and could not find another, when we were burning
through our meager savings and finally had to sell our dream house---the house we
were going to retire in---that I finally threw out my script altogether. It was high time to face and live the life that
I had, as opposed to the life I was supposed to have had.
A word about approaching life with a
script: having a script of how my life would go if I just “did God’s will” gave
me a feeling of safety. There wasn’t a lot of fear in me when I stepped into
adult life because I was so certain I was doing what God had planned for me to
do. What did I have to fear? I was going to follow God’s plan perfectly,
and all would be well. It took quite a
while before my iron determination to do just that cracked. Reality had a Chinese-water-torture
persistence about it, and my iron will leaked, split, and finally gave way like
the proverbial Dutch dike.
So, what I’m here to talk about this
morning is the power of our stories. We
live in story, grow up on stories, are taught by fable and story, and when we
are together, a great deal of what we do together is share stories.
Wisdom and morality teaching through
story and parable is found in every culture all the way back to the beginning
of time. It is as if we humans are hard-wired
to learn best through metaphor and myth, analogy and fable, and “The boy who
cried wolf.” Our stories teach us and
shape us.
One
example can be found in the Christian Bible: “And with many such parables He
spoke the word to them as they were able to hearit.34 But without a parable He did not speak to them.” Mark 4: 33-34
The legal profession is all about
whose story is more truthful and who is lying. Politics are all about spinning
the story and whose spin will trump the others’.
And don’t we love it when one story
binds us all together and captures our imaginations? Look at Harry Potter, or the Olympic Games, or
simply “Canada reads….”
Our stories shape us and bind us
together, for good or ill.
And that is where I’m headed in all
this. Our stories have power over
us. But we can have power over our story
in turn. I was raised on the story that God
said that my best purpose in life was marriage and child-bearing. I had to reach a place where I was ready to throw
out that story before I could be open to anything different.
My new story is that God has quite
the sense of humour.
Between 1997 and 2001, due to
working through the Artist’s Way, a novel dropped into my consciousness. The writing of it was soul-filling,
challenging, and joyful. It provided an
artistic outlet that helped me wrestle with the difference between my dreams of
what my life was supposed to be and how it actually was turning out. When I started putting down the opening
chapters, my story about this new
adventure was, “Well, I’m writing something, but it will never be
published.” A few months later my story
about it was, “I think I’m writing a novel!
I’m having so much fun! It won’t
be published, but….” A year into the
process I could say, “I’m actually writing a novel. If I finish it, I’ll see if it can be
published.” To finally, “It’s published!
Come to my book signing at Chapters!”
My story changed from impossibility
to possibility. I couldn’t possibly
become an author, and then I was an author.
My story changed me and I was changed by a story.
Here is that story! (Hold up my novel) I literally
got a new story.
Okay. Enough word-play.
Some of you may have heard of the
therapeutic practice of telling our life story in different ways. “Tell your story through the eyes of your
dog. Tell it as a Greek tragedy. Tell it as a comedy. Tell it as an action-adventure movie.” It is a process that can be quite eye-opening
and freeing.
It was healing when my husband and I
looked at each other and could change our story with mutual forgiveness. No longer did we even need to fake being
“soul-mates” (whatever that is), nor made by God for each other. When we could admit that we each had been
scared shitless at the prospect of facing adulthood alone---when we could both
admit that we each grabbed hold of the nearest willing partner that looked good
enough, it suddenly wasn’t so painful that we had such a struggle making things
work. It even got kind of funny. The more I could let go of how my life was
supposed to be, the more I could show up to how my life actually was. And how my life actually was, wasn’t all that
bad---it was pretty normal.
I found healing and freedom through
the practice of playing around with my story, though at first it was hard. I was pretty attached to my old
stories---first to my “true love” story, and after that to my “I was sold a
crappy bill of goods and now I’m miserable,” story. On my best days now, I’m in acceptance of all
that has happened, and even think a bunch of it is rather funny. My ex and I were smart enough to call it
quits a few years ago, and that was a good
thing, for example, not a tragedy.
The stories we tell ourselves have
power over us until we have the courage to test them. We humans seem especially prone to stories of
hopelessness and doom: “The NDP will
never win; they are too impractical.” “All churches are corrupt; I’ll never
find a healthy congregation to worship with.”
“My brother (father, mother, cousin) will never change.” “There’s no hope; I might as well give up.” “I’m too old to become an actress / learn to
play the guitar / try yoga / take ballroom dancing / or… fill in the blank…”
So tell me, what is your story? Did you approach life with a script? How has your life changed you? Do you have stories that trap you, or stories
that free you? Perhaps some of each?
On this planet we are people of the
story. We have shared our stories over
campfires, along the road, as we worked together in the field, as we sung our
way into battle, as we mark the passing of a life or the arrival of a new
one. Through fable and legend, myth and
sacred scripture, fact and fiction, we have been living through and with our
stories from time immemorial. We shape
our stories and our stories shape us.
What is your story? Amen
And now we will have a time of
processing. In your pews are papers and
pencils, or the ushers can bring you some if you raise your hand. I invite you to try to write a haiku of your
story so far. (And before you tell
yourself a story like, “I can’t write a Haiku!” just try it. You might find out something new.
If writing a haiku really isn’t your
thing, just doodle, or journal, but in some way remain engaged with this
morning’s material and meditate on it. We
will take about 3 minutes. And for those
like me who need a reminder, an English haiku is 17 syllables in three lines: 5
syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables. Any questions? Begin now.
(Sadly, most of the amazing haikus shared after this process are not included. I do include one.)
Like the seed in the scripture falling to the earth, we must
surrender. We would prefer to hold on to
“life.” To feel strong and competent and
capable. It is much harder to look openly
at our fears and insecurities. It is
much easier to be strong. Who likes
feeling vulnerable? Yet through our
descent into the dark earth of vulnerability, God cracks us open, and THEN the
sacred and creative and the beautiful burst into life. 
If we isolate and try to maintain the illusion of
strength, we remain alone. But when we
allow ourselves to die, and to let our pride go, we are open to finding true
intimacy and the abundant life of true heart-relationship --- which is the
kingdom of heaven.
