I written before that being involved in church as a teenager was a ‘safe place’ for me. It was a place to develop a bit of an identity, a space to have some importance – I was a junior leader, I was in the music group, I was part of the ‘Mens group’ from 18 for about 6 months, and after then was a leader in church things, team leader on a frontline team, youth leader in a church. Church meant involvement, and from about the age of 18 it was a place for me where I had some respect, importance. It was a place where I had responsibility.
Psychologically it was the place, one of many, that as a younger child, my ‘adaptive’ child took precedence. I adapted into the adult world of the local church, was a leader, even in the youth group, and had some kind of status. This isn’t and wasn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. It happens a lot. The most significant thing for me was that it was a space where my parents left from me being around 13 years old. So it immediately became safer for me, and only their torpid residue still hung on, like tentacles of time.
My role in churches, whether youth worker, leader or in ecumenical groups or denominations was exactly what the 20-30’s me required. Churches in which I kept some emotional distance (because I was an employee in many cases) , and could be important and useful, through either a paid role or voluntary ones involving music, young people or just by being a thoughtful, critical person who could preach or lead services even now and then.
ADAPTED JAMES was in his element.
The Shield.
Wounded interior hiding behind a hard shell. Back turned.
Oh and it was so easy.
Adapt to rules, expectation and performance
What I mean is, that it was so easy for me to exist in this way.
Nothing in main could get close, because academic critical head of mine would question, criticism or cynicism it away.
By the way that’s when I know I’m not feeling safe. I can tell.
But then I could keep all the barriers up.
I could hide the wounds behind the active mind. I didn’t have to be. To be honest, I didnt know, that I wasnt ‘being’ I was just aware that I wasnt alive. Not fully.
Church was a place where I could easily hide. Keep up the appearances. Easy to keep masks on when no one else is asking that question, and if they did I would run and hide.
Hiding behind responsibility, Hiding behind intelligence, Emotions left outside, Emotions no where.
Though I wouldn’t have admitted it, at the time, I had tied myself into the expectations of the identity of ‘going to church’, and it helped me in some ways to have some parts of my ego massaged with some importance and influence, but I didnt want to get close. And for a number of years I didnt know why.
I couldn’t emotionally invest myself in church. I needed it for my sake. Aside from frustrations I had no emotion to give at times. I had a head faith. But a head full of doubts. But not a heart faith – because actually that heart was well and truly hidden. And only, only on rare occasions did anything get through – especially in a church situation.
I used to criticise people in churches for not being real and vulnerable – when that was me – I just lacked any awareness to know it.
Projection as a defence mechanism, I shudder with my own embarrassment.
What provoked all flow of thinking you might ask?
I think, actually, no, I feel and beginning to know, that part of the healing journey I have been on in the last 3-4 years has been emotional, it has also been spiritual, and this has affected how I have interacted with the formative faith of my up to 40 year old self. I would say I have had more spiritual experiences since undergoing therapy than any time before. Through times when I have felt the most broken and confused, damaged and lost and also times when I have recognised my need to love myself – and to sense the spirituality and consciousness within myself. Its a journey that has taken me to Eckhart Tolle, to Karen Armstrong, to Gary Zukav, Irvin Yalom, Paulo Coelho, Richard Rohr, Victor Frankl and Haemin Sunim, and many others, as I continually discover the universe as a spiritual being, and the spiritual being deep inside of me, and spirituality of my body – the feelings and emotions. Holding in balance a spirituality that includes myself, God, creation and the other, and not denying the very heart and soul of myself – for the sake of the other.
But what I read today was the thing to which so much of my spiritual and religious life made some sense, and for that I hand the end of this blog over the the wonderful Brene Brown.
When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into ‘compliance and consequences’ rather than teaching and modelling how to wrestle with the unknown and to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms. …
(Brene Brown, Daring Greatly) going on to say….
I needed Church and I thought church needed me.
I left my own vulnerability at the front door. It was barely on the same street to be honest.
Performance, expectation and compliance was my safe place.
I know I did this, but how common is it? What is the cost in ministry terms when vulnerability isnt culturally valued? Thats a question others can answer…
Thanks Brene, for helping me see, again, and be grateful for the journey I have been on, grateful for the churches and groups who hosted and held me, who I kept at arms length and who I ran from when I got emotionally frightened. Thank you because you didnt know, and I didnt know what kind of emotional mess and what kind of emotional trauma I was and still carry. Thank you for doing your best, well most of you.
Thank you more so for those who in more recent days have held my actual vulnerability as I have let you into the layers and I have found connection and warmth and life through this process, thank you.
Thank you Brene too, for causing me to see the extent to which I was hiding and avoiding being vulnerable.
Surprisingly Emotional Therapy has given me Spiritual Epiphanies. Learning to be vulnerable to myself, learning to uncover the hard shell and layers one by one, learning to be warm and loving to myself. To value the God within. To Value love as a feeling, myself as a human. To be. To be , from the inside out.
‘Look at the Sparrows…….they dont plant or harvest or store food in barns….Can all your worries add a single moment to your life’ (Matthew 6; 26)
‘Look at the Stars……see how they shine for you..’ (Coldplay)
Ive heard a lot of sermons about the Sparrows verses, and usually they are about trust, trusting in God – because its was often about ‘see how your Heavenly Father feeds them -and aren’t you more valuable than the sparrow’ This is the part that would be emphasised.
But what if this wasn’t the point? what if it was about looking, what if it was about the ability to see
To see the sparrow.
To look at it.
So, go on, look at that sparrow outside your window.
Give it a stare.
What do you see?
Maybe its a pigeon on the street as you are sitting at a cafe reading this – look at the pigeon – what do you see?
Just stop for a while, and look at it
Your mind might want to think about all the judgement of the pigeon or ‘boringness’ of the sparrow.. and thats ok, keep looking… and as you do so breathe
Do you see the colours, it wings, the shape of its feet, its eyes, head, and …anything else?
When you look at the sparrow – what are you not looking at? When you give your attention to it – what are you not giving attention to?
In his book ‘Bird Therapy’ Joe Harkness writes, when looking at a Dunnock – a bird often mistaken as a sparrow – ‘I only discovered their beauty, as I took notice’
This isn’t a piece about the merits of birdwatching – its about looking.
Jesus causes me think about the mind of the birds – look at how they do not worry about food – look at how they behave, look at how they feed, look at how they are – look at them – notice them…and
at the same time
stop looking at yourself for a moment.
Look at something that you have no control over, or should have no desire to control
Look at something that is not looking at you judging you, comparing you
Look at something that lives in the now, has patterns of life, that is in the present
just..look…
What if the imperative is that – by looking you focus into the present, the now – and this causes some of the worries to disappear, even momentarily..because.. the mind is somewhere else
Maybe even in 1st Century Palestine there was enough man made stresses, that the act of looking at sparrows was becoming less practiced…as trade and farming increased, and the country was threatened by the Roman Empires.. – in those moments its difficult to remember to look – survival was the instinct..
As we look – we stop
As we look – we are in the present
What about the now
What about the gap in time created by looking
what are you noticing?
What is in the gap?
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time’
Meister Eckhart
Stay there
Look at the stars – see how they shine for you
Look at them
Do look
Do look up
Force yourself
Look up from the things that are otherwise all around, look up from them
Do you notice how every distraction wants you to not do this?
observe the voices, let them have their say…but dont act on them
carry on looking…
Look…. at the Sparrows – what do you see? What do you see in yourself..as you do?
A beautiful blessing on the healing of wounded history ( from John O’Donahue) , that I saw share by Andy Raine and wanted to post here as a gift and reminder to myself.
For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:
For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
when the pain takes you where you would rather not go,
through the white curtain of yesterdays
to a place, you had forgotten
you knew from the inside out;
and a time when that bitter tree was planted
that has grown always invisibly beside you
and whose branches your awakened hands
now long to disentangle from your heart.
You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
when you should have felt safe
enough to fall toward love,
how deep down your eyes were always owned by something
that faced them through a dark fester of thorns
converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
you could only see what touched you as already torn.
Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
and your memory is ready to show you everything,
having waited all these years for you to return and know.
Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
and according to your readiness, everything will open.
May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
who can accompany you through the fear and grief
until your heart has wept its way to your true self.
As your tears fall over that wounded place,
may they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound,
so that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
and feel the clear, free air bless your new face.
John O’Donohue, ( from ‘To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings’)
James Ballantyne 