Category Archives: Psychological growth

Overwhelm: The feeling and what we can do about it

Building community, Music, Psychological growth,

More and more clients seem to come into a session feeling overwhelmed. In fact, they use the word in the new way we have begun to use it to describe their feeling: “overwhelm.”

I can relate to experiencing overwhelm. The last few years have been the most overwhelming I can remember — maybe for you, too! As for me, I transitioned out of my long-time pastoring work – that would cause anyone some trouble. I was defrauded by a contractor. I moved to a new home. I lost my church community. And, of course, we are still in a pandemic and the country is unraveling – at least that’s what David Brooks says. And then the next climate disaster is in the offing! I have had my peculiar version of the overwhelm most of us are experiencing.

I am feeling OK now, but I am really concerned about those who don’t feel OK. I think they are multiplying and their feeling of overwhelm might be deepening. We have had two years of pandemic isolation to heighten issues we might normally handle well. We need to check on each other. Check on the vulnerable even if you feel vulnerable. We all need to find more community life.

Royal & the Serpent gets it

In June of 2020 Royal and the Serpent recorded a song which depicts the feeling of overwhelm just right. I can’t help but believe the 11 million people who have viewed it feel some kind of community with each other as an artist musically names what they are experiencing.

FYI, Royal and the Serpent’s stage name translates to “Me + My Ego.”  Her given name is Ryan Santiago. She struck a chord with many of her listeners on YouTube:

Youraverageartist commented: “I feel like the beat represents the buildup to an anxiety attack. The beat gets faster and more intense as they sing about being overwhelmed, and then when the beat drops into the wild electric music, that represents the anxiety attack. Then everything is calm and back to normal. You realize that everything around you isn’t any different. These attacks normally aren’t very physical, they happen in your head, although it doesn’t always show to the outside.”

Check up on people who might be feeling this. They might like to talk to you rather than a YouTube audience.

booksandboots commented: I’m 28 and I’ve known about my anxiety since I was 8. This is the first song I’ve ever heard that really captures what it feels like. For me, it’s never gone away. It’s a part of who I am, for whatever reason. Perhaps an evolutionary response to a threat that isn’t there?…

I’m happy to say I haven’t had a true panic attack in over a year, something I never, ever thought would be possible. I had just accepted that was my life: panic attacks every day or multiple times a day. Frozen. Silent….

It also helps to listen to your anxiety, as strange as that sounds. To ask it questions like, “What are you really upset about? Is it that person standing too close, can you do something about it? If you can’t, can you breathe slowly and deeply and try some grounding exercises? If that doesn’t work, can you try to drink some water to occupy your mind in this moment, focusing on nothing else but the water? You can do this. I believe in you.”

And, as juvenile as it sounds, I speak to my anxiety as if it were a child. In a good way. I don’t think of my anxiety as some monster in the closet. It’s just a chemical imbalance that believes it’s helping me stay safe. I explain what reality is to my anxiety and comfort it the same way I would my own child. If my anxiety is here to stay, then we better get used to each other. I can’t walk around hating that part of myself because it doesn’t make the anxiety go away, it makes it worse.

Tender people who are bravely looking OK might not be. Given what we are all facing, who isn’t feeling a bit overwhelmed? I know I have needed to tell my story to people who care about me. Telling it diminished the power of the loss and the trauma. But more loss and trauma is likely to come my way. We need community to face it all.

Signs of overwhelm

Sometimes (and maybe over a period of time), the intensity of our feelings outmatches our ability to manage them. At some point you will probably feel overwhelmed by negative emotions, such as anger, fear, or guilt. Some of us will experience mania and be overwhelmed by euphoria.

If you feel overwhelm, it might be hard to pinpoint why. Usually a collection of stressors contributes rather than one particular event. Your emotions may bleed into seemingly unrelated parts of your life until you are “all stirred up.” Emotional overwhelm may be caused by stress, traumatic life experiences, relationship issues, and much more.

Here are some common signs of overwhelm:

  • You have a big reaction to a small situations. For example, you may panic when you can’t find your keys.
  • You feel physically ill or fatigued and don’t know why.
  • You have trouble focusing or completing simple tasks.
  • You find yourself withdrawing from friends and family.
  • Your emotions color your perception of everything. For example, your grief may keep you sad even during pleasant occasions.

Causes of overwhelm

When we are stressed by the small things in our collection, we might say to ourselves, “This is dumb!” Nevertheless, small things often add up to overwhelm. For instance, it is common for a simple things-to-do list to hijack someone’s brain. That’s because your brain might not see a to-do list, but see the threat of scarcity: not enough time, not enough energy, not enough magical ability to fit everything into 24 hours. Or it might see the threat of failing, the threat of disappointing others, the threat of feeling like you’re not doing enough or might not even be enough.

We react to these feelings the same way we do with other threats. We fight, flee, or freeze. That’s true whether the threat is a bus hurtling toward us or our responsibilities  make us feel like we can’t catch our breath.

Usually, we land somewhere between freeze and flight, numbed out. We avoid. We dig in our heels and resist. If we’re at work we might procrastinate: make a call, do tasks that don’t matter, call in sick. If we are at home we might binge-watch Netflix, stay up late reading things that don’t require thought, sneak off for some porn, buy something on Amazon, or scroll through Instagram.

Remember, your emotions may get overloaded by a single stressor, like surviving a traumatic accident or violence, or losing a loved one. But overwhelm can also occur due to the pile up of many smaller stressors. For example, missing your bus may not feel like too big of a deal by itself. But if you’ve been fighting with your family, having trouble sleeping, and are hungry from skipping breakfast, a missed bus can be the proverbial “last straw” of the day.

A therapist can be a big help. Even if you are in therapy, everyone still needs some community. Check up on people. We are all experiencing the same big things bearing down on you. What’s more, the latest trauma may have dislodged some unprocessed memories. Everyone needs a safe place to tell their story.

Six ways to deal with overwhelm right now.

  1. Ground yourself in the present using the 5-4-3-2-1 technique.

When your emotions are flooding, your mind is getting foggy, or your skin is getting clammy, this technique could be a way to get your feet back on the ground and your mind cleared. It’s a classic tool everyone needs in their backpack. Donate it to someone who needs it.

5 – Look around and name five things you can see, right now, from where you are.

4 – Listen and name four things you can hear.

3 – Notice three things you can touch, like the pages of a nearby book or the feeling of your feet on the carpet.

2 – Next come two smells: Breathe in the pages of a book or the citrus scent of the candle you lit.

1 – Finally, name something you can taste: a sip of cold water will do, or even just the taste of your own mouth.

This does two things to interrupt the overwhelm. First, it grounds you in your senses and, more importantly, the present moment. Second, keeping track of the counting and working your way through your senses interrupts spinning thoughts.

  1. Clean up your immediate surroundings.

The phrase “outer order, inner calm” is popular for a reason. When you’re feeling overwhelmed, tidying the area around you restores order to a little corner of your universe and allows you to move forward.

You don’t need to redo the office or redecorate the house. Restrict yourself to things within arm’s reach. Stack loose papers, put caps on rogue pens, wipe away dust or grime. The resulting order will help you feel like you’ve accomplished something and allow you to focus. One time we all went over and cleaned someone’s whole house with them just to give them a boost and allow their emotions to settle and let them feel part of the friendship circle.

  1. Ruthlessly prioritize.

Cut everything that should be done and stick to things that need to get done now. This is harder than it looks for some people since if they change their “shoulds” they will feel disloyal to their family or feel like they are condemning their past self. If someone trusts you, they might let you help them sort.

  1. Stop accidentally multitasking

Trying to work from home and simultaneously keep an eye on the kids, holding a conversation while the TV is on, eating lunch at your desk, leaving your email open while you work, or simply keeping your smartphone at hand 24/7 are examples of things that force you to transition your attention (and then transition it back) hundreds of times a day.

Multitasking works about as well as texting while driving—which is to say, it doesn’t. So if your nerves are frayed, mend them by doing a singular thing at a time. When you’re feeling less frantic, you can go back to googling Beyonce’s net worth while making a sandwich. But until then, single-task, single-task, single-task. You might help your friend do this by asking them to take a walk around the block with you or eat lunch together — community building is also a single-minded task; giving someone else attention and receiving it is a natural way to heal from the pressures of life.

  1. Take the next tiny step.

When you feel frozen in the proverbial headlights of what is bearing down on you, think only of the next tiny step. The next step can be very tiny—only you have to know that you’re inching forward by thinking “Okay, now click on the folder. Now open the document. Now start reading.” Or “Sit up, Put your feet on the floor. Breathe in goodness. Stand up. Stretch slowly” all on the way to starting your day. I am often grateful when someone calls me and I get a chance to tell them what I am planning to do. Just talking to them gets me out of whatever rut I am in and often encourages me to take the next step.

  1. Radically accept what you cannot do or control.

This is the basic stance of faith. We stand in grace and we can turn into the reality of it at any time. God is with us and loves us. You can strategize, organize, and hack all you want, but at some point, you will run into something you can’t do or control. When you do, the only thing to do is to radically accept. Trust Jesus and be one of those good people who can be trusted to listen and care.

Radical acceptance doesn’t mean throwing in the towel. It means allowing for uncertainty and uncontrollability, without struggling like you’re trapped or complaining as if bad things should never happen to you. It is keeping on with what you can do instead of dwelling on what you can’t. (Thanks to Jade Wu).

When you get behind the wheel of a car, you radically accept that a reckless driver may hit you no matter how well you drive. Yet you still do it because you want to get from point A to B quickly. When you fall in love, you radically accept that your heart may get trampled on. Yet you do anyway because love is worth the risk. When you simply can’t meet a deadline without compromising your mental health, you can radically accept you’ll have to be late and you may disappoint someone, because your well-being is worth it.

Just telling a story, thinking things through, letting some feelings settle down or pass through might be enough to deal with overwhelm. Doing it together with Jesus is undoubtedly even better. There are a lot more resources to apply to feeling overwhelm, of course. Your therapist or trusted friend or mentor can help. This post was mainly a means to give you some space to feel some hope and experience some care. I write because I care. I think we need to keep finding ways to check in on each other and build some community. It is an overwhelming time.

Should I forgive them if they never offer an apology?

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Psychological growth, , , , , ,

The Washington Post surprised me the other day with an op-ed featuring Warren G. Harding – the first president after World War I, most-remembered for the corruption in his administration. That’s him throwing out the first pitch. It was a weird week. First, I liked Dick Cheney, of all people, for accompanying Liz to the Jan. 6 commemoration. Then I read WaPo and ended up admiring the super-capitalist, Teapot Dome president!

I did not know that Harding forgave Eugene V. Debs! He commuted the sentence of the  Socialist who ran against him from prison! Debs’ crime was doubting-out-loud the validity of WWI — he called it a diabolical capitalist war. I guess I would have voted for him. However, he got no affection from the Woodrow Wilson administration. They threw Debs in jail for his speech with a dubious application of the Espionage Act. When Harding followed Wilson he decided, against the advice of his advisors, to forgive Debs. He even made sure the traitor came to the White House on his way home from prison, so he could meet him and form some connection.

Biden has been acting out a similar public drama for us all year. He’d love to forgive people. But he took the gloves off on Epiphany and laid out Trump. For most of the year he has been restrained, trying hard to bridge the divide. But maybe that’s over. Are you similarly conflicted? Do you rehearse snappy things you would say to your enemies in your head — the zingers you will never get a chance to deliver? What do you do when your offender will not apologize, much less reconcile?

Have you decided how you are going to handle the people who have undermined you, lied about you and then blamed you for what they did to you? A lot of us are in a lot of drama. All over the country divorces have gone up, families have been divided over politics, churches have split and pastors have resigned. You can’t look at the news, if you dare, without someone worrying about American “democracy” – which Eugene V. Debs did not think much of when he was jailed for saying something that 900,000 people voted for.

It can be hard to forgive sometimes, but if Warren Harding can do it, maybe we can too.

What if they don’t say they are sorry?

This is always the big question when it comes to forgiveness. What if the person who hurt us is not sorry? It is not uncommon for someone to protest when forgiveness is suggested:

I can’t let my guard down. That would be surrendering and acting like they were justified in hurting me. They would get away with their crime! I would be just as vulnerable to more of the abuse I just suffered.

I will not forgive until the other person: 1) knows that wrong was done; 2) feels an inner sorrow for doing it; 3) apologizes to me; 4) and makes amends. Then I’ll know it is safe to forgive and enter back into the relationship.

Most of us are taught to apologize from a young age along the lines of those four conditions.  We bite a sibling, say something cruel, push someone around, and some well-meaning adult intervenes and tells us, “Now, say you’re sorry.” Half-hearted apologies ensue along with forced hugs and we move on. But something changes as we age. Apologies are harder to come by and pain cuts a little deeper than “She took my Sports Diva!”

What are you supposed to do when someone intentionally hurts you, rips your heart wide open, and then leaves you to pick up the pieces? What if they move on with their lives, with no well-meaning adult to come along and demand they apologize?

From our playground lessons, we’ve been conditioned to think that forgiveness follows an apology. But things change and people forget how to apologize. We protest and we hear “That’s your problem.” We get the unspoken message we’re wrong for being hurt. But living wronged with that prickly disconnection installed is a recipe for bitterness and it might even make us sick.

When hurt remains unforgiven, when the memory stays unprocessed, it sits in our hearts as if it is still happening. We wait for an apology in order to get some relief. Do you have anyone on whom you are still waiting? Is it fairly easy to get all worked up when their face pops into your mind or someone speaks about them fondly or you see them succeed? Jessica Harris wrote:

“My dad left our family when I was in elementary school. The pain caused by his abandonment ran deep. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly when I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Then, as I got older, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly and not care.

That ate away at my heart for years. The hurt remained unresolved as I waited for this man to return to my life and apologize for wrecking it. I thought my anger was my power. My ability to never forget was going to ensure I would never get hurt again. It was how I protected my heart.

That anger bled over into my other relationships. I became angry in general, always blaming it on my dad. If he would just admit he was wrong, my life would be better.”

I couldn’t tell that same story.  But I have definitely had to work through similar hurts in the last few years. You probably have had some hurts too. My clients certainly share them every day: a trauma that is lodged in the memory and won’t go away, a loved one who betrayed their trust, an unscrupulous salesman or contractor who swindled them, a family member who hurt them but has since passed on. They still feel people who cut them deep but have never once breathed an apology. You might feel you have a right to hold a grudge, yourself.

What if anger is not strength?

Bitterness is an enemy of resilience. It is the opposite of joy isn’t it? It is the taste of poison.  You cannot be strong and move forward with your life while still dragging around chests full of bitterness from your past like you’re Jacob Marley.

What kids rarely learn is that forgiveness is more for the forgiver than for the offender. Forgiveness is not, “I am OK with what you did.” It isn’t even, “I accept your apology.” It is, “I am not going to hold this in me or against you anymore.”

The point of forgiveness and apologies is ultimately reconciliation. An apology is extended by the person who committed the hurt. They need to do that to get free. Forgiveness is extended by the person who was hurt. It frees them more than the offender. Then two free people who have freed one another can move on to work out how to live together in love.

Even if you can’t get to reconciliation you can still forgive, and bring closure to a hurt. You can do that even if there is no apology. If you’re too hurt to forgive right away, take time to scab over. But try not to hold on too long. The anger you nurse is just the hurt hanging on. Being angry is not being strong. Forgiving brings strength that lets us really heal and move forward with life without waiting for someone to let us out of the bitterness prison.

Go ahead and forgive

Forgiveness is uncommon enough that it is actually studied. You can be a forgiveness expert.  A growing body of research shows that best forgiveness practices are about people exercising the moral virtue of forgiveness even if there is no justice or even hope of reconciliation. One tries to be good, within reason, toward an offending person. As a result, the forgiver reduces their anger, anxiety and depression and improves their self-esteem and hope (Robert Enright). A good reason to forgive is to protect your health!.

We dare not conflate forgiveness and reconciliation. People often do, but we dare not. Forgiveness is not dependent on reconciliation, restitution or justice. The offer of forgiveness can be unconditional, not dependent on the other’s response at all, including an apology. Sounds like Jesus, right? Reconciliation, when at least one party is deeply and unfairly hurt, is the fruit of forgiveness and apology and is conditional; it depends on how the offending party or parties understand their hurtful ways and change. Sounds like what Jesus would like to build, right?

A forgiver is motivated by their desire to be rid of resentment and act as good as is possible  toward an offending person. If that person has no inner sorrow, never intends to apologize or to make amends, you don’t act like they do. Yet, you can still have the intention to reconcile if the person changes and interaction becomes safe. You even can show an outward quality of forgiveness, for example, by not talking disparagingly about the offender to others. It is working out Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” If a person keeps abusing you, you can struggle for peace instead of just struggling against hurt. You don’t need to bear their responsibility.

Why not be healthy? If you reject forgiving because you conflate it with reconciliation, you  deprive yourself of a chance to recover, lead a healthy psychological life and even a healthy relational life with others (if not necessarily with the offending person). Deep anger from injustices can lead to a lack of trust in general, thwarting potentially uplifting relationships.

How we think about forgiveness is important. If we make the mistake of waiting for an apology or holding out for an ideal reconciliation, we allow the offending person or a passing act to dominate us for a long time, maybe even for a lifetime if the wound is deep enough. Forgiving and reconciling are not the same. You are free to forgive, if you choose, even if someone refuses to apologize.

Letting love in: Mary the beloved leads us

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , ,
The Annunciation — Henry Ossawa Tanner

On the second Sunday of Advent, Hallowood Institute provided some space for clients and friends to prepare a room for the Lord, to welcome love in. We created space to follow the full arc of Mary’s journey of receiving the angel’s message to entering into the fullness of God’s grace. She moved from doubting her belovedness to confidence in it, from “How can this be?” to the Magnificat. Here is an outline you might like to use to follow her example. I know it can’t really replicate everything that happened, but it might help you stay on the Advent journey.

The Annunciation of a Woman — Harmonia Rosales

First movement:  Doubts about our belovedness

Mary pays attention to the word coming to her and to the doubts it arouses. She listens to her body and to the thoughts that automatically come to her mind.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth,  to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.  And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.  And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”

And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” — Luke 1:26-34

When our “angel” comes to us we, like Mary, probably ask, “How can this be?” We doubt God can or would come to us. We doubt we could be important. We doubt we could be worthy. We doubt we could be loved.  We need to go through a process to let love in, to become the beloved of God we are.

Our brains and the rest of our bodies are accustomed to patterns that have defended us from not getting the love we crave and defended many of us from further abuse and disrespect. Our brains are rutted with programs of self-protection that don’t meet our needs and don’t protect us any longer. Our bodies have memories of trauma and fear that cause us to keep reacting in certain ways.

Mary was afraid when God came to her in the angel and doubted she could be part of the wonderful future he promised.

During our retreat we worked a little on getting our left and right brain to integrate. We found a place in ourselves of safety where we could return when we felt afraid. We created a container in our imagination where we could store intrusive thoughts that invaded our meditation.

Then we tried to welcome our doubting parts — the voices that tell us we are not loved. Maybe you would like to try it. Picture a time when you doubted you were loved or even lovable.  What makes you doubt you are loved? Is there an event from your past (distant or near past) that captures the feelings of this doubt? Put it into words. Then, if you can, float back to being 14 years old with Mary. Picture yourself at about that age. Identify the negative beliefs about yourself that go with this doubting picture. Write them out.

The Castello Annunciation by Sandro Botticelli

Second Movement:  Mary lets love in to talk back to her view of self

Mary turns from her former view of self and attends to the new life she is being given.

And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”  

And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her. — Luke 1:35-38

The various depictions of the annunciation tell different stories. The one above shows the second movement we are exploring as Mary shies away from this angel. Is she saying, “Don’t bother me I am trying to read the Bible?” Or is it, more likely “What do you mean ‘nothing is impossible with God?’ I feel quite impossible myself?” The process of moving from doubts about “For nothing will be impossible with God” to “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” is what we were exploring. It takes a process to see ourselves as the beloved of God, to turn away from other views of ourselves and turn into that one.

From Henri Nouwen in Life of the Beloved:

I am putting this so directly and so simply because, though the experience of being the Beloved has never been completely absent from my life, I never claimed it as my core truth. I kept running around it in large or small circles, always looking for someone or something able to convince me of my Belovedness. It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice that speaks from the very depth of my being and says: “You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.” That voice has always been there, but it seems that I was much more eager to listen to other, louder voices saying: “Prove that you are worth something; do something relevant, spectacular, or powerful, and then you will earn the love you so desire.” Meanwhile, the soft, gentle voice that speaks in the silence and solitude of my heart remained unheard or, at least, unconvincing….

Try this exercise to name those different “voices” competing to speak the loudest to you. Find a negative view of self that comes up in you. Do not collect all the views you can think of, just one. It might be as simple as when you look in the mirror and you go right to the body part you don’t like like: “too fat” or “bad hair.” But the voices can come from a deeper place: “I don’t deserve to feel good. Someone will discover what I am really like. You are all alone” — even “No one loves you or wants you.” Once we start listening, these often become quite clear as voices competing for our attention. Naming them does not feel good, but it begins to loosen their power on us.

Turn into a positive view of self:  “I am the kind of person who tries to grow” or “I have a very good grandmother” or “I see how I have good choices I can  make.” The big one is, “I am the beloved of God.” Nouwen talks about Listening to the gentle voice of God with great inner attentiveness. That attention makes the “angelic” voice surer and our true selves more obvious. Depriving the other voices of attention makes them weaker, fainter — “I can’t hear you!”

Painting in the Church of El Sitio, Suchitoto, El Salvador

Third Movement: Mary receives validation from Elizabeth

Mary welcomes support to face her fears and enter into her context with confidence.

In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!  And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.  And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.” — Luke 1:39-45

Recent scholarship on healing from identity wounds based in trauma says, “Radical healing involves being or becoming whole in the face of identity-based ‘wounds,’ which are the injuries sustained because of our membership in an oppressed racial or ethnic group.”

We acknowledged how our spiritual journeys differ because of our racist and sexist culture. For some of us, the wisdom of our communities has been deeply damaged by racist practices. Some of us have experiences of both healing and trauma from our interactions with our communities, in our neighborhoods and families, in our interactions with systemic violence, in our churches.

Mary experienced isolation and rejection as her story became known.  She and her young family had to flee oppression and slaughter based in part on race.  In this part of Mary’s story, she seeks much needed validation — even though she has spoken with an angel and knows she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit.  The encounter with Elizabeth validates what she knows inside, what her body is certainly telling her.

Take some time to consider your own journeys and where such validation may emerge for you. Note a few aggressions you have experienced recently.  Gwen’s was “The invisibility I often feel as a woman in leadership positions, or when I am left out, like when my husband got an email that should have also been addressed to me.”

Now consider how you responded to these aggressions. In your childhood were there any practices that you found comforting when faced with hurts — cultural practices or personal practices? What current social networks/systems are offering you support? Where do you feel empowered as Elizabeth empowered Mary? Are there ways you might help create further spaces where you can find this social support?   Notice what’s coming up in your body right now as you consider aggression. Deep breath and long exhale.

We need to meet our Elizabeths.  To listen to them and receive their love and encouragement, even though we already know that the life of Christ is growing in us.

Magnificat by Sister Mary Grace Thul

Fourth Movement: Mary takes her place as the beloved with her “Magnificat”

We created a final space to follow the full arc of Mary’s journey in Belovedness. She moves from doubting her belovedness to confidence in it, from “How can this be?”  to the Magnificat. In her prayer, Mary owns her belovedness and acts out of it.

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

And Mary remained with her about three months and returned to her home. — Luke 1:46-56

I was inspired to own my belovedness by Osheta Moore’s Dear White Peacemakers earlier this year. Both Mary and Osheta Moore show their beloved selves in their context, in their families, and in their societies. And they both speak out of this belovedness, claiming their birthright to be the beloved of God, sent with reconciliation into their own space. I actually got in a little trouble with my some people when I quoted Moore teaching that being beloved is where the Lord starts when he calls for truth and justice. It’s a radical and important principle. As beloved is how we should see ourselves and others, even those nazi-like guys who paraded through the Lincoln Memorial the night before our retreat. Even in the battle against white supremacy and the scrourge of racism, we lose our cause if we lose our souls by not seeing ourselves as beloved of God and not insisting that everyone is a potential member of the beloved community.

Osheta Moore is keeping it radical and I am with her. Here is a bit of what she says in Dear White Peacemakers

Jesus says that in this world we will have trouble, but to take heart, for he has overcome the world. He did this by first owning his Belovedness and then proclaiming it to every single person he met. His Belovedness empowered him to challenge societal hierarchies based on fear of the other, offer relief to those who have been oppressed, and eventually to sacrificially love on the cross. When you are grounded in something other than your work or results, when you are grounded in a truer, deeper, soul-healing confidence, you can continue to press on—even if it means death to all your comforts and control. This is your calling when trouble comes as you practice anti-racism….[O]wn your Belovedness so that you can proclaim mine. Belovedness is like a flowing river of renewal and justice. It allows us to challenge systems and have difficult conversations. It moves us from individualism into community.

Many of us wrote moving, personal “magnificats” of our own, to take a stand as the beloved of  God, to affirm we are letting love in — and out.

Mary’s prayer is called “the magnificat” because the first line of it in Latin is “Magníficat ánima mea Dóminum” — in English, “My soul magnifies the Lord.” Familiar prayers have often been known by their first word.

Try writing a prayer of your own. Write it for God, not for anyone else. You could use Mary’s prayer as a model. Better, use the spirit of what she is doing as a guide. She is pulling together the most meaningful thoughts she has into a song of belonging to the Beloved, graced with wonderful things going on inside her. She sees amazing opportunities to offer love to the world.

Our own magnificats sum up the whole process of letting love in. When it is time for you  to speak yours, what have you overcome? what are you standing up against?  When you say, “This is who I am, this is how God sees me, this is what I am for, this is what I intend to do, this is what I hope, this is what my truth in Christ is,” etc., what competes for that view of yourself? It could be your own family, government systems, or oil companies; the list goes on.

What do you say? If it is just: “I am the beloved of God, there’s nothing you can do about it. It is what it is.” That is good enough. That’s a short magnificat I am using this Advent as Jesus is newly born in me in this new era of the world being born.

All the unimportant places: Maps of civic and personal tragedy

Psychological growth, , ,

In August we were in Sequoia National Park with our grandson and passed the cut-off to Porterville. I told the story of going to nearby Poplar as a preschooler to see my Father’s father. I think of Poplar as an even poorer suburb of Porterville. My grandfather lived in a two-room migrant worker’s house, as I remember it – a free-standing studio apartment with a kitchen and little bath off the back. I became famous for crawling up on his bed and finding his gun in the headboard.

From Tulare County files

Just last week I flew over the Oklahoma panhandle where my father grew up as a farmworker, each year joining the planters and harvesters who lived in the Great Plains, never completing a year of high school because both ends of the schedule were occupied. If you draw a raggedy line between Poplar CA and Strong City OK you can create a history of dried up towns and forgotten people.

All the unimportant places

So I was struck with Matt Black’s map of his epic research of all the regions of the United States where the poverty rate is higher than 20%. He traveled 100,000 miles through 46 states and Puerto Rico to create a monumental work of documentary photography titled American Geography. He calls the lines on his map “veins waiting to be opened.” He wanted to create an “inverse map” since whoever draws the map decides what is important. He went to all the places people deem unimportant. I grew up, my father and his father grew up in those places. They install a certain kind of memory of the world.

Even if you didn’t grow up in such a place, I think you probably have such a place in your heart somewhere. There is some territory in us where we feel we are more impoverished than others. It’s the place where we feel unaccepted or irrelevant. It is the place where we see ourselves as unimportant or in need of more importance. The experience of that place is as simple as being shocked and angry over the driver who is inconsiderate to us. It is as profound as finding out the friend or lover we trusted could turn their back on us, even a parent.

It is a blessing we are on Jesus’ map. Jesus is from one of those unimportant places, called Nazareth. He is much more like a migrant farmworker than a CEO. He says he has no place to lay his head, which even makes him dependent on others for housing. He spends a lot of his life and ministry on an itinerary from one forgotten place and person to more of them. I think he is still doing that. I know he has been to those places in me.

I wish Americans, in particular, related to the woman who grabbed the Lord’s hem, or to the man who told him about his self-destructive son, or to the out-on-the-margins shepherds coming up in the Christmas story. Some do, of course. Just last week one of my well-off friends was identifying with Zacchaeus, found by Jesus in a tree, welcomed to be somebody by not striving to become somebody.

Why do people accept their unimportance?

But it seems that most people do not reject the the hierarchical structures that define them as less important and valuable than others. For some reason, they rank themselves in relation to their oppressors. Everyone seems to accept there is a 1%, viewed like a beautiful species on the Discovery Channel, and they deserve to be important, they made it. The unpercentaged people at the bottom accept who they are as someone at the bottom. They even have trouble being valuable to God since their value is defined by the economy. Poor Jesus, offering beggars what they really need and they want Trump to free them instead.

As he made his way through his map, Matt Black began to internalize the common outlook and language of the territories where people at the economic bottom live. He found the feeling that “we don’t matter to the rest of them” is much more important there than the money people don’t have.  In those places, being unimportant affects everyone’s self-worth, their self-esteem, their pride. It makes them angry — many Jan 6 rioters report feeling like a stranger in “their” own country. It drives them to despair — places of greater poverty have greater opioid deaths, which last week set a record of 100,000 overdose deaths in a single year with five weeks to go.

Feeling unimportant creates a sense of self constantly skeptical about the possibility for health, for safety, even for love. A narrative gets stuck in one’s head:  “When opportunities arise, our town never comes to mind. After a storm comes, our area won’t be the first to get fixed.” People get used to nothing coming their way, no redress, not even any listening. They hunker down and stop looking outward. The people huddled up against the Mexican border are certainly doing that. The couple I got to talk to from Honduras were from an unimportant village. When they reached the border, they found they were from a throwaway country. I have never felt their pain. I do not need economic shelter right now. But part of me knows the dread, the potential overwhelm of facing how unimportant I can feel, and might actually be.

Matt Black’s map plots the places where people are on the edge of being homeless, where they are often resigned to feeling overwhelmed. Black found a tragedy being played out in all the places he visited. He was a bit surprised to realize in the unimportant places people usually internalize civic failures are as personal failures. Immigrants come to the portals into the country and are unwanted, tagged “illegal” when they get in. Citizens at the bottom go to the doorways to the treasure house of the U.S. and discover they don’t have the means to get in, they are unworthy, not from the right place. They blame themselves.

I don’t know whether to attribute this whole sensibility on Christianity or not. But I do know a few people who are recovering from their grandiose personal responsibility to be holy and to save the world for Jesus. At one point, they drank blame for breakfast. They have never succeeded in their lives (at least succeeded enough), the promise of God’s blessing notwithstanding. There are congregations full of depressed failures waiting for someone to tell them they can be greater, or tell them their failures were really successes — like Trump telling them he did not lose the election. Evangelicalism can run like a multi-level marketing scheme luring the poor to get-rich quick (see John Oliver); the government gets into the act of promising glory by perpetrating a voluntary tax on the poor through lotteries (according to T1J). The leaders all promise it will be great, but only if you do what you need to do. If you have bad luck, that’s just the way it is.

Being beloved

The American dream trumps Jesus all the time. Everyone is supposed to get rich. And one does that by working hard, being smart and doing the right thing — clawing their way up  the hierarchy by grit and luck. That’s the subject for much cable  content, self-help sermons and a lot of church sermons too! Despite all the evidence to the contrary, people still think the dream is reality and they’ll vote for whoever affirms it.

Inquirer, Sep. 2020 after presidential debate

As long as people believe it is their fault they are poor, it is their fault their town has poisoned water, bad air, no jobs, the pyramid will stay in place. Someone is at the top and it is right to give them a tax break, so you vote for the people who do that.  If people who have all the power promise to protect you, you vote for them. Even when they tell you you are at the bottom because of your personal choices, your immoral life or your bad luck, if they promise you the dream, you’ll believe them. Even if they tell  you you’re stuck because you grew up in this impoverished town under terrible parents, you’ll wear the town’s t-shirt and expect it to prosper. I have a “Bad things happen in Philadelphia” t-shirt; that’s Philadelphia where the poverty rate hovers around 23% (read Inga Saffron).

Jesus is on the side of the poor, but his poverty in wealth or spirit does not define him, and neither does yours or mine. Even if we win the jackpot or are rewarded for our work, we’ll still feel that place where we are unimportant. We may have grown up in it, or it may have grown up in us; regardless, it will be a place where the homeless Jesus  settles. Creation is wondrous and all the fruit of it is ours to eat, but it is all a reflection of the one who calls me “beloved,” who’s love affirms my worth. My ancestors firmly believed in the American dream and fought anyone who tried to take it away. I think I still feel their worthlessness aroused in me by the smallest things that make me feel small.  Thank God, in Jesus I can even choose being small and not end up angry or in despair about how unimportant I am.

Parker Palmer and the trouble with autonomy

Building community, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

The psychological work of exercising healthy autonomy is challenging when it is seated in individualism and seeded with identity politics.

Part of a “heritage ride”

According to the Richmond Co Daily Journal, Jacob Mumford decided to hold a “Heritage Ride” after seeing news reports about calls to ban the Confederate flag. He said about the demonstration, “It don’t represent racism. It just represents my heritage, being raised in the South, Southern pride. That’s all it means to me.” He was trying to be someone, the newspaper was reporting it, the country was protecting it.

Mumford was reacting to the great cleansing that began after Dylan Roof murdered nine loving people in an historic Black church in Charleston. In 2015 the National Park Service ordered all Confederate flags and merchandise to be removed from all parks under the agency’s direction, including Fort Sumter and Gettysburg. By 2021 the massive Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond was removed, symbolizing the ongoing deconstruction of white supremacy intertwined with everything American.

The untwining is far from over and the pickups still parade. Alongside the Confederate flag a driver often has the yellow Gadsen flag, as in the picture above. It is the flag with “Don’t tread on me” on it. “Don’t tread on me” has been an assertion of national autonomy for over 200 years, and now it is an assertion of personal, pickup autonomy. I saw the same display in Lansdale the other day.

Christopher Gadsen designed his anti-British flag in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. The timber rattlesnake on it was something of a Colonial-era meme, evidently created by Benjamin Franklin. The snake is unique to the Eastern U.S. and came to symbolize a new country ready to bite anyone who stepped on it. The symbol stuck around. You can get a specialty license plate with the Gadsen flag on it in nine states. You can say your license plate is about “heritage,” but Gadsden was a slave owner and trader, who built Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. As many as 40% of enslaved Africans who were brought to the U.S. first arrived there. You can say it is about southern pride, but don’t leave out the white supremacy and the dread people feel when the pickups parade. I felt some fear when I saw one on the Turnpike!

Around the Time the Philadelphia Union soccer team was using the flag in 2006, the “Tea Party,” anti-tax Republicans began using it. They used it to communicate the U.S. government had become the oppressor threatening the liberties (I would say the unhealthy sense of autonomy) of its own citizens. By the time it was prominently displayed at the January attack on the U.S. Capitol, white men were flying it on their pickups to communicate they would not be replaced, not be tread on – especially by Blacks and not by immigrants “flooding the borders.”

Fighting for freedom

In the United States, liberty is life. Like the slave-capitalism that dominates the country, the powerful dole out freedom to their tribe. But even the lowliest feel a taste for “freedom,”  for individual rights, to be one’s unencumbered self able to make as much money as they can. Even Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, whose great wealth and power make them free, echoed this urge in the title their recent book Renegades: Born in the USA. As he was selling the book via NPR, Obama said,

So the truth is that either we tell each other stories that allow us to see each other as fellow travelers and humans, or we have conflict and clash, and whoever gets the most power wins. And I would argue that at its best, America’s been able – with a pretty major exception in the Civil War – to try to make progress and perfect the union without resort solely to violence, solely to power.

I keep wondering if the authors were riffing on Taylor Swift’s “Renegade” in which she sings, “You wouldn’t be the first renegade to need somebody.” They might have subtitled their book, “Meditations on our recovery from ‘Don’t tread on me.'”

I connect the search for freedom in all its perverse and noble forms as part of our drive to achieve the healthy autonomy we need as humans to become our true selves. It is the natural movement Paul describes as leaving the old self behind and taking on the new self restored in God’s image. We all need to have an experience of I AM in relation to God just like Jesus demonstrates His place in the community of the Trinity. The Gadsen flag states “I am an expression of power” the Jesus-follower insists “I am an expression of right relationship with Love.”

Nurturing good autonomy

How we do psychotherapy and relate in other ways requires many choices about how to handle everyone’s need for autonomy and our perverse lust for power.

I think “good autonomy” is when a person gets a sense of their true self operating freely. It is like the experience of getting the training wheels off the bike, feeling your own balance, moved by your own power, and even pedaling out of your parents sight and control. It is the freedom Paul writes about in Galatians: a life not defined by law, but confident in one’s reality as a person made in God’s image, the beloved of God whose life is eternal in Christ. I think of that autonomy as “I am-ness.”

There is a dangerous autonomy, however, lurking in the word. Nomos is Greek for “law”. Auto-nomos mean “makes its own laws.”  It would be great if Palestinians had this political right. It is not so great when individuals assume they are a law unto themselves and must be. One of my grandsons calls his brother the “dictator from the second grade” because he does think he should make all the rules. I think that is an example of what dangerous autonomy can do to community. When we, as therapists, parents or leaders protect someone’s autonomy to be themselves and make their own rules  as if their freedom should be inviolable, we do them a disservice. We may condemn them to be alone, going their own way according to their undisturbed thinking and feeling. We can hope God is disturbing them, which is usually the case, but the weaker among us could get the impression they are on their own and should be, even though they are connected to various communities and are part of creation.

Protecting a person’s personal freedom as a primary goal might be like giving them a bike so they can figure out how to ride it on their own. Personally, I was a bike-stealer as a child. I stole the neighbor’s bike and rode to kindergarten (which was illegal). I parked it in the rack right in front of the principal’s glass-paneled door. I stole my brother’s big bike when I was not tall enough to reach the pedals and crashed it into the curb. My father liked my gall but had to punish me anyway. My parents often left me alone to figure stuff out — and I did. But I also felt alone, which is worse than not figuring things out. And their neglect/appreciation for my independent spirit may have made me a little thief. It is in mutuality we thrive. Subject to a spirit of individualism in the U.S. and painfully alone, a lot of people can’t even give a full body hug because it feels like a violation or improper. What they need more than autonomy is to attach to God and others.

The best autonomy is mutual

The dialogue in the Bible about autonomy is all about having a relationship with God, first of all, then loving others. Jesus followers teach each other to accept every person and love them as they are right now. Such teaching includes freedom but also includes mutuality. My deepest freedom comes from right relationship. In love, my present limitations and boundaries are accepted and maybe even admired. In love, none of us are a law to another; we are all gifts who should be respected.

One of my psychotherapy clients wondered out loud if I knew a lot of thirtysomethings the other day (which I do). He doubted people could connect like I described healthy attachment. But I persist. Parker Palmer helps me persist. He is a gift from the Quaker homeland in Philadelphia. He added to the spirit of what I am trying to say in his well-known essay A Place Called Community. When he wrote his piece in 1977 I was in seminary and about to experiment in autonomy-defying intentional community – which was an irreplaceable education in love, truth and growth in the Spirit.

In his essay, Palmer says:

  1. If we promote autonomy in the individualist, psychotherapeutic and political sense we set up a society of dissociated individuals most suited to authoritarian government
  2. Mental and spiritual health is never just about oneself. It happens in our common suffering in the web of humanity. We build community to encourage health.
  3. Connection always breeds problems. Not connecting and leaving people alone in their autonomy creates even deeper problems.

When you fly the Gadsen flag or react to the flag as if it has power, you might be surrendering your healthy autonomy. Like Obama worries, we could get stuck in a perpetual fight for individual freedom. True renegades end up in friendship and mutual creativity, they appreciate one another’s true selves, and so undermine the endless power struggles of the world.

Why are the Post-Covid regimes so cruel?

Building community, Psychological growth, , , , , , , , ,

A few leaders of my church were afraid this post tries say something to them without naming them.  Not so. The entry is directed at me as much as anyone; I lead things, too. My point is that all of us are tempted to be cruel in the post-Covid age of Trump and act the four ways I list. I need to watch it, and if you think you need to watch it, you are probably right. 

Some questions beg for an answer, even though the answer is not easy or even welcome. But I have been asking the title to this piece all week: Why are the Post-Covid regimes so cruel? Here is some of what I hear.

Donald Trump is one big reason everyone is more cruel. Trump may be forever pre-Covid – since he may think the virus is fake news, his recovery from it notwithstanding. But he has greatly influenced what is taking root in the world and may bloom. You run into his disciples all the time. They are cruel.

For instance, Trump’s response to the death of Colin Powell last week was very cruel. I was going to say “breathtakingly” cruel, but he, of all of today’s wicked actors, has done so much to normalize cruelty we all feel a new license to take someone out, to maliciously undermine someone, to build walls against enemies, and to make exclusionary laws. It is all normal. His wickedness no longer takes our breath away. You probably saw Trump’s response, since he is the king of “all publicity is good publicity” and he horned his way into the national honors afforded Powell. I don’t want to repeat it, but you can see it here. It was cruel.

Infamous border patrol picture

Trump is not alone. The country is filled with policies and practices that require people to be cruel. For instance, in a couple of weeks I will be at the southern border with MCC folks. I know I will meet people full of love there. But that love will be more evident because it contrasts with the visible and relentless cruelty of the government.

I am asking the question because of Donald Trump and the border. As a country we are attacked from within and hemmed in from without by a siege of cruelty that is affecting how we think and treat each other. Just witness the incredible popularity of Squid Game.

But more, I am asking the question that needs to be asked because I am seeing the cruel impact of new, post-Covid regimes, inside the church and out, which impact people I know and love: my clients, fellow church members and friends around the world.

Somehow the upheaval of Covid has loosened a new need among a new generation to reform (hopefully, but at least deconstruct) any culture or organization that does not meet a new set of standards. Their passion is often cruel in its application. In so many organizations I hear about, relationships are frayed, leaders are strangely authoritarian, and dialogue is unusually vicious. Here are four stories remembered during a sleepless night that illustrate some of the characteristics of the new cruelty.

Cut off, don’t reconcile

A pastor I know was trying to talk a church member into listening to the struggle of someone reeling from new, “progressive” language about race. She told her pastor, “The hell with’em. Let’m go.” Somehow the new regime has lost Howard Thurman’s way to love, like I said last week, and has decided to perfect the hate. It seems that even Christians, with their “ministry of reconciliation” have perfected the cut off.

Be secret, not transparent

I was in a small group and a pastor told us about the “parking lot meeting” his board had about him last week. In his polity, he is on the board. Outside the church, it is common for accusations to go to HR or to campus committees. The accusations may or may not be true, but sometimes before guilt is established, the accused is hounded out. The spirit of due process is going out of fashion. It is not unusual for someone to get an email notifying them in some oblique way about what happened to them behind closed doors.

Stay safe, not antifragile

In their book, The Coddling of the American Mind,  Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt describe how the new regimes of the new generation have expanded the idea of safety in ways that undermine community and cripple their own development.  They insist that we will be happier, healthier and stronger if we

  • Seek out challenges rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that “feels unsafe”
  • Free ourselves from cognitive distortion rather than always trusting our initial feelings
  • Take a generous view of others and look for nuance rather than assuming the worst about people with a simplistic us-versus-them morality.

An over-emphasis on safety makes us fragile and so in need of more safety. A realistic approach to resilience makes us antifragile, more adaptable, more immune to things that might truly harm us. A hallmark of the “be safe” mentality that took on steam in the 2010’s is a preoccupation with words that make people feel uncomfortable. The new regime protects abstract people from abstract issues, but doesn’t have enough relationship to achieve immunity from the everyday wounds of love. People end up needing to protect themselves from love.

Enact law, not grace

One of my pastor friends in the Jesus Collective ended up on the other side of a pandemic-long, zoom-based fine-tooth-combing of his church’s by-laws. That choice, in itself, is a bit breath-taking. During the hardest thing most of us have ever experienced, the leaders decided to take a hard, virus-ridden look at themselves! They re-oriented the church so much he was, effectively, eliminated and could only see a door out as the way ahead.

There is a new focus on law, and especially laws that protect identity. It is true that such protections are a must in our “slave economy,” as two of my Black clients called it last week. But it is not unusual for everything to be seen through a lens of identity and the power struggle to get a just piece of the American pie. If someone promotes the generosity of God, the rain and sun lavished on the good and bad, they might get called out as giving in to oppression. Jesus could end up looking like some sort of supremacist because he chooses to die for others while others have no choice but to die, and atonement sometimes becomes an endless repentance for collaborating with oppressive systems. One of my newest favorites, Karith Foster, suggests a better way to undo white supremacy with C.A.R.E.ing not coerceing.

Fra Angelico – Paradise

I blame Covid for much of the cruelty happening, right now. In 2023, when we have all had a year of face time, those of us who have begun again might come up with something as breathtakingly beautiful as Donald Trump is breathtakingly cruel. It is a common thought that the Bubonic Plague in Europe caused so many social, economic and religious changes it led to the emergence of the Renaissance, an amazing era for art, architecture, literature and invention. I’m holding out for that kind of movement and hoping the present regimes are precursors to it.

We are not there yet. And you may be suffering under a new regime flexing its muscles and imposing its ill-considered philosophy or theology. I wish I knew what to tell you to do. My own solution leans toward creatively suffering . I am curious about what is coming. I am going to give my gifts to build it. I want to be the presence of love in it. I am going to trust Jesus to be with us through what could be the worst and best of times.

Turn around and face your shadow: Before you project it

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , ,

Carl Jung told this story about how the idea of “the shadow’ came to him. “I had a dream which both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment I was conscious in spite of my terror, that I must keep my little light going through night and wind regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.“ (C. G. Jung in Memories, Dreams and Reflections)

I have had my own frightening and encouraging dreams. I often tell about the monster that chased me in my dreams for many nights as a young husband. My dear wife, a little frustrated with being awakened night after night, suggested I stop running from the monster and turn to face it. I was not sure I could direct a dream, but I determined to do what she advised. I can still remember how the terrifying thing kept running at me and then right through me. I was left without a scratch — and I was encouraged to face what lurked in my unconscious.

The integration of the shadow is a great work of holiness. Robert Johnson says, “We are advised to love our enemies, but this is not possible when the inner enemy, our own shadow, is waiting to pounce and make the most of an incendiary situation. If we can learn to love the inner enemy, then there is a chance of loving – and redeeming – the outer one.” (in Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche)

Owning one’s shadow

To refuse the dark side of one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness. This boiling pot of self-denial is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness, or unconsciously inspired accidents. I think most people reading that sentence can feel the truth of it. If you show me contempt, the part of me hiding from abuse and unwilling to stand up to bullying critics might numb my whole emotional system, or I might take a weird risk with the car, or maybe I’d take the next day off from work.

Even though we know the work of repression in us, we are still committed to presenting a perfect-seeming self and are offended when it is not respected. Both the secular and religious side of the American experiment are ill-served by a streak of pride and perfectionism that shows a lack of integration. Obama’s “exceptionalism” and Trump’s “greatness” both reflect it. Antiracist radicals and antiabortion radicals both produce the violence and disorder we are experiencing in the name of their perfect political positions. [Listen to David Brooks recently talking about the scourge of “essentialism”]

Any repair of the fractured world must start with people who have the insight and courage to own their own shadow. This should be a well-known teaching of the Bible, since Paul demonstrated it.

I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service. Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen. — 1 Timothy 1:12-17

Many read this statement as a one and done: “Once I was a lout, but now, by the grace of God, I am perfected. Now I am perfectly shadowless.” I read it as an ongoing process of development: “I understand I am the worst of sinners and the beloved of God at the same time.” Paul is repeatedly trying to undo the heresy that Jesus makes us perfect in anything but grace (especially in Corinth!).

Doug Savage @ savagechickens.com

Integrate or project the shadow

When we do not integrate our shadows and live with enough humility to recognize our sin and receive our salvation, we project the shadow on others. To avoid this seems like an easy change of mind, but intolerable feelings that have been denied access to our conscious thoughts and actions are never easy to look at: guilt and shame, fury, worthlessness, fear and the trauma that often stores them in deep recesses.

Unless we do conscious work on it, the “shadow” side of us is almost always “projected;” that is, it is laid on someone or something else so we do not have to take responsibility for it. Mates are notorious for asking their spouses, “How do you feel?” when it is they who have a feeling they fear to express. Suddenly their mate feels defensive about a feeling they didn’t even have before their spouse walked in. Their partner should have stuck with having their own troubling feeling, On the other side of things, a weak-feeling partner might compliment their spouse for doing something, like driving or cooking, at which they, themselves, are actually quite adept and like doing. But they would rather give it over to someone else rather than bear the weight of being competent or being subject to scrutiny.

The worst

When we sit in the movie theater we are in the position of the projector, so the theater is an ideal venue for projecting our fears at a horror movie, or our anger and hate in a war movie or our unspeakable desires in a romance or crime drama. The economy makes billions off our disinterest in integrating.

It is easy to see society work out projection. The two political parties in the U.S. have created an image of the other party as terrorists or devils. In a recent NYTimes opinion article, Michelle Goldberg referred to Trump as a “Master of Projection” and noted that many instances of Trump’s projections were uncannily predictive of his future actions as president. He accused others of what he did not want to own as his own traits. Examples include roundly criticizing Mitt Romney for failing to release his tax returns and berating Barack Obama for watching too much TV in the White House, playing too much golf, and overusing Air Force One for “politics and play” (see The Nightmare Stage of Trump’s Rule Is Here. Jan 6, 2020, and this analysis).

Therapists often work with the projections their clients put on them to a good end. The therapy relationship is an ideal place to see what is happening in the shadowy places we can’t see or refuse to accept. Likewise, when I was a pastor, I often called myself a “projection screen,” since I often wore all sorts of unconscious processes instead of having the face-to-face dialogue I prized. Once I was out of the proverbial saddle, my “legacy” ironically became place to project fears and desires; I’ve heard about people using an abstraction of what I represent to make a point instead of owning their own feelings and thoughts. It is easier to “not be the old guy” or “not that less-than-desirable thing.”

The best

Most of the time we think we project the dark, unacceptable part of our selves. But it is also possible to project the best of oneself onto another person or situation. Our hero-worshiping capacity is pure shadow; our finest qualities can be refused and laid on another. A child may idolize an older sibling, feeling they ought to be but cannot be like them. Soon they will be like them and then, as a fourteen year old, they will find someone eighteen with whom to catch up.

Last week included Francis of Assisi Day. My family and friends know he is a hero of mine. When I did not have time for my annual showing of Brother Sun Sister Moon in his honor, I felt a strange lack of guilt, even though I had “betrayed” my hero. Looking back on my unexpected lack of feeling, I think I may have less need for him than I used to. I am more content with my own value and less in need of an aspiration. Being a Franciscan may have been easier than being Rod in some ways. His character and worth are widely respected, whereas I will need to survive the investigation of critics on my own merit.

There is help

God loves your shadow, too! It is you! He may love it more than your sense of self which competes with God’s sense of you. The repressed elements that become our shadow are often positive qualities, ultimately. When we project them on others, God has to be a bit disappointed.

I think God loved how Paul could own his past. He did not repress his murderous intent or his ignorant pride. He did not feel like his opponents were all terrorists or ignorant fools. He knew everyone needed mercy, just like he did. His trustworthy saying was a present tense experience: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.” Jesus came into the world this very day, too, still patiently walking with us. Maybe you feel Republicans or Democrats are sinners who need to be eradicated, or believe Lady Gaga is the star you are supposed to be but never will be. Jesus came to help us reel in such projections and learn to be loved — all parts of us, the parts we already own and the disowned parts yet to be integrated.

Our disposition towards the world makes all the difference

A life in the Spirit, Marriage and Family, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , ,

Much of psychotherapy is listening to stories about relationships. When married couples are with me, they are having their relationship as we speak! The quality of these relationships often hinges on the dispositions of each person, specifically toward the people they are talking about, but, more important, to the world.

You may have never used the word “disposition” in a sentence. I think the word should be more popular than it is. Since it is an inherently relational word, it has fallen out of fashion in an age in which people are mainly interested in their identity, their self-hood, their personal power. Just this week, Michelle Goldberg wrote a op-ed about the movement in feminism away from meaningless sex towards a restoration of relationality. Relationships might make a comeback! I hope so. If they do, disposition might get into one of your sentences!

You may have heard the word “disposition” used to mean the inherent qualities of mind and character that give someone their unique way of being in the world: “Your sunny disposition has a way of rubbing off on those around you” — temperament, nature, makeup, the grain of them that might cause them to go against the grain. In a less individual sense, someone’s or something’s “disposition” is the way someone or something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other people or other things: the disposition of infantry on the battlefield, the disposition of trees in an orchard, the disposition of the parts of this blog — arranging, ordering, positioning, relating.

When a couple moves into therapy, each has a personal disposition which their mate will learn to understand better and, hopefully, to respect and even love. Their relationship will also have a disposition of its own — its own character and a sense of how it relates to the world, how it arranges itself and how it has been arranged by various forces and its own history.

Since this word and all its synonyms are built into the English language, one would expect us to understand it. But during the last 50 years or so, the relationality of words has not been not assumed — we no longer assume words relate to something more than themselves. This blog post is for exploring that oddity in the hope that things are changing, just like Michelle Goldberg is exploring how sex is trying to regain human connection and love.

La‘amea Lunn and helpers on Oahu, Hawai‘i

A deeper knowing

A lot of what makes people “indisposed” when it comes to relating is the “left brain” dominance which accompanies the present domination of machines and technical skills. You may have friends, like I do, who have dropped off the grid and bought a farm so they can restore their relationship with the earth and feel all the parts of themselves in a natural setting (new farmers above). Most people have done the opposite and spend most of their time indisposed, in the sense they are unavailable for relating to others, the world, something or someone Other than themselves. This is so true that China recently passed a law to restrict video game use by minors. Chinese kids have been dwarfing themselves by attaching to a machine.

My favorite book of the year, so far, is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. In that book Iain McGilchrist exhaustively shows the difference between the left and right brain and how the left is meant to serve the right, contrary to much of western philosophy since Descartes. He says:

If one had to encapsulate the principle differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really “break out” to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own re-presentations only. Where the thing itself is “present” to the right hemisphere, it is only “re-presented” by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere’s consciousness is of itself.

I meet up with people who are dwarfed by their left brain disposition. Their relationships are especially difficult. In the case of men, their sexual relationship with their partner may be difficult to maintain, since they have been having sex with themselves via internet-delivered porn for much of their lives. When it comes to intimacy, they are often indisposed.

The deadly disposition of control

In an out-of-control society, in a state of perpetual warfare, on an outpost in the warming atmosphere, it is easy to see how one could conform to the illusion of control the left-brain-dominated, corporate world promises. For instance, below is a Lexus commercial from this past summer by a student in Oklahoma which tells a young man that it (the car) needs a fellow dreamer to experience the “power of the spirit of now” together. This is a popular idea; a Cadillac ad from this year depicts the growing “light” within a woman climbing the corporate ladder as resonant in her Cadillac.

The philosophy the video neatly expresses in thirty seconds promises that the “spirit” can be reduced to a relationship with a car. I hope the student was being ironic, but I suspect he was angling for an advertising job one day.

Longing for what a car ad promises is healthy humanity. But actually attaching to representations of meaning within the limits of scientific, consumer capitalism reduces one’s will to managing the elements of a merely material world. McGilchrist explains the philosophical necessity of thinking beyond the boundaries of that kind of representation of reality:

Philosophy being a hyperconscious cognitive process, it may be hard to get away from the left hemisphere’s perspective that will is about control, and must lie in the conscious left hemisphere. But if our disposition towards the world, our relationship with it, alters, will has a different meaning. The disposition of the right hemisphere, the nature of its attention to the world, is one of care, rather than control. Its will relates to a desire or longing towards something, something that lies beyond itself, towards the Other.

The relentless teaching about “the spirit of now” is all about power and control. Even the search for the beloved community often descends, these days, into a fight about power and one’s share of spoils of capitalism.

When people with a “left hemisphere” disposition enter into the self-exploration of psychotherapy (or spirituality) they often feel confronted with a terrifying choice to make. Will I leave my “zone of control,” aided by all sorts of machines and society’s present philosophies? Or will I moved with my right-brain empowered longing for what is beyond the left brain’s frame? Will I leave my porn world for a real relationship? Will I desert the constant, anxious monitoring for what I dread and my anesthesia against that anxiety in order to move with the desire I have neutered in honor of my fear of betraying what dominates me? If I change my disposition, I will have to care and become respons-ible.

I believe in you

When I was in high school I played the lead in one of the more unpopular musicals my director could have chosen for us: How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying. [Harry Potter tried it]. I did not understand the tongue it had in its cheek. But I got sort of famous on campus for singing the signature song: “I Believe in You.” It is a left-brain hymn to looking sincere and believing you are good at looking sincere.

How to Succeed was lampooning what happens when advertising execs become the advertising (nowadays when we are all our personal brand). Robert Morse is singing a right-brain idea in a left-brain environment. He is climbing the ladder by performing the representation of a man who can succeed in a left-brain world devoted to selling right-brain dreams. He is literally singing to his representation in the mirror! I did not get it. But after a life of believing, I do now. As a result, I found this quote from McGilchrist compelling.

Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: “I believe that the train leaves at 6:13,” where “I believe that” simply means that “I think (but am not certain) that.” Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say “I know that” instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere’s disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can’t rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned.

But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not “know” anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of “responsibility.” * Thus if I say “I believe in you,” it does not mean I think such-and-such things are the case about you, but can’t be certain I am right. It means I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting “as if” certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, “resonant,” “respons-ible” relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by which relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centers on control rather than care.

Marriage is the queen of all adult relationships, where we create more care in the world, daily – at least the opportunity presents itself. In marriage we are called upon to see “the other” and relate ourselves to it in the person of our mate. Friendships and church covenants do much of the same kind of work, of course — that is, they do the work if we are disposed to it, if we turn into it, if we hold on to the love.

Right now relationships are under a barrage of criticism all day and night, left-brain radicals think justice is exactitude in speech and action, and the generation raised with a cell phone in the aftermath of 9/11 is sure they are saddled with the personal power to succeed in their business. I bring it up to give another opportunity to choose see the Other and to turn a new eye on the world which might develop a more holistic disposition toward it. As the world disintegrates under the weight of its left-brain foolishness, surely it is time to listen to the voices within and without, even built into our brains, that lead us deeper.

* Belief, like faith and truth, etymologically implies a relation of loyalty, and has the same root as love (and as the German words Glauben and Liebe).

Rebuild after an affair: 4 basic nutrients for new love

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, , , , ,

My clients in troubled intimate relationships are searching for answers. They often come to a session after spending hours online looking up solutions for their problems. Their search often comes up with damning criticisms and daunting expectations scattered among the good ideas. A few have come to an appointment with a diagnosis that promises a quick fix if the associated steps are accomplished.

Their seeking is promising, if sometimes misguided. They want to do something right or good. They want to feel better and repair something, not just cut off and do it all again somewhere else. Even better, they want to form a relationship with a caregiver, their therapist, who can help them sort out how the relationship went wrong and how they participated in the problem.

Several clients are rebuilding after an affair, either sexual or emotional, that broke their partner’s trust. Many people go directly to divorce after such an event, some accept sharing their partner, but quite a few try to work out a renewed, exclusive relationship. That is not easy. Injured relationships need to recover in many ways, especially when it comes to  trust.

Recently I have spent months with people trying to rebuild, not always successfully. I woke up one night with a list forming in my mind about what they could do. The following list  includes my dreams as well as some research into what everyone else is saying. Here are four basic ways back into a rebuilt love relationship.

Recognize the trauma

If something feels traumatic to you, it is. New relationship breeches trigger old ones. Some of your emotional reactions may feel overwhelming when infidelity is revealed.  It will take time to settle down and more time to work your way into a new equilibrium.

See if you can get to the “table.” Everyone may be unhappy, initially, but there has to be enough talking and action for someone to think the process is going toward healing.

In this day of “alternative facts” getting to the table will likely include a definition of adultery. Is it penetration only? Is it just looking on someone with lust so you were penetrated in your heart? Is it lonely Gov. Cuomo touching inappropriately? Is it the surprising porn addiction you discover in your husband? Is polyamory OK as more people than ever assert? Arguing over the terms won’t solve the problem, but it might take some discussion to get to a common table to negotiate something new.

How did you get to adultery? You might want to take the quiz in “What Makes Love Last?” by John Gottman, who did extensive work on divorce prediction, marital stability, and recovery from infidelity.  You may never get to a satisfactory answer to “Why?” The basic answer may not feel like enough. But the process will help you move through the trauma. As you do, some fundamental questions will need to be addressed:

  • Are you interested in making amends? Or are you willing to leave your partner?
  • Will you let go of the anger and resentment towards your partner and move forward?
  • Can you imagine a future with your partner even though they betrayed your trust?
  • Do you have adequate resources to help you recover, personally?

Get out or make something new

In therapy I consistently need to ask, “What are we doing here?” Would you like to build something new or are you content to keep seeking justice or maintaining your old patterns?  Gottman’s “four horsemen of marriage apocalypse:” criticism and contempt often meeting defensiveness and stonewalling, are likely elemental to the old pattern. If you don’t want to take this opportunity to build something new with this person, you should probably admit it. I would not admit it too soon, but you’ll need to commit to be in if you don’t want to be out.

Therapy can help sort this out. But therapy won’t make you do something. The post-adultery relationship is a new relationship. Same people, new relationship. You might be building the relationship you should have built originally. More likely you are just getting to building a good relationship with the advantage of having a new urgency to do so.  That is OK.

Repent

Many people say things like “There are two sides to a story” when it comes to an affair. The betrayed partner must have helped cause it. The victim often gets blamed in the U.S. I don’t think much restoration will happen if an endless argument about who is at fault is installed as a solution. If you sin, repent. The person who committed the act must take all the blame.

This is going to be difficult since the betrayer will be dealing with shame. The angry responses from the deep well of grief and loss from the aggrieved partner are not going to feel good and every time they emerge a natural defensiveness will arise. If you did it, stay calm and respond to this anger with another round of admission and asking for forgiveness until it is done. Get forgiven by your partner. God will forgive you, so start there. Your partner, however, is not God.

Forgive

Betrayal gets stuck in my craw until I can’t stand seeing the person and I start assuming everyone will treat me bad. It can make me hardhearted. I need to forgive to preserve my soul. Even if you divorce an adulterer you will still be better off if you forgive them. “Will you forgive me?” must be met with “I forgive you” at some point. It may take a while to get there but this is the first step toward a new relationship.

If you reserve your forgiveness until you feel you have exacted justice, you are not really at the table of rebuilding yet. The table is all about reconciling and rebuilding. Forgiveness does not mean we are done. But it does mean we are beginning.

Learn improved ways to relate

There is no linear path or prescribed method for rebuilding after adultery. We are all different and our relationships are unique. There are a lot of ways to rebuild better. So the following elements that came to my mind and came through research are not in a particular order. At some point I think they all need to be exercised, however.

Grieve. The old relationship died. The betrayed partner, especially, but the betrayer also, will grieve for what is gone or what was desired. Grieving takes as long as it takes. We usually need to decide we have had enough and move on.

Wait. Everyone is re-calibrating. They are seeing things in new ways. They are changing and growing. All these things take time. The plant won’t grow faster because you are frustrated with it. Waiting is also how we hear from God and trust the work of the Spirit. If we try to control the future we will only achieve what our limited capacity can achieve.

Listen in a new way. The relationship probably had some habits that did not work. We need a new curiosity and some new understanding. Listen to understand; give the gift of understanding.

Let go. Suppressing the past as if you do not matter will not work well. Acting like everything is fine is not sustainable. But we do need to let the past go, let the sinner go free after they have repented, let our feelings mellow, let our view of ourselves and our relationship change. Letting go is elemental to trust in God; we are not in control of the world. Letting go is essential to love, otherwise your partner is subject to judgment, which is intolerable.

Accept each other. Most people ease into newness and you should accept the relationship you presently have if you want it to grow, not hold out for the ideal you don’t have. Accept one another as God accepts you is key to togetherness.

Attune. Your therapist can help you with this. But there are any number of self-help books (like the one I already mentioned) that can get you started. Attunement is the desire and the ability to understand and respect your partner’s inner world. This cannot be done completely, but the attempt matters. Sharing vulnerabilities stops either partner from feeling lonely or invisible.  Marriage is God’s gift to our maturation. Everyone needs a way to communicate that allows for safety – no “You” messages, enough space to allow each other to do what they can without criticism or stonewalling.

Work day by day, stone by stone

We like to say “trust the process” these days. We generally don’t trust it, since we can’t tell where we are going. I think we all need to trust God, since none of us knows what we are doing. Here are a few ways to stay in the incremental process of new growth.

Receive the good given. The good you have needs to be good enough. Looking over your partner’s shoulder for something better may have been the initial impulse that led to an affair. Looking beyond the repentance your partner offers to the ideal mate they never were and aren’t will subvert the process of building love with the one to whom you are committed.

Get right brain. The right brain is the seat of holistic health in our body. The left brain is more about correlating the evidence and keeping us on track. We are a left-brain dominated society, thus we have people who have served time in prison and are still refused jobs and the right to vote after they are released — endless “fairness” and no grace. You and your partner must not be left as an eternal judge and felon. The left brain internet never forgets, the right brain comes to a bigger picture by ignoring unnecessary facts.

Make small commitments. This is one way toward a new, fuller marriage commitment. We like to leap to the end of the process we imagine and often give up because “This is not working.”  It might be the impatient way we work that does not work. Love is not a commodity to procure, it is the fruit of a wise life. Changing the way dishes are done could be revolutionary over time. Making a weekly time to consider the schedule could be life-changing. Creating an affirming ritual when someone comes home from work could loosen up tangled emotions.

Re-Attach. Or maybe you will be attaching for the first time. Our re-enactment of unfinished childhood attachment issues is integral to marriage. Your therapist can help.

Symbolize the progress. For some people ceremony cements what is new. You write a card that is about repentance or forgiveness. You go on an anniversary trip that is designed to be a new step. You put your wedding ring back on or buy a new one. You go on a pilgrimage and throw a stone into the sea that symbolizes your past.

These ideas can also apply to the friends we have cut off or the churches we have divided. Even those difficult family systems that seem so impossible might change! Underneath all these practical responses to injured trust is love. I think love has a deeper source than my own capacity. Marriage is a radical re-enactment of being created in the image of God as male and female. How we connect in love is as deep as creation itself. So whatever we do to work that out, it is good. Sometimes it may mean moving on from a relationship that is too broken to repair or from a person who can’t get to the table.  But many times it means being healed by a deeper love than that which was broken.

Grief is everywhere: Open to joy by acknowledging it

Psychological growth, , , ,

Grief hangs over us like a cloud. Over 647,000 families have experienced the loss of a loved one since the onset of Covid-19. Climate change presents us all with a daily dread about more loss of normalcy. After two hurricanes flooding our cities and our basements in the Northeast, we are reeling. People try to keep the grief down, but it keeps bubbling up. If we keep trying to repress it, that is one more use of energy we need for doing more important things — like surviving, adapting and thriving.

Megan Devine (NPR in Boston) has been talking a lot about grief. Her conclusion is this: “The real cutting edge of human emotional development isn’t resilience, and it isn’t a stiff upper lip. It’s acknowledgment.”

Opportunities for acknowledgement are easy to find. We were walking around our neighborhood the other day and were glad to run into a neighbor who recently, suddenly lost her sixty-something husband to Covid-related attacks on his vital organs. Then the hurricane hit and the new roof on her home began to leak rain into her top floor bedroom. A sodden piece of drywall tape drooped low enough to be caught by the ceiling fan, so bits of wall and drops of water sprayed all over the room. It was a moment of “perfect storm,” when Covid and climate invaded her bedroom. As we talked, she was exhausted from grief and bravely putting one foot in front of another.

I was glad we stopped to hear the story and commiserate. It is always tempting to leave the grieving alone. “They probably don’t want to deal with me,” we think, or “I have no idea what to say.” Even as we were talking I gestured I was about to walk on, thinking I would overstay my welcome. But she began a new story and drew me back. She just needed to be together and talk. It opened up a little space for joy.

The summer is over

We rushed back to normal as the summer began. The economy opened up and bustled. I did some traveling. My friend began making money on his restaurant again. The church began to meet in person. Many people were vaccinated. It was like the weather report was “partly cloudy” instead “overcast.” The more sunshiny among us started to celebrate the future and move on after their survival. The need to get out of pain and uncertainty did not leave much space to process what happened to us. Grieving opens up space for new happiness if happiness doesn’t repress the grief.

LaToya and Peaches Foster at the  headstone of Lovell Brown at the Leavenworth National Cemetery Aug. 30.

Last Friday, health officials in Leavenworth, Kansas quietly updated a 78-year-old woman’s death certificate dated January 9, 2020, listing cause of death as Covid-19. Hers is now the first recorded pandemic death in the U.S. I wish we had honored the grief that followed her death on January 9, 2021. We missed the funeral for that lost year. I do not think the outpouring of emotion over the lost election in Washington was an adequate substitute, although it is hard not to think it provided an indirect outlet for feelings we resist having.

Now the death rate is again climbing as the vaccine-refusers have provided a suitable pool of victims for the Delta mutation. Many of the dying are from the same territories that supplied the mob that stormed the capitol. Children are going back to school and already, just a few days in, frightened parents are hearing about infections and some are arguing about masks. Many want to keep their kids out altogether.

We will be very needy on January 9, 2022 (or whenever the new first-death date is discovered) for ways to acknowledge our grief.

Would you say we aren’t that good with grief?

Sigmund Freud gets tagged with a lot because he was first and famous in many ways. But he was hardly alone in his influence. However, his paper called Mourning and Melancholia, struck a chord in 1917 with people reeling from the carnage of WWI and beginning to experience the horror of the last deadly pandemic. Megan Devine says,

The paper gave a framework for suppressing grief in order to embrace life, a seductive and reductive approach to mental and emotional health…He posited that you simply need to “withdraw” your energy from the person who died and attach it to someone else. Two years later, his own daughter died, followed soon after by his grandson. Freud himself recanted his paper in the wake of his personal experience, but by then, his initial position on grief had become canon.

The generally accepted way to deal with grief seems to be, at best, “keep it to yourself,” or at worst, “don’t think about it– move on.”

Illustration: Peskimo at Synergyart.co.uk

An example of this “stoic” mentality might be the many variations on the meme “Keep Calm and Carry On” that have been going strong since about 2008. They keep appearing, sometimes sincerely, on Facebook or Instagram. While it did not become poster during WW2, the original encouragement represents the spirit of the English response to their huge loss, displacement and fear. The same spirit carries on with the kind of “positivity” that floods social media. We’re encouraged to have a “stiff upper lip” in relation to the pandemic which coerces people to deny their losses and the losses of those around them. This week the screen was full of people in Louisiana saying, “I lost everything, but I am pushing” or “I can’t think about it or I will break down” and “I am tired of being resilient.”

Grief is good

In an era more adept with grief, less concerned with power and image, at least among normal people, Jesus talked to his disciples about their upcoming grief. His beloved disciple, John, remembered the moment:

Truly, truly I say to you that you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will be turned into joy! Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one is going to take your joy away from you. (John 16:20-22 NASB)

There is a lot to learn here. But I think a couple of things speak to us about acknowledging  our present grief.

  • Jesus acknowledges it. Grief accompanies loss in its many forms. My grandchildren express it when they feel the loss of the cookie they imagined. We quickly teach that right out of them. By the time people are young adults, they are tough and keeping calm and distant from a lot of feelings. Some of my clients are so depressed by their inexpressible grief they feel numb.
  • Jesus sees grief as birth pangs. It is terrible, but it signals something new is being born. People would like to skip the grieving of the pandemic and go right to whatever is being born. Chances are, whatever is being born is going to take all the time it needs.
  • Grieving is a feeling that passes as newness inevitably comes. Even in grief we can feel the seeds of joy unless we are trying not to. If you lost your husband suddenly to Covid, that grief will have some staying power. But organizing around it would be a mistake. It will probably stick around, like the country remembering 9-11 and its legacy of destructive wars. But if you aren’t walking around on a beautiful day, if you don’t stop to talk, you’ll miss the sunshine of the earth and the love of neighbors that heal grief. You might even miss Jesus.

I will be grief-stricken this week. So many typical troubles will cloud my joy. Institutions like school and church will fail me. And the storms of Covid and climate change are upon us all. There is a lot of grief to go around and quite a bit we did not acknowledge yet. It won’t help to act like it shouldn’t happen or it didn’t. It will happen. How we suffer it and what we expect from it will make a big difference. Acknowledging it will begin the process of opening up new space for joy.