“Everything has been said already, but not yet by everyone.” – Karl Valentin
In our world today, it can feel impossible to do a very simple thing such as finding your own voice amidst all the competing forces. We often feel as if an inner critic lives in us that agrees with all the criticism we hear in our daily lives, in the news cycles, in Presidential campaign rhetoric, and even in religious experiences where we may have felt toxically shamed.
Often the hopeful and imaginative voice that was alive in us as children goes into hiding as we become the adults we need to be to make it in this world. But, along the way, we may begin to receive messages from our Inner Child, or our True Self, a nagging, a symbol that keeps re-appearing in our lives, or something that continues to speak up. Some even believe panic and anxiety are messages from our Inner Child, reminding us that we need to get back on the path she was on. This voice within may be telling us to go back and rediscover the one that believed in goodness, love and dreaming. However, it is difficult to give ourselves permission to seek out this Inner Child, but it can be done, even in today’s culture, and it is one of the most rewarding journeys you will ever take. Not only that, but it is a critical moment in our time. Now, more than ever, we need to dig deeply within the depths of our own souls and manifest the love that is hiding there in our Inner Child. For ourselves, for others and for a Divine, Higher Power many of us call God.
One of the main challenges to connecting with our authentic self in the world is that we all seem to be swimming in a stew of constant criticism and it’s confusing as to what we’re supposed to be. We live in a culture in which most people do not feel truly valued, have few intimate friendships and lack the support systems needed to cultivate the kind of trust and love it takes to mine the voice within. We often feel that we connect more deeply with ourselves whenever we are experiencing nature, nurture or an experience of self-love but may find it difficult to bring these moments into our every-day lives, moments where we feel connected to ourselves.
In recovery groups for trauma, addiction and dysfunction, this voice of criticism that is constantly running is known as the Critical Parent. We use a Loving Parent within to silence this Critical Parent and help us develop the dreaming of the Inner Child, where our true voice lives. As we take our painful experiences and begin to address the voice of the Critical Parent with the voice of the Loving Parent within, we see a little tunnel of beauty open up inside of us. We lovingly raise the goodness, dreams and imagination of our Inner Child to the surface of our lives, allowing our voice to come to life.
In indigenous peoples, a child’s dreams were a special way of living out the story written upon the walls of our souls. A dream was given on behalf of the community to each person to be lived out in the world so that others would benefit. It was a parent’s responsibility to bring the child’s dream before the Great Spirit as a sacred thing, to be nurtured, cultivated and lived out in the tribe. This is an action of love. But in our culture, we seem to have taken the idea of a dream and turned it into a commodity, something that should be profited from or should bring us fame, glory or success. In doing so, we’ve actually created a kind of trap or snare for a dream in which we may feel if it doesn’t produce or make us money, it’s not worth pursuing. But nothing could be further from the truth. Though dreams may lead to profit, the purpose of a dream is to bring one closer to God, others and provide something useful and beautiful for the community. Pursuing a dream is about falling in love with one’s own true voice and life itself and sharing this with others for the benefit of all.
St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” As we apply the voice of the Loving Parent to our Inner Child within, over time and with much practice and diligence, we begin to become fully alive and see the beauty of our inner world shining out from within. We mine the depths of what God has placed in us already, love. All the saints remind us, Jesus, too, that love is the highest form of praise and the most important thing we can do, for ourselves, for God and for one another. What’s interesting is that, as we do this, we find others that are on this journey, too, or perhaps they find us. As we resolve to love, love becomes that force that connects us more deeply to the sacred in the world.
We live in a time when there is an enormous amount of information available to us but not a lot of wisdom. Wisdom travels beneath the surface of things, is usually passed down through stories and can be quite slippery at times. Yet, if we have any hope for catching a glimpse of our authentic self, that soul self that guides us to purposeful living, then somewhere along the way, we have to make an appointment with Wisdom, herself, and listen. Or, we might just ask the foxes.
Reasoning with the foxes is a great place to start. One can learn a great deal from observing foxes and the way they hunt for prey beneath the surface of things. This fox has a technique of hunting in the snow in which he must get very, very quiet and listen for the smallest of movements.
Not only that, scientists have discovered as told in this article from Discover magazine, that the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field as a kind of “rangefinder,” pinpointing a north easterly direction. When he is pointed in the right direction, the fox catches its prey 73% of the time, otherwise, the odds are around 18%. Just like this fox, if we want to find our purpose in this life, we also must be pointed in the right direction and be willing to take the leaps and accept and learn from the failures that occur along the way. It takes a good portion of our lives for most of us to get ourselves pointed in the right direction and a great deal of grit and surrender to keep trying.
How do we know when we are pointing in the right direction? Like the fox, we must become very quiet and listen to what is going on beneath the surface of our busy lives, we listen for the sound of what is moving within. We use the region of our heart to guide us, just as the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field to position ourselves in our true direction.
I often think it would be so much easier if we could just take a stethoscope and hear what our hearts are saying, but this is a different kind of listening, we are learning to observe with our spiritual senses. As we do, we become re-grounded to our roots, to the ground of our being, our spiritual life within, through slowing down our breathing and breathing deeply. We begin our meditation with a focused prayer. We listen to the field of our hearts to hone in on our spiritual purpose for being in this world. We focus on God alone, which is focusing on the deep reserves of love moving within us, some call this a Higher Power.
We can trust that God’s purpose is hidden deeply in our hearts, waiting for the right time to emerge in our lives, waiting for us to get pointed in the right direction and open our hearts to the Divine will. Just like the subtle sounds of vibrations moving beneath the heavy snow, Wisdom will guide us as we become more and more willing to surrender our own will to what is moving deeply within us, the Creator. We may make many nose-dives beneath the surface before we come up with anything that resembles a direction, but we keep practicing, trusting Wisdom to guide us to our true north.
In my tradition, centering prayer is a very effective tool for listening for the heart to speak, for God’s will to be made known more clearly than all the other competing noises. Once we are pointed towards this, we continue to ground ourselves in that alignment. We learn what it feels like, what our breath sounds like in these moments where we feel re-grounded, and we seek this out again, each day until it becomes a practice. Over time, we begin to experience the world through the senses of our hearts.
There are many centering prayers available online, some really beautiful ones from the Native American traditions as well. Here is one of my favorite centering prayers from St. Teresa of Avila:
“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing make you afraid. All things are passing. God alone never changes. Patience gains all things. If you have God, you will want for nothing. God alone suffices.”
In a post 9/11 world, we live in a culture of collective trauma. It’s not something most of us want to discuss over coffee, in fact, we’d really rather avoid any unpleasant conversation about collective pain in general and the resulting fall out. But here we are very obviously in desperate need of a few solid clues as to why everyone seems to be trying to live life to the fullest from a center that, as W.B Yeats said, simply “cannot hold.”
What does it feel like to live in a culture of collective trauma? It feels like we may have lost access to a loving, hopeful or joyful self, the very center of our being. iIt seems the evidence around us points only to the tragic loss of the kind of safety or sanity. And that is the core issue, that we are trying to gain a sense of peace, sanity and stability from outside of ourselves. When fear and trauma become dominant states, we begin grasping for solutions. Where we may have once lived in a world that seemed to be able to provide a measure of stability, we find that our usual framework has lost its ability to sustain us anymore. The key to healing the wounds of collective trauma is going within, but that is easier said than done.
Trauma effects us in many different ways, but one of the main coping mechanisms for dealing with unrealized trauma is hypervigilence, emerging from the constant expectation that something horrible is about to happen, it is the state of constantly keeping watch and managing one’s environment. Most of us experience it as anxiety, some as anger, but it is also there in addictions to media devices and the constant news feeds of the subsequent horror of the ongoing tragedies of the world. Our hypervigilance gets confirmed over and over again by our news feeds through the evidence of terrible events unfolding all over the world. A hypervigilant state then becomes justified and we are caught in an unending loop. We can easily become trapped in hypervigilance and this can keep us from a taking the healing journey within. Hypervigilence can also keep us in a state of fatigue and exhaustion.
Collective trauma also generates the feeling that the world, events and our lives are moving very fast and it is difficult to slow down. Traumatic experience, left untreated, separates a person from his or her ability to self modulate between extreme emotional states of highs and lows. In order to cope, a person uses either/ or thinking or fight or flight responses whenever challenging situations arise. Anger and fear are the emotions that rule a culture trapped in a collective trauma. Media seems to play a prominent role in maintaining a hypervigilant state, though it can also provide opportunities for healing. Media or any medium for collective experience can also become tools for healing the wounds left by trauma.
What we all too often fail to experience in our culture is any true acknowledgment and would be healing from the deep psychological wounds of trauma. But how do we even approach these wounds that seem to overwhelm us at every turn? The pain seems so much greater than the solutions. In addition, the places that once seemed to keep peace and order are disappearing due to lack of interest. Churches are closing at an alarming rate, massive expanses of wilderness are being co-opted for natural resource development, the places that once brought peace seem to be bordering on extinction.
When Jesus, the great healer, walked among us, he shared the radical notion that the kingdom of God, the place where the healing happens, is within. Whether you think of it as a kingdom or a realm or a dimension, it’s the same thing, he told us that we must go within if we are to discover our authentic soul life awaiting us, that part of us that is eternal, indestructible, connected to God, connected to love. Some have gone so far as to say that in our time, even the soul is at risk. I suppose Jesus said this, too, in a way when he warned, “do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul, rather fear the one who can kill both the body and the soul…” (Matthew 10:28)
Jesus left the Christ (Holy) Spirit on earth as a guide, comforter and intercessor to the God within. If we continue to seek out what is hidden in our hearts, believing, we will begin to catch some initial glimpses of the possibility of healing. But we cannot do it alone, we need others to walk with us.
Faith communities are set up to be places that provide stability for people to experience moving from a trauma driven way of functioning in the world, to a love infused way of functioning. But all too often, we never make it past functioning mode. However, if we can bring this kind of awareness into our lives of faith, we can turn that around, too. A slow conversion to a God that heals, removes the barriers to our healing and enables us to live life from a center of love.
Just as collective trauma is contagious, so is collective healing. Our journey inward to sit with pain, to bring it before the Divine Light and risk loving love into being is the pathway to overcoming fear in our ourselves and in our world. We must learn to seek out the trauma in ourselves and allow God to heal us if we are to try and help others or set out to make the world a better place.
We are due for a collective healing and it begins in each of our hearts, each day. Claim some territory in your heart today for healing, slow down, breathe, meditate on the heart. As you do, ask God to be present and feel the wounds of fear letting go. Keep coming back to the prayer of the heart and to the community of prayer, the heart among hearts of love will surely find the way to God.
What are your thoughts on this post? What are some strategies you are using to become more emotionally resilient in your day to day life? Leave your comments here.
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The largest tomato was stolen
From the community garden
No one cared, really…
“We give our food away to the hungry,” she proudly said.
She, the gardener,
who stood in the courtyard
of garden plots surrounded by
rusty chain link fence and broken asphalt. The stench of pollution lingered
among dejected apartments.
A light breeze blew.
Eden
in the world
is both frightening and peaceful at once.
She mentioned it a few times Like the chorus of a blues song,
“someone stole the one thing
I asked everyone not to touch.”
She had left it on the vine
until the very last moment of ripeness, “Too long,” she shook her head.
The caretaker of spontaneous combustion. Of earth, sun, rain and God. In my mind
I imagined her
standing over the hoe, waging her gentle, ferocious war
with the weeds.
In one second,
a season’s work
plucked
from the vine
at the precise moment
she was not keeping watch (which was almost never.)
I imagined the large, red tomato
in her hand,
an old, skilled hand
of a dark color called “ancient”
by the spirits,
and “black”
by those with
a severely impoverished imagination.
She stood with her ancient hands on her hips To push away pride.
But it had already
taken root in
her soul.
She had tucked the whole incident away in a box marked “hurt”
in her heart,
a routine gesture.
There was asparagus to talk about sprouting up from the ground like tiny trees.
“Break off a piece,” she said
I did, it tasted like sweet leaves and rain “this is how we get our monies,” she said.
We found out later on that often
she must choose between food and medicine Depending on the month.
“God sustains,”
we all say,
but some days the irony is too great. Perfect things
don’t last long
in this distorted paradise
we call the world.
Things of wonder
juxtaposed
against too much pain
are simply
irresistible.
A woman doesn’t become a hero overnight and she doesn’t do it alone. It takes a village to make a hero in the form of an Olympic athlete. A village of men and women working together to make something spectacular occur in one rare and gifted human being. But that’s not the point, the thing about watching women set some of the world’s greatest records in this year’s summer Olympics is simply that we are not accustomed to seeing women shine so brightly on center stage and we don’t know what to say. Even seasoned commentators seem to stumble, searching for excuses as to how this can be happening, preferring to lay the proof of her success on the shoulders of the (perceived) real hero, her male counterpart.
Quite simply, we are seeing things we never saw before and it’s magnificently stunning.
We’ve known it all along, that women are heroes, leaders, strong, wise, and the equal of men, not the same, that is, but equal, nonetheless. But these facts have remained hidden in plain sight. Even in the Bible, there is a whole class of women warriors hidden in the pages, but with just a little digging, we can find at least six scripture references to the class of warrior women in the ancient Hebrew culture who led, fought, strategized and prophesied in Yahweh’s army. Perhaps we are just now able to welcome them onto the scene of religion, though they have been there all along.
As we learn to see the world through the eyes of women, we see our world changing, both the old and new. This is scary for a lot of people, but it need not be. Things are changing in our world largely due to the perspectives female leadership is bringing. New perspectives are often frightening when we’ve lived so long in the old. Take the Bible, for example, it’s been the bestselling book in America for a very long time, the cornerstone of the “swearing in” of legal court procedures, and yet many popular Biblical interpretations support perspectives that promote practices of violence against women, sexism and silencing as the norm.
Depth Psychologist, C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, we need to read our Bibles. This is also scary because many oppressive biblical ideas about women became the foundations upon which our culture was constructed. While I’m a female pastor and search for new perspectives on the old, old stories to inform faith in the 21st Century, I try and remember that the Bible didn’t invent patriarchy, but many interpretations of Bible portray a system in which women were conscripted to become subservient to males as a form of moral, civil and religious practice. In other words, Bible culture often promotes a world view like Etta James sings about in the old blues song: “it’s a man’s world but it would be nothing without a woman or a girl.”
But there is a way forward, a kind of third way, something Jung was popular for promoting. The tension between the opposites, and we’re seeing it now in our world and we can see it in our religion, too, if we’re willing to open our eyes and hearts to a new perspective, accepting not only a woman’s leadership, but learning to see the world through her eyes, backwards and forwards.
We can still do Bible and believe in women’s identity, it’s not an either or situation, we don’t have to isolate ourselves from society to adhere to a morality system built for the first millennia BCE, and we don’t have to ditch our Bibles to see something new.
As woman becomes more and more the hero, the champion, the lead character in her own story, we begin to see our old, old stories differently, too. The women in the ancient stories who led men, became warriors and war strategists, and through their leadership, accomplished heroic acts on behalf of God, become more present on the pages that undergird our faith world as women become more prominent leaders in our world, too.
Jung also said that what is needed in our time are new narratives from old stories. If we can learn to read our lives through the eyes of the women who are leading us forward, with the seeds of new life in their hearts, we just might see things we never saw before, the future just might be brighter than we think.
Blue lives matter, black lives matter, LGBTQ lives matter, but what about Melania Trump, does her life matter too?
Our media has analyzed everything from her choice of words, to her choice of clothing to her alleged college degree. It seems as if the hounds have been released to attack this woman of stunning beauty, multiple languages, business acumen and incredible speaking skills. While most journalists and analysts agree that there were, in fact, words and themes lifted from Michelle Obama’s speech, now the question is, so what? Are we to burn her at the stake for her unorthodox behavior, putting the freedom fighting words of the Democratic Party to work for the Republican Party? Offending the standards of our national morality….uh…whatever that is?
I wonder if the lives of women who have made something of themselves in the world matter, too, regardless of status, beauty, nationality, color or spouse. America has unleashed the hounds of hell on Melania and it is a difficult thing to watch. It reminds me of the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials and all the ways in which we punish those women who offend our highest ideals of who we are, even though we can’t seem to live up to them ourselves.
Jesus said to the mob gathered to stone the woman caught in adultery, “you who are without sin, cast the first stone.” He was good at bursting the bubble of mob mentality.
It is clear from my blog that I am not a fan of Trump’s methods, in fact, I wrote about his persona as a Trickster character, bringing out the shadow side in all of us so that we can see the darker aspects of our personalities for what they really are. His tactics bring out the worst in us and I write that this is actually a gift, because it enables us to have the conversations we’ve refused to have, to begin to work through some of our ways of behaving that seek punishment and retribution over forgiveness and love. The article speaks to some of our deeply held core beliefs about women, beliefs that reinforce the statistics of violence against women. Trump seems to bring out the worst in all of us, including his very own family.
If anything, a refreshing response to Melania’s speech would be to offer her refuge from the storm, to grant her the freedom to “go and sin no more,” so to speak.
We seem to be obsessed with living a life that matters, and in this obsession, we put everyone on the stand who seems to stand in the way. But are we willing to explore the realms within us and with others where mattering occurs? What makes a life matter is not achievement, fame, fortune, wealth, popularity or beauty. The hyper focus on these things in our world, played out in the example of Donald Trump, gives us a sense of importance and maybe even power, (and in Trump’s shadow, humiliation) but it’s not the same thing as having a life that matters. The way in which you can live a life that matters, in other words, feel as if your spirit is being transferred into matter over the course of your lifetime, (what we as Christians call the twice born soul, the second birth), is by walking away from a life controlled by dominance and transferring your life into love, the being and doing of love in the world.
There are many creative ways in which this is done, artists do it through creation, teachers with their students, engineers with projects that enable humans to live better lives, people who decide to invest their hearts in communities of diversity, and on and on. The reality is, it cannot be done alone and there is simply no one “right” way to love, but it must be done with others, you need others to help you create a life that matters.
It is the giving and the receiving of love in its many forms that turns your life into something that feels like matter in the larger world.
We all have the opportunity to live lives that truly matter, to walk away from those areas of our lives that make us feel as if we don’t matter and move toward the people, places and things that help us transfer our love into the world.
Rev. Sherry Cothran is the pastor at St. John’s West UMC, Nashville, TN, a writer, musician, speaker and Co-Founder of Dreamweave: Transforming the Lives of Incarcerated Women Through Social Enterprise.
