We all begin in the dark. A tiny seed of life potential sewn into the body of a mother in total darkness. Somehow, remaining in this utter darkness for a period of time is a very important element in becoming what we are created to be.
Jesus compares the children of God to a good seed planted into mother earth. (Matt 13:24-43) In our spiritual journey, we are like a seed with great potential, planted underground. If we are to become who we are created to be, that image of ourselves that God has imprinted upon our very souls, at some point along the way, we have to learn how to see our way forward in the dark.
Just like a tiny seed bursting into life underground, growing roots in the deeper darkness as it shoots its tender, life bearing limbs towards the light of the surface, we also must risk becoming in some very dark, uncomfortable, maybe even claustrophobic spaces. In the darkness, we learn to depend on something we cannot see with our physical eyes, Spirit. Spirit becomes the light we move towards, what we yearn for, need and require in order to grow. In this darkness we develop our spiritual intuition.
We all experience times in our lives when there seems to be no guiding light whatsoever. Times of seemingly unbearable pain, grief, sadness, loss, disappointment, disaster, times when we feel trapped by life’s circumstances. We may feel overwhelmed and think that there are no answers or solutions. St. John of the Cross called this period of spiritual trials, the “dark night of the soul.” It is the time between a major life disruption, a time of darkness, and the place where we have not yet reached a spiritual stabilization or awakening. It can last weeks, months or years. He wrote volumes of poetry about his own “dark night” experience while imprisoned for his radical religious beliefs in a cell with hardly any light. During this time, he learned to see light in the darkness and it liberated him from his suffering. It was to be the critical passage of his own spiritual journey. His writings of learning to see in the dark have inspired millions to perceive the value of a life passage through a dark time and have words and images to navigate through it.
Just as our eyes use light to produce images that send information to the brain about what to think and do, our hearts need to discern a spiritual light within to find the way forward in dark times. The darkness has work to do in us if we allow it. But so often, we avoid the kind of emotional pain we might risk feeling in the dark times of our lives.
We have developed a very strong pain numbing culture and become dependent upon all kinds of artificial light. Most of us spend our days staring at a computer screen and then go home to stare at T.V. screens and go to bed with the bright, electric lights from the outside burning through our windows. This is just modern life. The point is, we need to take some time to turn off the kind of light that distracts us in order to fully experience the work of the darkness within.
We are all packed with painful information inside that we need to feel, process and turn over to a Higher Power in order to grow. If we continue to numb it and ignore it, the darkness cannot do its natural work in us, our emotional life becomes stagnant and expresses itself in negative ways. It seems that if we cannot grow into a spiritual maturity, the kind of soul birth and journey that Jesus proposes, then we go the opposite direction, we decay.
In our culture, we have all kinds of ways of making death look like life, but we are smart people. God has equipped us all with great internal sensors. At some point along the way, we get tired of our own tricks. We reach a point when we can no longer sustain the patterns of anxiety, addiction, co-dependence and all kinds of artificial ways of dealing with internal pain. This crisis point is often where the dark night begins.
Jesus points to a pathway that enables us to become real, authentic, and grow into what we are created to be. To find a higher strength and power that enables us to flourish, even and especially in a dark and darkening world. He tells us that the children of God are meant to shine like the sun, but only after we learn how to bloom in the darkness. (v. 43)
The faith journey is about learning to see in the dark and sharing the hope we find there with others. We bring jewels out of the caves of our dark times and share them with the world. We help others find the way in the darkness. In my own experience, these times of the dark night are when God sends the angels, God in human skin, to point the way forward, a thing that is perceived with spiritual sight. (v. 41) Apparently, the dark night of the soul is where they like to hang out. Perhaps in that kind of utter darkness, they can really shine.
We often have to go through dark times in our lives so we can learn a new way of seeing, through the eyes of God. In these times we develop deeper roots, our sense of what we are created to be grows ever stronger, we surrender more of our own will to God, we become more refined in our faith journey and we learn to trust an inner truth. Eventually, God brings us to the other side and we reach a new level in our faith. We even look back on our times of suffering with a sweetness, a fondness for how we fell ever more deeply in love with God, with people and with what we were put here to do on this earth.
So have faith in your dark times, embrace them, walk through them, know that God is doing something very special in you and will bring you through it to the other side, a place of joy, sweetness and growth. Sometimes we have to sit in the darkness until we learn how to see the light. When we develop this way of seeing, we begin to burst into new life.
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Even Jesus said that he didn’t come for the people who already claimed to have found the way, but for those who were lost, wandering, without the great shelter and shield of the religious institution.
Even though I’ve had a “sketchy” relationship with religion, (some would say that’s healthy) I became a pastor of a Christian church. Somehow, because of all my searching, I discerned that religion, at its core, held a mystery within that defied the human desire to control everything unknown. I discovered that religion shared some of the same snares as politics or patriarchy or any system that has a hi-er-archy. Religion can be used, just like any other system, as an avenue for greed, power and corruption. I just got caught up in that net.
In my own long, circuitous journey of healing from religion-induced pain, I learned that God is pretty wild and untamed, regardless of how we feel about it, and very often defies any container that religion (or anyone– agnostic, spiritualist, new age, etc.) seeks to squeeze God into or out of. That makes the pastorate quite adventurous and also quite freeing to know that (on my best days) I get to play in the field of this wild and untamed God.
The other thing I have learned recently in my travels is that we live in a Christ haunted world. As Richard Rohr says: “Christ is just another word for everything.”
I ended up in United Methodism, not that it’s better or worse than any other brand, it certainly has it’s faults, but we do have a unique relationship with Native Americans. We have an entire Native American division devoted to exploring that unique kinship between our faiths. Last fall, this curiosity led me, by way of invitation, to a Lakota Sundance ceremony in New Mexico. On the side of a very high mountain in the “Blood of Christ” mountain range, wearing my long skirt and arms covered, I danced to the songs of the singers. In Lakota, they sang out “Wakan Tanka, Tunkashila” around a cotton wood tree. I felt like an eagle.
Early the next morning in the woods, feeling the chill of the air in that liminal space between sleep and waking, still in a half dream state, there came into my mind an image of Christ on a cross.
I continue to have similar experiences, always to my surprise, everywhere I go.
I visited Cherokee, NC, recently, doing some research for a book and was talking with some Cherokee women. It seems it is a common legend among various tribes that Jesus made an appearance around the time of his death over on this continent. The women told me about the Cherokee version. The legend goes that the “little people” (the spiritual beings of Cherokee lore that live in the woods) cried tears when Jesus died and these tears ended up in the form of little crosses at the bottom of Fontana Lake, hundreds have been found. Of course, there’s a scientific explanation for this but the legend is much more interesting. There are various versions of this story in other tribes.
An African woman in my church tells me that in Sierra Leone where she is from, the Muslims and the Christians all consider themselves part of the same family. The Muslims pray to be with Jesus in death, the keeper of eternal life. There is also a legend that Jesus and Mohammed had an actual conversation.
Jesus has been out in the world for a very long time, doing lots of things Christians may not even approve of very much. Alongside the mother struggling with addiction, with the young man feeling compelled to join Isis, the refugee, the immigrant, the homeless person, the rejected war veteran, the traumatized Native American. Jesus is, in fact, right there beside them, having been hung on the same cross.
We miss the whole point of Jesus when we try to pin him down and make him exclusive. Jesus simply belongs to everyone. “In him, all things hold together,” and he is the “image of the invisible God.” (Colossians 1)
The goal of religion, in its purest form, religio, is to bind the spiritual “word made flesh,” Christ presence on earth into a form we can participate in with one another. Divine love needs not only the human vessel but the vessel of the beloved community that doesn’t exist just for itself alone, but for God. With rituals and practices that make it safe for us to experience, to bind, what is unfathomable, God, if only for a brief hour or two.
I’m glad I didn’t abandon the path, because I would have missed out on all of this, the sweetness of communion, the chance to help the homeless find homes, all of us wanderers. I would have missed out on my very own healing, and the opportunity to be part of this massive healing that is taking place in the world around the hurts done in the name of God.
What would happen to a faith, or wonder of wonders, even a religion, that understood Christ as another word for everything? It might shift our understanding of the work of Christ in the world from dominance to infusion, from conformity to love, from rules and laws to simply presence and being. From scarcity to enough, from certainty to curiosity, from death to life. What if Christ really is in all and through all and another word for everything? What then?
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Shame. It’s a feeling in the pit of the stomach, a burning sensation. A rupture in the belly, a spiraling inward, shrinking, feeling inferior at the core. Shame makes us feel that our very identity is under threat of erasure.
At one point or another, shame takes us all hostage and calls the shots. Under extreme shame, we may even feel as if we are not the ones running our lives. Shame is a hostile dictator, suffocating us from any sense of freedom. Without realizing it, we often hire shame as the micro-manager of our lives.
We may feel paralyzed by shame because we live in a shame culture. It’s a force that is very real. Since we are enculturated to locate our self-worth in performance, this sets us up for an extreme sense of shame when we are not able to perform according to the (perceived) expectations of our peers or superiors.
But, we need to realize that we are not primarily performers, we are people. As the Native Americans say, “we are real human beings,” and this is our core identity. We have good days and bad days, good years and bad years. What is often missing and what it means to be a “real human being” is to have a sense of continuity between the ups and downs. A feeling that we are simply the same person regardless of what successes and failures come our way.
But the state of shame is often exacerbated by a lack of intimate and honest friendships. Without this shield of human love, shame can isolate you. It is often hard to find a community of friends that will love you no matter what. We are often judged so harshly by our performance that even our friendships are based on status and prestige. If you have ever lost a job, significant relationship or marriage and witnessed most of your “friend” community drift away from you, then you understand this. But, we have to look at our own choices here. We often become friends with the people we think can get us to the next level in our lives. If we crave authentic friendships, then we need to become willing to examine our own motivations. When we are able to get shame out of the equation, we tend to make better choices.
But swimming out of shame, I’ve found, at least, begins with acceptance, self-acceptance. Because shame will continue to send messages such as “you’re not good enough, worthy enough, smart enough, beautiful enough,” simply, “you’re not enough.” This leads to an inner conflict. The authentic self wants to love, cherish, express joy, compassion and empathy for the self and others. But shame is like a stun gun, sealing us off from access to the authentic self. When we can accept how things are, where we are in our lives, our jobs, our relationships, our bodies, then we can begin the long journey of leaving shame behind. One day, we just say to shame, simply, “I don’t need you anymore.” We break up from our long, sordid, dysfunctional relationship with shame.
Becoming real to yourself, learning to love yourself today, where you are, how you are, this is respect. This is what authentic women and men model in the world for one another. This is what Jesus brought out in all of those who believed, freedom from living in the paralysis of shame and a restoration to living life from the true self. This often restored people to a sense of community as well. The Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, Mary Magdalene and her seven demons, Peter in his constant self-doubt. Jesus even loved Judas, the betrayer himself. Jesus knew the great power of shame, that it belonged to the realm of the shadow, it was a tool of separation from God, from the Divine image of the Creator. With love, Jesus created a bridge to the sacred, the realm of God and gave people the power to walk away from shame. He did this through love.
When our stomachs are burning with shame, it makes it difficult to focus on the heart. In fact, as we receive shame into our bodies, it is so strong and has such a grip on us that we usually over react in anger, binging, compulsive behaviors or isolating. We live life in the extremes, vacillating from anger to feelings of self-doubt, shame keeps us running the spectrum of emotional intoxication, cranking down on the lever of control all the while feeling completely out of control. Insanity. If we are to be done with shame, we need a power greater than ourselves to lift us out.
In the image of Jesus on the cross, we see an open and vulnerable heart, a Spirit that even the cruelest enactment of shame could not kill. Focusing on this image in meditation can often bring us to a ground zero where we can accept ourselves and begin the long journey of walking away from a shame culture, a resurrection, a healing.
Letting go of shame can be scary, because it has often been the driving force of our lives for so long that we have come to rely upon it as our primary motivator. But it is possible to live life from a different center. A Divine love can stabilize us as we become willing to be done with shame.
We find a true identity, a wholeness we never knew before is waiting for us at the core. As the poet Rumi says, “beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” In this field, we meet our true selves, beyond the fighting and the wronging and righting, we meet the joy given to us from the beginning of time. We take the hand of our Creator and begin the long journey home.
Don’t let shame take you off your path today. Who you are is enough, find the center of you and begin living life from that center. You can ask God for the courage to break up with shame and help you find a community to sustain and nourish you in the journey.
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We all have choices about who we will be in this world. It may not feel like it sometimes, we may feel suffocated by a job, a lack of finanical resources, a relationship or a system in which we feel trapped. But even in these situations in which we may feel trapped, we have choice. In making choices, we find our way forward. Sometimes to more freedom, and sometimes to more entrapment. It’s all about buillding discernment, the ability to make better choices.
But we live in a world in which “better” is not always true to form. Where the news is written primarily for “click bait” headlines and self worth is often defined by how famous you are or how many people are following you on social media. How do we know what is truly authentic anymore? How do we learn to tell the difference between what is truly good and what might just be posing as good? Both in ourselves and in the world?
When problems seem really big in the world, we can always return to something small to find the way. Stories point the way forward. We can examine stories to build discernment in a crazy time.
A big theme throughout stories is discernment. Just because we live in a technologically advanced society, the themes of humanity really haven’t changed much. We just have more of everything now. But some stories really hit on a nerve in our world.
So it is with the Eden story of the serpent who tricked Adam and Eve, and the story of Jesus being tempted by the Devil at the very end of his forty day fast in the wilderness.
In the first story, the characters take the offer, the offer that is always on the table. Be big, be famous, be legendary, be powerful, be the master of your own destiny.
The offer always comes at a time when the character is doubting themselves and/or God. This seems to be the time when the trickster comes, at a time when the character is vulnerable. The trickster plays on the character’s internal doubt: God? Where is your God, anyway?. Why does he have so many rules? Oh yeah, he doesn’t want you to be like him, knowing everything, having God power. He’s kind of selfish, don’t you think? If he’s so powerful, why doesn’t he solve all these problems here on earth? You really should take matters into your own hands. You really have nothing to lose.
And we see Eve and Adam fall for it. And of course, the serpent can’t deliver on the promise of “God power,” at least in the terms he presented, because, after all, it wasn’t a promise, it was just a sale, a trick. Instead, this “God Power” delivers some pretty awful realities. Adam and Eve enter into the great human saga of suffering and are shut out of paradise. Homeless, they have to make their own way in the world without all the resources of Eden. So they experience shame, guilt, vulnerability, all of those things we know so well from our experience of being human in the world. We can relate to them and the feelings of entrapment that come with these very real emotions.
But it’s tricky, really, to tell the difference between snakes and devils. In the ancient world, the snake was considered wise, a symbol of healing, renewal and fertility. It wasn’t odd for Adam and Eve to have trusted a snake’s wisdom. How do we tell the difference between snakes and devils?
In another story, with another trickster, we have Jesus, on the other hand, who resists a similar offer. Not once, or twice, but three times.
Even though many people were going hungry in Jesus’ community, he resisted the temptation to create enough food to feed them all in order to prove his power. He resisted proving the power of God just so the Devil would believe that Jesus is the real deal. He resisted inheriting all the wealth, fame and power the world had to offer so that he might become a legend in his own time. Why? Because all of these things, while it is arguable that he could have done a great deal of good, would have taken him away from his true mission.
He was on a journey of resurrection. A soul journey. He was focused on the choices that would enable him to complete his mission. And resisted the ones that would take him further away. From his choices, we learn his true character.
We are all on a soul journey, we each have a soul story. It’s difficult, much of the time, to figure out what brings us closer to or further away from our spiritual path. It is tricky to know how or when or even why to resist the offers before us. The offer comes in many disguises, this offer to become masters of our own destiny.
Jesus’ path helps to point the way forward, especially when things get confusing. The One who resisted the offer can point the way, a way we can trust, because it is always primarily concerned with genuine love, not tricks or sales. Jesus simply has nothing to sell, he is only peddling hope. By studying his path and meditating on that internal garden, that “kingdom of Heaven within” as Jesus said, we build faith in something substantial. We build discernment and learn to the art of making better choices. We learn to tell the difference between snakes and devils.
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens.” –C.G. Jung
Love is the bridge between you and everything. -Rumi
Click here If you’d like to hear my homily, “The Difference Between Snakes & Devils” (13 minutes) from this week’s Tuesdays in the Chapel at Scarritt Bennett, Nashville.
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We all have a soul, we are created from sacred stuff. But many of us struggle to make a connection to it.
We may even be seeking that soul connection with our new year’s resolutions, craving more spiritual order in our lives this year, and that’s great!
But often, when we get a few weeks into the new year, we find that our energy seems depleted, the spark has left the agenda. We get busy with our lives, the demands of our current reality. We feel bogged down by the state of the way things are in our world, sucked into the gravitational pull of chaos. Connecting with soul slips way off the list, down into the netherworld.
When you spend any time in the news or dwelling on our current reality, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, here’s my brief synopsis of what I call the dark stew we’re all swimming in.
The Dark Stew:
Anxiety over unstable political environment.
Fear over increasing violence and disaster in the world.
A sense of aloneness, lack of support or community.
The feeling that you will never become who you were meant to be, that the odds are insurmountable.
Restlessness over a lack of resources such as health insurance, medical attention when needed, job, financial, etc.
Collective trauma
It’s really not our fault that we feel the invasion of the dark stew. We’ve been trying to control it for a very long time, and that tactic just doesn’t seem to work anymore. Sometimes, we even make our new year’s resolutions from a determination to control the chaos in our lives. From a young age, we are usually taught that we can gain the upper hand on chaos if we just learn techniques of control. And maybe for a while, it has worked.
But the stew is out of control.
More often than not, controlling the chaos through the various tactics we learn, working harder, becoming a huge success, being good at producing more, consuming more, etc., may help us “get ahead.” But we discover, eventually, that more is never enough. We have to work harder to keep up, our modern lives often leave us feeling depleted, experiencing identity loss and wondering where our promised sense of peace, hope and future lie. These traits may make us good producers in the world but often fail to bring us the deep sense of wholeness we crave. What’s even more confusing, is that these traits make it inside of our religious experience where they prevent us from connecting with the spiritual core.
What are we here for anyway?
We all may have had moments when we have glimpses of the sacred or soul within, like an elusive fox crossing the road in our headlights. We often ask, did that really happen? What was that? A moment of natural beauty or joy. Our instinct is to follow it, but we often have to just keep driving on, we have somewhere to be, something to do, we have an agenda, a set list of goals, or a plan we must follow. Or, if we don’t stay distracted, we are afraid we might get swallowed up in the experience of the dark stew. It’s so ironic, we often miss the soul journey because we are too busy making plans to thrive in the world, all the while thinking we are headed in the right direction. Or keeping ourselves distracted from our feelings. But the blueprint for our thriving is already within us, if only we would take the time to go within.
Our little glimpses of soul are often lost as we get sucked into the gravitational pull of chaos.
Consider these teachings about the soul from ancient traditions:
Lakota spirituality teaches us that we all have a story written upon the walls of our souls, our lives are about living out this story. The story is given to us by the Creator for the good of our community and the betterment of the world. As a young child, the soul is brought before the Great Spirit to discover its path. The role of the family and community is the help the child nurture this soul journey into the world, along with spiritual practice, rituals and traditions.
In the Christian journey, we believe that we all, at one point, are to experience the soul’s awakening to the Divine power within, this is the presence of God to which Jesus referred when he said, “the kingdom of Heaven is within” (Luke 17:21). Jesus’ presence in the world is the Holy Spirit, giving us the power to enter into and sustain a life lived from the soul’s purpose. “Abide in me and I will abide in you” (John 15:4) is an invitation to experience life from soul center. Jesus becomes the stabilizing force within you as you let go of the “learned” survival traits (control over the dark stew) and awaken to your gifts and talents for the betterment of the world. You take on the Spirit that is Christ, unique in all the world. Christ’ teaching on love, radical love that transforms hatred, is utterly unique and transformative.
This time of year, we all become particularly vulnerable to the urge to control chaos in our lives, or distract ourselves to distraction sickness. We crank down on control to make a new start, get the upper hand on the disorder or perhaps take the bait on that old sales pitch that “get the life you always wanted.” But the pathway to the soul is one of surrender, letting go of control, awakening to the wholeness within and experiencing restoration to your natural self.
There is no secret tunnel, no hidden formula, and there are no short cuts, just a lifetime of daily practice and surrender to what is already within you. Someone once said that the soul journey is about subtraction, letting God remove the barriers to God’s presence in you.
We don’t ever get rid of life in the stew, the gravitational pull of chaos will always be there, but we don’t have to be swallowed up by it or live at the pace it demands. As we learn about the Power that brings sanity, sustainable peace and manageability into our lives, God, Creator, Higher Power, we come to experience a new way of living in the world. We learn to surrender and let the internal blueprint take over. We become more connected to all that is sacred in us and in the world. This connection stabilizes our lives over time as we become less and less attracted (and attached) to the chaos, and more drawn to the peace available to us through our connection with God. Ironically, because we are changed, miraculously, by our experience of God, the world around us changes, too.
So why not take a close look at those new year’s resolutions that call for more control, or setting unattainable goals that force you to enslave your body and spirit to impossible amounts of work. Why not be guided by a higher cause, the soul’s journey? Perhaps your deeper yearning, what you’re really searching for, is a deeper connection to your very own soul.
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Grace and Peace,
-Sherry
Rev. Sherry Cothran is the pastor at St. John’s West UMC, Nashville. An award winning singer/songwriter, former lead singer of the popular late 90’s rock band, The Evinrudes, and upcoming author, Sherry writes about soul, recovery, women and faith, and the spiritual journey. Sherry’s new CD, due out in early Feb., 2017, “Hundreds of Ways to Kneel and Kiss the Ground” contains her alternative interpretations from the spiritual wisdom of Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Native American practices. Her writing and music can be viewed here: www.sherrycothran.com
