In the bubbling hostility of our social climate today, you may be among the growing number of people who feel, simply, rejected. Perhaps it is not the emotion that you lead with in your day to day relationships, maybe it brews beneath the surface like volcanic magma. Rejection is painful. Maybe you’ve tried all kinds of seemingly positive approaches and though you may have felt a little immediate relief, as time passed, you may have sunk even deeper into despair, thinking you will never find a way out of the soul trap of rejection.
We often accept the false belief that rejection lies in things we simply cannot change such as gender, ethnicity, disability, social class or sexual orientation. Certainly, these realities are often cited as reasons in which people and systems reject people. Discrimination is very real and should be resisted and transformed. But rejection itself is not rooted in these things. Rejection is kept alive by a constant diet of pain and fear.
Strangely, this is good news. Because we certainly can’t change the gifts of our DNA, in fact, we want to learn to celebrate them. And we can’t change other people. But we can change our lives and the way we feel. We can recover from feeling rejected. Not only can we grow beyond that hollow and paralyzing feeling rejection brings, but we can find acceptance, love and healing in the process. Helping others to find the same along the way. We may even be surprised to find that purpose and meaning await us on this journey.
I offer this quote from Jean Vanier, founder of 147 L’Arche communities in 35 countries for people with intellectual disabilities writes:
“People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.”
People who are rejected often practice rejection as a reaction to the stored pain a lifetime of rejection brings. It can come if the form of perfectionism, shame, impossible expectations and many other forms. Rejection is passed on from generation to generation. The fear of rejection traps us in the pain of isolation, convincing us we are alone, and that it is us against the world. This kind of learned and deeply engrained belief keeps us from reaching out to communities of healing that might be the key to our self-acceptance and the doorway to letting go of painful emotions that block us from our higher selves.
It seems that we need to place ourselves in relationships and communities in which we find love, respect and trust. But these don’t just magically appear. We have to risk looking for them. In my experience, the way I’ve approached this is to become willing to give the very things I crave myself: love, acceptance, healing and trust to some of the most rejected people on the planet before I could open up and receive these things for myself.
For a decade, I followed this mantra (and I still do):
“We are healed by those we reject.” – Jean Vanier – (winner of the 2015 Templeton Prize in the company of Mother Teresa, Dalia Lama and others.)
We are not doomed to hatred, fear and rejection, there is another way. We are not doomed to constantly spin into frantic action driven by our pain. I call that way of living emotional whiplash. There is a better way, and the key is through offering not necessarily our great achievements to others, but our vulnerability, acceptance and love.
I began to experience the kind of healing Vanier refers to when I began working with the community that suffers from homelessness as a pastor in urban churches. As I began to open myself to the woundedness of others, some of the most rejected people on the planet, I began to gain the courage to explore my own wounds. Something was broken open in the exchange of brokenness. I could see into my own heart in ways that had been previously sealed off to me by pain and my own efforts to protect myself from pain. I had fear, certainly, but something more powerful than fear took over as I continued to put my body, my work and my faith into a community that was, by all outward appearances, not thriving but dying. Healing. Love. Trust. Faith. None of these things were misplaced. I began to believe that I had a path to walk, a path of purpose and meaning and it came by taking the risk of loving those whom the world seems to have stamped “rejected.” It was not easy, but I was ushered through cosmically, somehow, by the needs of others, by the very real healing presence of Christ between us, and my willingness to respond to those needs. I didn’t fix anyone, I helped some, but mostly what I had to offer was acceptance and love. And over time I leaned that it was enough.
When we interact with those we reject, we somehow feel safe enough to open up our own deep wounds for healing. Because of this, we gain the courage to take the rejected pathway in ourselves. I say that Christ, the sacred, shows up when we open ourselves to those we reject, because it takes the power out of our fear and shows us true power, that of love. Love transforms fear into the energy of hope. Rather than rejection, we suddenly experience acceptance. Rather than fear, we have the sudden bodily knowledge that we are loved and that we are capable of love. Rather than mistrust, we have the experience that we can trust others and be trusted. There are plenty of places in your community that need you to express love and acceptance. As you become willing to find them, you will.
I wrote a song about my experience, it’s called “Tending Angels,” and it tells the story of how I began to have the real life experience, working among the homeless community that I was, in fact, as the passage in Hebrews states, “tending angels unaware.”
Have you had experiences that have changed your life similar to this? How did it change you? I would love to hear about it, leave your thoughts in the comments box below.
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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.
