The thing is for every living being on this earth, there is risk and there is beauty.
The thing is for every person who harms someone, there are a ridiculous amount of people who do not.
The thing is that we are constantly recovering from something because that is the nature of living. Our bodies, our families, our friendships, our world are adjusting and healing in ways we could not imagine.
The thing is if we turn toward and walk through the dark nights of the soul, we are fostering an internal and external world that is truly healing.
The thing is if you are recovering from trauma the best thing to do comes from Anne Lamott: “Go only as fast as the slowest part of you.”
The thing is, we heal, we love well and fully.
The thing is we step into the stream of life and it gradually, ever so slowly returns us to the present moment and opens us to life in ways we cannot fathom.
The thing is… Life takes a lifetime and we have so much life ahead. The best is yet to come. I know that and honor that in you.
As some of you know, in my Monday through Friday 8-5 life I am a nurse case manager for one of the state Medicaid programs. I work with women who have high risk pregnancies. These risk factors can be physical, like diabetes or high blood pressure; it can be emotional like anxiety/depression or other mood disorders; or social, like being homeless. Bella* is typical of many of the women with whom I have the privilege to speak. She is a 22-year old who is 3 months pregnant with her second child. Her oldest child, Rocky, is 15 months old. Bella’s pre-pregnancy weight was 215 and she was just diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Her mother is her primary support both emotionally and financially while she stays home to care for her son. Bella and the father of the baby are not getting along since the news of this second, unplanned pregnancy. She has a history of anxiety but has never sought treatment for this. She has had one year of college and eventually would like to go back to school but her first pregnancy interrupted her studies. Historically my conversations with her would center on her diabetes and how it affects her pregnancy. I would offer behavioral health support and most of the time the offer would be declined by saying “I can manage it on my own; I just need to stay positive”. And I would leave it at that.
Recently however there has been a push within Medicaid to “integrate” disciplines so we do a better job of addressing more domains of health, noting that physical health, emotional health, spiritual health, and social health are all interrelated. Statistically, patterns have emerged which indicate that symptoms in one domain usually cascade through the other domains in fairly predictable ways. For instance, if one has a food addiction like Belle, it can be predicted that one might also suffer from physical limitations such as obesity and diabetes. Prescription drug use from back or joint pain is likely. Often there is a history of untreated anxiety/depression or other mood disorders and maintaining close relationships with others can be difficult. As you can see, an illness in one domain affects all domains of health. Illness is a spiritual event.
Now if we visualize the domains of health on a horizontal axis, as a snapshot in time, it is also helpful to remember that health throughout a person’s lifetime lies on the vertical axis. There is good reason to believe that two-thirds of us experienced at least one traumatic event in childhood. We now know that the more trauma a child has experienced, the greater the change to the neurobiology of the brain. This affects the body’s ability to process and recover from stress, especially chronic, unpredictable, toxic stress. Chronic exposure to this type of inflammation correlates significantly with auto-immune diseases, mood disorders, as well as substance use in adulthood decades after the initial exposure. So, with Belle, like many of the women I talk to, it is best to assume a history of trauma rather than not. This information radically broadens the conversation. The starting point may indeed be in the physical domain but, as rapport is established, the conversation can move across to other domains or backward to previous experiences and how these experiences might affect present and future health. It is here that I learned she was ridiculed as a child for her weight and she witnessed her older brother die of a heroin overdose. Often interpreted in childhood as a defect in their character, these types of experiences contribute to an ongoing angst in adulthood, pushed from thought by “being positive”, belied by reaching for the 8th cookie on the plate.
Which brings me to my real area of interest…spiritual health, and alas, it is the one domain of health I cannot talk openly about at work so I’ll muse about it here instead. Spiritual health is the point of origin, in my humble opinion, of both the horizontal dimensions of health and the vertical history of “how your biography becomes your biology”.
What exactly is Spiritual Health? Spiritual health is something that we all have a sense of but it is not always easy to articulate. I am drawn to Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s quote “To heal, a person must first be a person”. Could it perhaps be said then that spiritual malaise looks like a forgetting of what it means to be human? Without a protracted discussion with the philosophers amongst us, I would argue that one aspect of personhood is the need to make sense of the experiences in our lives. As Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminds us, “religion survives because it answers three questions that every reflective person must ask. Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live.” When we have forgotten who we are, what we are put on earth to do, and are unable to live up to our identified values, we have experiences but often miss the meaning of these experiences in our lives. Experiences without meaning leave us feeling empty, anxious, apathetic, conflicted, hurried or harried, self-absorbed or feeling we have something to prove. These disembodied feelings can originate from events that have occurred on either axis.
So if spiritual malaise is a forgetting of who we are, either from not recognizing that each domain of health affects the others, or by not understanding how events from childhood shape our adult health, what is the prescription? How do we recover the meaning by which we are able to re-interpret our experiences? “To heal, a person must first be a person” and awaken (again) to their own identity. I offer these as possibilities but this hardly represents an exhaustive list.
A remembrance can happen through engaging in activities of quietude such as meditation, prayer, visualization, stretching, yoga, dream work, labyrinths, and mandalas.
A remembrance can happen through a flash of insight while engaged in the profane or mundane tasks of our lives.
A remembrance can happen when we take our faith seriously and actively work to deepen our spiritual life.
A remembrance can happen through the development of strong social ties to a community that makes room for questions about identity, purpose and ethics.
A remembrance can happen through consciously seeking ways to exercise each domain of health every day, i.e., eating well, participating in the spiritual practice of your choice, reaching out to a friend, or volunteering with an organization.
A remembrance can happen when we work with professionals like spiritual directors and counselors who help us recognize and name the patterns of our experience.
Spiritual health opens up space to fully claim our humanity in the moments when we are awake. It allows us to be more fully in relationship with God or the Divine. It allows us to feel grounded in our purpose, to live with a sense of wonder and joy, to befriend death, to be a global citizen, and to practice forgiveness, compassion, and unconditional love. Not too shabby, huh?
I would argue that Bella is not unique to the population I work with. Her story, while uniquely hers, has elements that ring true for many of us. In fact, she is our colleague, our neighbor, our fellow congregants, and committee members. Perhaps even ourselves.
To heal a person must first be a person. Blessings on your journey!
Every year, thousands of people develop a dependency on opiates. Most go through some form of treatment which means that they have to endure detox. There are medications out there that can lessen this severity, but there is withdrawal when those are stopped as well. It’s gonna hurt to quit the thing that the person started using in order not to hurt.
Unless there is secondary vulnerability, we won’t die from withdrawing from opiates. We could die withdrawing from benzodiazepines or alcohol, but not opiates. The line used by some professionals who know a few things about addiction and recovery is, “You won’t die from withdrawing on opiates. You will just wish you were dead.” What they are saying here is that opiate withdrawal is one of the hardest things a person could endure.
I have withdrawn from opiates on a couple of occasions. I can assure you, it is the truest, most brutal kind of suffering ever. Don’t do drugs. The after-school specials of yesteryear were right. They were poorly acted and scripted, but they were right. Like Jack, getting high on that beanstalk, I didn’t heed the cautionary tale.
I’ve written about the disease of addiction already and this is actually not what this article is about. I know, we are four paragraphs in and it has been about addiction, but it’s about to merge into something else. So, check your re-view mirrors and let’s merge.
I came to a friend some time back who knows a few things about addiction. I said, “I think I am addicted to opiates.” He assisted me in finding treatment, getting time off of work to withdrawal, and walked me through withdrawal one step at a time. He is a good man, that guy. I won’t say who he is but his name starts with an E and ends with an “verett”. One thing he said over and over again during my withdrawal was, “Embrace the suck.” I hesitated to write that line in a faith-related blog, but any other word to replace “suck” just would not do.
What my friend was telling me in that moment was that embracing the suck means walking through it rather than struggling against it. It means acknowledging the reality of where you are at physically, spiritually or emotionally without having it be the place you will forever stay. It means that if you are in the habit of embracing the worst moments, you will most certainly be in fit position to embrace the good when it comes. And it will come back.
When hurting, it is a good idea to develop some mantras. I use some mantras in my own life, in addition to the one in the paragraphs above.
“This too shall pass.”
“Breathe.”
“Be here now.”
“God is Love.”
These are anchors to truth when I feel untethered. When the extreme happens in our lives, it creates an awareness that we are at risk. A healer in my life says, “The vigilance we experience after an extreme event puts us in touch with how fragile life can be. We generally don’t walk around thinking about that or experiencing that because it would be too much and too debilitating.” Scary, unwelcomed, hurtful life stuff makes it feel like we are only fragile. We are only vulnerable. That is not true.
We are fragile. We are sturdy. We are vulnerable. We are powerful. We are all of it. And what a range of emotion that can be. If it feels hard it’s because it is hard. If it feels easy it’s because it is easy. All of it. No binary, no either/or; all of it. Improv comedians actually know this reality well. They teach you to say “Yes, and…” rather than, “No, but…” They utilize that concept to be in a flow with the other folks doing improv. It’s basically, “I accept that and here is what I can contribute.” Back and forth, flow…
The pain will come and I am sorry for that, I wish it were different for all of us. The tears will well up. The sadness will seep in from time to time. The grief will take a seat at the most sacred place in your life at some point. And it will so suck.
The ease will come and I am so happy for that. The smiles will come again. The laughter will find its way back. And peace will take a seat at the most sacred place in your life at many points. And it will be so joyful.
So I say to you, as I also say to me, “Open your arms. It’s time to embrace it. All. Of. It.”
Before you read this, may I ask you to do something? It may be an odd request, may even prevent you from reading this now since you may not be in a space where it would be a good idea to play something on YouTube. It may even be something you choose not to do, but I will ask anyway.
Will you please play this video? Will you then close your eyes and sit with what you hear? Listen as many times as the mood strikes you. It’s good stuff.
Then come on back:
John Denver “All This Joy”
Welcome back…
When I was about 8 years old I remember hating nighttime. There are a variety of reasons for this that increased my sense of vulnerability at night, probably things that would resonate within you as well. My little 8 year old self thought frequently, “Why do we all go to sleep at the same time? Shouldn’t someone be keeping watch?” We are at our most vulnerable when sleeping, completely unaware. We really should have planned this out better as a human race, right?
Going to sleep while everyone else is asleep has a certain strange agreement of trust. We’re pretty much saying, “Hey, I am going to just close my eyes for the night and make myself as vulnerable as can be. I am pretty sure we all are going to wake up on the other side of this day.” When life events, though, challenge that level of trust and belief, sleep becomes harder to come by because vulnerability is harder to come by.
I’ve shared with you before that I am in recovery from drugs and alcohol. As many with that history, I tend to be pain avoidant. It is hard to sit with pain, physical and emotional, palpable and overwhelming. I don’t like it. I actually hate it. I despise it. It frustrates and confounds me that it’s in the mix of life.
That avoidance of pain versus the turning to face it is really the challenge we are faced with most regularly.. Each time we turn to face the reality of the present circumstances or moment, we are being co-creators with Spirit and participants in the flow of life. I forget this a lot. Like all the time. I forget this because pain hurts. You likely do the same because pain hurts. We certainly do this as a community because pain hurts.
I write a lot of subtext to my daily experiences. I make meaning in ways that allow me to understand the world around me. I can act as though that subtext is true, but really, it’s just my thoughts trying to make the world more palatable and less dangerous. Often the subtext that I create separates me from the world around me, separates me from you. Separates you from me. I’m pretty tired of that, aren’t you?
Here are some myths about pain that I’d like for us to consider getting rid of:
-If I feel the loss, the grief, the sadness, it will break me. Forever.
-If I start to feel I will feel this way always. Forever.
-If I leave it alone and not look at any of it, time will just make it go away.
-If I spend time honoring those feelings, I am self indulgent and need to change.
-If I drink this, take this pill, watch this video, it will numb me out and I will not have to worry about it anymore.
-I should compare my pain to what others have to walk through and then shame myself for feeling bad because they have it worse than me.
There is an ebb and flow to pain and healing. It looks like this:
It gets better.
Then it gets worse.
Then it gets better.
Oh great, now it got bad again.
Hey! Guys! Look! It got better again!
Ok it’s getting worse again.
Yay! It’s better…
And the bad days start to neutralize and the wound starts to heal.
There is more space between the times it gets better and when it gets bad again. We are constantly reaching for equilibrium. And, if we let it, it comes. Eventually.
The only way it comes, though, is through a turning to rather than a turning away.
I am not an expert on grief and loss, but I certainly have experienced it. I am not an expert on brokenness, but I can check that box too. I am not an expert on isolation and turning away. Wait, I kinda am. I’m kinda a gold medal contender for that one. Who else would like to join me on the podium?
Your life, my life, our loved ones lives, will experience pain, injury, brokenness. It just is. Your life, my life, our loved ones lives, will experience healing. It just is. My dear friends, this is the work in living. This is the work in relationship. This is the work of the ministry of reconciliation. This is the work of our communities of faith.
Last Sunday, at First Congregational Flagstaff, several members shared memories and anecdotes concerning their baptisms. One recalled being baptized as an adult in a beautiful river beside red-rock cliffs in Sedona. A middle-aged man shared that his earliest memory in life is his baptism as an infant!
Wherever you were baptized, and however it was done, it is good to ponder its ongoing reality in your life. Like faith itself, the memory and interpretation of the happening may be more important than what occurred in the past.
We commonly think of baptism in its most obvious significance—that of washing away our impurities. That’s certainly an important and abiding perspective; “Repent and be baptized…for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). At the same time, there is another Scriptural tradition that might point us in additional directions, regarding the significance of our baptism. Each year in the lectionary cycle, at the start of each new year, we commemorate the baptism of Jesus, and we are called to recall our own baptism. Yet the baptism of Jesus points to something more than forgiveness of sins. In classical Christian theology, Jesus was without sin. Or, in more contemporary terms, Jesus possessed a perfect God-consciousness. Unlike us, Jesus had no need for a ritual of cleansing moral impurities. So what does Jesus’s baptism mean, and what does it mean for us?
In the mid-seventh century an Irish scholar wrote a treatise titled On the Miracles of Holy Scripture. It’s a unique work, seemingly ahead of its time. Covering a huge array of Bible miracles, the author sought to point out that God never works in violation of nature’s laws. By portraying the harmony between miracles and natural order, this author makes Scriptural wonders feasible to a scientific mind while also elevating the ‘miraculous’ aspects of everyday natural events.
Referring to Jesus’s baptism the writer reverses our normal understanding: normally we think of water as cleansing the baptizee (as a normal bath would do). Yet Jesus was in no need of cleansing. Rather, the waters required redemption, because they are held within the confines of the earth, and the earth was cursed by humanity’s fall, as indicated in chapter 3 of Genesis. So Jesus’s baptism had a reverse effect–the baptized One gloriously refreshed polluted creation.
Could you think of your own baptism as being a similar event? Has God not called all believers to labor for the good of all creation–not just for humans, but for all beings and the earth itself?
At Jesus’s baptism he hears a voice from heaven: “You are my child, whom I dearly love: in you I find happiness.” It might be a stretch for you to believe this, but God no doubt said the same thing at your baptism. Our self-doubts, or our lack of awareness, probably prevented us from hearing that loving affirmation—but it was there. Ponder your own baptism vows for a moment. Imagine God saying those same words to you. How does it make you feel?
Jesus, knowing how much God found happiness in him, went forth from his baptism to begin healing the world. You had the same experience! So as you recall your baptism, consider how God has called you to live as a dearly beloved child, and how you can work with God to cleanse our polluted earth.
Field of Dreams came out when I was 11 years old. I saw it on video when I was 13 and immediately used the line “If you build it, they will come” for comedy effect with my friends. It was a catchphrase and said at the right moment, it always got a good laugh. Because of the incessant use, it became hard wired in my brain. Sometimes I hear folks talking about a project or an effort they are involved in and that line runs through the back of my mind.
My access to places of worship and faith development post coming out as LGBT was very limited. I had been to a few congregations that expressed a welcome to LGBTQ folks. These churches, though, were largely made up of members who identify as LGBT and very few allies. This was disheartening to me. I wanted to be able to pick a faith community that I could grow spiritually in and not just choose one because they embrace my community. This is further proof to me that the most segregated hour in America is still on Sundays. And I had no desire to participate in that. Then I heard about the UCC and everything changed.
I became introduced to the UCC through the Pastor who served at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Tucson, AZ. She was an out, partnered lesbian, yet her ministry consisted of people from all walks of life; likely people that would never have sought each other out in the world outside the church. Members affirmed and celebrated each other. They advocated openly and unabashedly to ensure those who did not have access to rights would gain access to rights. They just were all so kind and open. It appeared to be church in action. So, I was suspicious. What’s the catch? Why are you guys being so nice to us? And the answer that came consistently was that we were part of them and they were a part of us.
The reason all these things happened is they made an intentional decision to become Open and Affirming, welcoming LGBTQ into the full life and ministry of the church. And I dug it. I shook off the suspicion and embraced the openness. It was delightful and rich. And still, many LGBTQ people would never come through those doors, simply because it’s far too painful. A friend of mine told me the story about her congregation’s decision to become Open and Affirming. They thought it was simply the right thing to do. And it created an expectation for some that the LGBTQ community would pour in. One person said, “I don’t get it. We say we are Open and Affirming. Why aren’t they coming?”
There are a whole host of reasons LGBT folks do not participate in organized religion. Some have experienced churches to express a welcome, only to be condemned when they do attend. The trauma of losing their faith community due to being LGBT is often triggered by churches. In short, many don’t trust us. And that makes perfect sense.
Addressing the trauma that results from faith based rejection is the role of the church. Healing, ministering, listening, affirming. It takes intention and it takes openness to achieve. The church is inviting those who have been wounded from ministers and church members to come to our churches. It is our responsibility to prepare a place for them that will truly heal.
If you build it, they may not come, but we, as the church, must build it still.
Davin “Dax” Franklin-Hicks is a proud member of the United Church of Christ. He was introduced to the UCC in 2003. His primary focus is in supporting those that have experienced trauma within spiritually based communities and/or rejection from family members due to being determined as unacceptable to God for various reasons. Dax had his own church-related trauma experiences after coming out as Queer, and later, as Transgender that included a disfellowship process from a rejecting congregation. What a breath of fresh air the UCC was after that experience.
In 2008, Dax transitioned from female to male, experiencing an incredible affirmation from his UCC congregation at the time, the former First Congregational United Church of Christ in Tucson. The grace and love he received during this coming out and transition process was a very healing experience.
Dax works in the field of recovery in Tucson, is a member of Rincon Congregational United Church of Christ, and currently serves on the Executive Board of the Southwest Conference. He has an amazing wife, Nancy, who is a member of Rincon and a Social Worker in hospice. They have a rockin’ awesome son, named Angelo, who is in his twenties and works in the helping field. He has a cat who shares his point of view nearly constantly, and a pit bull he kisses daily.
