Safe Place

by Karen Richter

In this week following the mass shooting of LGBTQ persons of color in Orlando, I’ve read much about the importance of sanctuaries, places where a person can be who they truly are. This reflection is about one of those places in my life.

The picture above is my Great Aunt Georgia’s house in Asheville, North Carolina.  It’s a lovely bed and breakfast now, but when I was a kid it was just a rambly, way too large and slightly spooky old house.  My aunt was Georgia Virginia Daughdrill (at least that was her full name when I knew her.  She was married once before to my father’s favorite uncle.  Plus – two states!).  I called her Georgie.  She was my paternal grandmother’s much older sister and had pretty much raised my dad.  My whole life, she was the same… fluffy completely white hair, frumpy clothes, and the kind of pleasant unadorned woman’s face that people sometimes call handsome.  She’s gone now, and I’m realizing now that I remain completely clueless about her inner life.  I never knew her to attend church, but she sat down with the Good News Bible every night and once, when she thought I was already asleep, I heard her whispered nighttime prayers.

The house was a character in my childhood almost as much as my aunt and grandmother.  It was there that I stayed up until midnight the first time.  We had a freedom there, my brother and I, that seemed missing everywhere else.  It’s a well-worn family story that “my Aunt Georgie says I can do anything I want.”  My mother swears she came into Georgie’s kitchen once to find me licking the end of a stick of butter when I was a toddler.  The house was the setting for a bizarrely diverse cast of characters – friends, neighbors, boarders – that seemed completely normal to me, just like I knew it was normal for the bread to be always slightly burned.  As a very small child, I thought everyone had an Aunt Georgia.  And what a world it would be if we all did.

On Chestnut Street, Dennis and I spent many happy hours searching for hidden passageways and hollow spaces, deciding whether or not the old portrait’s eyes followed us as we walked down the hallway, or compiling dossiers on my aunt’s boarders.  We knew that “in the olden days,” the house had been owned by a local doctor.  We imagined ghosts of former patients gliding by us in the parlor.  I guess we felt so safe there, so loved and cherished by this wonderful aunt with no children of her own, that we had to invent dangers to keep ourselves occupied.  Or maybe we just watched too much Scooby Doo.

One of my earliest memories is a tree falling over at this house.  It was a huge tree (an oak, maybe?).  When it fell, it shook the whole house.  The top of the tree landed across the street.  It had been diseased for some time; when it fell, a misshapen cement blob fell out of the trunk.  It was like a giant’s dental filling, and it stayed where it had landed, in the corner of the yard along Chestnut Street.  I wonder if it’s still there.  And I wonder how big that tree would look to me now.

Aunt Georgia’s house was not what I would call child-friendly.  There was no closet full of toys or bunk beds or collection of kiddie DVDs.  In the sideboard, there was a shoebox of random small toys and junk that we fashioned into all manner of pretend items.  In the living room, there was an oriental-style rug that became a wonderful garden of my favorite sweets.  In the hall was a trunk with old-fashioned shoes and photos.  Occasionally, we would pull various items out of the trunk and play ‘going to Atlanta,’ an elaborate storytelling with parties and dancing in fancy dresses. Out in the yard were snapdragons and snowballs and low bushes that became hideaways.  We swung on the front porch glider and came inside just in time for Lawrence Welk or Hee Haw.

Although she always looked the same to me, as I grew older, Aunt Georgie did too.  When I was in high school, she moved out of Chestnut Street and into a more practical apartment.  When she closed the door at Chestnut Street, we all lost something precious.

Scripture for Today: Psalm 40.11-12

So now you, Lord—

don’t hold back any of your compassion from me.

Let your loyal love and faithfulness always protect me,

because countless evils surround me.

 

Prayer for Today

Spirit of Life, I pause to give thanks for places of safety. May I be that place of protection and acceptance for another!

Vulnerability is Sacred

by Davin Franklin-Hicks

Vulnerability is sacred.

I first thought this when I had been attending First UCC Tucson for about three years. I was spending a great deal of time, attention, thought, and meditation in developing relationships, including the one that I had once known with God. It was a communion Sunday and I often did not partake in communion. This was due to a resentment that I had against those who created insiders and outsiders at the communion table. The other aspect of my refusal was that I did not know what, if anything, communion meant to me and my path.

Vulnerability is sacred.

The work that I get to do in the community where I live is often heart-wrenching at times and  celebratory at other times. Working in the realm of substance dependence and mental illness, I see people often at their most vulnerable. The stripping away of ego is so hard to watch, especially when it is due to illness. Many of the folks who fill our jails and psychiatric facilities have a large number of adverse childhood events, also known as trauma. As trauma increases, health needs and disparities often increase. As safety increases, health needs and disparities often decrease.

Vulnerability is sacred.

The return to the sense of safety often comes on the heels of talking about that which made it unsafe, most often trauma. The concept, “the only way out is through” is very applicable here. Finding that way through trauma is not for the faint of heart. That being said, I shall now give you a bit of a gross comparison that a coworker of mine uses. He says, “This whole time we have been together, you have been swallowing your saliva without any thought about it. It’s natural to you, it’s normal. If you were given a cup and told to spit in it vs swallow the saliva, that would likely gross you out. If you were then told to drink from that cup (my note: my stomach is turning too, ugh) you would likely refuse.” Here’s why that is: when it is out of you, it changes. We interact with it differently, we see it differently, we address it differently.

Vulnerability is sacred.

The telling of trauma is exhausting, scary, and so incredibly hard. The pain that induced the trauma feels fresh and feels awful, most do not want to talk about things like that. Yet, we must. To some degree, we must. In the telling, we are no longer alone with it. In the telling, we are able to look at what exactly it is that was inside us. In the telling, the event of the trauma can be a single event versus the overshadowing painful, all consuming thing that it had been. It is out of me, it is out of you and we can look at it together.

Vulnerability is sacred.

That communion table. What am I to do with that communion table? Can I just fake it and hope the feelings of acceptance for communion comes? Can I continue to ignore it and just check out while it is being served? I could do that. Or I could work on this a bit more. I chose the latter. The only way out is through, after all. Within the same hour that I opted into contending with communion and determining my beliefs and practices, a thought came to me. Communion is the telling of trauma. As we sit with the understanding of the horror that was done to Jesus in his execution, we are bearing witness. We are bearing witness to injustice. We are bearing witness to something intensely private and very human. We are bearing witness to trauma.

Vulnerability is sacred.

I look very closely for the vulnerability in those around me. I have a strong desire to protect that vulnerability, to ensure they are safe and cared for in whatever way the vulnerability arises. I have a strong connection to vulnerability and I have a strong disdain for abuses of power. The Sermon on the Mount, or the Beatitudes made perfectly clear the expectation that we would look for the vulnerable and honor that vulnerability with love. In so doing, we are reaching beyond what is in front of us or what is our present reality and we are inviting the sacred into our relationships. When I am vulnerable with you and when you are vulnerable with me, I do believe God is there. The whole, when two or three people are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them. The presence of the sacred.

May we tell our stories.

May we look for our shared humanity.

May we be vulnerable. And may the sacred be present.

Your vulnerability is sacred.