Healing Spiritual Wounds Read online

  In the space that you have claimed, with your posture of openness, you can pray. When you haven’t prayed much or you’re out of practice, it can be good to use the words of other people as your guide. I often pray the words of Howard Thurman:

  Lord, open unto me.

  Open unto me—light for my darkness.

  Open unto me—courage for my fear.

  Open unto me—hope for my despair.

  Open unto me—peace for my turmoil.

  Open unto me—joy for my sorrow.

  Open unto me—strength for my weakness.

  Open unto me—wisdom for my confession.

  Open unto me—forgiveness for my sins.

  Open unto me—love for my hates.

  Open unto me—thy Self for my self.

  Lord, Lord, open unto me!

  Amen.5

  Each time you work through the practices, you can begin with the opening exercises, preparing yourself to gently remove that scab.

  Chapter 2

  FINDING SHALOM

  I held the clear plastic cup of wine in my hand and watched as my husband, Brian, flitted through the crowd with ease. His animated voice propelled over the beating music, and his enthusiastic arms waved with each word. It was his party and his friends. I was the plus-one tagalong. Still, I admired his charisma. Large gatherings full of loud strangers seemed harder for me. He typically got more anxious than I did, but while his anxiety propelled him outward, meeting and greeting people with energy, mine made me burrow inward.

  I decided to rely on my old party trick. I took a deep breath of sweaty, perfumed air and looked around for someone who looked as alone in the crowd as I felt. Surely I could find a fellow introvert. I spotted him, at one corner of the food table, taking way more interest in the cheese assortment than any dairy products warranted.

  “Which one’s the best?” I asked.

  “Well, it depends. Do you like soft or hard cheese?” When I answered, he pointed me to a lovely goat milk and herb concoction that made something inside of me melt. I nodded and hummed in appreciation.

  “So, what do you do for a living?” he asked.

  I smiled. His opener reminded me that I was in DC. People practically shook hands with business cards up their sleeves. But this bit could be a little awkward, especially when strangers expect a CV filled with political campaigns or NGO designations. Through bites of hors d’oeuvres, they try to suss out governmental codes, such as “GS-14.”

  “I’m a pastor. And a writer. I lead conferences,” I answered.

  “You work at a church?” He looked confused as he rapidly took inventory of the whole length of me with suspicion. I supposed if I were a casting director, looking for just the right person to play the role of a minister, I would not pick a five-foot-tall curvy woman wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

  “Yeah,” I said, and smiled, acknowledging his furrowed brow. “Pastors come in all shapes and sizes now. Thank God.” But then I realized those forehead creases weren’t really about me. Something else was going on in his mind.

  “Did you grow up in church?” I asked.

  He told me about his religious background, and within moments, the pain in his voice spun this web that entangled all my attention.1 “My parents were in the military,” he said, “so we went from one navy chapel to the next. We weren’t really a part of a denomination.

  “Then when I was a teenager, we had this chaplain who preached against ‘hom-o-sex-uality’ every week.” He took his time drawing out a Texas accent, mimicking the preacher. “Every week. I knew I was gay. There was no denying it.” His eyes drifted beyond me, and he fell silent, as he seemed to search for serenity. “I did deny it though. I didn’t want to be rejected by my family or by God. So for all those years, I rejected myself.

  “Can I be honest?” He suddenly focused on my face, reading my brow to see if he could detect those traces of abhorrence he knew well from his youth. I nodded my permission. “I hate Christianity. I hate Christianity. It took away my family. Hell, I almost destroyed myself because of it.” Our conversation grew silent for a moment, our words got swept up in the surrounding beat as I let the information sink in. Then he persisted. “But even after all of that, I know that unless I make peace with Christianity, I’ll never have any peace.” He flushed and looked down at his hands, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t go on and on.”

  “You’re good,” I said. And then I said it again with gravity, because I believed it and I wanted him to hear me. “You are good.”

  With a deep breath, he explained how he shifted from feeling shame because of his sexual orientation to a remorseful embarrassment that he could have ever been a Christian. He severed his past from his present, cutting off his Christian upbringing from his life as a gay man. It was the only way he knew to save himself, but it didn’t work for long. “Over the years I found out that Christianity was like an appendage. Like an arm or a leg, I couldn’t throw it away. If I tried, I was just left with this big hole. Finally, I had to admit that being a Christian was as much a part of me as being gay.”

  As he spoke, these perplexing words from the Hebrew Bible echoed in my mind:

  Come, let us return to the Lord;

  for it is God who has torn, and God will heal us;

  God has struck down, and God will bind us up.2

  I can’t cram those words into any sort of neat and tidy theological system. They aren’t meant to be a divine explanation of who God is; rather, the poetry reflects the cry of an imperfect people. The words give voice to the broken bitterness people feel when wounded, even as they articulate a hope in a God who heals, a God who knows how to clean out the bleeding gashes and bind the lacerations securely enough so that they could recover properly. As I examined the face of the man next to me, the poetry felt true—not in a theological sense, but in an existential sense: God has torn. God will heal.

  Then, I began seeing things spiritually. Shattered pieces appeared on the floor of our friend’s house—glistening fragments of this stranger’s torn and struck-down life. The beliefs, relationships, and yearnings that made up this man felt as acute as recent wreckage. I longed to put each beautiful piece together, carefully and delicately. I wanted to embrace him, surround him, and force him into wholeness. But I couldn’t.

  Shalom. Shalom. Shalom. I silently prayed.

  Needing some air and a bit of quiet, we walked outside. Though other members of the party had already spilled onto the lawn, we were able to find a suitable green space to continue our conversation. With each step we took, I continued my prayer.

  Shalom—the ancient Hebrew blessing means peace but it also means wholeness. The word is pliable. People use it as a greeting or as the goal of treaties between nations. It also has an economic aspect to it. The root letters of the Hebrew word can mean “it was paid for” and so it can be applied to convey a hope for prosperity. Or it could be used in the way I was using it—as a meditation, a longing for God to heal.

  I told him about my prayer. The word seemed the only thing I could offer, and so I kept chanting the intercession in my head, even while recognizing the disorienting force of religion. Systems of beliefs could easily tear at us and break us. The church this man experienced had taken sexism, homophobia, racism, greed, and violence and dressed them up so they appeared as piety. Many of us have met that face of the church.

  Yet, even in the midst of these wounds, I couldn’t deny that God could heal. I knew that since the tree grew in my room, and I’ve seen God work similarly in many others’ lives. I have witnessed people recover wholeness in the midst of addiction. I have watched people escape the torrents of abuse and find wholeness. I have known enough people on their deathbed to realize that hope shared can build a bridge strong enough to give a person the miraculous courage to cross over to death. And I have seen people who have been wounded by religion’s hatred pick up the scattered pieces of their lives and bind them back together. I had seen it happen too many times to deny it. God can heal.
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  I didn’t have any particular wisdom for the stranger. I couldn’t make him forget his experience or hand him a self-help book, but I shared and prayed that simple one-word meditation—shalom—because it is the best one-word answer to what all hurting people seek and need. That prayer was the one thing we had in common, even if we had to go back to the faith of his youth to retrieve it, and even if that act felt like stealing bandages from the enemy’s encampment. With that word, we held something sacred between us—a powerful yearning for his well-being.

  A rowdy group of partiers came over and broke up our conversation. So I smiled a wordless farewell to him. He nodded back.

  Memories are mysterious. From now on, I hope that stranger will not be able to conjure up those horrifying sermons without the prayer. And I continue to pray that peace attached itself to his recollection so that the pain and messiness of that encounter could begin a journey toward wholeness.

  We parted, but the stranger’s wisdom lingered. Even though the church caused much of the suffering and violence in his soul, he could not simply walk away from his beliefs. He had nurtured the hardened scab long enough, and he needed to be healed in a way that recognized and incorporated his faith. That was what I wanted to help him with in our brief and stumbling conversation. I heard in his words that he was on a healing journey, that he was seeking to reconnect with God in a new way.

  PICKING UP THE SHARDS

  Years after that chance encounter, I sensed a larger movement occurring in spiritual circles. It seemed like many of us who were hurt by the church were forging some sort of path toward spiritual healing, whether we bumped into a pastor at a party or sneaked back into a cold, hard pew after a decade of absence. It was a common occurrence.

  The wounds were easy to see. People on the Internet hinted at them through status updates with “trigger warnings,” soul-baring from new atheists, and tortured blogs of ex-fundamentalists. I worked with the religiously wounded in church and met them at retreats. They were people with the sort of trauma that comes when your injuries are wrapped up in the condemnation of the soul, the shunning of families, or the shaming of flesh.

  The lacerations ranged in acuteness. A man revealed a paper cut when he told me about being scolded by a haughty elder lecturing him on his shabby shoes. He knew his parents couldn’t afford dress shoes, and so to protect their dignity and his own, he refused to attend church.

  Other times, a scar lingered after a woman felt subhuman in her religious community. She chafed with complementarian teachings of obedience and submission in the very place where her full humanity should have been celebrated.

  Still in other moments, I witnessed deep gouges inflicted by a manipulative man in his collar seducing a young boy into his forbidden bed. I watched how the abuse did not affect just the boy, but it rippled to his family, friends, and community.

  It was staggering to see what people suffered in the name of God. Many sought a cure for their spiritual wounds. They wanted something that made the pain go away or insured that it mended properly. They longed to figure out a way to get back what they had before their faith was damaged. They needed to feel comfortable praying again. Underlying each story, latent questions lingered: What can I do about this despair? Was this my fault? Where was God when this was happening? Where is the balm to soothe my aching soul? Is God still available to me? Is there any way that I can find healing?

  These questions intrigued me, especially because people asked me—the one who wore a clergy collar—about them. Why would they search for healing in the same place where they were wounded? Why would they be looking to Christianity for a balm?

  I knew the answer. Somewhere in my bones I understood. I recognized these moments that ranged from being socially uncomfortable to severely destructive because I lived through them myself. My abusive father regularly used religion to undergird his rage. I also had a pedophile pastor, and I spent my childhood watching as the church maneuvered to cover things up, encouraging parents to forgive instead of pressing charges, and sacrificing victims to the idol of pious pretense.3

  I’ve been tempted to abandon God altogether; yet, I stayed.

  Why didn’t I leave the spiritual life? Why didn’t I flee and embrace atheism? Was I like an assaulted spouse who remained inexplicably bound in a relationship that caused brutal pain?

  I wasn’t afraid to ask the questions or deal with the consequences if I eventually found religion unbearable. It’s just that when someone complains of religious wounds, we’re often told to quit going to church and disconnect from spiritual practices. No doubt this works for some people, but others see the world through an irremovable religious lens. Asking us to stop believing and practicing would be so unnatural that it would cause certain blindness. It would be like demolishing a musician’s piano, breaking an artist’s brushes, or denying an engineer’s numbers. Some of us have a spiritual or theological orientation, and to eschew that would make us incomplete. Like the wise man at that party, we’ve found that we need to make amends with our past rather than severing it.

  How to make amends is another matter. When I get a physical injury, I know what to do. I can clean out a wound, making sure that the dirt and germs don’t infect it. I add ointments and bandages. I know how to Google symptoms. I even have that ability to become extraordinarily paranoid upon seeing all the horrifying pictures and contemplating the worst possible scenarios that the hive brain of the Internet conjures up with my inquiries. To ease my worries, I take myself to the doctor’s office and explain my physical symptoms. My doctor relies on years of education to give me the right sort of prescription. If there is a cure, I will probably buy it.

  Psychological injuries can be more difficult to detect. I used to think that I could make sense of my psychological conundrums on my own, but I quickly got in over my head (so to speak), and so I saw a therapist to work through complex issues, trying to tease out how I reacted to my family of origin or sort out my response to a traumatic experience. I needed someone who knew more than I did about the human mind, family systems, and how we function, and so I worked with professionals, intermittently, for a couple of decades. I learned a great deal by having someone walk alongside me, listening to my story, and giving me the tools that I needed to understand my context.

  Then I realized this other sort of healing was needed. It was tangled into the physical and the psychological, but it was somehow different, because it was often inflicted by a religious person, culture, or community and needed a spiritual solution.

  Where do we go when we suffer from the sort of contusions that we hardly have the ability to identify? What do we do when our therapist doesn’t seem to have the right sort of navigational tools to walk with us on a spiritual journey? How do we heal from that particular religious malaise when we hardly have the vocabulary to articulate what it might be? What happens when we find our vulnerable souls have been wounded, and we don’t want to reject God any longer?

  This is the space where I work—in this murkiness where the science and labels evade our grasp and give way to mysteries and myth. It’s the place where we long for the love of God when we have been taught only of God’s vengeance and judgment. We discern the goodness of our desires when we have been told only of their corrupting abilities. We long for the world as it ought to be even when we have been told to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. And it’s the place where God yearns to meet us.

  HOW DOES WOUNDING HAPPEN?

  As I wrote in the first chapter, the way we ought to live can be summed up in Jesus’s instructions to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus said these instructions summarized the entire message of the Law and living by them would be the sign to ourselves and to others whether we were following God. Jesus’s words also serve as our foundation when it comes to understanding when spiritual abuse has occurred. Religious wounding occurs when people and communities violate this three-part nature of love—love of God, self, and neighbor.

  Implicit
in these directives, we understand certain things:

  • Jesus commands us to love ourselves.

  • The love of God, love of self, and love of others work together.

  • Love is generative.

  • Love is an act of receiving as well as giving.

  • Love can be shown through providing emotional and physical needs.

  • Love can also be shown through justice.

  • When the Bible contains directives that seem to contradict the law of love, we can assume that those other directives are either wrong or we have misunderstood them.

  Imagine these three types of love (God, others, self ) as part of a simple machine with three pulleys. The machine works best when all three mechanisms are working. When we love God, we love ourselves; when we love our neighbor, we love God; when we love ourselves, we love our neighbor; and so on.

  This seems like an obvious spiritual reality, but it counters what we often think. We imagine love as a limited resource. It’s true that most of us cannot manage a thousand best friends or lovers, but we can love God, our neighbor, and ourselves. Doing so generates rather than diminishes love.

  We understand the generative nature of love because the command is to love God with all our soul, mind, and strength. After all of that loving, we should be wiped out and completely depleted of affection. But we’re not. Even after all that, Jesus keeps talking and says that we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

  We might imagine that if we love ourselves too much, then we will become narcissistic and won’t be able to love our neighbor. But narcissism typically results from the abuse one experiences as a child and happens when one has not learned to love oneself properly. By contrast, when we learn to love ourselves in a healthy manner, then that love can spill out in excess and we can have the emotional reserves to love others and God.