Healing Spiritual Wounds Read online

  Parents who lose their temper at a child know that it often has less to do with the child’s actual behavior and more to do with the fact that the parents feel hungry, anxious, lonely, or tired. We have not loved ourselves with the necessary provisions, and so we have no more love to give to our children. Love produces love, and spiritual wholeness happens when the finely tuned mechanisms of love work in tandem.

  Religious wounding occurs when people and communities violate the love of God, self, and neighbor. This machine of three pulleys stops working and a breakdown happens. For instance, when we fashion a vengeful God who demands eternal torture, we desecrate the love of God. Or when we think that we must hate our gay neighbor in order to love God, then we partake in religious wounding. Or when we imagine that we ought to allow ourselves to be abused in order to love God, then we transgress the laws of love. How do we love our neighbor or ourselves if we think God is ready to torture and kill us if we ever step out of line or fail to conform to God’s rules? How do we love God or ourselves if we think it is required to hate others who do not measure up to our religion’s standards? How do we love ourselves if we think we must continue to suffer abuse?

  For those of us who grew up in a strong religious tradition, we might be able to quote Bible verses that counter these laws of love. Indeed, there are many irreconcilable things in the scripture. That fact may make us feel uncomfortable, but Jesus explained that the laws are made for humans and not the other way around.4 Then Jesus showed us that certain instructions were wrong when he refused to stone a woman who had been caught cheating on her husband or when he healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath—both of which were supposedly against what the Law taught.5

  In addition, certain texts might be culturally bound to another time and do not apply to ours. For example, laws declare a woman “unclean” when she is menstruating; but in our culture, we know that menstrual blood has nothing to do with whether a woman is clean or not, and we have ways of dealing with this inconvenient week that do not include sitting outside the city walls and not allowing anyone to touch us.6

  So we learn to hold up certain truths above others as a lens to interpret. And these truths, as Jesus said, summarize the whole of the law—love God, love yourself, and love your neighbor.7 When religious wounding occurs, it’s typically because one of these loving mechanisms broke down; and in order to heal, we can go back and relearn love.

  WHAT DOES BEING HEALED LOOK LIKE?

  In these matters, shalom is not only our prayer, our longing, and our hope, it is also what being healed looks like. Imagine a shattered vase. It will serve as an ongoing metaphor. Throughout this process, we will be reclaiming the pieces of the shattered vase. We will look at the different shards and remnants of our lives—our beliefs, emotions, self-understanding, and practices. We will turn to our past and examine our attitudes toward our bodies and money, and we will do it with the hope of making peace, of allowing all the shattered remains of our own lives to be bound up and repaired.

  Shalom may be a different goal than we’re used to. In many points in our lives we work for success or happiness. Bookstores are lined with volumes that have those particular ends in mind, and they are both worthy goals, but in striving for professional or financial achievement, we might forget to look around to see how much of the rest of our lives we shattered in the process. Other times, we search for happiness and end up numbing other emotions and so we end up with an elation that lasts about as long as a firecracker before it fizzles.

  When searching for spiritual healing, a person might let go of a lucrative job that is destroying her. It can make her feel a whole range of emotions. It’s not as if peace will destroy your career or make you sad, but it will compel us to reclaim and embrace things that we tried to avoid in other pursuits.

  Finally, shalom is not a state of perfection, but a feeling in our gut and a way of responding to the world. Sometimes peace settles upon us unexpectedly, as it did that morning in my bedroom, but that event stands out in my life because it was so rare. Most of the time gathering peace is an intentional process, rather than an item on a checklist or a finish line we will cross. We may work for all of our lives and never achieve a constant peace, but it’s an important end for which to strive.

  I know that I haven’t achieved a state of perfect peace, but I have glimpses of it and I’ve learned to recognize it. I sense when that cerulean blue settles, when I embrace my past and present and accept who I am. I perceive peace, even when I struggle for justice. And I wake up to it when I sense God’s embrace surrounding and holding me.

  Through this process, we will learn to look for our own shattered pieces, collect them, and appreciate them. In their sharpness, pain, and brokenness, we will search for ways to put our lives back together. We will make a conscious decision to join that global, historical longing and commit ourselves to that yearning for peace.

  WHAT NEEDS HEALING?

  I will close with some homework. Below are two exercises I recommend for you to do. Each will help identify what parts of our souls need to be healed and what healing might look like. We begin the process by looking back at the pieces we need to reclaim.

  The Looking-Back Exercise

  Finish these sentences as quickly as you can. If the question doesn’t apply to you, then skip it and go on to the next one. Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them until they are complete:

  I’m ashamed that I ever believed . . .

  When I was growing up, I imagined God as . . .

  In church, I learned to dislike . . .

  When I went to church, I was embarrassed about . . .

  The sermon I remember the most was . . .

  The Sunday school lesson I remember the most was . . .

  My religious upbringing taught me that I was . . .

  In church, I learned to think my body was . . .

  In church, I learned that sex was . . .

  In church, I learned that women were . . .

  In church, people said that being gay was . . .

  In church, I learned that suffering was . . .

  According to my religious beliefs, I was never allowed to feel . . .

  When my neighbors die, they will go to . . .

  To God, poor people . . .

  I learned that people are poor because . . .

  To God, rich people . . .

  I learned that people are rich because . . .

  My religious beliefs made me afraid of . . .

  Look at the answers. As you excavate the things you once believed, you might feel embarrassed and frustrated. Remember that you are identifying a wound on your vulnerable, precious soul, so be gentle with yourself. Take time to forgive yourself. Now spend twenty minutes reflecting. Ask, “How did that belief help me? How did it make me the person I am?” And, “Why did I change?”

  We believe things for a reason. Sometimes it’s what we were taught to believe, but even those things have a purpose. So we can learn to be tender with our former selves and honor the person we used to be and be thankful for how some of those beliefs and practices led to better ones. For instance, it was very resourceful for me to be a religious kid, because it helped me to be able to pray. Or I often hear people say, “In a way, I’m glad I was so conservative, because I learned to memorize Bible verses and stories.”

  What did your past religious beliefs do for you? Did they help you navigate a fear of sexuality? Did they give you a sense of safety? Did they give you a good place to go to summer camp or provide a fun youth group? Or did they give you a way to please or connect with your parents?

  As you think about your past, imagine gathering the pieces back up and reclaiming them. You don’t have to believe them any longer, you can just realize they make up who you are. You were resourceful to believe them at the time. You were resilient. Like growing up in a particular town, you don’t have to live there any longer, but you can acknowledge that the town formed you in some unique way.

&n
bsp; Visualizing Healing Exercise

  If we’re taking a trip, the journey will usually be more satisfying if we know our destination. Likewise, it’s hard to know what healing looks like unless we have an idea of where we want to be. It may be tricky to imagine it, but we’ve all had glimpses of peace in our past, and it looks different for all of us. In order to imagine where we’re going, make a collage. Start with a poster board, a piece of paper, or something you can attach pictures to; then write the words PEACE, HEALING, and WHOLENESS on it. Now look through magazines that showcase visual images and rip or cut out all of the pictures and words that make you think of healing, peace, or wholeness. Again, don’t spend a lot of time pondering, but just tear. Arrange the pictures and glue them down.

  After the collage is complete, spend twenty minutes writing down what you see. Are there certain locations in the collage that make you think of peace? Why? Is there a certain relationship that makes you feel at ease? What peaceful memory do you recall? Is God in the pictures? Can you locate God? What is your strongest metaphor for God in the collage?

  You may find that these torn and broken bits make up a pleasing piece of art, which can be instructive in itself, because it can reflect the beauty that comes out of the process of bonding our torn and ripped parts.

  Now put yourself into these images of healing. What else comes to mind when you imagine yourself in a place of peace and wholeness? Can you imagine your life taking on some of these qualities?

  Chapter 3

  HEALING OUR IMAGE OF GOD

  “I had to strip away everything,” Pete, a man who visited our congregation, told me over the phone. He wasn’t talking about clothes or possessions. He was explaining how his concept of God had to become naked in order for him to walk through the 12 Steps of recovery. “I got to that second step: ‘Believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,’ and I didn’t think I could do it.”

  God had not been sane in Pete’s mind, and so he couldn’t imagine how God could restore him to sanity. Pete was a devout teenager until a pedophile pastor seduced him. “Years after our relationship ended, I couldn’t even walk into a church without getting nauseous. I mean physically sick,” Pete said. “The name ‘Jesus’ made me want to throw up. But I had to do the step.”

  Then Pete realized how Alcoholics Anonymous says “a God of our own choosing,” and so he began to imagine God. “I took the most basic definition of God that I could think of: God is love. I tried it out. I lived with it for a couple of days. I realized that I could accept the idea of God if I focused on love. I began saying it in my head: God is love.”

  Leaving behind Bible stories, doctrines, creeds, and sermons, Pete focused on love. “It became my litmus test. If I remembered that pastor, or thought about hell, or recalled some Bible story that scared me as a kid, I would think, Does that sound like a loving God? If it didn’t, I threw it out.”

  I was standing in my office. As Pete spoke, I slid my fingers over the spines of my theological library, carefully curated books I bought with student loans and book allowances, diligently chosen from used bookstores and gleaned at seminary sales. I inherited many from retiring pastors and beloved professors. I’ve lugged them from apartments to garages to houses to offices across the country. I always knew when I was “home” when my books were in alphabetical order on a shelf—row upon row of intimidating black volumes with the words “Dogmatics,” “Systematics,” and “Institutes” in the title. I picked up a volume and smelled the yellowed pages, feeling elation. People spent thousands of years trying to understand the mysteries of God. They built elaborate systems of belief so tightly that to pull one part of it away would seem to make it all topple.

  This thought made me worry. What should I say? Pete was coming to me for guidance. What did I think? What if everyone went around, making up a God of his or her own? Would we end up with Disneyesque gods that look like the tooth fairy, with pixie hair and glitter? Or would we construct gods who look just like us? Do we want a bunch of gods who took selfies on vacation and spent their time posting inspirational memes on Facebook? Or would we indulge in our white military Christian gods with guns, in an eternal battle with Islam? What would happen to all that thought and knowledge that made up my library? God talk is a long, labored discipline. I had studied theology for seven years and I had barely scratched the surface. Would we just toss all that out for our own whims?

  Yet I could sense the peace in Pete’s voice. I understood the wisdom he offered. The truth is that when we describe God, we are always using imperfect words and metaphors constructed by humans. We’re like toddlers, trying to fit syllables around a concept so large that our mouths can hardly utter them. Every time we talk about God, we attempt to know the unknowable. So if experiencing God means we might stray from the dogmas of dead white men, I suppose I could be okay with that, especially since Pete was returning to such an important realization: God is love.1 After all, even God invites us to understand God’s self that way.

  Here is the crux of spiritual healing. The reason religious wounds can cut so deeply is that they carry the weight of God with them. In some way we have felt that God was behind what wounded us. So the first step in spiritual healing is to learn to love God by separating God from our experience of being wounded. Pete had to realize that the pastor who abused him did not really represent Jesus or God as Pete longed to recover a nonabusing view of God.

  Focusing on “God is love” worked for Pete. He continued his path to recovery, and though his beliefs would not pass any rigorous orthodox standard, he has stayed sober and he has learned to love and be loved by God. He built a solid relationship with a loving partner. He could even be spotted at church every once in a while.

  It was not the first time I heard the story of recovery and reimagining God and it would not be the last. By the third time I heard it, I realized AA held a key, not just for recovery from addictions, but also for spiritual healing. We had to believe in a power greater than ourselves, and for many of us, that meant we had to come to a different understanding of God. We had to learn to love God, which meant beginning a theological journey toward healing.2

  REFLECTING AND REACTING TO GOD

  When we imagine a spiritual path to healing, most of us will not be trying to construct an elaborate dogma or treatise; instead, we’re thinking about simple ideas and syllables to describe God. Our idea of God can be crucial, not only for our personal lives, but also for the whole of society. People reflect or react to those we worship. Cultures form around the things we celebrate.

  We can see it, on one level, as we value entertainment and art. We give celebrities an honored position, paying them extraordinary homage with money and prestige. Then the rest of us begin to reflect their habits. It becomes a compliment to be compared to a celebrity, and so we mimic their fashion, haircuts, and style. We may not even know that we’re doing it, but soon enough, the culture begins to shift toward those we honor.

  In much the same way, we value certain aspects of the God we worship. Anthropologists realize this. When students of humankind want to understand a culture, they take a careful look at its religions, myths, and artifacts. A society who worships a wrathful God will reflect violent characteristics and honor those traits in its people. They will begin to believe that God calls them to war rather than forgiveness.

  It’s not just an anthropological understanding, but it is also a neurological reality. Worshipping an angry God changes our cerebral chemistry. The amygdala, that primeval bit in the brain that triggers fear and anger, gets a workout when we worship a God of fury; it becomes stronger, and we can begin to reflect that rage.3

  While reflection is one outcome of our image of God, reaction is another. For instance, when people celebrate a vengeful God who becomes personally violated with every wrong a human commits and gleefully punishes him, people can feel shameful and long for penance. They are never quite convinced that God will forgive them.

  A demanding
God is not difficult to imagine. The bar is high, particularly when one tries to take a set of laws from an ancient nomadic people and apply them to modern life. The Hebrew Bible puts restrictions on almost every conceivable act—how a person cooks, menstruates, or desires. Then Jesus comes along and in some ways, he raises the bar, telling us that the Law instructed us not to have sex with someone other than our spouse, but Jesus said to not look at another person with lust. Jesus could be prone to hyperbole as he preached difficult words, telling people to give away everything they own, let the dead bury the dead, cut off your own hand if it causes you to sin, and deny your mother and father.

  If we take every instruction of the Bible literally and universally—as many Christians claim we should—it would be impossible. Opportunities to let God down abound, especially if we imagine God constantly looking over our shoulder with contempt and outrage, waiting for our next blunder.

  In reaction to the fear that we disappoint God, we might long for punishment to relieve our guilt, and so we interpret everything as punitive. When we get in a car accident, we are not amazed that we walk away from the damaged vehicle; instead, we look at our smashed bumper and wonder why God is punishing us. When our house is hit by a hurricane, we have clogged arteries, we declare bankruptcy, or we get a divorce, the event takes on cosmic significance and we assume God is teaching us a lesson.

  Shame burrows further into us. And then every uncomfortable thing that befalls us happens because we deserve it. Our lives won’t be the result of weather, history, or fate. They will be our own failing. God was doing God’s job of meting out justice to the deserving. Then we will find ourselves attracting abusive lovers, insulting friends, or harmful religious communities, because we assume that’s what we deserve.

  Conversely, when we imagine a peaceful, loving God who is for us, we become more peaceful and loving in our actions and reactions. Our lives and our society begin to reflect forgiveness and mercy rather than vengeance and violence. We learn to move and breathe as loved and forgiven people.