Thankful

It is hard not to come back to this place in my journey, over and over again. Like a well-worn footpath leading to some beloved sight in the woods, I have walked Memory Lane more times than I can count, arriving again at the season in my life when church stopped being a building, when Christians met the rest of humanity in their ability to disappoint and wound and completely abandon. Back to the season when stepping foot inside the sanctuary that had once brought me such life and belonging and hope, now brought me deep pain and aloneness and an overwhelming sense of all things lost. Back to the day I realized that all the answers I had worked so hard to learn, all the verses I had memorized and all the prayers I had prayed, held no weight against the mysteries and injustices of the world.

Before that season I scoffed with the best of them at church members that did not seem to offer enough of their heart or time to church activities, judged those with dissenting views and dared to vow that I would never be a “backslider” myself. My life revolved around being the best Christian I could be by fitting as neatly inside the tiny box that image had created. All I could think of was doom, disaster, deep sin that would keep someone out of the light and righteousness of our church community. It never crossed my mind that one day I would count it a great blessing to be standing outside amongst them.

As well-worn as the footpath to memories of the months that marked my walking away from the traditional church are, equally abstract and faint are the footprints walking back out of that place. I have tried to pinpoint before exactly what decision it was I made, when and how and why I knew to start walking. But the reality is that in that season of life, I was lead almost subconsciously by the stirrings in my soul. I had no clear intention, no decisive goal, just an undeniable pull within me saying “this way.” And this way was away. Away from the building, away from the rules, away from the people and the comfort and the decades of certain answers and a well-defined Deity.

 ~Barbara Taylor Brown, Leaving Church

It would be years between the walking away and the opening of hands in my case. Perhaps because the decision was so reactionary, so survival-oriented, I could not think about opening up and growing again. I could not comprehend wholeness outside of the church, peace and joy without all the certainties. I sensed for a season that my spirit was dead, if it were ever alive at all. I struggled with dark thoughts and sadness, some days yearning for the comfort of what was, knowing it could never be again. It would be years of closing down, letting the dying things die, before my soul could fathom of flowering again.

And then, years after walking away, I found myself loosening my grip and letting the crumbled parts start to fall. I found myself waking up and seeing life as if for the first time, finally able to articulate some of those soul urgings from years past and owning the blessing of the new place they lead me to. I found in that place wells of hope and joy and wholeness that I had never, even in those days of constant church attendance and such certainties, ever experienced before.

I found – and am finding - a Deity big enough for all the questions and all the mysteries. I found the thrill of the finding, the unfolding, the questions dwelling in a beautiful place of unknowing. I found the seed of the divine inside myself, parched from all those years of guilt and shame, of rules and answers, of right ways and exhausting effort, finally flourishing in freedom. Returning to that true place of goodness and creativity and love. In walking away, I found life. 

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Life in the middle.

For the longest time, I thought only in labels.
Boy. Girl.
Black. White.
Smart. Dumb.
Fat. Skinny.

Like a toddler sorting blocks, I defined the world into neat compartments.
One of two extremes; opposing opposites with no middle ground.
Beautiful. Ugly.
Happy. Sad.
Organized. Messy.
Calm. Anxious.

Life was a world of stark contrasts, conveniently ordered and comfortably separated.
I thrived in the labeling, the ordering, the marking of one to this side, one to that.
Leader. Follower.
Christian. Seeker.
Devout. Backslidden.
Whole. Broken.

I understand the benefits of these labels. The organization and camaraderie.
The sense of self and community and stability.
I empathize with the need to order our lives. To order ourselves.
The need to belong and to be and to be known.

But then there came a time in life when the labels became muddled, 
the clear compartments lost their neat lines.
Life got too complicated, too real, too raw and broken open for "one or the other."

It took losing my son to realize labels are incomplete.
Happy? Sad? Yes.
Whole? Broken? Yes.

It took the death of a lifelong dream to realize labels do not suffice.
Calm? Anxious? Yes.
Organized? Messy? Yes.

It took death and grief and disillusionment to realize opposite extremes oppose reality.
Leader? Follower? Yes.
Christian? Seeker? Yes.

Three decades into life, and now I see, much of life is shades of grey.
Much of life is messy mixtures of purposeful planning and hopeful wandering.
Of asking and answering, rinse and repeat.
Always a teacher, always a student.
Full of faith, full of doubt.
Life in the middle.
Labels removed.

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I see goodness.

For the longest time, I would have told you my truest essence, the most indisputable fact about me - and all other humans for that matter - is my sin: my dirty hands, my wayward heart, my wandering ways. I would have said that the essence of humanity is imperfection and brokenness, these core features tying us all together in one miserable, exhausted lump of mess. That we are hopeless and helpless, without divine intervention. 

If an impoverished Hindu man slumped over his rickshaw in India had anything undeniably in common with me, it was his tainted heart, his “sin nature”. If the acne-spocked girl across the bus from me or the overweight woman serving my meal at Applebee’s bore any resemblance to one another, it was because of this tainted lineage, forever stringing humanity together in what seemed to be an inescapable plummet toward sin, toward death. For years, even as I loved, even as I served, even as I traveled around the world and back, this truth resided just below the surface, a foundation for my beliefs and actions: We are all sin. We are all flawed. We are all tainted at our core.

At some point, I finally started questioning those beliefs. Not the reality that we are, in fact, clearly flawed. Clearly imperfect. Clearly capable of unspeakable atrocities. No, such things could not be disputed without sticking our heads in the sand or burying our hearts in a deep freezer. Evil exists. In me. But what if evil and sin and the ability to harm are not my truest nature? What if brokenness is not the core essence of my being? 

Slowly, I started to wonder what it would mean to embrace myself - and the world - as inherently good. At first the thought of “inherent goodness” struck me as blasphemy, as overly-spiritual, modern relativism scheming to merely improve my self-confidence. Then, I began to wonder if there was a place for inherent goodness within Christianity? I wondered if such a belief would lead to the sort of licentious living I had always been warned to avoid - to fear as the inevitable outcome from such escapades with self-love - or if, instead, it would lead to wholeness and peace and courage. If, looking within and loving myself, honoring myself, esteeming myself as good, would wreak any of the havoc so many early spiritual teachers had warned me of. 

Or had they? Had that been their warning? Had I somehow self-filtered all those teachings and created my own belief system as a sort of protection against the scarier task of loving myself? Had I misheard, all those years; missed something core? And, either way, what would it mean for me to embrace this belief, now at thirty-one, that my essence is not sin? 

Serendipitously, like so many times before, books began to fall into my lap. Like raindrops of light, beaming truth and hope into my wary questioning, I read from mainstream Christian author, Dr. David Brenner, "Love is our identity and our calling, for we are children of Love.” I read from an Eastern monk named Maximos, "All of us as human beings are icons of God.” I read from Glennon Doyle Melton, an addict in recovery, a mom writing to her son, "When you were born, I put a piece of myself in you. Like an indestructible, brilliant diamond, I placed a part of me inside of you. That part of you - the very essence of you, in fact - is me; it is Love, it is perfect, and it is untouchable. No one can take it and you can’t give it away. It is the deepest, truest part of you, that will someday return to me. You are Love.”  

Then I start to remember Scriptures, verses I had not read in years, like this from Psalm 8, “Yet you made man only a little lower than the angels (some versions say “only a little lower than God") and crowned them with glory and honor.” And then this staple from the Creation story in Genesis flashes through my mind, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” And I wonder, is this the space? Is this the place where inherent goodness has existed all along?

I am not a theologian, although certainly there was a season when I thought I had an awful lot of life figured out. I am not a Bible teacher or a philosopher or a spiritualist of any repute. No, truly, I’m not even close to any of those things, nor do I have any aim at becoming so. 

What I do own, though, is my life - my stories and my experiences and my soul. I have friends, too, and a wonderful family. And when I look within or when I observe my kids, when I talk to a close friend or meet a new mom at the park, I do not see sin. I do not see inherent flaws and impossible pathways to death. I do not see dirty hands and tainted souls. 

I see beauty. 

I see courage. 

I see sacrifice and concern. 

I see hope and creativity. 

I see a deep, undeniable essence of love. 

I see inherent goodness. 

  

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Feel

What does it mean to be true to our hearts? Is it the same things as being aware of how we feel, and integrating that knowledge into our actions and our speech? And what does it mean to honor our emotions? To feel our feels and call it good, courageous?  Is there a place of esteem for our emotions to sit, where mind and heart and body can dwell peacefully together? Where we can be whole, feelings and all?

This month, I have been stirred by such questions, urged by my own continued encounters of separating my heart from my days. Wanting to live in a place of wholeness and oneness, where thoughts and feelings and limbs are all respected and openly presented as me. And so, I have been re-reading Matthew Elliot's book, Feel: The Power of Listening to Your Heart. I was originally given this book by the first counselor Daniel and I saw after returning from Thailand several years ago. I was one big mountain of messy emotions at the time, layer upon layer of grief and shame and confusion and loneliness and fear, fused together by confused beliefs and an addiction to please. After months of floundering around and suffocating in that mountain of mess, we were sent by our church to a weekend counseling session. Unfortunately, the session itself proved more traumatic than helpful. But, as soon as I read the introduction of Elliot's book, I knew I had found something true - and something I deeply needed to embrace.

That Fall, I began reading through Feel with a friend, and was struck page after page by the novelty of someone suggesting that we honor our emotions, that we not only integrate, but actually esteem how we feel. For years, decades - maybe even my whole life? - I had lived by the law that emotions are dangerous and weak. That expressing our feelings is unacceptable, inappropriate, immature. I grew up knowing that what I felt was largely to be kept a close secret, my own personal possession. That - whether joy or sorrow, excitement or fear - all should be tamed, tended, kept tidy and quiet.

As a young Christian, I learned, too, that our feelings tend to lead us astray, and should never act as a guide, if even a factor at all, in choosing the course of our days. I drank deeply of the motto that, "Where your mind leads, your heart will follow," the message clearly being that reason should reign supreme. But, "Listen to my heart? Honor how I feel?" These notions seemed absurd, if not blasphemous. In all my years as a devout, conservative Christian, I had heard many teachings about how to check my emotions and choose God's truth over how I felt. I learned to believe that my feelings were often, if not always, at odds with God's Word. That true love is not a feeling, but an action and a decision. But, never, never, did I learn that my emotions could be noble. That my heart had something to say, something maybe even worth listening to.

I think Elliot summarizes it well when he writes in his book, "For years we've been taught by our culture and in our churches that emotions are not to be trusted; that reason and knowledge and logic are the firm foundations on which to build our faith and our spiritual lives; that it's our attitudes and actions that matter, not how we feel about things." He goes on to say, "Many peoples' spiritual lives are actually killing them. They are living by duty, by rote, by fulfilling their responsibilities to church and family. Their goal is to get all their ducks in a row, to believe all the right things and know why they believe it, and to act according to God's commands. But eventually they find that it doesn't matter how well they can do "all the right things." They still find themselves dry, cold, and empty." That has definitely been my experience.

But as is too often the case, even after reading Elliot's book four Falls ago, even after awakening to a new possibility for honoring my emotions, I didn't have the capacity to digest the extent of what he was saying. My belief framework was so stiff and so opposite from much of his suggestions that, although I received the book as a breath of fresh air, I could not breath it in completely. It felt like tiny spurts of inhalation, shallow and rapid winds trying to make their way into my being, but only going so far.

Three Falls later, I found myself in another counselor's office (the only other counselor I've ever seen), finally trying to process that mountain of messy emotions I'd abandoned or buried or ignored years before. Soon, I heard my counselor asking me to do things like, "Listen to your heart. If your soul feels up to it, go ahead. Honor where you are." I was truly baffled by her words, confused what it could possibly even mean to know, in any given moment in time, how my soul felt. Do people live like that?, I marveled. I had only ever been encouraged to hide or disregard my emotions at best, or be wary of them at worst. To disconnect my mind from my heart. And so now, this command: Listen and honor and step-in-time with your heart. Could such a thing be done?!

I confessed this to my counselor. I told her, with wide-eyes and gaping mouth, that I couldn't even fathom making a decision from the place she'd just described. It went against everything I knew, every way I'd been taught to think and act. And, wasn't she a Christian anyways? Didn't the Bible teach us not to get caught up in our emotions or follow their whims, but, instead, to stick to the clear path of Biblical truth?

I spoke this second-half in more of a devil's advocate sort of way, pushing and probing and finding, yet again, that not all Christians were the same. That not all who called Jesus, Lord, had been raised as I, or believed as I once did, or felt constricted as I once had. And I should not have been surprised by this realization either, for this was the Fall when voices honoring mystery, honoring truth in every form, honoring middle places and dark nights and grey in every shade came flooding into my life, awakening my soul finally. Telling me life was still to be had, even without that notebook of neat answers in hand.

I wrestled then and I wrestle now with what it means to be true to my heart. I struggle, still, to engage with my mind and my heart at the same time. To integrate emotion into the natural expressions of my every day. Just today, the kids eagerly packed their bags and got themselves buckled in the car, for the long-awaited day of their first swim lessons had finally arrived. We'd counted down days and then hours and now, finally, it was time! At the pool, I helped my son strip off his jacket and tennis shoes and watched him fidget on the bench until finally his age group was called into the water. He hopped up and hopped in and then, with tears welling in his eyes, found out that mama had drove us to the pool on the wrong day. He'd missed his lesson two days earlier.

I, too, wanted to cry. And maybe I should have and maybe I shouldn't have. But the only reason why I didn't initially, was because those old voices told me it wasn't acceptable. That I needed to be stronger, sturdier, headier than such whims. That maybe it looked immature or that maybe it showed the wrong values. And that ultimately, these were just my emotions, so what did they know anyways?

But, looking at my son's earnest disappointment, I let the tears well and I didn't choke them back. I let his tender tears fall on my shoulder, while we hugged and cried and honored the sadness of a hope deferred. I let my emotions speak - I let them lead - and there was much beauty and life in doing so. I learned my emotions do have something to say, and that, perhaps, they point to the greatest truths of all.

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