Tag: Healing

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It Happened

Today concluded a weird confluence of happenings and feelings:

  1. Nora and I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside special, which received two comments from us: I said it definitely came from a very specific time and place, Nora said the setting looked like our living room those first few months of the pandemic. We both had feelings.
  2. The Exegesis Ordination Exam for Winter 2023 was on Judges 19, which I have not spoken publicly on because I have nothing to add that wiser voices have not already said, but today the PCC held their plenary to discuss the exam and their response to the public outcry. Listening to some of the committee members brought back all of the rage and frustration (and trauma) from my ordination process.
  3. Today the first letter I wrote to my previous congregation about the pandemic came up in my Facebook memories. I reread it this morning and realized I could see glimpses of the end of that chapter of my ministry in that first letter.

I have thought about this tweet a lot recently.

For Context, in Infinity War, Thanos snaps half of the world’s population out of existence, and then in End Game everyone comes back somehow…?…not an MCU person; I know the theory, not the practice…

After watching Inside, thinking about how that special only happens at that exact time, I said something like, “Everyone just seems to be pretending the collective trauma we went through did not happen, like none of it actually happened…” Every day it seems like we have decided collectively — including the church — to try to regain what we had before and, by going backward, make the trauma not matter anymore.

This happens a lot, I have realized, and with all kinds of trauma, collective and personal. I remember the day I finally got the magical “Rev.” behind my name. At the time I could not name it because every emotion of seven years came flowing out in my tears, but now I think to myself, “How hopelessly pointless was most of that time?”

I cannot publicly talk about what the gatekeepers said to me in meetings, how others just watched it happened and expected me to endure more than pastors endure without any sort of support (I have experienced this as an Inquirer/Candidate and as a pastor; the preparation process hurt worse and felt so much more isolating), how they justified their treatment of me and called it holy, nor how many times I prayed to God to give me a different calling so I could leave the toxicity and have my heart back. I can only say it did not serve to prepare or support me; it only served to gatekeep me and push me away — and, failing that, demand I pretend it was fine.

But that day I had the title, so I never had to deal with the process or my home presbytery again, so I needed to just move on and not live in the past.

With the pandemic, with the ordination process, with my childhood trauma, I so often just want to scream, “It happened! It was real! Stop gaslighting me in to thinking everything was okay and I didn’t experience this! And let me speak the whole truth about it!”

All of it happened. And it was all bad. Some of it threatened me, threatened God’s call for me, or threatened my marriage, and the virus took the most innocent of us.

It happened.

And your trauma happened, too.

Why do we allow the world, society, and especially the church to demand we swallow our trauma and never speak of it, and especially never name names or specifics of what happened? I get why we do not say it out loud — trust me when I say I get it — but why do we continue to allow the church, a place instructed by Christ to reveal our fullness with the completeness of surgical lights instead of hiding in the shadows of denial and falsehood, demand we swallow our trauma if others do not want to help us bear it and find it too heavy for polite company?

Or, if we have a bit more fire in our bellies, why do we keep calling institutions that prop up that attitude “the church” and “The Body of Christ” instead of calling them the social clubs and

It happened. It happened to me, and it happened to you. May we find the spaces that will allow us to say “It happened…” and to say exactly what “it” is* for each of us.

And maybe someday our churches will always serve as that space for everyone within its walls.

Peace,
– Robby

* Yes, I know this brings up Bill Clinton vibes; sorry…

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Why Confess? (An Ash Wednesday Reflection)

Every Sunday, immediately after the first hymn, I invite a group of people to join me in a prayer to confess our brokenness. I invite them to publicly pray for forgiveness (more on this in a second) and to publicly call themselves sinners.

Every Sunday we read a bit of a psalm together, sing a song together, and then get sad about how terrible we are — publicly and together.

Kinda.

I have heard this criticism of Christian worship before, and I think it bears responding to honestly. I have sat in worship services where the liturgy has called me to confession, a thing I find important and healing, and found the Prayer of Confession had less to do with my actual sin and more to do my audacity to live and believe differently than the pastor or congregation or wider church. I know my LGBTQ+ beloveds have experienced this 100-fold in most of the worship services that happen every Sunday.

The confession in many churches serves a cruel purpose of making you feel shame for existing in a way that contrasts with the specific church and specific pastor — and that contrast does not even need to conflict with the beliefs and teachings of the church for condemnation to rain down.

If your experience of Christian worship matches this description, you find yourself in good company. Many wise, loving, and thoughtful people have validly risen this concern, and I cannot just pretend they do not have a point.

Why, then, do I still lead a confession every Sunday? And why do I suggest my parishioners spend the next 46 days focusing inwardly on their brokenness and sin? Why do any of us spend all this time making ourselves feel bad about ourselves?

To answer this, we first need to agree on a rough definition of sin. The legalists and the “It makes me uncomfortable, and I’m a good Christian, so it must be bad because whatever makes me uncomfortable must be bad, right?” folks tend to have lists and rules to define sin. “This is sin!” “That is sin!” “I don’t like that, so it must be sin!”

But if we define sin not by action but by intent of action, which I think we can easily and correctly do, then it becomes more convicting but also more welcoming.

If we take the greatest commandments — “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind.’…‘You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.’” (Matthew 23:37, 39 CEB) — and invert them them, we get a fairly robust definition of sin: anything that denies complete love to God or your neighbor (which is everyone, according to The Good Samaritan).

Love to God is a sticky wicket I will not try to parse out here, but everyone should quickly agree and understand love of neighbor. We can get into questions about the minutia or ethics and morals (i.e. the Trolley Problem or how much inaction is an action), but ultimately we pretty universally can agree in philosophy with this.

And, we can look honestly at ourselves, we know when we withhold love and chose our own selfish desires over the needs of others.

So, sin is withholding complete love. Our confession has an obvious goal — forgiveness, which again, I will address in a minute — but also has an equally important goal: repentance.

To repent is to confess and to turn away. You confess so you can stop committing the sin, stop withholding love. You acknowledge where you have fallen short — sometimes with gentle and not-so-gentle suggestions from the person who wrote the corporate prayer — so you know how to turn away from withholding love and toward using your time, talents, and treasure to promote love, your ballot to demand love from our elected leaders, and your heart and voice for compassionately showing love.

Repentance is good and necessary. I stand up and preach a convicting message so the people who hear will turn away from their sin and do better. Prophets, modern and Biblical, preach so everyone can see their sin and learn to turn away from it.

But what about forgiveness? I struggle to even include forgiveness in my confessions because, as a good Presbyterian, I believe forgiveness happened at the cross and our prayers have no influence on if God forgives us or not.

But why confess if we do not get some sort of punch on our heaven admittance card? Why make ourselves feel bad and focus on the “bad” in us?

For this, instead of leaning on scripture, I will quote Augustine:

“Confess. Let all the pus come out and flow away in your confession; then dance for joy and be glad.”

Augustine of Hippo, Enarrationes in Psalmos 66.7

Basically, confession lets you get rid of the infection of sin. It lets you release it, stop letting it weigh you down and poison you.

You confess for healing. You confess for forgiveness of self. Neither really takes if you do not also repent in response to your confession, but holding onto past sins, allowing them to weigh you down and make you sick, helps no one — including those whom you wronged.

We all need healing and to let go of shame. I will not speak of justice and consequence here — much wiser folks have and will continue to work the limits and boundaries of that out — but we, in our hearts, need to let our confession excise our sin from our hearts and stop allowing it to poison us, both through shame and continuing to sin.

Confess for healing and forgiveness, not in some future after death but here and now. That is why we confess.

Peace,
– Robby

P.S.: Side note I may expound upon later: love is not affection (physical or otherwise), and complete love does not require nor demand continued relationship.

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Silence About the Hardest Problems

Something has bothered me a lot recently. Think about the hardest things in your life — the things that cause you the most pain, wound you the deepest, and you cannot fix on your own — and think about how little you feel you can talk about them.

  • Maybe your thing involves a beloved person who wounded you, so you cannot share for fear of turning others against you.
  • Maybe your thing involves a powerful person who failed you but still retains power and influence over you, so you cannot share for fear of them turning further against you.
  • Maybe your thing involves something difficult to sit with and feels like you cannot burden anyone else with it, so you cannot share for fear of others abandoning you.
  • Maybe your thing involves your past failures and needing help but the people who can help you refuse and/or decide shaming you will help you, so you cannot share for fear of a greater burden of shame than you already feel.

Maybe your story involves all of them, or some other reason you society/church/family has conditioned you not to talk about, so you just cannot share.

It bothers me that, when we need the most help and we suffer the most, we cannot ask for help. The hardest problems of this world should not leave us abandoned like Christ at his end. We should not have to filter, modify, or remain silent in our pain to not embarrass someone else or cause them discomfort. We should not have to feel shame for past failures when we try to restore and improve. We should not have to suffer medical diagnoses and mental health problems alone because no one else has the strength to sit with us (or at least we have received that message).

I cannot speak to your family systems nor have the wisdom to speak about how the wider society should change, but I can say the church should not enable, enforce, nor encourage hiding our wounds and pains for the comfort of others. If anything, the church should encourage opening up, enable honest disclosure, and enforce safety to find healing for our wounds — especially those wounds caused by and in the church.

Before you ask, yeah, I hold on to some of this, and not just from the past/long enough ago that I should just “get over it.” If Christ heals like a physician, and if followers of Christ are the Body of Christ on Earth, we cannot receive healing from the great physician if we cannot share our wounds in the doctor’s office; trust me when I say I know this for certain.

We need to create church where all of our wounds have space to heal, not just the easy wound and not just the wounds of those who already have the most comfort.

Peace,
– Robby

P.S.: I cannot create that space specifically for you if you do not live in my sphere of influence, but I would like to create that space for myself and other clergy who lack it. If you are a clergy person who does not have space to name your wounds and seek healing in community (or know that clergy person), please reach out. I do not know what that space looks like, but I know I need that space and cannot imagine I am all alone.

I mean, I can imagine and most of the time believe that, but logically it makes no sense.

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How Long, O Lord?

I still have no words.

The beginning of Psalm 13 has rang in my ears since I first started watching the attack on our democracy yesterday:

“How long, O LORD?”

How long will we deny the problem?
How long will our leaders deny truth?
How long will the powerful sow seeds of hatred?
How long will can we bear the violence of weaponized discontent?

13:1 How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
2 How long must I take counsel in my soul
    and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
– Psalm 13:1-2 ESV

Lord, in your mercy…
…hear our prayers…
…hear our screams…
…hear our wails…
…hear the pain in our speechlessness…

I cannot give commentary, I cannot make more sense of it than anyone else has, I cannot even speak more truth to the powerful than has already been spoken.

I can only mourn. The America I believed in – the America promised to me by those who loved me – came under attack yesterday, or at least the illusion of and eventual hope for that America.

A misguided American – a misguided child of God – lost her life because she believed this was necessary; she was lied to and believed it, and she lost her life because of someone else’s lie.

I just…have no words anymore. I have said it all before, and today I can only mourn and pray for healing that has not come yet and does not appear on the horizon.

Come, Lord Jesus, come.
Come, Holy Spirit, come.
Come, Lord Jesus, come…

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Self-Care and Novocaine

I need to confess today.

Actually, I confessed multiple times last week, but today I confess publicly:

Before Thursday, when I found myself with zero choice, I had not seen a dentist since age twelve.

Going to the dentist after so long scared me.  The actual dentistry did not scare me–the needles and drills and scraping sound terrible but also restorative–but the cost and the shame scared me.

I have ignored broken teeth.  I likely need numerous root canals and fillings.  My teeth look like they haven’t been cleaned in nineteen years–and I owe a gracious “Thank you!” to everyone for not mentioning it.  I will need to some something expensive about the salvageable teeth.

Do you know how much shame I feel writing that?  I asked my nurse sister about interactions between amoxicillin and pseudo-ephedrine–because I cannot just have dental problems, I also need to have sinuses that act up concurrently–and I prayed she would not ask me the doctor prescribed me amoxicillin so I would not have to confess I had not seen a dentist in nearly two decades and only found one out of extreme pain and swelling and that the visit included Novocaine and antibiotics, which only means one thing.

I also have two kickers: one, I have had continuous dental coverage for the past five years and spotty but at least occasional coverage for the past thirteen, probably some before I know nothing about; and two, my wife works in the dental field.

I have no reasons aside from shame and fear.

The fear comes from cost.  I will not spend a lot of time griping about dental costs and how worthless dental insurance is beyond cleanings and x-rays and how it should cost more to receive dental implants in the United States than to take a month off of work, live in Europe for a month, and receive dental care from a UCLA-trained dentist.  It really should not cost less to do it twice in Europe than once in the United States.

No, not an exaggeration or hypothetical.  Literally know someone who did it and had that exact cost experience.

A realization fascinated me as I drank my chocolate malt for lunch because Novocaine: no one made me feel ashamed at the dentist.

They acted confused and shocked a dental lab technician’s husband had not seen the dentist in so damn long, but they did not shame me.  They had, and have, the goal to get me back in to clean and x-ray my teeth and chart a plan of attack to get my mouth healthy.

How much suffering had my shame and fear caused me?

I believe I stumbled upon a thing, not unknown but also known widely discussed.  We do not go to counselors because strong people can take care of themselves.  We do not go to doctors because we fear blowing sicknesses out of proportion and hypochondria, or we need to improve our self-care to justify having a doctor try to fix our problems.  We do not admit our exhaustion because good pastors/ministers/church leaders/parents/teachers/… … … do not get worn out given our amount of work.  We do not admit that we need help with our faith and our church life because a strong, faithful Christian would not need it given our place in our faith journey.

Eventually it festers until we do not have a choice and we have to let the giant needle go in and have the blade and pliers remove we we maybe could have salvaged had we just taken care of it initially instead of letting it get so bad it risked hurting us irreparably.

Or worse, letting it fester long enough to hurt us in a way we cannot recover from in.

We have a problem, though.  My dentist appointment went as well as getting a tooth ripped from your mouth can go.  The last time I saw a doctor, though–after going to the ER because my indigestion tried to convince me my heart would explode and that doctor telling me a thirty-year-old can no longer not have a primary care physician–the PCP gave me zero answers to any problem I brought to her.  We did no actual diagnostics because the blood work came back normal, and all of my stomach issues were chalked up to my weight and she told me losing weight would solved them if one possible diagnosis ended up being correct.

I realize the level of my obesity.  I have struggled with my weight for 23 years, more and more as I age, and I know some minor weight-loss and mildly alleviated some of my symptoms, but never fully and never some of the newer symptoms I have.

The doctor did not try to actually find a problem, instead just making it about my weight.  Even if we can blame the weight 100%, I need to know what the weight does to my body instead of implying fat people just get heart burn and stomach pains magically because of fat.

Many times, when you try to help yourself and seek the help of someone who has the skills to help you when you cannot help yourself, that skilled person shames you for needing help in the first place.  The idea of “Pick yourself up by your bootstraps!” guides so many in positions to help.

“If you just do the right things, the bad things will stop.”

The church does this, too.  We forget about the cross and the empty tomb, instead making people think they can be good enough–or not good enough–for church and for the help that the church provides.  We forget we need of Jesus in our own lives and something higher than ourselves saves us, too, and we believe people need to lose enough “sin” weight before we can take their needs and problems seriously to try to help them.

We see some people as “fallen” and others as “hopelessly fallen” even though we all are “hopelessly fallen.”  We contribute to the shame that makes people not want to seek help, instead opting to suffer until they cannot suffer the pain any more and succumb to it.

We withhold love to those we deem unworthy and shame them for their unworthiness.

We need to take care of ourselves and reach out for help when needed.  We need to admit when we are inadequate to fix our problems.  We need self-care and care from outside ourselves.

And we need to be open to caring, not blaming and shaming but just trying to help.  We need to love without reservation or requirement.

Also, Novocaine is terrible and even though it far outweighs the alternative, it is terrible.

Peace,

– Robby

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Stop Hiding

Sermon on Genesis 3:8-12 – Stop Hiding

We need to set up the scene.  This immediately follows creation.  God gave Adam and Eve one instruction—one singular rule—and this passage happens as a direct result of them failing to follow that rule.

We cannot ignore that; they broke the rule, and that indiscretion had consequences.  Remember what the passages says they did: they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, giving them awareness of everything, including sin and shame.

Actions have consequences.  They gained this knowledge and they could not unlearn it.  They suddenly had to be aware of their bodies, their thoughts, their desires, and how selfish they became.  They had to be aware of things they could desire, things that would harm them and damage their relationships.

Adam and Eve had acute and intimate awareness that they broke the one rule, that God had a reason for that one rule, and the consequences they would suffer for breaking that one rule.  Their knowledge of shame and desire and brokenness makes them feel shameful and broken.  Something changed, and they now felt the need to cover and hide themselves.

Adam and Eve sinned, permanently and irreparably breaking their relationship with God and with each other, and they had painful awareness of that.

No matter how you read the creation story—six literal days, six periods of time, or an allegory for evolution—the story ends the same: humans became aware, enabling them to sin and desire things that will destroy relationship.  Adam and Eve failed and every further relationship suffered because of it.

They hid their shame.

We do not like to fail.  When we do something bad, we often become like children.  Remember your childhood when you broke something and very carefully placed it just so appeared unbroken until someone else touched it, hopefully placing the blame for breaking the thing on them instead of you?  Or maybe for the married klutzes in the room, last week or last month when you did not want your spouse to realize the thing broke—like a knick-knack that has no real value but you cannot replace because you bought it states away on a vacation—so you just place it just so and hope it does not come up for a decent amount of time?

When things get messed up—often without true fault—we act like children and try to hide it out of shame.  When we do something wrong and stand at fault—like, say, eating from a tree that will give you all knowledge without considering if you want all knowledge—the shame usually trumps our willingness to vulnerably admit something broke, a either trinket or a relationship.

Sometimes hiding works on Earth.  The person you hide from suffers the same state of imperfection you do.  We do not always know when someone else does something wrong to us or in a way that affects us.

God knows.  Adam and Eve hoped they could hide, ignoring the fact that the creator of that Tree of Knowledge that gave them all the knowledge they wished they could erase from their minds or give back also created them and would have to know everything and see everything to create a Tree of Knowledge.

God knew Adam and Eve messed up, and they all knew Adam and Eve’s actions broke their relationship.

In Adam and Eve’s case, hiding simply exasperated the situation; they added lying and deception to the problem and did not give God the opportunity to possibly fix it.  In our relationships, hiding has the same result; it simply further breaks the relationship, especially once everyone knows the truth but even before when it remains a secret.

I believe we live in relationship with God, and that relationship facilitates the healing God gives.  God can heal everything, but God healed us not through waving his arms and making everything okay but through Jesus walking amongst us and having relationship with us before giving himself for us.  Without relationship, the healing from Jesus does not happen.

Relationship requires vulnerability and honesty.  We cannot expect healing from God if we do not lift the parts of our relationship we broke and our wounded hearts up to God to vulnerably ask for healing.  God knows all—God sees our fig leaves and sees us hiding behind the trees—but God heals us through relationship and we cannot have relationship if we continue to hide.

You cannot have relationship if you do not vulnerably admit your brokenness and weakness, either with God or with each other.

This must go beyond selfishly asking God for forgiveness to avoid condemnation.  We live in relationship with each other.  We have friendships, romantic partnerships, the guiding relationship between parents and children, and life as a family in the Body of Christ.  Those relationships cannot heal if we do not confess the actions that wound each other and address the wounds we create.  These relationships exist between broken people instead of a broken creation to a perfect creator, and we can only offer imperfect and incomplete healing apart from God, but any healing requires the same vulnerability.  We cannot heal in hiding.

We need to start confessing for real.  The liturgy feels nice and sounds nice, but if we do not lift our broken hearts to God, we cannot get the healing we need.  If we say sorry out of obligation but will not willingly and vulnerably name our misdeeds, especially when no one confronts us, the wounds our misdeeds create will not heal.

You are broken.  You have wounded multiple people.  You have broken relationships with each other and with God.

Confession and repentance can provide opportunity for heal; hiding and claiming innocence does nothing but exacerbate the wounds.

Do you want healing or bigger wounds?

Confess for healing, to God and to each other.  Amen.