This post is a bit different than the rest. It still focuses on my healing path, but comes as an epiphany of something I've been holding in for 3 decades but didn't know it existed. A healthy release has been so refreshing.
To start with, I've been working on opening up my heart to love of life and people. I've spent the last year praying and meditating on it, working through any areas that seem to be closed up as I become aware of them and being open to change and vulnerability. It's not easy work, but it is worth being free again. I'm tired of being locked down, clamped down, living within my own emotional walls of fear and protection that have formed over the years. Brene Brown says in her article about the midlife unraveling, "it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt and the second half trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt."
It started with #1) listening to this episode of The Connected Life podcast while driving my kids out to strawberry picking each morning. I randomly started listening to this couple and felt that Abi (the wife) hit the nail on the head right at the 11 minute mark about her anger with "the church". (as an institution, not the people as clarified later in the podcast). I was driving by myself and when she said that the Christians "they eat their own", I both laughed and cried out loud in the car. She goes on to say that we all want to belong, but that belonging to Christians is the hardest group to belong to, because they have the power (on behalf of God) to oust you at any given moment, and that to a child is really scary. She says they, "turn on each other, they judge each other, they are cruel towards each other, they act like they know everything about what everyone else should or shouldn't be doing". That the adults/leaders get to decide who is good and who is bad, what is good and what is bad and you just have to go along with that. That podcast really resonated with me, but I didn't really know why yet. That came a week or so later.
But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye not be consumed one by another. (Gal 5:15)
Step #2 was a conversation I had about the pro-life movement. I was talking with someone about different stories of unwed pregnancy and realized as I was telling a story from my own life that I apparently still had a lot of anger surrounding it. When I was about 19-20, there was a young lady in our church who got pregnant. She was older than me, but since I had no experience in the love and marriage area, I didn't really realize the implications or ramifications this had. What I mean by this is, although I knew how babies were made; I didn't know how much of "falling in love" was where you just fell into it with no control over how this happened, or how much passion had to do with our ability to make choices (how hard or easy was it to avoid temptation? I had no idea!) I had never been in love or had anyone in love with me let alone had 2 people in love with each other!
So, when I heard the adults talking about this situation, I didn't really understand it but what I did understand was the pain that must have been involved with it all. And also what I observed (even more so) was the material it provided for gossip, slander, self-righteousness & judgement along with a whole lot of two-faced-ness. As someone unmarried it stirred up a ton of fear in me that this situation may somehow happen to me, because I was (a) unmarried (b) female (c) also may "fall in love" with someone who I'm not married to [yet/decide not to] someday. I knew I would also receive this same judgment on my head if I somehow (I didn't really know how) fell into this situation. I also observed very little love or compassion, grace or mercy as observing this all playing out. (It wasn't everyone doing this, but it was the most common loudest response). And I was appalled. But, when I questioned the disconnect, I was shut down as if they had a righteous authority to do these things because they were the adults (on behalf of God, of course!)
What I learned from this situation that I'm only comprehending now is that the preaching from the pulpit on forgiveness, love, grace and mercy were only lip service, we don't actually do those things when people sin or fall short, we just talk about them. I should clarify that this behavior I am explaining below was never preached nor condoned in our congregation, it was all on the sidelines in casual conversation. I know in some churches it was, but in mine it was not. The preaching I heard aligned with what the preachers themselves lived out in example.
The observations I made were this: We (as Christians) have full reign to use other people's vulnerabilities to make judgments about their character, assumptions about their walk of faith (or lack thereof) and their heinous sin from our own moral high horse. Blech. Things like mental illness or breakdowns, addictions, sufferings of any sort that we deem to be someone's own fault are all fodder for the flesh to gloat in. [fodder: cheap, inferior or readily available material used to supply a heavy demand] They all give us leverage to determine someone's ability to belong to "the church". And we all want to belong. So we strive and then we strive some more. We either learn to hide our sin (how many other people had unmarried sex that didn't end up in pregnancy and thus avoided the ostracization that I witnessed here?) or lie about our sin or kill ourselves off trying to stay ahead of expectations and the reproaches that follow? Why do Christians feel the need to use reproach as their main weapon of control when Jesus clearly again and again teaches that love is the way to win people and change behavior? And that the goodness of God leads us to repentance? (Romans 2:4) And that His main emotion was "He had compassion on them..." “For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:14)
The other thing I learned as a child/young adult was that although we had to blanket forgive the adult's behaviors and weaknesses, they had the authority to not forgive ours as the children. They could use our past sins, failures and weaknesses against us whenever they chose. For. The. Rest. Of. Our. Lives. Forgiveness was conditional. Nothing was ever washed away as long as a situation arose where it could be used later for leverage for better behavior. "The gospel" was only used when we wanted to use it, it wasn't for everyone or every situation. We could hold people's sins against them for as long as we wanted to, there was no obligation to forgive or heal things we didn't feel like addressing. We could choose victim mentality as much as we liked, and although we demanded better behavior out of our kids and other people, we didn't expect it of ourselves. This hypocrisy was crippling for me. I observed that adults also were allowed to decide how "contrite" or "repentant" or "humble" someone else was and use that as leverage to forgive or not. As if we have that authority or ability!!
For as much as "the gospel" was taught (and even hammered in an "exacting manner"), it wasn't actually applied. [I put "the gospel" in quotations because that's what it was called, but the definition is rather murky. I will be addressing that in my next post] That too was only a theory for the most part. We didn't need to ask forgiveness of our children if we behaved badly (they were just automatically supposed to endlessly forgive us), we didn't need to forgive anyone we got in an argument with if we lost our cool or said things hurtful (it was called "standing up for truth"), we didn't need to apologize for reproaching someone even if it was none of our business to get involved in the situation in the first place, and many more examples like this where we didn't act in ways that were kind, gracious nor loving to our fellow believers. Often times reproach was called love, when in fact it wasn't love at all, only fear and a need to control others & outcomes. I am still often confused as to what love truly is, because there were so many things that I was told was love, but the behaviors didn't feel the least bit loving to me. It felt fearful and manipulative at best.
So, for all these things, I am angry. I'm angry at how this young lady was treated, along with all the other ones throughout time who were treated poorly in the name of "we need everyone to know how sinful this is". I'm angry that I didn't know better how to call out the crap going on back then because I was too stymied by it myself. Just like a small child stands by and watches another child get bullied (and doesn't go tell an adult for fear of getting bullied themselves), I stood by quivering lest I be the next head on the chopping block for one of my sins or failures to perform to the unwritten yet ever changing list of expectations required to belong to "the church". And then we wonder why people leave the faith, leave the church and leave their families. This is one big reason why.
This FB post below was step #3 on the path to being angry. This is Billy Graham's grandson who has also been stymied by the church's list of ways to belong. This isn't just my church or yours, it's pretty much pandemic in North America, and Europe as well. To me the first step to healing this is to not use other people's vulnerabilities against them in gossip & slander. To have compassion on ourselves so that we can then share it with others because it's free to give, it's not a limited resource only reserved for those subjectively deemed worthy. To hear their story of struggle and believe it. To validate their pain and acknowledge our own. To work through our own anger to then come to a place of forgiveness and healing. To apologize if we've hurt people and not get defensive (we do this because our own voices have been silenced in the past, so we just follow the same trajectory). And then to be a trusted source of love, hope and healing to those around us, not just one more place of judgement and reproach.
I'll be addressing some of these things in a part 2, as now that my anger has dissipated a bit I feel like they need to be worked through in more depth.
