The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is a theologically based covenant community, dedicated to "recovery of the soul" and promoting competency in the clinical pastoral field.
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“If you knew that you would be alone,
Knowing right, being wrong,
Would you change?” - From a song by Tracy Chapman, entitled “Change”
I was asked recently to do a brief reflection on the above lines from a Tracy Chapman song, “Change” for a worship service at the seminary I attend. The song asks, in effect, “What will it take for you to change?” I felt compelled to offer a response from the point of view of the people that I minister with—people who are snowed under with a mental health disorder, or a terminal illness, a chronic disease that is slowly narrowing their world to a sliver of its former self, or the sudden death of someone they love.
When people hurt deeply, they almost always feel alone. That aloneness feels like forever – there is no sense of time. In the midst of grief, or intense fear, or physical or emotional pain, one moment can feel like a thousand years.
From the outside, being deeply hurt can have many faces:
a bitter, hostile person who has nothing good to say about anything;
an arrogant, condescending person who knows better than anyone else;
a timid, fearful person who refuses to take a stand;
a cheerful back-slapper who listens to everyone’s problems but who never listens to themselves or ponders the depth of his own soul;
A competent person who conscientiously performs good work but never honors her own needs and limits.
Though it seems like it should, not even being a person of faith automatically heals this hurt. We are broken people, some more broken than others.
The brokenness we carry within us shapes our whole being—body, mind, and spirit. We grow into our brokenness, and as we do every part of us shifts and changes, like a wisteria vine grows around a wire until the wire is enveloped and it’s hard to tell the wire from the vine.
Even from the inside, we can’t always tell what’s our true, unique and precious self and what’s not. Our brokenness becomes our identity, who we are, the way we know ourselves. The glass through which we see ourselves is so dark, so murky and so distorted, that we can’t see ourselves or God clearly.
It’s a funny thing about our sense of who we are: no matter how painful it feels, or how shameful, we cling to it as if our very lives depended on it. You’d think we’d be so glad to get rid of it that we’d be asking everyone we know to help us find healthy release and freedom. But we don’t.
It feels as if our lives do depend on it, because without this distorted identity the person we know ourselves to be—ceases to exist. And we have nothing to put in its place. Leave my abusive husband? What would become of me? Go out and get to know people to ease my loneliness? Then I might have to let them see how flawed I am. Give up my drugs? How would I bear the pain?
Is it any wonder we resist hearing a word of grace? Over time, it becomes safer and even easier, as strange as it sounds, to see ourselves as damaged beyond repair. It feels safer. This is just who I am. I’m at home here. It may be a minefield, but I know how to navigate this landscape. I know the rules.
We know, deep down, how sinful we are. We’re working overtime to keep it at bay, out of our line of sight. We’ll do most anything so that we don’t have to face who we fear we really are: the lost, the unloved of God, the unredeemable.
If you want us to change, don’t come at us with easy answers. Give us a safe space. Stick with us as long as it takes. Don’t take your helplessness out on us. Respect us. Acknowledge our pain. Hear us. Show us God’s grace and God’s caring. Expect to do it for years with no results, while we test you until you’d like to throw up your hands in frustration. Our land is so cracked and dry that our roots are buried down too deep for cheap grace. Walk alongside us, keep faith with us. Believe in us.
If we can trust you enough--and we’re the only ones who get to say how long that takes--maybe we’ll be able to come out from hiding—to you and to ourselves. Maybe we’ll be able to take a deep breath, begin to learn to look compassionately at ourselves, and think about gently lifting away those parts of ourselves that shadow the face of God.
________________
Alexis Versalle, Chaplain
Margaret R. Pardee Hospital
800 N. Justice Street
Hendersonville, NC 28791
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at March 11, 2008 4:09 PM
