The Project: Spirituality, Trauma, and (Re) Discovering God’s Goodness

As way of introduction to this project I am including my project proposal. I had to go through four "phases" as I prayed about and planned this project, and this piece chronicles my movement through those four phases:

As I begin this proposal, I am struck by how much my movement through this process feels like a sacred cycle, moving me through the same themes over and over again, each time with a new sense of God’s voice. When I looked at the requirements for this proposal, I thought, “This is going to be so disjointed—I don’t know if anything really coherent has emerged for me in this process that I’ve had to engage in such fragmented, busy ways.” And, yet, when I look through what I have written throughout this time, I see themes and stories I wasn’t even aware of.
When I began this process, I struggled to write my application essay. Writing the essay meant really acknowledging my call to ministry in a church and religion that has brought me life and hope but that has also damaged me in unspeakable ways. It meant acknowledging my call in a religion that once told me that I could not hope to be a pastor (or any sort of leader) because I am a woman. Acknowledging my call was painful and frightening and reminded me of aspects of my faith journey I would rather forget. As I went through the application process, I sought spaces of prayer and retreat and found myself at one point at the foot of a sculpture of Jesus at the local archdiocese thinking about how oppressive so much of Christian history has been, how often our symbols have been used to justify conquering people, stealing their lands and their dignity, destroying women, silencing people of color. I found myself wondering how I could possibly continue to relate to these symbols that, in my own life, had been used to tell me that I am dangerous, bad, innately unlovable. But as I sat there, I found myself thinking about my church’s weekly Eucharistic ritual and realized that I can’t escape this story, these symbols, this faith because in it ultimately (as I wrote in my essay), I hear God saying, “I am broken. I am broken because I am in solidarity with the broken, with the needy, and with the oppressed. Each time a human body or soul is brutalized, I choose also to be broken. I choose to be shattered as the oppressed are shattered so I can be fully present in this broken world. I give you this broken body of mine so that you can be a part of reconstructing it. Bring my resurrection into the world.”
This week I have been struggling again to write an essay—this essay. Once again I am struggling to acknowledge my call, this time as I take my first steps into the ordination process in the Episcopal Church. This week I have found myself once again wondering why I don’t simply abandon these symbols and this story and this life path toward ministry in this messy, messy religion we call Christianity. As I have talked about this with mentors and friends, three people have asked me, “Why Christianity?” And though I was not thinking about this essay or my project, I gave pretty much the same answer I came to as I sat below that sculpture of Jesus in a chapel in the archdiocese last year. I said that I cannot abandon Christianity because at its heart is the Christ story that tells us that God is present, that, in fact, God is so present it is as if God wears a human body, gets inside the human self and story, inside human history. God is so intimate, so in love with us, that God chooses not to stay separate but instead walks with us, suffers with us, is born, dies—God breaks, just as those Eucharistic wafers at my church break in my mouth and fill my body. I again found myself affirming those words I had written in my application essay, that God breaks in order to fill us with pieces of God’s own self so that we can birth resurrection and wholeness into the spaces of terror and death that so often rule our world. But through the process that has led to this essay, I have also discovered just how very much I struggle to truly believe what my own theology tells me, and the discovery of the depth of this struggle is what has ultimately shaped this project.

In my first phase I wrote that I have some trauma in my background that has seriously affected my ability to really, deeply, fully believe—and experience—that God is good, present, and loving. I'm not always sure how to fully recover from personally experiencing deep evil coupled with a sense that God did nothing to stop that evil, did nothing to protect me from that evil, and was not meaningfully present in the midst of some of those awful experiences. In phase two I found myself more fully exploring this theme—this fear that maybe God is absent—and linking it more explicitly to my understanding that at the heart of this struggle is my early experience of personal trauma resulting from my mother’s mental illness and abuse later reinforced by abusive “healing” programs in the Evangelical church and by the misogynistic theology of my childhood church. After many years of therapy and spiritual and psychological work, I feel like I have a fairly good grasp on some of the reasons behind my sometimes-fear that God is absent, dangerous, and abandoning. Though my work in therapy and spiritual direction has been enormously helpful, I also am aware that I have a different sort of work to do—work that is more reconstructive than deconstructive.

Years ago I left the church and faith I grew up in largely because I recognized just how misogynistic it was and because I finally let myself admit that I just couldn’t believe what I’d been told to believe with any sort of intellectual credibility. Leaving was liberating and healing, but it also left me adrift. I’d lost the structure through which I first met God, experienced God’s love and goodness, and believed in the possibility of healing, redemption, and joy.
As I worked through phase two, it also became very clear to me that becoming a mother shortly after leaving my Evangelical faith made it even more difficult to rebuild a foundation. I had a baby just as I was beginning the work of rebuilding, and I was totally overwhelmed with post-partum depression and motherhood. Becoming a mother has been the most life-altering, shocking, painful, healing experience of my life. And I feel like it’s entirely connected with my call to ministry. The growth I’ve embraced and moved into—as well as the intense pain—as I’ve become a mother will all be vital parts of my ministry someday. As I have learned to be a loving, present, good mother, some of my images of God have shifted, and in my own parental love for my daughter, I have discovered and experienced new aspects of God’s love for me. Nonetheless, it often feels as if motherhood gets in the way of my spirituality and has interrupted this journey I’m on toward faith and ministry simply because it is so consuming and because the post-partum depression and personal healing I’ve been working so hard on has left me very burned-out.

By the end of this phase it was very clear that I needed some way to tangibly, richly experience God’s love and goodness, that in the midst of all of the really hard psychological work I’ve been doing I also need something that is purely restful and good and joyful to remind me of who God is. And things like natural beauty, dance, slowing down enough to let my senses really ground me in the world are all ways that I’ve noticed really help me attune to God’s presence and love and delight in me and in this world. They help to remind me of God’s liberatory, loving work.
In Phase Three as I attempted to articulate a “theological vision,” I found myself again (unconsciously) returning to some of the same themes I explored in my application essay: I believe that true and meaningful (though not complete) transformation—personal and societal—are possible in the here and now and I believe that God labors to bring that about. I believe that God has made us to be co-creators: we are meant to labor alongside God to birth transformation—to birth God’s new life into our worlds. And giving birth to something so earth shattering and self-stretching is simply not possible alone. This birth happens only in community—with others and with God. And, despite my many, many struggles with this, I do believe that God is somehow present with us in the midst of these labor pains. I believe that God’s work—and our work—is to identify what is most death-affirming in ourselves and in our culture and to bring God’s love and grace and creativity into those spaces: personal spaces of psychological brokenness and pain, of sexual brokenness and pain, of physical and emotional brokenness and pain; and social spaces of oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism, and heterosexism
In my application essay I wrote that my intellectual gifts and my gifts as a teacher and a communicator will benefit my ministry, but what I really have to offer to the church is my own experience of being both damaged and healed by Christianity. I carry within myself a very personal understanding of just how much damage the church can inflict on its people through its interpretations and uses of Christian symbols, rituals, stories, and theologies. But I also carry within myself pieces of the God who broke through these imperfect rituals and stories to find me. Through them, I have glimpsed the God who chooses to break in order to be with us, to fill us with pieces of God’s own self so that we can birth resurrection and wholeness into the spaces of terror and death that so often rule our world. It was true when I wrote it, but I want it to be much, much more true before I enter into ministry. Thus, as I entered phase four, I knew that there were several things I wanted to do with this project: 1) build some space into my cluttered, mommy/student life to really discover (and rediscover) spiritual practices that allow me to experience God’s presence and goodness deeply 2) consciously seek out joyful activities that will help me to continue to heal and to know the playful, delightful/delighting parts of God, and 3) have an experience of worshipping with and working alongside a community that deeply integrates a contemplative spiritual life and work to bring God’s love and transformation into places of brokenness and injustice. Ultimately I would like this project to help me get to a place of being able not only to articulate but also experience and believe more deeply in God’s love and solidarity with the suffering, in God’s brokenness, presence, and healing in myself and in my world.

(As this is already long, I'll post the project outline in the next entry!)