If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame,
If Thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame…
You want it darker?
We kill the flame.
Magnified, sanctified, be Thy holy name,
Vilified, crucified, in the human frame,
A million candles burning for the help that never came,
You want it darker?
We kill the flame…”
- “You Want It Darker”, Leonard Cohen
“One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma.
Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors.
Trauma by definition is unbearable and intolerable…”
- The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk
In Joan Bauer’s novel Rules of the Road, protagonist Jenna Boller says, “My grandma always said that God made libraries so that people didn't have any excuse to be stupid…”
My people are readers.
Book-types.
Library-book-store-rooms-full-of-books people.
When libraries were in vogue, when book stores were King - remember book stores? - when Kindle hadn’t yet displaced paper, if you could read it, we read it.
From cereal boxes to newspapers, from novels to poetry anthologies, from comic books to theological treatises, my people read.
No room for stupid.
Oh, and Bibles.
Lots and lots of Bibles were around.
Did I mention Bibles?
Lots of Bibles.
Funny thing is, I also skipped a lot of school.
A seemingly antithetical practice as a professed lover of all things read-able.
But starting in junior high school all the way through high school, I found ways to skip classes, mornings, afternoons, and entire days.
Lots of days.
Lots of you’re-in-grave-danger-of-not-graduating-days.
I don’t think I cared.
I don’t think I was missed.
It was a different time, those ancient days.
You could fly under the radar at big schools like the ones I went to.
Until report cards came out.
Then, as the saying goes, the shit hit the fan.
Hit.
The.
Fan.
Cutting school always packed an adrenaline hit, but it wasn’t always just to hang out with the other truant hooligans and ne’er-do-wells (ne’er-do-wells?) engaged in shenanigans and horse-play.
No, not me.
I was disciplined in my school ditching.
I played hooky to go to the local public library to read what I wanted to read because school bored me.
Bored me to no end.
Bored the hell out of me.
I read War and Peace (just to forever be able to say I read it), the biographies of famed lion tamers Clyde Beatty and Gunther Goebbel Williams (because of course I was going to be one and this was an early high school-age aspiration), histories of the Apache Indians (because of course I was one, said my extremely unreliable great-grandmother), Alexander Solszyhenitsn’s The Gulag Archipelago (because, well, the Russian literature thing), Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums (the early sex-appeal of Buddhism), to name a few, and of course every new issue of Mad Magazine, Sports Illustrated (for the articles), and Famous Monsters of Filmland.
Weird?
Yes.
Very.
Very weird.
But with the exception of my abysmal, almost complete and thorough non-comprehension of basic math, I’d stack my personal-high-school-alternative-hanging-out-curriculum up against, well, the rest of the ne’er-do-wells (ne’er-do-wells?) I skipped classes with.
Somewhere along the way I amassed a library of over 3,000 books.
A respectable, personal library.
Surrounded by so much knowledge made me feel good about myself.
Empowered.
Smart.
Proud even.
Truth be told, a little smug at times for a self-imposed-almost-high-school-dropout.
People would walk into my office, look around, take in the impressive wall-of-words and inevitably ask, “Have you read them all?”
3,000 books.
All mine.
Other than reference works, lexicons, and dictionary type volumes, the answer, after a dramatic-pause-for-effect was, drum-roll-in-my-head, yes.
Please.
Hold my beer.
Yes, yes of course.
I had read them all.
Cover to cover.
All of them.
That didn’t account for the many other books I’d also read and then given away, but arrogance is never a good optic.
My people are readers, and they passed the gene on down to me.
This little trip down book-memory lane is a long introduction to what this piece is leading up to.
It’s not about books.
It’s about context.
It’s about backdrop to my present status, spiritually speaking.
Reading expands knowledge.
Knowledge generates growth.
Growth opens horizons.
Somewhere along the way, my spiritual horizons broadened, opening up unfamiliar and uncharted terrains.
That life-long-love and thirst for reading connected with deeply-seasoned and unsettling-life-experiences had tested many of my well-rooted-generationally-held faith-stories, central themes, and foundational beliefs.
“Then I open up and see,
The person fumbling here is me
A different way to be…
I want more, impossible to ignore…”
- “Dreams”, The Cranberries
Almost all of the church-life-spiritual-rooms and spaces I occupied, grew up in, roamed in and out of, metaphorically speaking or otherwise, felt uneasy for me from early on.
Claustrophobic.
Cluttered.
Questions.
Lots of questions.
Doubts.
Seeds of doubts.
Teachings and practices that didn’t add up or stand up.
At least not to my probing, prodigal-leaning, ever-restless mind.
Persistent murmurings that never really left me.
My own personal Troubles that only intensified throughout the over 30 years of full-time church-work and ministry that sculpted my career.
I suppose the term “deconstruction” is as good a fit as any.
Although, almost on cue, the moment the term worked its’ way onto the theological landscape it was branded.
“Woke”.
“Weak”.
“Never Christian to begin with”.
“Destructive”.
And so on.
Boring.
Predictable.
The fear surrounding the very idea of examining - really and truly examining and dissecting one’s faith - is a bridge too far for too many.
Doubts and questions are fine as long as they always lead back to the same starting point.
But stray too far into the wasteland of this “destructive deconstruction” and well, you probably weren’t at the right starting point to begin with.
I don’t mean to sound obtuse, muddled, or unclear.
The mixture of religion and politics in recent days and the rise of “Christian Nationalism” has rattled many who once trafficked in spaces that were previously deemed normal, traditional, family-values-type Christianity.
No more.
That in addition to the many battle scars from decades of church-civil-wars - speaking only on my behalf here - have left me weary, disillusioned, and wondering.
Wondering about so much that had wrapped around and within my Evangelical-Fundamentalist upbringing.
So much “othering”.
So much “separation”.
We don’t drink - others do - we were separate.
We don’t go to the movies - others do - we were separate.
We don’t dance - others do - we were separate.
In grammar school I had to be excused from gym class when square dancing was being taught.
I sat in the hallway and watched.
Othered and separate.
This went on well into adulthood.
The list can go on, but the list isn’t the point, and the point is sharp.
Perceived cultural battle lines were and are drawn and hindsight has only dialed reflection into sharper focus.
Dialed all the way up to 11.
Hence, a season of deconstruction.
Nothing to fear.
Everything to gain.
At a recent visit to my sister’s house, I was thumbing through the many volumes in her library, and one caught my eye.
My people are readers.
I’m a sucker for titles, so this one was a no-brainer.
“The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma”.
Trauma.
Trauma, some might say, is a little extreme to define a few church hurts here and there.
Sitting in a hallway watching others square dance?
Fearing being “left behind” as a child, wondering if I believed enough to not be?
With little explanation given, it’s easy to categorize these events as scarring.
Ultimately even traumatic.
Trauma, as I’ve learned, has seen a remarkable remapping of drawn lines.
From the book:
“We have also begun to understand how overwhelming experiences affect our innermost sensations and our relationship to our physical reality - the core of who we are.
We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.
This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.
Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think...”
Our.
Very.
Capacity.
To.
Think.
I’m no expert on trauma.
I speak only to my personal history.
To what I’ve learned.
To what I’ve read.
To things I’ve witnessed.
But I’ve also had over 30 years of leading, listening to and helping severely traumatized people.
Where?
In the church.
In.
The.
Church.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: the spirit keeps the score, too.
Not the Holy Spirit, for my churched friends.
That’s for another time.
No.
Your spirit.
My spirit.
Your spiritual you.
The spiritual me.
That part of you that responds to matters of life, the afterlife, perceptions of a higher power, God, evil, suffering, purpose, separation, otherness, significance in life, and so on, and so on.
Our spirits.
It keeps score and it can be traumatized.
Deconstruction then, for better or worse, is simply pioneering a path through the events and experiences that have affected - traumatized - our spirits.
In his book “Surrender”, Bono, frontman of rock band U2 and global-social-activist, writes freely of his faith.
“If my faith is a crutch, I want to throw it away. I’d rather fall over.
I remain more suspicious of religion than most people who’d never darken the door of a church…I tell the kids to be wary of religion, that what the human spirit longs for may not be corralled by any sect or denomination, contained by a building.
It’s more like a daily discipline, a daily surrender and rebirth.
It’s more likely that church is not a place but a practice, and the practice becomes the place.
There is no promised land.
Only the promised journey, the pilgrimage.
We search through the noise for signal, and we learn to ask better questions of ourselves and each other.”
Asking better questions.
Of ourselves.
Of others.
Imagine that.
Expanding knowledge.
Generating growth.
Opening horizons.
Sounds like reading.
“You live through that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours.
What you are is an expression of History…”
- Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time
