Healing from our Broken Places
By Charles Rush
September 15, 2013
Phil 2: 4-11 and Galatians 5: 1, 13-15
[ Audio
(mp3, 13.3Mb) ]
smyn Ward grew up with her four siblings in DeLisle, Mississippi, down where the Delta meets the coast in the deeper part of the Deep South. She grew up on the black side of the Deep South. It is true that a great deal has changed in Mississippi over the past thirty years, but from the land of Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, she's written a piece that explores the question of why, by the time that she was 25, were four boys that she knew- including a brother and a cousin -- all dead.
They all
died separately and quite various ways, but in their own intricate way, were a
way in for her to review her childhood community. Thinking in the broader
sub-conscious trends that form the cultural ethos they all lived in, she says,
‘We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: you are nothing. We
tried to ignore it, but sometimes we caught ourselves repeating what history
said, mumbling along, brainwashed: I am nothing. We drank too much, smoked too
much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a
great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”[i]
As it turns
out, this propensity for thinking that we are ‘not enough' encompasses a much
larger of our personal reflection on the meaning of our lives than you would
imagine. Jesmyn is describing the indirect after-effects of racism as it was
(and is) in the Deep South. Substitute, addiction in our families -- drugs and
alcohol. Substitute, homelessness or economic precariousness. Substitute -- dysfunctional
family members. Substitute genetic patterns for depression and other medical
maladies. [ii]
Even though,
we may have left our childhood world far behind and even though we may have
actually been fortunate to achieve much personal accomplishment. Even though,
we have since known substantive love in our lives that is a lot more healthy,
this ‘not enough' mentality occupies the personal reflections of a much bigger
proportion of the population than I would have imagined.
We mostly
just carry around this inferiority complex by ourselves, especially if we have
something that we think we really need to hide like the fact that our family
has been homeless or my mother is a heroin addict. But, the literature suggests
that the preponderance of us actually carry around some secret that we try to
hide about ourselves, whether we should or not. We are worried, more that we
wish we were, that we just aren't good enough to be accepted, well liked,
loved.
Even if it
lies dormant for years, usually it surfaces again during the transition of the
generations. Several years ago, we had a woman in town that was nearing the end
of her life. The family had asked me to get involved because her 5 children
were trying to decide just how much to do for her as her health was failing and
she was transitioning to hospice care.
Like a lot
of these situations, her medical situation was ambiguous and 1 or 2 kids wanted
to pursue an aggressive line of treatment, two of the kids did not. There was a
lot of back and forth, much of it amicable. But, there was also a lot of
competitive humor in the Irish tradition of sarcasm. I'm sure they watched ‘All
in the Family' back in the 70's and I wouldn't have been surprised if the
father in the family had been an Archie Bunker type.
All of them
were in their 60's when their mother was dying, but I remember at one point,
one of the daughters had a suggestion for the group, something none of them had
considered before. The oldest two in the family dismissed her out of hand,
really because she was the fourth child in the family and they had never cared
much about the fourth child's opinion about anything when they were little and
they still couldn't figure out why they needed to pay her any attention now.
It was
somewhat remarkable the way that they could jump back in time several decades
to recall old scores, like ‘you don't think I care? I care more than you did
when you left our dog Checkers in the station wagon in the hot sun, nearly
killed the dog from heat exhaustion while you and your girlfriend Courtney were
making out at Stone Harbor.'
I'm
thinking, the legal statute of limitations runs out after 7 years, but in
families 7 decades seems like just a week ago. At any rate, hopefully we've changed
from the person we were when we were in high school.
But that is
not the point. If we have some time on our hands and we are together during the
changing of the generations, we all do some processing of then and now, some
sifting. And sometimes, some of these scores really still haven't been settled
and brothers and sisters will continue on settling them.
Over the
weeks that their Mother lingered on, I had a chance to talk to four of the five
kids, listen to them really process the passing of their parents and what their
family had meant to each of them. They were probably a pretty typical family
that goes through a process like this. One of the kids, a therapist, wanted to
process more of their generation, dealing with all of the vices as well as the
virtues. Three of the kids wanted to talk about it somewhat but selectively.
One of them just wanted the family to gather, take a family portrait with
everyone smiling, (i.e. remember the good things) and then just go home our
separate ways.
They sort of
represent all of the different voices in the choir inside our souls as we
process the changing of the generation. In some ways we want to process the
good and the bad and strategize about how we are going to avoid some of the
things that we want to overcome and in other parts we just want to have this
idealized sentiment that we can return to in the future when we need to recall
the image of home.
I left an
email message for my brother this summer, as our family is going through this,
my father has died, my mother in the end stages of Alzheimer's. It read, “I had
one of those days when I came to grips with one of the gifts that I received
from the previous generation, that thing in myself that I need to overcome in
order to be lovable.” I titled it ‘The gift that keeps on giving'.
My brother
wrote back, “Remember Alan”. My brother had taken me to an AA meeting on
Capitol Hill. His is a very interesting AA meeting because it has Congressman,
politicos of all types and the street guys from Washington.
“I'm Alan
and I'm an alcoholic”… he began. And then he told this incredible story of
success, risky behavior when his
drinking started to get out of hand that made your stomach tighten, and the
progressive dissolution of his friendships that ended with him driving home
(dead drunk) one night when it was
snowing in our nation's capital. He gets to his home in MacLean, Virginia,
drives down his driveway, can't quite see where the driveway ends and the yard
begins, ends up driving over the shrubbery into the front living room of his
house through the magnificent picture window. He gets out of his car, now
inside his home, decides he'll deal with this in the morning, finds a piece of
the couch and falls asleep.
He awakens
in the morning, cops outside because apparently he'd been playing bumper cars
on the way home to his house and had hit half a dozen things down his street.
The cops get him up to talk and just then he notices his wife carrying out the
last box of the things she had been hauling out for a couple hours now. She
tells him she has filed for divorce and leaves.
I'm like,
“Wow, you can't make this up.” Then Alan said, “You know people often ask me,
don't you wish you hadn't been born an alcoholic? When you look at how much
damage it has done in your life. Don't you wish you hadn't lost your big job
and your fantastic career arc? Don't you wish you hadn't lost your wife and
your family? Don't you wish you could just go back and live your life over
without all of litter that alcohol caused you?”
“I tell
them, I'm glad I was born an alcoholic. I'm grateful to be alive at all. I've
learned a humility about living now. I have to say that really, I'm glad I'm an
alcoholic. Truly sorry for the damage that I've done to my family and many of
my friends, truly sorry for the irresponsible behavior I inflicted on all the
people that worked for me.
“But, I've
come to know so much about myself. I've grown so much and discovered what real
faith is and what my purpose is on this earth. Since, I've been in recovery, I've
learned how to be honest with myself and how to actually be available to love
other people. I'm so grateful for the person that I've become through healing
that it is hard for me to say what I would be like if I hadn't gone through so
much change in my life.
“I'm
Catholic, and what I learned from Jesus is that he accepted the world as it is,
not the way that He wanted it to be. He just accepted the world as it is. And
he started to heal what he could right around him. And that is what I think my
life is about now. I'm born broken. My family was born broken. Our society came
to me broken before I was old enough to know it. My job is to offer some
healing around the broken places.
I don't have
to be perfect anymore. I don't have to be Mr. Big in order to be acceptable to
myself. Once I was able to accept God's acceptance of me, I found a new freedom
and a new project. I am simply called to heal what I can in myself and what I
can in the world around me. And this is enough”.
Alan, from
MacLean, got it pretty close on what we should take away from Jesus. And the
freedom that is speaks of, the almost giddy joy and release from the burdens of
carrying around this great persona that he used to prop up, that is the
beginning of the quest for authenticity in your life.
Most of us
suffer from a kind of personal tyranny trying to become an image, a persona
that someone else gave to us. Our culture holds up an image of success. Our
well meaning parents, often compensating for their own inadequacies and
insecurities, project onto us these hopes and dreams that they tell us we need
to fulfill in order to be on the path of success. And we are perfectly capable
of convincing ourselves that if we could just attain this status, if we could
position ourselves in this social arena, we will be cool. It makes us restless
and anxious, hyper-critical of ourselves.
Spiritually,
it is inauthentic because we are trying to live as someone else. Jesus tells
you that you are a child of God. You are acceptable just like you are. You don't
need to try to be somebody that you are not. You don't have to live someone
else's blueprint for acceptable cool.
It takes us
years of trying to be someone we are not, years of frustration around that and
this strange dissatisfaction even when we are successful, because it is not us,
really. And then one day, sometimes because we hit bottom like Alan from
MacLean, or maybe because people around us really love us and give us the
confidence to be who we are.
I hope for
you that when the season of your life is right, you too will accept God's
acceptance of you. I hope that you will discover that freedom that comes from
simply being honest about where you come from and what your life vector is
about, the possibilities and also the broken places. I hope that you can find
people to share yourself with, people that will support you for who you are and
help you discover how and what you need to heal in your actual life, in the
limited time we have left on what has been a really great adventure so far.
It is a
vulnerable path to be sure, but it leads towards the door to authenticity and
the deeper fulfillment that we might know in this life, not a perfect path,
just the way of redemption. Peace be with you. Amen.