Fear is always lurking in our lives…[and so] we train in opening the fearful heart to the restlessness of our own energy. We learn to abide with the experience of our emotional distress.
Pema Chodron
In reality, we are inter-abiding because we are all inter-related. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, we Inter-Are as we all exist within a constant state of Inter-Being. When we realize our own inter-connectedness with Life, we can zoom out from our own shame, we can stop being so afraid of our own fear, and we can finally inter-abide with confidence, peace, and compassion with ourselves and everyone around us. This leads us to life-affirming communication instead of life-alienating, shame-based communication.
To do this, I have to begin to gently and compassionately (lovingly) let go of my beliefs and opinions about my own shame and the expectations/demands – the stories I keep telling myself about myself and others – that helped to constitute my own shame so I can begin to come out of hiding. “Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or hope that there’s anywhere to hide” (38).
For me, the truth in this statement lives within my story, my body, the acknowledgment that my soul and my body are not separate things…they are the same thing.
The truth of suffering dissolving is releasing the shame from my body where it has been stored for so long, buried, burrowed, deep within the darkness of my own tissue and bone because shame is always bone deep. Now I come to a place where I must admit to myself there can no longer be places for my shame and fear to hide. I can no longer harbor shame and fear like fugitives, protecting them, even as they colonize my body…even as I recognize that this shame is not even mine, it was given to me.
Our souls and our bodies are not separate things…they are the same, the enfleshment of the divine, Spirit-breathed pieces of Creation that we all are. Whether you consider this to be God, some divine something, energy, or just our own human connection, we are embodied beings. We are mind, body, and something spiritual. When we are able to accept this reality, then we are able to begin a process of healing and mending, and we must do this hard work because none of us will ever come to truly know the face of God or our neighbor if we continue to reject our own. God (or the universe) doesn’t just show up one day and say, “Tah dah! Here I am!” No…God – the movement of Spirit within our hearts and across this cosmos – is with us even now, but we can’t see that truth until we do the hard work of accepting ourselves, accepting our own face, accepting the reality of our life as it is, exactly as it is.
Learning to accept my own face comes in practicing the courage that is required to begin and to endure the long journey into my past, where my story lives and moves and has its being.
As I learn to creatively re-explore my past, I must also begin to reframe. I have to begin to train in reframing the fear-focused, shame-based communication in my life so it does not continue to function as an endless chain of shame triggers for me in the present and future. Part of that reframing is about opening, being afraid and opening anyway, being okay with the restlessness of our own lives, and listening to the trauma in our bodies.
Part of what it means to reframe is to generously open to the communication of our own emotions…to listen, to sit with our emotions in silence – see and feel and touch them – to heal and weave them into our heart, making friends with ourselves, and deeply abiding within our own experiences and our own embodied sensations.
Since much of my shame-based communication came out of my religious community, that is where I go to reframe. Here is one simple example. A common verse from the Bible that I heard in my community was, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).
Now, this is simple enough and seemingly harmless; yet, I would argue this verse can do immense emotional and spiritual harm when it is misinterpreted and framed as shame-based communication.
The way this verse is typically used is to say that “I can DO ALL things through Christ who strengthens me,” which is to say that I can do anything. I should have no boundaries or limitations, and IF I DO, then shame on me. I must not have enough faith. I must be doing something wrong. This is a very toxic and aggressive way to interpret this passage. We see here how this verse encourages us to believe in the lie of being superhuman, of being perfect. I can either do everything because Christ gives me some of his superhero, nuclear powered mojo or I am the scum of the earth because I am a failure. This is the splitting language of shame and fear I discussed in my previous post.
I can reframe this narrative, however, with a simple shift to “I CAN [I am able to] do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” In this case, I am now simply acknowledging that, as a Christian, I am able to do all things – in thought, in speech, and in action – through the Spirit of Christ within me, which gives me energy, love, and compassion for myself and for others. The verse no longer means that I should be able to become a superhuman who can do anything, even the impossible.
Rather, I am simply an ordinary human being who is acknowledging dependence and inter-dependence on God, creation, other people, and myself. I am simply accepting myself as I am and practicing the act of surrendering and of letting Christ’s love and compassion be manifest in me. In this way, I am doing all things in mindfulness of my own Christ-nature within me. Grounded in my Christ-nature, I am able to live and move and experience my True Self as beloved and accepted. In contrast to the first interpretation, this second way is a much more non-aggressive and gentle way to approach this passage.
This interpretation also allows me to actually practice Christianity. It allows me to identify with Paul’s mystical vision of Christianity that we are all the Body of Christ, unified in one Spirit of love and compassion manifesting Christ into the world together. I am also able to embrace other passages such as Colossians 3:17 more fully, which is freeing because this verse in particular invites me to practice being mindful of thought, speech, and action in all things so that this practice of mindfulness would manifest Christ-nature into the world and allow me to practice gratitude to God for the strength, energy, and aspiration to keep engaging in this mindful practice.
Paul says to pray without ceasing, and now I know what that means - practicing mindful awareness at all times throughout my day, doing all things with Christ-mindfulness, manifesting my Christ-nature in each action and in each moment.
If I am honest with myself, which doesn’t always happen for most of us or for me, praying without ceasing should be more like groaning without ceasing. Our hearts should ache and groan, if we thirst after justice and hunger for redemption the way we say we do with all of our words about words about words about God, and all of our songs about Jesus. If we meant even five percent of the things we say about God, then we would groan without ceasing, for what we have done and for what we have left undone….
Our hearts would break open just from the sheer weight of it all, all the pain and all the joy, it would all just break us wide open. Isn’t that what it really means to practice Christianity? To break wide open? Doing all things through Christ, who himself broke wide open, really should mean that is where our groanings – that we might call prayer – might take us if we follow the echo of their love and despair down the empty corridors of our heart, all the way down to where our monsters live, because that’s the place of transformation.
That’s where time comes undone and we break into eternity, in the deep and dark places of our soul that Paul calls the holy space of the Temple, our very bodies the vessels of something beyond thought and wonder and awe, our very bodies a sacred place of fire, pain, wounding, and ecstasy.
The audacity of Paul to call these dry bones the temple of God, his insanity…it’s no wonder he called himself a fool for Christ, drunk on the intimacy of a beloved’s embrace, wild and free to be unified into the mystical body of Christ, caught up in the seventh heaven of wonder and awe and passion and ecstasy for his true lover, his soulmate, the Name, Adonai, the Anointed One…how could he do anything other than write about bringing all things into alignment with Christ – speech, thinking, actions.
Are we not all enraptured in the same way when we fall in love? Is our speech, thoughts, and actions all not completely focused on the object of our love, brought into unity with the vision of our beloved?
And, I wonder, if we were really honest with ourselves, how many of us actually fell in love with God, the Divine, our Christ-nature within, the energy of Life, and the movement of God’s Spirit the way that Paul did, as a fool for love, running wild and free into the heat of those desert sands just so he could share a small piece of that cherished encounter with anyone who would listen? How many of us got the message of wild, unfettered, unconditional love and acceptance and how many of us were given a message that missed the point of it all?
Missed the point that Christianity actually has nothing in common with culture or capitalism, with dominance or power, with hatred or exclusion. Missed the point that Jesus’s life clearly reveals four truths about the Christian God: greatness in humiliation, gloriousness in self-surrender, power in helplessness, and divinity in humanity. Missed the point God is not a God of power but a God of crucified love. Missed the point that the Christian message is nothing other than death leads to life, sacrificial love leads to fullness of love.
Missed the point that the mystery of the Christian God resides only ever in poverty of spirit and humility, gentleness, acceptance, and compassion. Missed the point that the mystery of the cross can only ever be found by entering into the mystery of our own hearts, where God in-dwells, bending low to mend and weave, God is here, God is here, God is with us, within the depths of our own hearts is where God lives…in the depths…silent and gentle.
Twice back on the downhill run towards love I tripped and fell into a shadow and a farce that someone called love once but was really just me being shamed into places of fear and proving I was worthy of being loved. But this isn’t love, because true love, as Paul also says, has nothing to do with shame or fear or judgment of any kind, or blame, or proving anything to anyone. True love is about unconditional acceptance. How many of us felt that, experienced that, lived into that? Groaned and prayed without ceasing with our whole bodies, hearts breaking wide open…wide open enough to leave our desecrating beliefs behind and jump into the faith and the audacity that we are the Temples of God…
And so, I take my messages of shame in my past and reclaim them, these stripes…I am woven, I am woven in the tapestry of mercy and grace.
As I begin to identify my shame-based communication and to reframe it, I am much less likely to experience being triggered by this shame. In fact, I now experience this verse in a very life-affirming, life-giving way instead of in a life-alienating way. This is the way that I begin to reclaim my own religious tradition so that it comes to abide with me rather than provoking fear within me.