Letting Go of Old Wounds

My Mom called me up from the basement: “Come into the kitchen with me, I have something to tell you.” With my Dad behind her, and my brother beside me, my Mom told me that my Grandmother, my Babcia had died.

I will never forget the tile on the floor of the kitchen. I can’t, all these 33 years later, remember my Mom’s face, or my Dad’s as they shared the news with my brother and I, but I can remember the tile on the floor.

This was the first brush with death that I can remember. I remember feeling confused, and like someone had taken all the air out of the room. I felt light headed, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to cry immediately, or go into my room first.

There had been no previous instructions about what one is to do when someone you loved has died.

In telling me of her Grandmother’s death, my Mom wounded me, not out of malice, but in doing what she ought and should have done. In the natural course of a human life, the people you love die. I was very lucky to know and love my Grandmother, Helena Witowrksa-Wiesniewski.  

But learning of her death, that I’d never see her again, hurt me deeply.

This sort of deep hurt, of deep woundedness, is both a universal and utterly unique experience. Earl A. Grollman, in his book Living When a Loved One Has Died wrote:

There are no pat answers.

No one completely understands
the mystery of death.

Even is the questions were answered,
would your pain be eased,
you loneliness less terrible?

There is no answer that bridges
the chasm of irreparable separation.

There is no satisfactory response
for an unresolvable dilemma.

Not all questions have answers.

Unanswered why’s are part of life.[1]

The unanswered, and unanswerable whys are part of living with grief.

Grief, of course, comes not only when someone you love has died. It comes when a friendship ends, and when your childhood heroes fail you.

Loss comes in many forms. Some of them serious, some of them less dire.

One of the less serious losses might be when you have a favorite band or artist, and you love their fist album so very much… and then they make their second album, and it’s so not like what you loved about the first one.

One of the more serious losses though, one that leaves deep wounds, is the loss of our childhood ideals. These losses may come in many forms, some of them feel universal, like the loss of your first best friend, or your pet.

Today I wanted to talk to you about letting go of old wounds; these wounds that we’ve been carrying around, sometimes for decades. This is kind of a big and intimidating topic to address on a Sunday morning. Knowing that this topic was coming, I was extra diligent about doing research.

What I’ve discovered is that there isn’t much literature on addressing some old hurts.

There are a lot of books about grief and loss when a loved one dies. There are many articles about getting through the dissolution of a relationship. Nowhere could I find any articles about healing the deep emotional hurt that one feels when religion has failed you.

For many of us in this room, religion has, in one form or another, failed us.

The God we were sold as children did not meet our expectations and our needs, and has therefor failed us.

Even though, as you know, I was not a particularly churched child, even I know some of the rhymes and little stories of religious America “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

And then people told me that Jesus didn’t love me.

A lot of people told me this.

One of the people who told me that Jesus didn’t love me was named the Rev. Fred Phelps.

Fred Phelps felt he was a man on a mission from God to denounce homosexuality, and to do so he and his church, largely members of his own family, but not exclusively, performed many. many acts of public witness, decrying the influence of homosexuality in our American culture.

Together, in an attempt to save the world, this church demonstrated at gay pride marches and funerals of people who had seemingly no connection to the feared “gay agenda” that was bringing down God’s punishment to our nation.

The anti-gay actions of Fred Phelps and his followers, beginning in the late 1980’s, were harsh, hateful and divisive.

And their actions offered convenient peg for people who already had been hurt by religions, to hang their hat on.

“Look at that behavior,” they would say, as they placed took off their coats to get comfortable in the house of religious dissidents. “Those people represent God.”

For the entirety of my life as an openly gay man, the efforts of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, have made my life so much more difficult than it needed to be.  With their “God Hates Fags” chants and the “Gay equals Got AIDS Yet?” signs, they frightened me, no they terrorized me, when I was at my most vulnerable.

Their actions have made my own ministry more difficult. Here are two ways in which this happens. Many of the openly gay clergy I know have had this experience. It is easier to come out of the closet to a religious community, than it is to be an openly spiritual and religious person in gay life. This is particularly true if one is clergy. You get called a betrayer, an Uncle Tom, a sell out. You become part of the problem and people’s hurt causes them to close the door on you. Leaving you out in the cold, shut out by the very community that is supposed to embrace you because you’re one of them.

Another way they make my ministry more difficult is that people who are in this very room see this church acting out of their own understanding of God, and use this as a weapon to dismiss examining their own spiritual needs, because the action of people like the Westboro Baptist Church repulse them.

On the one hand I have this community that I’m supposed to be part of shunning me because I am a preacher, and in the other hand I have these people I care for deeply, people I know only because I am a minister, and I witness to their pain because of what other people have done in the name of religion.

All around, there are wounds.

With the death of Fred Phelps, I was sort of stealing myself for a lot of anger and hatred unleashed by gay folks on the internet. To my surprised, and frankly delight, what I have read has been almost universally forgiving of Mr. Phelps. There have been very few mean comments about him, mostly acknowledgements that he, like all of us, was a frail and human being.

Of all the comments and articles I’ve read over the last few days, only Fred’s estranged son, Nate Phelps, had anything to say that was remotely troubled:

Fred Phelps is now the past. The present and the future are for the living. Unfortunately, Fred’s ideas have not died with him, but live on, not just among the members of Westboro Baptist Church, but among the many communities and small minds that refuse to recognize the equality and humanity of our brothers and sisters on this small planet we share. I will mourn his passing, not for the man he was, but for the man he could have been. I deeply mourn the grief and pain felt by my family members denied their right to visit him in his final days. They deserved the right to finally have closure to decades of rejection, and that was stolen from them.[2]

Nate talks about his father’s 23 year mission against the people of the Bi, Gay, Lesbian and Transgender community and how he hopes that his father’s legacy will be that people remember that the BGLT community are our friends, neighbors and family, and that the larger culture will learn something, saying:

 How many times have communities risen up together in a united wall against the harassment of my family? Differences have been set aside for that cause, tremendous and loving joint efforts mobilized within hours… and because of that, I ask this of everyone — let his death mean something. Let every mention of his name and of his church be a constant reminder of the tremendous good we are all capable of doing in our communities.[3]

In his words, Nate Phelps echoes the advice of many people who have let go of deep hurts from their past. But still, you can see in his statement that Nate has not forgiven his father for all that his father has done in the world, and now that his father has died, and a living reconciliation is impossible, Nate will have to do this work on his own.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and her working partner David Kessler say that there are five stages of grief

1. Denial

2. Anger

3. Bargaining

4. Depression

5. Acceptance.

There are many systems of grief work, some have more steps than these, some use different nomenclature, but these five will do for us today. Can you recognize any of them from your own life experiences?

The Buddha is meant to have said “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

When we do not let go of our old grievances and wounds, we are doing what the Buddha suggests that we do not. We hold onto to our anger, we stop at the second stage of grief.

Sometimes our being stuck has to do more with not knowing how to move forward, and less about wanting to stay stuck in the grief we are in.

Deepak Chopra offers these ideas on how to begin to heal:

1. Gain some detachment. Stand back and view yourself as if you were the helper, not the victim.

2. Don't indulge in emotions you cannot afford. Don't act as if you’re feeling worse than you really are -- or better.

3. Make a plan for emotional recovery. Look at where you hurt, feel wounded or see yourself as victimized, then set out to heal these areas. Don't rely simply on letting time do it for you.

4. Feel the hole inside and grieve over it -- but promise yourself that you will fill it.

5. Seek a confidant who has survived the same betrayal and has come out on the other side.

6. Work toward a tomorrow that will be better than yesterday. Don't fixate on the past or what might have been.

7. Counter self-pity by being of service to someone else. Counter regret by seeking out activities that build your self-esteem.

He then says that it is far easier to do the opposite of these things. One can try:

1. Dwelling obsessively on how you were wronged. Feeling exultant in our self-righteous pain.

2. Turning your pain into an ongoing drama.

3. Acting erratic and scattered, with no plan for getting better.

4. Mourning your loss forever. Not looking honestly at the hole inside yourself because it is too painful or you feel too weak.

5. Talking to the wrong people about your woes. Seeking out those who keep agreeing with you and amplifying our resentment by egging you on.

6. Idealizing the past. Obsessing over the good times that are gone.

7. Letting self-pity and regret dominate your state of mind.

This kind of behavior only makes a betrayal linger.[4]

How many of these last seven, unhelpful behaviors, do you engage in around the topic of God and religion?

I have been serving as your minister now for 27 months of my 30 month’s time here. My time with you is now 90% over, and, with love, I want to tell you that I have seen these last seven behaviors around here, and around Unitarian Universalism, so much that it’s heart-wrenching.

So often I feel like we are a people stuck. Spiritually stuck in anger and grief over stories about God we were told when we were children of less than ten years old.

I am not, let me be clear, advocating that we “slide into deism.” I have been accused, jokingly or otherwise, of being too theistic in my sermons.

What I am saying is that as a body, as a whole, we, Unitarian Universalists globally, we spend most of our lives in anger over religion because we have been wounded by it in our past.

I’m asking you… I’m begging you, let go of your anger.

God, in whatever form God may or may not be, has not spent decades being angry at you, I can assure you.

There is a proverb that says “In order to keep a man down on the ground, you must be there, too.” I don’t want to get into the exact logistics of that, but rather I want to say, if you have to keep your focus on a person to keep them in the place you wish them to be, you must also focus on them, rather than being able to turn your attention to any of the many other things going on around you.

If you take a child to the park, you watch the child, right? You don't get to focus on the beautiful flowers and trees around you for more than a millisecond.

If you’re first and immediate negative, visceral reaction to someone, like me for example, talking about God or things religious, than it’s clear that you have some healing to do. We only react strongly to things that have hurt us. It’s a fear-based response.

I don’t want you to live in pain and fear anymore. I care about you.

I want you to live in abundance and joy. I want your days to be filled with happiness and new experiences.

This is far less likely to happen if you are stuck in grief.

Grief and mourning have their place. I know this, and I encourage you not to forget that either.

But always the next day there is a dawn.

I want to close by telling you something very personal about myself and my theology.

For as long as I can remember, when I think about death, my own death, this is what brings me comfort.

I know that the day that I die, no matter how or when it’ll happen, the day that I die will be followed the next day by a sunrise. A glorious change in the sky from the stars to the light.

I expect that some will be sad, but that billions and billions of others will have been completely unaffected by my death. I hope that some people’s lives will have been made easier by my life and my work.

But I know that the next morning, there will be a sunrise. 

This is one of the things my sense of faith, what my religious understanding has gifted to me. I think to find it, I had to let go of my grief around topics of God and religious people. It is by letting go of the grief and anger I had toward God that let me become the religious person, this spiritual entity, that I am.

It is my deep hope that you are gifted some sense, some idea, some certainty that will help you rest easy all the days of your life.

Blessed be and Amen.

---

[1] Living When a Loved One Has Died. Grollman, Earl. Pg. 8

[2] http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/21/nate-phelps-issues-public-statement-after-his-fathers-death/

[3] ibid.

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/on-betrayal-deepak-chopra-healing-pain_n_1967059.html

Letting Go of Old Wounds

© The Rev. Joseph M Cherry

Written for and delivered to

The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County

And the Unitarian Universalists of Merced

On March 23, 2014