Healing Spiritual Wounds, by Carol Howard Merritt (Book Review)

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

I love a good story, and Carol Howard Merritt’s book, Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a Loving God after Experiencing a Hurtful Church, is full of them. But it is not just a memoir of leaving one theological tradition for another, nor is it simply an anthology of pastoral problems and solutions. The book uses the specificity of individual’s stories to draw out insights and ideas for healing a multitude of spiritual wounds that leave their mark on the soul and the body, and on the body of Christ.

Helpfully, Merritt states up front that she is “not interested in defending Christianity.” We each wound ourselves in our own way when we try to gaslight our own twisted experiences of a false gospel. Instead, Merritt is content to let God be God, and to encourage, coach, and accompany those who want to find their way back to loving God, and loving themselves into the bargain.

Neither is she interested in converting, or reconverting, those who have simply had it with God and the gospel, saying,

No doubt this works for some people, but others see the world through an irremovable religious lens. … Some of us have a spiritual or theological orientation, and to eschew that would make us incomplete.

I can definitely relate to that.

Through experiences of her own and the conversations she has had with others, Merritt addresses issues of money, sex, body image, gender and sexuality, guilt and shame, and family. Each chapter includes stories and reflections, and exercises to begin to think through some of the wounds that the reader might carry within themselves.

I’m not big on books with exercises in them, to be honest, but I did use an exercise for “healing our image of God” already with my Centering Prayer group, and it was well received. I can see using this book in my pastoral practice, not only with those who carry deep scars, but also as a way of broadening those images, and deepening connections between our stories and our image of God.

There are so many moments of connection in this book, which I think speaks to the strength of its storytelling. From the woman who had the affair, to the woman whose husband told her whole world of his own faithlessness; from the bible college dress code and its insidious misogyny to the shame of barely making ends meet; from the scars of an abusive home to the scabs of an abusive theology;  I know that I will be pulling this book off my shelf often, to make those connections and reaffirm a shared experience: to say, you are not alone.

And I am ordering a second copy for that moment that I know is coming, when I need to give mine away to someone who needs to it and keep it, for the sake of their own shalom.

*Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of Carol Howard Merritt’s book, Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting with a loving God after experiencing a hurtful church (HarperOne, 2017)

 

 

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Truth, love, and justice

Posted on February 12, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the sixth Sunday after the Epiphany.

Jesus said, “If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement. If you say, ‘You fool!’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.”

Pretty strong language, and for anyone who has indulged in social media, the consumption of news and opinion journalism, or had a conversation lately, language that is liable to make us just a little uncomfortable.

It’s probably worth remembering that we are still listening to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – that seminal address to his disciples and early followers that began with the Beatitudes: blessings for the meek, the peacemakers, the persecuted, the lost, and the lonely. This is the same Jesus, and this is the same day, the same hour, the same message that he is preaching, believe it or not. This message will continue even into next week. We have stumbled into the middle of his sermon today, and that in itself might give us pause to remember just who it is who is speaking to us, and just what his framework for speaking is.

His framework, of course, is the overarching, overwhelming love of God, which redeems and refreshes God’s people; which receives and reflects their devotion; which engages and affirms their worship. This love, steadfast, merciful, and all-encompassing, is the context for Jesus’ difficult words about anger, adultery, and oath-taking.

It is as those called and fashioned to be salt for the world and light for the nations that we hear his admonitions for righteous living, and his commandments for our common life together.

Jesus is addressing those whom he has just blessed: the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure of heart. He is exhorting these blessed disciples to prove their blessedness in the way that they live together, and in the way that they live with the world. They are not to repay blessings with curses, but they are to live within the law of the Lord, loving God and loving their neighbours with all of their being: body, soul, words, hearts, and minds. They are to live out their blessedness by becoming a blessing to the world: salt for the earth, light for the world.

We hear a lot of noise lately, heat and light, sound and fury, sometimes with little sense. We hear the hurled insults flying like bricks between those even whom we trust to work together for the good of the people as a whole. We know that such noisiness is not helpful, nor is it loving, nor is it godly. We try not to get caught up in it, but it is difficult to know how to stand against the sound of the storm.

Jesus has some advice: tell the truth. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no. Do not bluster, do not brag. Tell the truth, says our Way, our Truth, and our Life.

Don’t share fake news, or alternative facts. Do not repeat rumours, but deal only in truth. Luther, in his Small Catechism, puts gossip and slander in the same category as murder, since it kills a person’s character, and assassinates trust between those who share its poison.

Tell the truth.

Furthermore, Jesus says, do not let your lust, your greed, your restlessness undermine the faithfulness of your relationships with God or with one another.

This teaching is hard, and it can be hurtful to those who have undergone a divorce; but read in the context of the Sermon on the Mount, it may be less about the rules themselves than it is about the way that we treat one another.

In the context of Jesus’ time, when marriage was more transactional than the way in which we tend to use it, and set side by side with the warning against lustful looks, the teaching about divorce defends against treating people as disposable goods; against treating women as objects only of desire; against the conspicuous consumption of those whose very lives become commodities to the rich, the powerful, the predatory.

Jesus is explaining that we may not treat as disposable, or as less than human anyone who is made in the image of God. We are to demand justice for the powerless, the vulnerable, the poor. We are to remember that we are made in God’s image, and to look upon each other with respect, with all of the godliness and good that we can muster. Remembering that Christ himself became human, became our brother, we are to seek and serve that Incarnation of the image of God in all people, loving our neighbours as ourselves.

Which brings us back to anger, injury, and insult.

We know that we live in divided and divisive times. Our political context is fraught with anger and insult. It overflows into our news streams, our coffee shops, our conversations, poisoning the word supply. If only, we think, we could all live by Jesus’ instructions, to love God and one another, to refrain from anger and insult!

If you want to know a dirty little secret, though, it turns out that Jesus himself, later in Matthew’s gospels, uses that exact word to express his anger against his brothers in faith, the Pharisees. Not to mention that time he yells at Peter, telling him to, “Get behind me, Satan!”

So remembering that Jesus himself called the Pharisees blind fools, and Simon Peter, Satan, we might gently reframe our own judgement of ourselves and of one another.

Refraining from angry insult does not have to mean acquiescing to every foolish opinion, nor does it exempt us from arguing against injustice and immorality. It is not about making nice, and it is not about speaking peace where there is no peace. We hear, often, “Judge ye not” (Matthew 7:1) as an instruction to shut down argument, but moral theologian Stephen Holmgren has another take on that instruction:

It is usually quoted in situations where a person or group is admonished not to criticize the behavior of others. However, it is likely that the kinds of judgments that Jesus forbids are assessments of the final state of another’s soul. … This is quite a different matter from using reason and reflection to assess the structure and moral character of acts that we witness on an everyday basis. – Stephen Holmgren, Ethics After Easter (Cowley Publications, 2000), 143-4

In other words, giving up angry insults does not mean giving way to unjust agencies, nor appeasing immoral opinions. It does mean that we base our arguments and our judgments on the foundation laid out by Jesus: love God, love your neighbour as yourself. Deal in truth. Remember that every person is made in the image of God, and treat them accordingly.

In this way we can be salt for the earth, and light for the world. Grounded in truth and framed by the gospel, we can resist the noise, the fury, the storm of meaningless sound.

If we act as those who are blessed to know that we are loved; if we act as those who know the truth, that we and every one else is made in the image of God; if we will remember that we are blessed to hunger and thirst for righteousness, then we have nothing to fear from Jesus’s strong words and hard challenges.

For he has already called us blessed.

Amen.

 

 

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Bitter

Posted on February 10, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Stone on my tongue
cold and bitter
grit rasps my teeth
sets them on edge
sharp and dangerous;
my heart is in my mouth.

Take this heart of stone
the bitter grit;
feed me sweet flesh
feed me sweet honeyed
words of kindness.

Soothe my sour tongue.
Let me speak love.

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Salt and light

Posted on February 5, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the Solemn Sung Eucharist at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, on the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany; adapted slightly from the Rector’s Annual Meeting sermon preached at the Church of the Epiphany, Euclid, that morning.

You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.

These declaratory statements by Jesus to his disciples are pretty astonishing, when you think about them grammatically (and I am not the daughter of an English teacher for nothing).

Jesus says nothing of potential or possibilities. There is no suspension for a foreseeable future. This is definitive, and this is performative

You are the salt of the earth; because Jesus said so.
You are the light of the world; because Jesus said so.

Salt is not only for flavouring our food. When our salts get out of balance, or drop to levels too low in our bodies, we are in real medical trouble. Salt is essential to our life and to our health, and not only to our gastronomic happiness. Salt is elemental.

In the older church rites, salt was added to the rituals surrounding baptism. It was placed in the mouths of those being presented for the baptismal rite. That combination of salt and water – that is to say, the combination of you and your baptism – is powerfully good.

Salt, when added to water, is incredibly useful. It acts as an antiseptic. It draws out infection and soothes inflammation. The salt of the sea buoys up bodies and gives rest to weary limbs. If you put just the right combination of salts and minerals and whatnot into water, you find that you have invented Gatorade!

So when Jesus says that his disciples, when he says you, as disciples of Christ, are the salt of the earth is not only a matter of good taste. It is elemental. It is sacramental.

And Jesus, the Word of God through whom all things were called into being, beginning with the words, “Let there be light!”; this Word now tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world.”

That light: we take it for granted, most of us. Unless we are fully blind, we take care that there is always sufficient light to find our way into or out of trouble. When it is absent, this light, taken away, for most of us the absence of light is paralyzing. We are afraid to move. We are afraid to look into the darkness and see nothing. We are afraid, in the absence of light, of our own imaginations.

For most of us, light, almost as the air, is the medium within which we work, within which we function as whole and sensible human beings.

To call his disciples salt and light: Jesus is not naming nice qualities to which Christians should aspire. Jesus is saying that they, we, you, are essential to the continued well-being, health, and sanity of the world.

You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of the world.
Wow.

Jesus also says not to waste these properties – and when you consider how vital they are, we realize our responsibility to use them wisely, and for the good of the world.

Salt does not exist for its own sake, but to serve the needs of the body, of the earth, of the world. Without salt, the body dies!

Of course, it is not the purpose of salt to make everything taste salty. It is not to take over the body, but to support the health and vitality of each person it affects. It works to strengthen the body that surrounds it. In cuisine, it works with the other flavours to lift their profile. In life, maybe that translates to elevating the truth of another’s God-given identity as a child of God. Salt, secure in its own saltiness, can allow the other to be; even to enjoy the differences to be found between individual creatures of God; and it is arguable that this respect for the individual, for the other, has rarely been more essential than now. Salt exists for the sake of that which is not salt.

Neither does light shine upon itself. Light does not exist to illuminate itself, but to light the way for the other creatures, to cause things to grow, to find to see, to recognize. Without light, the world is frozen into fear and madness!

There is a risk, mind you, in shining a light into the shadows; there is risk of uncovering sin, or discovering evil; but light is not afraid of the darkness, for light breaks open the darkest night and dispels it. And at least in the light, one can see what are the real obstacles to our health and salvation, and which are just monsters of our imaginations.

You are light, to declare to the world what is real and what is not; to show the world which way to turn; because you have the Gospel within you, the promise of God’s love made manifest in Jesus Christ, our Lord, our Way, our Life, our Truth.

Light does not exist to illuminate itself. Salt does not exist to season itself. Neither does the world exist to serve them; but salt and light serve the health, happiness, and well-being of the world.

Any time we are tempted to feel sorry for ourselves; any time we are confused about our purpose; any time we want to turn our back on the needs of the world, or expect the world to serve our needs first, we are to remember that we are salt. Jesus said so. We are light. Jesus made us that way.

Our purpose, our reason for being the church lies beyond ourselves, always and even beyond our understanding; for what does salt understand of the food that it seasons, or light see of what it illumines?

And this, of course, is where the metaphor may break down; because we are not only salt and light for the world; we are the world. We live and move and have our being along with every other creature that we season and for whom we light the way. We flavour one another; we shine a light for one another in our own dark moments. We are essential to one another.

A single grain of salt is soon lost and overwhelmed. A single lumen of light is limited by the darkness that surrounds it.

But when grains of salt clump together in one dish, they are strong; even overwhelming! And when light is multiplied, it can reach from the farthest heavens, break open the darkest night sky.

Our own needs are met by the One whom we call our Light, our Way, our Truth, our Life. He is Bread for the hungry, and Living Water. He is our health, and our salvation. And he invites us into his gospel work, to be good news for the rest of the crowd, the ones gathered on the hillside behind his disciples, waiting for a blessing.

Blessed are you, salt for the earth; baptized and poured out for the health and strength of the world.

Blessed are you, the light of the world, for by your light the world will see the greater glory, which is the glory of the Christ of God.

Amen.

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Return

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Without prayer
my words are empty air
Without silence
I bellow in the wind
Without praise
my anger turns to bitterness
Without passion
my blood runs wasted cold
Without humility
endurance loses its endeavour
Without return
disquiet finds no rest
Without love
my protest finds no purpose
With God
all things are possible

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Broken

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

At the parish where I celebrate Communion week by week, we use pita for the bread – a nice Middle Eastern connection. I tear off a small piece for each person who presents themself at the altar rail, place it in their hands. The Body of Christ.

This morning, every time I tore the bread, each time I placed it, between my hands and theirs I saw the child. You know him: his picture flooded our news streams for a week or so after he drowned while his family was fleeing the war, after he was washed up on the beach in his bright red t-shirt.

Suffer the little children, he said, to come to me.

This is the Body of Christ, broken for you.

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Beatitudes

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

A sermon for the fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, and the aftermath of an executive order turning away refugees and other immigrants (including green card holders) from seven nations.
The Gospel was the Sermon on the Mount: the Beatitudes (Matthew 5)
The congregation was invited to write their own Beatitudes, for themselves, for the church, and for the world.

Have you ever thought that you would like to have been there, on that hillside, as Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount? We have an image of peace, of a quiet, grassy space in the sunlight, warm and comfortable; warm and comforting.

And yet if we had been there, what would we have heard? That this is your blessing: the reward of the prophets?

Yet Jesus addresses his disciples those whom he has called, and tells them, you are blessed. You who mourn, you who wander and wonder and are weary of spirit. You who pine for justice and are parched of righteousness. You are blessed; blessed simply to be in the presence of the Christ, the living God; for they have seen God.

The Beatitudes, these blessings which Jesus offers to his disciples and to those who would follow him, they are grounded in hard reality. They do not shy away from the deprivation, the poverty, the grief, the powerlessness of those who surround Jesus on the mountainside. They name our trouble, and they do not trouble to deny it.

Nor are they simply an instruction manual: we are not called to be in mourning, or weary of spirit. We are not called to seek persecution, nor to be starved of righteousness. These are not so much instructions as indications that in Jesus God sees our trouble, and meets us within it; that God finds us where we are, even mourning, or afraid. That God finds us in the poverty of our own spirits, and blesses us out of the abundance of God’s Spirit.

Still, there is an ethical dimension to this description of the disciples. They are peacemakers. They are merciful. They persevere. As the prophet Micah describes, they “do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with [their] God.” (Micah 6:8)

Jesus describes a motley and ill-sorted crew of disciples, poor and downtrodden, yet clear-eyed enough to recognize the call of Jesus when it comes; to leave their nets and follow him. To walk humbly with their God.

He blesses them out of their lives of sorrow and confusion, and through them he blesses the crowds beginning to gather, beginning to listen, beginning to follow. He invites them into the kingdom of God.

He reminds them of the prophets’ reward, and invites them anyway to be unafraid, to be unbowed, to find even out of the poverty of their own spirits the abundance of the Spirit of God.

So if we were to find ourselves on that mountainside, hearing Jesus, letting his eyes rest upon us, telling our lives with his breath, with his blessings: what would he say to us?

He would name what brought us here, to his feet, to the hem of his robe. He would bless us even out of that need, even out of that desire. He would name for us the promise of our God.

What would we hear?

Blessed are the lonely, for they shall find their place at the banqueting table.
Blessed are the faithful, for they will find God to be faithful in the promises of salvation.

He would bless us, and through us he would bless the crowds behind us, because we are here not only for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world; gathered as a motley assortment of disciples for the good of the whole people of God. So what would the world hear, from us, and through us, as Beatitude?

What would the refugee, the immigrant, the exile hear as Beatitude today?

I confess that I cannot imagine what it is like to live in a refugee camp for years at a time, while the wheels grind out paperwork and tape, finally to be presented with a visa, a passport to a new life, another chance at a normal home and family dinner on the table. I cannot imagine what it is like to have that snatched away at the airport, to be left, distressed, displaced once more, cast out even from the camps.

Blessed are the refugee, for they shall hold the keys to the kingdom of God.

Here’s what I can imagine: We moved here on a Tuesday, on the hottest weekend of the year. On Friday, camping out in our house, with our furniture on its way across the ocean, my mother called. “You can’t move to America,” she said, “the electricity’s off.” It was the weekend of the great power outage along the East coast and all the way into Cleveland. “That’s not how it works, Mum,” I told her. But if she had said, “You can’t move to America, the borders have closed”?

Blessed are the migrants, for such was your forefather Abraham.

Ten years ago this weekend, travelling back to visit my father for his birthday, newly minted green card tucked into my passport, it would never have occurred to me that the rules could change overnight, keeping me from my family, my home, my American life.

Blessed are those who are afraid to lift up their eyes, for the hills shall be brought low, and shall raise them up to the Lord.

I share these stories because the Beatitudes are not for the disciples alone, but for the crowds gathered behind them on the hillside. Because Jesus did not shy away from naming the suffering that he saw among them. Because he persisted, anyway, in declaring hope.

Blessed are those who do justice, for they will be justified.
Blessed are you when you proclaim by word and deed the Gospel of Christ; for you shall hear the Good News of God in Christ, the promises of heaven.

Amen.

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Unfinished

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

Silk, the colour of home
patterned anew
knotted behind;
her fingers ache to run
through his hair,
silk upon silk;
almost done. She leaves
her gift on the bed,
silk upon silk,
runs to the airport, where
she waits

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Truth

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

 

Truth is not proud, running
his calloused hands across the welt
of guilt, knowing good from evil,
deliverance from dependence on
temptation to sway the scales.

Truth is not innocent of
the burden of each deficit of decency,
quavering beneath every slight,
every blow, each evasion & economy of grace.

Truth is not garrulous, having
learned at last to distill his words
into a single, potent flavour,
intoxicating on the tongue;
disequilibriating.

Truth was never altogether
balanced, leaning heavily on
humanity, and a complex,
nuanced naivety.

Truth is not pretty,
but, ever the pointillist,
his brush has potential to create
out of havoc
something more beautiful.

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Mortar

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Rosalind C Hughes

blood & dust,
water, sand, bone
and sinew, wet
cement slapped, nails
etching names
within the walls

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