The False Idol of Ownership In trauma circles, there is a saying, “Don’t ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Instead, ask, ‘What happened to you?” In other words, all those people who seem crazy and wrong—the addict, the mentally ill, the homeless, the timid, the broken-hearted, the hungry, the prisoner trapped by cell walls or greed or an unacknowledged emptiness of heart—are not crazy or wrong. They are wounded. Trauma, which is the battering of our defenses, the shattering of our spirit, an event that overwhelms our capacity to cope, is not the only way we become scarred, though it is, perhaps, a more common one than we might suppose. Not…
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Removing Blocks to Love
We Are Love At the Universalist Recovery Church meetings, we talk a lot about love. Not long ago, we concluded that our essential nature is love. That’s not a unique idea. Many religious traditions endorse that belief, especially those comfortable with mysticism. Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, is all about love. Called “lovers of God,” Sufis often speak about the blissful union between us and the divine, one that is better than the most intimate oneness between a lover and her beloved. [1] Before we were born, no separation existed between us and God. With birth, we lose the memory of that oneness. For the Sufi, our…
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Healing from Trauma
The Trauma of Coronavirus We live in a time of worldwide trauma. Not that this is new. After all, for as long as we have written down our histories, and perhaps before that, when all we had was an oral tradition filled with myths and violent gods, we humans have violated and terrorized one another. The coronavirus has merely made this more visible, at least to those of us whose lives are simple and orderly and safe. Now we are all in danger. An invisible virus is sickening and killing us. Our economies are falling apart. Stuck at home, lonely, bored, our tempers frayed, it seems our lives are unraveling.…
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Addiction, Surrender, and the Holy
Surrendering to the Wrong Thing Twelve-step groups talk about surrender. Few of us, perhaps none of us, get through life without surrendering to something, but not all surrenderings are created equal. Some lead to freedom and restoration; others lead to suffering and eventual annihilation. During my late adolescence, I saw some of the ugliness that comes when we surrender to the wrong things. On my way to the Midwest, I ended up riding around with a young man who sold large quantities of drugs to local dealers. Some of them lived in homes where the lawns were trimmed and the siding newly painted, but most squatted in boarded-up apartment buildings,…
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The Serenity to Accept What Is
The Serenity Prayer In the “Serenity Prayer,” theologian Reinhold Niebuhr asks for the serenity to accept what cannot be changed. [1] Many of us have a hard time with such acceptance. When we feel powerless, we often struggle to regain our footing, hoping to set things right, at least by our definition of “right.” In my work as a hospital chaplain, for instance, I often meet with people whose bodies are falling apart. All the interventions at the medical team’s disposal cannot stop the disintegration of their lives. Patients and family feel angry, sad, and afraid. Sometimes, they lash out at staff, blaming doctors for their illness or chastising nurses…