Here is a prayer I wrote for last Sunday (Dec 19, 2021) as a worship leader at the church I now attend as a participant. Since I received many affirmations, I have decided to share it more broadly. Feel free to use it in your context. Leader: God of truth, we notice that there are many ladders in the world that people are climbing: the ladder from poverty to wealth, from low status to high status, from powerlessness to powerfulness, from hunger to fullness, from little to plenty, from suffering/boredom to pleasure, and many more ladders. Leader: Thankfully, God, you are not found in these paradises for within your Kingdom there are no ladders to climb. They simply don’t exist. These ladders are human creations. This is why, Lowly and Humble God, that we are surprised to find You at the base of each of these earthly ladders inviting us to climb back down and join You with all the other people there, and to bring all our earthly treasures with us. Here, You say is where Heaven is found. Here there are no ladders, no us and them, no rich and poor, no vaccers and anti-vaccers, no divisions of any kind, just Your children seeking to grow and mature, as best as we are able, to become Christ-following people of Yours. Leader: Now, we understand why You, through Apostle Paul, invited us to have the same attitude as Christ Jesus had. To emptied ourselves just as Jesus emptied himself, to humble ourselves and climb down our ladders and become humble human beings…just as Jesus did, even if it meant suffering and death on a cross for him. Gracious God, through Apostle Paul, You taught us that when Jesus climbed down his ladder and discovered the secret to becoming a fully divine and human person, he also discovered Paradise for You, Creator God and all of Your people elevated him up and worshiped him for who Jesus had become: You, God, in human form (Phil. 2: 5-11) God of Christmas, when we contemplate the nativity scene, we realize that in this scene there are no ladders. We see wealthy wise astrologers with lowly poor shepherds, a teenage mother, an older father, and farm animals all gather round your baby Christ Child, a humble human incarnation of You, God, on earth. May your spirit, God, guide our souls as we contemplate, for a moment, what it means for us to empty ourselves, to climb down whatever ladders we may be climbing, and become a part of what You, God, are doing on earth.
How are we already in touch with our poverty of spirit and humility, like the shepherds? How are we allowing Your Spirit to guide and shape our lives? (pause) How can we become like the wise astrologers who climbed down their ladders to become part of God’s paradise? What treasures could we give to support the expansion of God’s paradise on earth, especially during this current challenging time of COVID? (time, our abilities with our hands, mind, heart, body, etc., wealth, possessions, influence, relationships, fruits of God’s spirit, etc.) We pray this, and much more, all shaped by the Attitude of Christ within us. Amen. Here is the link for the Powerpoint of this prayer if you wish to share it with your community of faith. Gord Alton MDIV RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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Within the Christian Christmas story, the virgin birth of Jesus is often stressed. Each year as the church retells the Christmas Nativity story, a key point of the story is the miraculous birth of Jesus because Mary, his mother, was a virgin. Virgin in this context almost always means that Mary had no sexual relations with her husband Joseph, that this child was conceived only through God’s spirit interacting with Mary’s body. But I have wondered about this interpretation of Mary’s virginity, especially within our modern times where such an understanding of virgin makes no scientific or medical sense. Could there be another understanding of Mary’s virginity that has far more relevance to our world, a virginity that makes it possible for the miraculous birth of Christ to be conceived within the womb of our soul? The notion of Mary’s virginity leading to the miraculous birth of the Christ Child captures our imagination which suggests that there is an important mythological truth to this virginity connection. This sense of virgin birth is what brings God into this birth story, what brings heaven down into our earthly realm. I think all of us at a deep level are looking for signs of God breaking into history and our lives, and thus see some important connection between Mary’s virginity and God’s holy spirit breaking into her life and our life. What does it mean for Mary to be a virgin and how did that virginity lead her to become pregnant with the Christ child? And before my male readers disengage, I also believe that Joseph was also a virgin which made it possible for him to be the father of this Christ Child. Clearly, I am not talking about virginity from a biological point of view but rather a spiritual point of view. What does it mean for Mary and Joseph to be both virgins, that is, both having “virgin” souls that allowed them to embody in their own unique ways the words that young Mary said to the angel, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1: 38). Through their willingness to surrender to what God’s spirit wanted to do within their lives, the Christ Child was born in their midst. What does it mean to have a virgin soul? If you look at the Oxford dictionary, you see that the word “virgin” has other meanings beyond “a person who has never had sexual intercourse”. A virgin is also someone “who is naive, innocent, or inexperienced in a particular context” like a political virgin or “not yet touched, used, or exploited” like a virgin forest. This suggests that a virgin soul is a soul that has retained its child-like innocent, that is untouched and unstructured by a person’s history. A virgin soul is spacious, free of any beliefs and structures that distorts what the person is experiencing in life. A virgin soul has retained its emergent properties meaning it is sensitive to the dynamics of the present moment including thoughts that arise in the mind, feelings that arise in the heart, and sensations that arise in the gut and body. This means that a virgin soul is the perfect environment for us to experience the movements of God’s spirit whether it be the spirit of love, grace, truth, compassion, strength, power, value, joy, peace, willingness, creativity, intuition, etc. just like Mary’s and Joseph’s souls were. People who have virgin souls are sensitive to dreams and visions like Mary and Joseph were and have many other forms of inspiration. Furthermore, Apostle Paul claims that through the dynamics of God’s spirit, we can sense the presence of Christ in our heart (Eph. 3: 17). This presence of Christ is often called the Indwelling Christ within our Christian tradition, and is a major aspect of Apostle Paul’s teaching on Christ. When we first become aware of this Indwelling Christ presence, one could call that day the birthday of the Christ Child within our soul. Another way to understand what a virgin soul is like is to look at its opposite. Within the New Testament, Apostle Paul describes so well a “non-virgin soul”, a soul enslaved to sin. He writes, “I don’t know what I am doing, because I don’t do what I want to do. Instead, I do the things that I hate ... The desire to do good is inside of me, but I can’t do it. I don’t do the good that I want to do, but I do the evil that I don’t want to do. But if I do the very thing that I don’t want to do, then I’m not the one doing it anymore. Instead, it is sin that lives in me that is doing it (Rom. 7: 15, 18b-20). Here we see a soul that is structured by many compulsions, addictions, patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing, and thus contains little or no sense of spaciousness or freedom within it. The person is at the mercy of all the fallen dynamics within their soul. They may have some sense of self awareness of their situation, like in this text, but they feel helpless to do anything about it. They feel they are at the mercy of the “sin that lives within them that is doing it”. They may, as Apostle Paul writes, delight in the law of God in their inmost self, the virgin part of their soul. However, they see another law at war with it, the non-virgin part of their soul, making them a captive to the law of sin that dwells within them. As a result, they conclude “I am a wretched person” with no hope (Rom 7:22-24). Clearly, when people are in this fallen state, they are not in touch with the presence of the Indwelling Christ. They have yet to experience the birth of the Christ child in their soul. Then Paul writes at the end of this chapter, “who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 7: 25). In that one sentence, Apostle Paul has just described a huge switch of perspective. God, through the presence of the Indwelling Christ, has transformed one’s experience and identity as a “wretched one” to a human being loved by God. This astounding transition is captured by the opening words of the old gospel song “Amazing Grace”, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” What happened to make this healing possible? I want to suggest that this person experienced the birth of the Christ Child, the indwelling Christ, within the virgin part of their soul. What I have just described may sound like a lot of theological Christian jargon that we have heard a lot in our churches over the years. However, it turns out that this spiritual incarnation process within our virgin soul is at the centre of a few forms of psychotherapy, one of them being Internal Family System (IFS). Over the past few months, I have taken a deep dive into understanding this form of psychotherapy. What I have found is that this model of psychotherapy resonates quite well with Christian spirituality and the notion of the incarnation of the Christ Child within a virgin soul. IFS believes that our psyche or soul has many parts to it based on our history. Some of these parts, known as exiles, carry the pain of different difficult experiences from our past like hurt, shame, distress, fear, worthlessness, unlovable, abandonment, loneliness, anger, and many forms of abuse. When these parts are triggered by events in the present, all that historical pain flows into the present moment causing us to be surprised by how much suffering we are experiencing. Other parts, known as managers, seek to protect these exiles from being triggered by the outside world, through behaviors of anger, numbing, pleasing, avoiding, compulsive patterns, intellectualizing, and many other coping mechanisms. There are also reactive parts known as firefighters who function like managers but their responses, instead of managing pain through control behaviors, manage pain through acting out behaviors like rage outbursts, suicidal ideation, cutting, addictions, etc. Most people live most of their lives switching from one manager or firefighter part to another manager/firefighter part with the goal of trying to avoid or reduce the pain their exile parts may be feeling inside. Now, when people blend or merge with these many parts of their soul, they find that they are totally at the mercy of their parts and their behaviors and connected beliefs. In fact, they believe that they are these parts, this is who I am. However, when this happens, they are never truly in the present moment and thus have no freedom to think or say or act in ways different than these programmed parts. As a result, these people experience a lot of suffering in life, and when things get bad enough, they seek medical or counselling attention. Does this psychological suffering remind you of the struggle Apostle Paul talked about it? It should for Paul uses theological language to describe the same issue that happens with a “non-virgin soul” that is enslaved to sin. The law of sin is the theological word for the experience of times when we are psychologically merged with the structured parts of our soul. If this is true, how does IFS help people experience the virgin birth of the Christ child within their souls? IFS believes that there is an aspect of our soul that is not a part, but an expression of what IFS calls the Self. This Self is “an innate presence in each of us that promotes balance, harmony, and nonjudgmental qualities (such as curiosity, caring, creativity, courage, calm, connectiveness, clarity and compassion). The Self is a state of being that can neither be created or destroyed” (Transcending Trauma, p. 8). These qualities of the Self echo of the fruits of God’s Spirit and the character of the Indwelling Christ found within our Christian tradition. Here is one way IFS explains to a client in the first session what the Self is: “In addition to lots of parts, we all also have internal strength to get through tough times. So deep down I’d would say you do know what’s best and you have the inner resources to navigate this situation. These resources include a kind of inner wisdom that is your core Self: <that essential you> who is not a part” (Internal Family Systems: Skills Training Manual, p. 28). This “essential you” would be what Christians might call the indwelling Christ that resides at the base of our soul, the personal “I Am”. Frank Anderson, a psychiatrist and trainer of IFS, experiences this Self in three different ways. First, he experiences it as a tingling or flow of energy throughout his whole body with a particular concentration in his arms and legs. Second, he experiences this Self as a titanium core or centre that is solid and unwavering. When he is connected to this centre, he feels calm, strong, and powerful. Thirdly, when he is linked to his Self, he discovers he is also connected to the spiritual realm beyond himself. When he is in this place, he feels “that all is and will be okay” and thus he is able to let go and trust the flow of goodness within life (Transcending Trauma, p. 37). Isn’t it fascinating to see how a psychiatrist describes his experience of the Self in ways that echo of how some Christians experience the Indwelling Christ and God’s Spirit in their souls? However, until we, who struggle with traumatic pain, are able to unblend from our structured parts in our soul, there is no internal space for us to experience the transforming presence of our Self. None. We are merged and identified with our manager, firefighter or exile parts and thus are trapped by the internal law of sin within our “unvirgin” soul. So how do we break this merge dynamic? How do IFS psychotherapists help clients unblend from their structured parts so that there is space for their clients to experience their Self expressing compassion and gracious understanding to each of their manager, firefighter, and exile parts? This is a key role of the IFS psychotherapist. We, as counsellors, allow our Self to hold and validated the pain and narrative of the various parts of our client. If we do this well, space begins to arise within our client’s soul allowing their sense of Self to emerge within their soul. This developing space within our client’s soul is evidence that parts of their soul is regaining its virgin state free of the programming and influence of their painful history. As we as psychotherapists nurture our client’s virgin soul and invite their sense of Self to express how its feels toward their various parts, our client’s sense of Self begins to emerge. When our client’s sense of Self first emerges, one could say that this is the birth of their Christ Child within their soul. But that birth is just the beginning, and this is where the theory behind IFS is different than the theology taught in our churches. Within IFS, our sense of Self needs to grow in wisdom and compassion and its ability to express the different aspects of God’s spirit to the various parts of our soul. Until this development happens, the various manager, firefighter and exile parts within our soul will not trust our Self enough to allow our Self to carry our past pain for us and protect us from future pain. However, as this trust grows between our parts and our Self, our parts will begin to unburdened themselves from carrying our past traumatic pain and instead allow our Self to carry this pain for them. As our parts unburden themselves of this pain, they become less needed and active in our lives, and we live our lives more and more shaped by our Self. This IFS belief that one goal of our Self is to carry the pain held by our manager, firefighter and exile parts echoes so well with the Christian tradition that teaches that the purpose of Christ’s death on the cross was to bear all the pain and suffering of the world. However, it was a matured Christ who bore this suffering pain on the cross, not the Christ child born in our manager. If we take the IFS process seriously, it suggests that there is a developmental process involved with the Indwelling Christ, beginning with the birth of the Christ Child within our soul. For me, this development process of the Indwelling Christ makes total sense. In the visual below, I have tried to capture how the Indwelling Christ within Jesus developed from the Christ Child present in baby Jesus, to the Young Christ growing within the boy Jesus, to the Youthful Christ evolving within the teenage Jesus, to the Adult Christ maturing within the healer and prophet Jesus, to the Suffering Christ embodied in the Jesus who died on the Cross and transformed the pain and sin of his world. As our Indwelling Christ presence within us matures in its wisdom and ability to carry and transform pain, the different parts of personality begin to trust our Indwelling Christ more and more. This maturation of our Indwelling Christ is a key part of what spiritual formation and growth looks like for us who follow seriously the Christian way.
I hope that you are now seeing more clearly another way of understanding Mary’s virginity, and I would add, Joseph’s virginity. They both possess virgin souls, souls that allowed them to be receptive to receiving the birth of the Christ Child in their midst. My hope in writing this blog is that each of you readers will explore the virgin nature of your own soul. Here are some questions to help you in your exploration:
Bibliography: Anderson, Frank. Transcending Trauma: Healing Complex PTSD with Internal Family Systems. Eau Claire: PESI Publishing, Inc. , 2021. Anderson, Frank; Schwarts, Richard; Sweezy, Martha. Internal Family Systems Skills Training Manual: Trauma-informed Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, PTSD and Substance Abuse. Eau Claire: PESI Publishing, Inc. , 2017. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator |