Last month, I did a funeral for a man who I shall call Luke. I visited him biweekly along with his wife for six months. One of his struggles as he approached his death was his inability to experience God’s love. Like most Christians, he was taught that God unconditionally loved him and yet for him this love was a statement of faith. He claimed that he could not recall any time that he had sensed God’s love personally. For me, this was a big surprise considering how gracious and caring this man was. How could such a caring man not be able to feel God’s gracious love for himself? This is the question I want to explore in this blog for I have found that many people struggle to experience God’s unconditional love despite being caring people. When Christians say that God’s love is unconditional, they are saying that God’s love is always present, available for people to encounter. I often compare God’s love to the sun that is always shining on our planet. The sun’s light and warmth is unconditional, that is, the sun is constantly shining upon our earth regardless of what is happening on it. Without this constant shining, there would be no life on Earth. However, as we all know, just because the sun is shining does not mean we experience this warmth and light consistently on the surface of our planet. Sometimes there are heavy clouds that block the sun rays causing our world to be cooler. Sometimes, since the Earth is circular, only half the planet gets sunlight causing there to be a daily cycle when we have brighter warmer days and darker cooler nights. Sometimes, the distance between the sun and earth increases causing us to experience seasons of cool falls and cold winters when the hours of daylight lessen. I want to suggest the same is true about God’s love. God’s love is always emanating from the centre of our soul. This teaching of love appears in many places in the Bible but one place where the theme of God’s love is front and centre is found in the Epistle of 1 John. Here we read the following:
This scripture highlights that any love we express is because we are experiencing this Divine love arising from our centre. This is why Luke, my palliative care client, was able to be so caring to others in his life. He was the ultimate host to anyone who visited his home. When he was in this mental place, we saw a gentler side to him, a gracious side, a playful side, a creative side, a loving side that came out as he related to people. He made others feel special. God’s love was emanating from his centre to all the people he cared for. And yet, this man claimed that he was rarely aware of God’s love flowing toward him in the same way it flowed through him to those around him. I remember asking him if he ever experienced the sense of being God’s beloved, of being special in God’s eye. He answered "no", but he was intrigued about how this could happen. On the day when Luke and I were exploring this notion of him being God’s beloved, I pulled out my Bible and read the story of Jesus’ baptism to him. It goes like this: In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.’ (Mark 1: 9-11) I am a former pastor within the Mennonite Christian tradition. In this tradition, we practice adult baptism. Often at these adult baptisms, these words of Jesus’ baptism are read. And when, I, as a pastor, poured water over the heads of youth and adults for their baptism, I would purposely say to them, “Hear these words from God, “You are my beloved child. With you, I am well pleased.” I wanted each of them to experience and know deep in their hearts that they are one of God’s beloved sons or beloved daughters. Luke was quite fascinated by this story. He did a ton of research on the meaning of the dove in this Bible story, which is a symbol of God’s Holy Spirit. He hoped, I think, that in doing this research, he would find the secret to experiencing this sense of being God’s beloved. While Luke longed to experience being God’s beloved, he believed the way to this goal was to be a perfect Christian man. He highly valued truth, rightness, and integrity and these were values he believed he should live perfectly, at least he tried. However, he often felt he fell short of the ideal that God wanted of him. He could always point to ways that he failed to live up to what God expected of him. He reasoned that this was why he didn’t experience God’s gracious love or the sense of being God’s beloved child. This is why he micromanaged himself so much; he wanted to make sure he lived up to God’s ideal for his life. I remember encouraging Luke to not micromanage himself but have faith in the gracious nature of God. The phrase “don’t micromanage but have faith” was a phrase he wrote down from my visit and became a mantra he often said to himself when he caught himself judging himself too much. This is a common issue I find in my spiritual care work. Many people struggle with an active inner critic voice that is constantly monitoring their behavior and telling them how sinful they are. As a result, the experience of God’s grace or the sense of being God’s beloved, of being special in God’s eye, is hard for people to discover. Within the church, we often encourage people to pray to God about these condemning voices. Some people believe these critical voices is God trying to convict us so we will repent of our mistakes. They are not. But how does one pray to God about these voices so that they might go away? Even within the counseling profession, a common approach is to help people develop strategies so that they stop listening to these inner critic voices. But often these counselling methods teach clients ways to manage these unhelpful dynamics so that they become less of a problem. When we take this approach, we fall into the same trap that Luke did. We end up micromanaging our negative voices/thoughts and as result, we find the experience of being God’s beloved totally elusive. I have found the Internal Family System (IFS) model of psychotherapy a helpful model in understanding these negative voices and how to help people hear and experience the gracious voice of God and the sense of the Beloved. Within IFS, this pattern of micromanaging and hearing condemning thoughts involves a dance between three parts of our personality including two Protector parts and a young Exile part. Our Exile contains all the memories, feelings, and beliefs that arise from painful times in our past. When we are in touch with this part, we often feel very young, vulnerable, and experience to some extent the negative emotions tied to these traumatic memories. If we are really identified with this Exile part, we become this little boy or girl and find ourselves reliving our traumatic memories all over again. Since our soul wants to avoid feeling such traumatic experiences again, a Protector develops early in our life whose goal is to avoid these painful times in the future through micromanaging. Our Micromanager constantly monitors our experience to make sure we do nothing that may trigger the traumatic pain within our unresolved memories. Our Micromanager may cause us to avoid people or situations, numb our bodies and feelings, or be careful with what we say or do so that we never create circumstances that may cause our Exile to relive its past trauma. Our Micromanager does everything it can to keep people from getting angry at us or hurting us in any way. Our Micromanager's goal is to keep our wounded child part hidden away so that we never relive those painful memories again. The downside of having an active Micromanager is that our young Exile is always isolated, disconnected from others, and has to live with its pain alone. As a result, our Exile is frequently looking for safe places to connect with others for support and love. This means that our Exile and Micromanager have cross-purposes. While our Exile longs for caring connection, our Micromanager seeks to avoid this vulnerability so that no future trauma will happen. Despite our Micromanager’s best efforts, painful or scary situations still arise in our life that cause our Exile to relive its painful past. Because this happened regularly when we were young, our soul developed a second Protector, often called the Inner Critic, whose task is to make sure this trauma never happens again by punishing the Exile and Micromanager when it does. Our Inner Critic is often patterned after the people who traumatized us as children. The words our Inner Critic spew out at our Micromanager or Exile often resonate with what we heard as a child from those who hurt us through their words and/or behaviors. This gives you a good description of the various parts, but lets see how this dance plays out in real life. During a normal day, our Micromanager is monitoring our behavior guiding our life in such a cautious way that our Exile feels safe and secure. When that is happening, our inner world is fairly quiet. However, our Exile longs for caring connection which cannot happen if our Micromanager is always protecting it. When our Inner Critic notices our Exile wanting to risk being vulnerable to experience loving connection, it becomes critical of our Exile and our Micromanager through lots of negative thoughts and self-talk triggering feelings of anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. These critical thoughts remind us of the dangers of being vulnerable and so we stay cautious and safe. However, due to its loneliness, our Exile sometimes convinces our Micromanager to allow it to come out so caring connection can happen. When this happens, we may take a risk by sharing what we think with a friend or family member. Sometimes, though, they may react in ways that trigger our young Exile’s past trauma. When this happens, immediately our Exile becomes scared. Our Micromanager jumps in quickly to rescue us to safety. But it is the Inner Critic that does the major damage. A major Inner Critic attack happens. It begins to attack our Exile and Micromanager by shaming them for their incompetency. It might call them “worthless”, “useless”, “hopeless”, “unlovable”, “incompetent”, “you did it again”, “stupid”, and the list goes on. Because of this shame attack, our young Exile becomes more traumatized and wants to hide. Our Micromanager becomes even more determined and hypervigilant in making sure such inner critic attacks don’t happen in the future. As a result, our Exile becomes even more hidden, protected, and isolated. All people have these three parts to some extent: a young Exile, a Micromanager, and an Inner Critic. How powerful these dynamics operate in our soul depend on how much trauma we have experienced throughout our life. Knowing this common human dynamic, you can begin to appreciate why people struggle in experiencing the flow of God’s love to them within their soul. To do so means that their soul needs to move into a place a vulnerability, a place of unguardedness where the experience of Being can arise, but this can only arise when our Micromanager is quiet. This is a rare experience, especially for people like Luke who have a very active Micromanager and Inner Critic. In Luke’s case, he had a Micromanager that helped him become his ideal of what a good Christian man should be. His Micromanager constantly monitored his life in terms of truth, rightness, and integrity. Every time his Micromanager noticed a shortcoming or failure, his Inner Critic would jump in and shame him through one of its many condemning critic attacks. Now, we can appreciate why Luke struggled so much with a sense of self-failure and why the experience of God’s gracious love was such an elusive experience for him. To enter that place of vulnerability and Being was a very rare experience for Luke. And yet, Luke’s young Exile so badly wanted to feel this loving connection with God, to feel this sense of being God’s beloved.
It seems that Luke is in a hopeless place with his experience of faith. This is a spiritual dilemma for every human being. On one side, we have Micromanager and Inner Critic parts that keep us from becoming vulnerable so that we can experience the Spirit of God in our lives. On the other hand, we have a young Exile part that struggles often with unworthiness and isolation and longs for caring connection with Being and God. How can we rise above this impossible dilemma to encounter the gracious love of God? That is the goal of next month’s blog. Questions to Ponder: 1. Luke longed to experience God’s gracious love and sense of being God’s beloved, and yet he claimed that it was something he rarely if ever experienced. How do you resonate with his experience? Can you relate with him, or is your experience of God different? 2. How do you experience the three parts that make up this Inner Critic dance:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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Within the Christian tradition, praying is an important spiritual practice, but how does one practice prayer? How does one know when we are praying? Since the act of prayer affects our experience, you would think that psychology and psychotherapy would have lots to teach us about prayer, but these scientific fields rarely discuss prayer. A year ago I discovered Internal Family Systems (IFS), an evidence-based approach to psychotherapy that has become popular in the last decade. Within it, there are the concepts of blending and unblending which I believe help us understand how prayer works. In this blog, I plan to explore the connections between prayer and the IFS practice of unblending. Blending and Unblending Within Internal Family System (IFS), the concept blending refers to those experiences when our sense of “I”, what IFS calls our Self, blends with our experience. Within IFS, this Self resembles the Christian concept of God. For Christians and other religious people, this sense of “I” can sometimes be experienced as a sense of God speaking to them, depending on their theology and their spiritual development. As a result, throughout this blog, I will be holding this sense of “I” and sense of God together. When we become lost in our anger or sadness or depression or fear, our sense of “I”/God has become blended with that part of us that holds these feelings. When this happens, there is no space between our “I”/God and what we are experiencing. Our “I”/God and our feelings are merged as together as one experience. This merge not only happens with feelings, but also with thoughts. When we lose the spaciousness between our “I”/God and our thoughts, we are not aware that most thoughts come to us, that we are more the receiver of thoughts than the thinker or controller of our thoughts. When we believe we are our thinking, we are blended with our thoughts for our sense of “I”/God has become reduced and attached to our mind. For me who values my thinking mind a lot, it took me years to discover this space between my thoughts and sense of “I”/God. That same blending can happen between our body and our sense of “I”/God. Rather than there being awareness that our “I”/God and body are separated, when our body is in pain, we feel we are our body. Pain and us are one. I remember this happening to me when I had a kidney stone attack. My sense of “I”/God had identified with my physical pain and my body. When we are in this place of spaciousness, we are aware of our thinking, emotions, and body sensations and our sense of “I”/God. Both are present. But this division of our experience into a thinking part, an emotional part, and a physical sensation part is too simplistic. In reality, each part within our soul is some combination of feeling, thinking, and body sensation. For example, if we have a depression structure within our soul, that depression part may have related feelings like self anger or self hatred or helplessness. That depression part may also have beliefs and thoughts that support these depressive feelings like “I hate myself”, “I am worthless”, or “I am a helpless person” or the “the world is dangerous”. That depression part may also include physical sensations like numbness or heaviness or tiredness in our body. Each part within the soul often has all three of these dimensions, thoughts, feelings, and body sensations. IFS teaches that every person has many parts within their soul. Each of these parts have aspects of thinking, feeling, and body sensations within the soul. Some of these parts are called Exiles, young parts that contain traumatic memories and feelings that our culture, caregivers and ourselves often reject like pain, shame, guilt, worthlessness, fear, anxiety, anger, and hatred. Other parts are call Protectors whose goal is to keep us from feeling the experiences of our Exiles. Some of our Protectors are proactive managers who do everything possible to manage our experience so that our Exiles are not triggered. When these manager-type Protectors fail, other Protectors jump in and react through behaviors and actions that are extreme like addiction, violence, cutting, purging, gorging, suicide ideation, etc. which distract us from feeling the pain of our Exiles. As one learns to provide counselling through the Internal Family Systems model, you soon realize that blending is the common human condition. People are constantly blending with their parts, moving from one part to another without being aware of it. They may be angry one minute. Then the next minute they are guilty for feeling anger. Then they get distracted and find themselves talking about something they heard on the news. On and on clients will go unless a counsellor helps them slow down and helps them unblend from their flow of life experience. When that unblending happens, suddenly the client’s sense of “I”/God emerges and now a relationship can be developed between our sense of “I”/God and our many parts. Blending and the Christian Tradition Within the Bible, you will not find the word blending. However, you do find teachings that capture this dynamic of merging with our parts. Let me share five common biblical metaphors that capture the dynamic of blending. One such blending metaphor is spiritual blindness that Jesus taught (John 9:35). Jesus critiqued the religious leaders for their spiritual blindness. When we are merged with a part of us, we only see and experience life through the lens or belief framework of that part. We are totally blind to seeing the world in any other way. Our parts are structured and legalistic, often very black and white. Another image of blending in the Bible are the teachings around staying awake and falling asleep (Rom 13:1; Matt. 25: 13). When we merge with a part, we lose self awareness, fall asleep one could say. This is why Jesus says to stay awake otherwise we will miss “the Lord’s coming”, that is, miss noticing when the spirit of God emerges within our lives. A third teaching that captures blending is found within the Ten Commandments. These Commandments begin with the instruction to worship only God and to worship no other gods or make idols for ourselves (Ex. 20:1-3). Normally, when we think of other gods or idols, we think of gods or idols in the outside world like wealth or power or sex or people we lift up and follow, or oppressive systems like slavery. But these gods and idols can be located within us as well. In many ways, when our sense of “I”/God merges with a part of us, that part has now become a god to us. It is easy to see how reactive parts like rage or addictions or bulimia function like gods in our lives. However, the managing protectors are just as powerful, even more so, for they are often hypervigilant and shape how we see the world, who we believe is safe, what situations are dangerous, and control our speech and behavior to make sure we stay safe. A fourth blending metaphor is that of lostness like we see in the parable of two lost sons (Luke 15:11-32). The prodigal son spends all his inheritance for there is a part of him that believes the outside world contains everything he needs to be happy in life. In the end, he becomes penniless losing everything, including his sense of dignity and sense of self. His elder brother also becomes lost for a part of him believes that the blessings of life happen by following the religious laws obediently. When his younger brother full of shame (merged with a shame part) comes home hoping to be accepted by his parents who symbolize God in this story, the elder brother becomes lost in his rage at his parents who embrace his younger brother with grace for he has been religiously obedient all of his life and never experienced any of these blessings. When we become merged with parts of our self, we lose touch with the essence of who we are and who God is, and, as a result, become spiritually lost. Finally, the Biblical theme of slavery is another blending metaphor. The Bible often talks about becoming a slave to sin or a slave to our fallen nature or a slave to the law (Luke 16:14; John 8:34, Rom 7:14). Whenever we become a slave to sin/law, we have merged with that part of us that causes us to think, say, or do things that no longer bring fuller life to us. These experiences of blindness, falling asleep (losing awareness), idolatry, lostness, and slavery are very common human experiences. In fact, if you were to track your experience in a typical day from when you arise from bed to when you head to bed, you will discover that you spend most of your day blended with different parts of yourself. Yes, you may remember moments when you are awake, that is, unblended from any of your parts, but those moments for most of us are the exception, not the rule. This is often why they stand out for us. Prayer and Unblending Now we are finally getting to one of the purposes of prayer and spiritual practices, from an IFS perspective. When we are truly praying, the practice of prayer causes us to unblend from our many parts. When that happens, internal space opens up between our sense of “I”/God and all our various parts. Our sense of ”I”/God becomes our “witnessing I” that is able to witness the various dynamics found within the different parts of our soul. This is the benefit that comes from mindfulness, meditation, and centering prayer practices found within both the Eastern and Western religious and psychological traditions. However, this spaciousness between our “witnessing I” and our parts is very hard to maintain. It does not take much stimulation or triggering before our sense of ”I”/God blends with one or more of parts. And when that happens, we find ourselves again under the influence of one of our parts. The fact that blending happens so easily tells us that prayer and maintaining a prayerful state are hard practices to do. Bible Teachings on Prayer and the Challenges of Blending When I look at the teachings of prayer in the New Testament, it is interesting how it portrays prayer in this same way. I remember Jesus teaching his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane how difficult prayer is. He taught, “Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” How true this is. When our parts are triggered or activated thus compromising or weakening our human will, we find ourselves unable to stay awake and pray. We merged instead with our parts. Jesus also shares examples of people who think they are praying but they are not (Matt 6:5 ff). He calls certain religious people hypocrites for they are not praying from their quiet spiritual centre, their sense of “I”/God. Instead, one of their religious protector parts is doing the praying for they are praying for the purpose of being noticed in public and using lots of words. Such a critique should make us wonder who is praying when we pray? Is our prayer coming from our sense of “I”/God, what Jesus calls our “secret room of prayer”, where prayer often has fewer words, or is it coming from one of our protector parts that prays for many other reasons? This idea that structured parts within our soul can do the praying rather than our deeper spiritual centre may be a new idea to many of you. But I think we can all think of examples when we were praying from an angry place demanding God to destroy our enemies or praying from an unhappy place asking God to give us what we want. Are not these types of prayers coming from activated parts within us who are really not interested in truly praying? This distinction I am making between “parts within us” praying and our spiritual centre or sense of “I”/God praying helps us understand one of the puzzling teachings of Jesus. Jesus teaches the following, “Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive” (Matt 21:22; Mark 11:24) What does it mean to pray with faith and to pray without faith? From an IFS perspective, this difference becomes clear. When are we praying without faith, our sense of “I”/God has blended with a structured part within our soul. Remember, these structured parts often formed during times in our lives when we were traumatized and our sense of God’s protection was missing. Many of the coping patterns connected with our Protector parts are compensating for the historical times when we felt abandoned by God. As a result, many of our Protectors have little trust or faith in God for if God’s spirit was absent in our past, these parts assume God’s spirit will be absent now. When these Protectors are doing the praying, that is, our sense of “I”/God has merged with these Protectors, we are “praying without faith.” However, when our sense of “I”/God is not merged with any part within our soul, we are in a place where we are “praying with faith.” And when we pray from this unblended place, Jesus teaches that we will receive what we pray for. So what does it mean for us to pray from this unblended place? Praying styles like meditation, mindfulness, and centering prayer work at this process of unblending through focusing our attention on our breath, a word (eg. chanting), an image like a lit candle, or a focal point within our body (just below our belly button). A similar unblending process can happen during worship through singing, reading scripture, times of prayer, contemplating a sermon as it is preached, rituals of communion, baptism, anointing, etc. When we unmerge from our various parts, we move into a place where our sense of “I”/God is aware of our experience, and as that awareness deepens, we not only feel present to our experience, we also notice Presence arises, that feeling where we our sense of “I”/God is part of something larger. For Christians, this Presence emerging is called the Presence of God. How to Unblend from an IFS Perspective Internal Family Systems has done a ton of research into what helps people unblend from their many parts. This suggests that the unblending process within IFS is some form of prayer. IFS has broken down the unblending process into two stages. A: Developing Space between Our Sense of “I”/God and Our Part. The first stage involves developing space between our sense of “I”/God and the part that we are merged with. This stage follows 3 steps:
The “find the part” step involves choosing one part that we want to unblend from. For example, one part that I have struggled with is “intense self rage”. I am rushing out the door to a work appointment, but my keys or wallet are not where I thought. I get irritated but as I look around in all the spots they might be found with no success, I realize that I am going to be late again. My irritation soon becomes a self rage that says to me, “how can you be so stupid?” and “you did it, again.” Step 2, “focus on it” invites us to focus our attention on this part, in my case, this “self-rage” part, and to stay focused on this part without becoming distracted. Once we have chosen a part to focus on, we need to flesh this part out. For example, with my self-rage part, I can ask my part some of the following questions:
It is important that we listen to our self-anger part for its answers...and wait for its answers. The temptation is for our mind to jump into a thinking mode and guess what our part may be saying rather than actually listen to it. Our parts do reveal their answers slowly to us if we are listening to them. The purpose of all of these questions is to flesh out this part so that our sense of “I”/God begins to separate from a chosen part. As you begin to distinguish your sense of “I”/God from this part, you begin to realize that this chosen part is only a part of you, not all of you, and that it has its own unique personality, beliefs, emotions, body sensations, and memories. B. Developing an Interactive Relationship between Our Sense of “I”/God and Our Part. When this unblending begins to happen, you can enter stage 2 of the IFS unblending process. Rather than our sense of “I”/God being a passive witness to the activities of our part, the goal of stage 2 is to encourage our sense of “I”/God to form a relationship with this part, that is, an interactive, back and forth relationship. When this interactive relationship happens, this dynamic is similar to what happens for people in personal prayer with God. Again, IFS has developed 3 steps to help people accomplish this interactive stage of unblending. They include the following: 1. How do you feel toward it? 2. Befriend it. 3. Validate and negotiate all our fears. In stage 1, the goal is to understand how our part works, how it, if it is a Protector part, protects us from feeling the pain of our exile parts or, if it is an Exile part, how it carries the pain of our traumatic memories of our past. Once you have unblended from this part, your sense of “I”/God can now form a relationship with this part. The question “how do you feel toward your part?” is a question that IFS practitioners often use to help clients form a relationship with their part. For some Christians and religious people, they may respond better to the question, “what do you sense God feels toward your part?” The answer to this question reveals in the present moment whether we are blended or not with our part. If we are unblended, our sense of “I”/God will feel a curiosity or compassion toward our part. If we feel frustration/anger or fear or guilt/shame toward the part in question, that tells us that another part has blended with our sense of “I”/God, and thus more unblending needs to happen. When our sense of “I”/God feels curiosity toward our part, we can begin to befriend it with the goal of appreciating why this part exists. In stage 1 of the unblending process, we develop an understanding of why this part functions the way it does. In stage 2, we begin to appreciate the necessity of this part, and how it is working to protects us . As a result, our sense of "I"/God begins to form a friendship with this part with a goal of helping it. Every part exists for a reason, either as a coping strategy and thus it is a Protector, or as the holder of pain from tramatic events that have happened in our lives, an Exile. As we befriend it and discover its positive role in our life, our sense of “I”/God will begin to feel compassion and care for it. Once we have befriended our part, we want to explore what it fears will happen if it stops doing its coping strategy. Every part has a very good reason for doing what it is doing even though it may appear destructive on the surface. Once we able to validate our part’s fears, our sense of “I”/God are then in a position to minister to and care for our part, and help our part move to a better place.
This two-stage process forms the essence of the IFS unblending process. The goal of stage 1 is to create a spacious separation between our sense of “I”/God and our parts, similar to what we find in mindfulness, centering prayer, and meditation. In stage 2, the goal is to develop a caring interactive relationship between our sense of “I”/God and our parts, a relationship that echoes of the prayerful relationship we see being taught in many theistic religions like Christianity. Conclusion: Throughout this blog, I have explored the unblending process within IFS and how it provides a helpful framework in understanding the dynamics of prayer. We have explored how the dynamics of unblending can be seen within the Christian images of spiritual blindness, awakeness, idolatry, lostness, and slavery. We also investigated the two stages of unblending and how the IFS practice of unblending could be seen as a form of prayer, a combining of centering prayer with interactive personal prayer taught within theistic religions like Christianity. Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator Within the Christian tradition, the Bible teaches about the inner conflict that all humans experience. This conflict is understood often as humans having a divided nature, a Divine nature and a sinful nature. The Divine part wants us to do what is good. The sinful part causes us to do the very opposite of good, namely evil, and this sinful part often acts against our will; we often can’t control it. The Bible concludes that “the Spirit of Christ” will save us from this unsolvable problem but what does this mean? That has been the million-dollar question that I have wrestled with throughout my pastoral, spiritual direction, and psychotherapist ministry. However, this past year through learning about Internal Family System (IFS) approach to psychological healing, I have discovered that I have understood this inner conflict wrong. In this blog, I want to share a different understanding of this inner conflict based on IFS which I think has significant ramifications for the Christian Church. The Inner Conflict Within the Christian Church, we have often understood the human soul as having two natures. There is a Divine Nature that is connected in some mysterious way to the realm of God or a Higher Power that is beyond ourselves that shapes all reality. From our Divine Nature arises all the fruits of God’s Spirit into our human experience like love, compassion, truth, strength, resilience, trust, will, grace, etc. There is also a sinful nature, or a fallen nature as I prefer to call it, made up of mental/emotional structures and patterns that have formed due to earthly human experiences, many of these experiences being traumatic in nature. These psychic structures within our soul block or distort the energies of God spirit flowing in our soul causing us to experience thoughts, emotions, and actions that are more fallen in nature. (see my Sept, 2021 blog “Privation: A Theory of Evil” where I unpack how sinfulness and evil arise from the fallen nature part of the human soul). When we read Romans 7 from the Bible (NSRV) which talks about this inner conflict within the human soul, we quickly map this two-nature soul model unto this text. We see the Divine Nature being expressed in terms of what Apostle Paul labels the Mind, that part of us that “wants to do good”, “agrees that the law is good”, “can will what is good”, “that delights in the law of God”, and is a “slave to the law of God”. This Mind, a mental part of us, knows the law of sin and seeks to manage our sinful nature. In contrast, our Sinful Nature is that part of us that Apostle Paul calls the Flesh. Our Flesh "does that very thing I hate”, “does the very evil I don’t want to do“, is evidence of “another war within me”, and “is captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” This Flesh part contains all the temptations, passions, and behavior patterns of our fallen nature. When we understand Roman 7 in this way with this two-sided soul model, Mind and Flesh, we get a vivid picture of the “wretched” hopeless state that all humans live in. So when Apostle Paul proclaims the solution to this inner conflict between our Mind and Flesh through the words, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”, we often hear those words in a certain way. We, as Christians, believe that somehow the spirit of Christ empowers our Mind or Divine Nature so that we now have control over Flesh and thus can manage it and live more easily the Christian way of life. Internal Family System's View of Soul When I began learning the therapeutic model of Internal Family System (IFS) a year ago, I anticipated seeing some form of this two-sided nature of the human psyche in its framework. But that was not what I found. Instead, I discovered a soul model that had three parts and a fourth aspect that IFS calls the Self with a capital “S”. Let me briefly described each of these 4 aspects of the soul within Internal Family System (IFS) which appear in every human soul. Let me begin first with the three parts which are not the Self. The first part are the Exile parts. These parts, often young in nature, contain the painful memories of our past and childhood, experiences that were not held and supported well by our caregivers in our home and school environment. The Exiles often carry intense experiences of guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, helplessness, overwhelmness, aloneness, abandonment, worthlessness, unlovableness, confusion or not knowing, etc. Since these Exile childlike parts are hard to experience and hold, we developed Manager parts whose goal is to manage these Exiles so we don’t experience their uncomfortable feelings. Managers use many different coping strategies such as numbing , repressing, conflict avoiding, withdrawing, excessive thinking, being constantly busy, people pleasing, excelling at school or work, inner criticism, becoming the expert, etc. so that we don’t feel the discomfort of our Exile parts. Our Managers seek to always be in control so that our Exiles are kept out of our awareness. Managers are very proactive in nature anticipating what could trigger our Exiles and thus develop coping strategies design to keep our Exiles out of our awareness. The third type of part within the IFS soul model are called Firefighter parts. They are similar to Managers in that they seek to protect us from our Exile experiences. However, unlike our Manager parts, Firefighters are reactive in nature and so they react to distract us or break the overwhelming pressure we are experiencing inside due to our Exiles being active. So when our Managers fail to control all the emotional energy of our Exile, our Firefighter parts come to the rescue. For examples, some of us have a Firefighter that causes us to “blow our temper” or become violent when things become too much. Others turn to addictive Firefighters like drinking alcohol, eating/snacking, drugs, overworking, etc. when this internal pressure becomes too much. Other firefighter parts include eating disorders (anorexia and bulimia), dissociation, schizophrenic experiences, cutting, and suicide ideation. IFS teaches that each of us, as humans, are born with multiple parts that work in harmony inside us until life experience changes that balance. None of us grew up in perfect families and holding environments and so these different parts get energized and begin to take on beliefs, emotions and roles within our soul like Managers, Exiles, and Firefighters to keep our internal familiy system in balance. When our soul’s internal world becomes overly intense, these parts often become quite polarized and in conflict with one another. As a result, our Managers are working hard to control both our Exiles and Firefighters. When we compare this 3-part IFS soul model to the 2-part common Christian soul model, some interesting insights arise. It is easy to see how the Exile parts and Firefighter parts of IFS map onto the Fallen Nature or Flesh of the human soul. But what about the Mind and Divine Nature part of the Christian model of the human soul? How does this aspect map onto the IFS model of the Human soul? "Mind" Part as an IFS Manager It may be shocking to some of my Christian readers but this Mind part that Apostle Paul describes in Romans 7 fits well the description of a Manager part in IFS. This Mind part that “wants to do good” “delights in the law of God” and is a “slave to the law of God” is trying so hard to manage our Fallen Nature. Based on IFS, this Mind part is clearly a manager part that is trying to control all the seemingly uncontrollable dynamics of the Flesh described by IFS through its understanding of our Exile and Firefighter parts. This realization has forced me to rethink what we, as Christians, are describing when we say that humans have a Divine Nature. If the human Divine Nature is NOT that Mind part within our soul that is trying to do good and follow the ways of Jesus, then what is our Divine Nature? That is a very good question and is the reason why I wanted to write this blog. So much of what the Christian tradition teaches is based on this understanding of Divine Nature, that desire to want to be a loving and truthful person who models their life after the life of Jesus. That desire is why we strive so hard to transform and manage our fallen human nature. That desire is why we attend worship at church, read the Bible, practice prayer, meditation, and contemplation, and do other spiritual practices. It is hard to imagine, as a Christian, that this desire and all the motivations that come from that desire is not part of our Divine Nature. However, IFS would suggest that this desire is a sign of our Fallen Nature, a sign of one of our managers at work striving to manage our life based on a certain principles, what Apostle Paul aptly describes as the “law of God” (Rom 7: 25). Indwelling Christ Dynamic It is interesting to note that Apostle Paul saw this inner conflict between our Mind and Flesh as a hopeless situation. He writes, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” However, Apostle Paul saw hope for this hopeless situation, namely a spiritual dynamic that he called “Christ Jesus”. It is clear in this text and what follows that Apostle Paul is not talking about the historical person of Jesus Christ. Rather, he is referring to what is called the Indwelling Christ dynamic that Apostle Paul describes both here in Romans 8 but also elsewhere in his New Testament writings (Gal. 2:20; Eph. 3:17-19; 1 Cor 3: 16; 1 Cor 6:19; 2 Cor 6: 16; Gal. 4:6). The IFS model also does not see this ongoing conflict between our Managers and our Exiles and Firefighters as a hopeless condition either. Rather, Richard Schwartz, the developer of IFS, and thousand of IFS practitioners since, have discovered a soul dynamic that they label as the Self. Let me first summarize how Apostle Paul describes this Indwelling Christ dynamic based on Romans chapter 8. Then, I will summarize how IFS has come to understand the Self. When I do so, you will see some remarkable similarities between the two. Apostle Paul describes this Christ dynamic as nonjudgemental for there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom 8:1). It is interesting to note the IFS has discovered a Self dynamic within all clients that is nonjudgemental, curious, and compassionate in nature. Furthermore, this Spirit of Christ “sets us free from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8.2) for God has done what our Mind, under the control of God’s Law, couldn’t do because it was weakened by the Flesh (Rom 8:3). But how does this Christ dynamic free our Mind from its obsession to follow the law of God, an obsession that is an aspect of our fallen nature? Next, Apostle Paul describes an interesting quality of our Mind, especially since we will see this same mental pattern within the IFS healing process. When our Mind is connected to the things of the Flesh, we lived according to the Flesh; when our Mind is connected to the things of the Spirit, we live according to the Spirit (Rom 8: 5). When our Mind is set on the Flesh, we experience death; when our Mind is set on the Spirit, we experience life and peace (Rom 8: 6). In other words, what our Mind is connected to determines what we experience and how we behave. But how does our Mind connect to this Christ dynamic that opens the doorway to the life of freedom and all the qualities of Spirit that give us life? Apostle Paul says it this way: “if the Spirit of Christ who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, it will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you (Rom 8: 11). These words are profound for they help us see how our Divine Nature can connect directly to the spirit of Christ dwelling within our soul. The church historically has made a major assumption that the indwelling of this Christ Spirit happens after birth, that we are not born with this Christ dynamic already potentially dwelling within the seat of our soul. Even with the Mennonite Christian tradition, which I identify with, this is true. As a Mennonite Christian, I was taught that while all humans are born with a good divine nature, aspects of our human nature still fell or become sinful during our life. As a result, our tradition teaches that people need to come to believe in Christ, seek healing for our fallen nature, and follow the ways of Christ. This is the spiritual purpose of adult baptism within my Mennonite tradition. Through the symbolic act of baptism, we invite the Spirit of Christ to dwell within our soul, and in doing so, we are able to live more of our life from our good Divine nature. What if the Spirit of Christ already dwells within our soul when we are born, and that this Christ dynamic is the Divine nature of humans that is waiting to be discovered? There is actually a place in the Bible where the gospel writer John has Jesus actually teaching this, although I have never seen or heard it interpreted this way. Jesus teaches that God is the vinegrower, that Christ is the vine, and that we, as humans, are the branches (John 15: 1-2). If we take this literally, this means that when we are born, we are already connected to the vine of Christ. Jesus goes on to say, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15: 4-5). The question this text raises is not whether we, as humans, are connected to the vine: that is a given. All humans are. The question is whether we are abiding in this Christ Spirit that flows from the vine to our branches. If we are abiding in Christ, or using Apostle Paul’s language, connected to the Christ that dwells within us, then the fruits of Christ will manifest in our life. If we abiding in something else, we will produce no good fruit and eventually will be pruned. You are probably wondering why I am making such a big deal about this different but rare understanding of Christ within the Christian Church. It turns out that the Self within IFS works exactly this way. IFS has discovered that “we are all born with a Self. It does not develop through stages or borrow strength or wisdom from the therapist, and it cannot be damaged” (Schwartz and Sweezy, Internal Family Systems Therapy 2nd Ed, 2020. p. 43). In Schwartz’s book, “Many Minds One Self” (2017), he goes into great detail to help people see how the concept Self found within IFS appears in all the world religions including Christianity. However, the reason people struggle in discovering and experiencing this Self within them is because their Self can “be occluded or overwhelmed by <their> parts. We call this blending. When a part blends fully <with our Self>, we see the world through its eyes. When a part blends partially, its perspective influences us. When polarized parts blend, we live in the midst of an ongoing debate and have no peace of mind. But when parts unblend, the Self is immediately present and available” (Schwartz and Sweezy. P. 43) This property of blending is what I think Apostle Paul is describing when he describes what happens when our Mind is connected to Flesh and to Spirit. When our Mind is connected to the things of the Flesh, we lived according to the Flesh, (our Self blends with the Flesh parts); when our Mind is connected to the things of the Spirit (our Self unblends from the Flesh parts), we live according to the Spirit (Rom 8:5). Since the Self is the source of healing within the IFS system, and not the therapist, the developers of IFS have done a lot of research in understanding how Self interacts with the Manager, Exile, and Firefighter parts of our Soul. They have discovered what are called the 8 C’s and 5 P’s of Self. As a therapist, we know the client is speaking from their Self if one or more of these qualities are present to some degree: a curiosity toward what they are noticing, a feeling of calmness inside, an air of confidence as they validate and comfort their various parts, an awareness of connectiveness, possess a clarity in what they are noticing, a sense of creativity and openness, embody a courage that allows them to be protective of themselves and others, and finally a having a nonjudgemental compassion toward all of your parts despite the painful roles they may be playing in your life ( Schwartz and Sweezy. p. 50-53), The qualities of presence, perspective, patience, persistence, and playfulness are other traits of Self when they appear in our client (https://www.therapywithalessio.com/articles/self-in-ifs-therapy-what-it-is-what-are-the-8-cs-and-the-5-ps-of-self). If our client expresses attitudes contrary to these traits of Self, then we know that our client’s Self is blended with one or more parts of their Soul. A major part of IFS therapy involves helping client unblend their Self from their various parts. However, this issue of Self blending with parts is also true for everyone for everyone has parts, including therapists, spiritual directors, and pastors. A major part of the training to be a IFS therapist involves learning to unblend from our own parts for they will often arise in session and interfere with our counselling and client’s healing process The 8 C’s and 5 P’s of IFS echo of the spiritual fruits that Christian often associate with God’s Spirit, but IFS notes that that there are many other qualities of Self that can arise too. The reason IFS focuses on the 8 C’s and 5 P’s is because these are the important ones for healing to happen. In conclusion, Schwartz states that “the Self exists, cannot be damaged, can often be accessed quickly, knows how to heal, moves to correct inner and outer injustices with an open heart, and becomes the good attachment presence for parts and people alike” (Schwartz and Sweezy. p. 54). In summary, I have attempted to help you see how the evidence-based framework of Internal Family System brings new understandings to how Christians can understand the inner conflict found within our soul. IFS helps us sees our Divine nature differently. Seen through the IFS lens, our Divine nature is not the Mind part of us that seeks to manage our fallen or sinful nature. Rather, our Divine nature is the dynamic of the indwelling Christ that resides within us right from the day we are born. Within IFS, the dynamic of the Self echoes of the Indwelling Christ dynamic and follows many of the ways we, as Christians, understand the Spirit of Christ interacting with our lives. Much more can be said about this connection between IFS and Christianity. What excites me as a Christian psychotherapist is that through IFS we now have a contemporary evidence-based psycho-spiritual model that can help us, as Christians, along with the Bible, Christian history, and various Christian theologies, to understand how prayer and spiritual healing and transformation actually happen through the dynamics of the Indwelling Christ.
Questions to Ponder: 1. How would you describe the inner conflict within your soul, between the Mind part and the Flesh part? When has your Mind been able to manage your Flesh part? When has it failed you? 2. The IFS model helps us see that the Mind part within our soul is not our Divine Nature but a fallen manager part whose goal is to manage our Flesh or fallen nature. How does this view of the Mind part differ with your theology? How is it freeing for you? 3. Apostle Paul describes the Christ dynamic as the secret to us being freed from this battle between the Mind and our Flesh. How have you understood/experienced this Christ dynamic? 4. IFS has discovered that we are born with the Self or Indwelling Christ dynamic, and thus this dynamic is the essence of our Divine Nature. How does this new IFS insight differ with the theology you have been taught? How is it freeing for you? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator There is a strong emphasis within the Christian tradition around forgiveness. While the Bible highlights the importance of forgiving others, what is stressed repeatedly is our need for God’s forgiveness, for God to forgive us. However, I have found that there is another type of forgiveness that is rarely discussed within Christian communities, and yet it is one that I see a profound need for within my palliative care and spiritual direction ministries, namely the need to forgive God. In this blog, I plan to explain our need to forgive God and what that experience of forgiving God looks like. I went looking in the Bible for any story or verse that talks about forgiving God. I could not find one. Now, you know why forgiving God is rarely if ever preached about in Church. And yet some Christian writers realize that we, humans, have a need to forgive God. For example, Chris Baldwin, a Christian blogger, speaker, and writer, writes that “we need to forgive God, not because He needs forgiveness, but because we need to have forgiven Him” (https://chrisbaldwin.com/why-forgive-god/). Baldwin argues, and many Christian leaders including myself would agree with him, that God can only act in good ways. God cannot do evil things that hurt people. Yet I find in my spiritual direction and palliative care ministries that most people need to forgive God. Why is that? It is not because God caused hurt to us. Rather, it is because God has failed to protect us from the many traumas that have happened to us in our life. The reality is that we find ourselves living in a world where we often experience life as very traumatic. By traumatic, I mean that we have had times in life where we felt our survival was threaten, when our soul felt overwhelmed due to too much physical or emotional distress. We now know that adults develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) when they “have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, or rape or who have been threatened with death, sexual violence or serious injury” (https:/www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd). If trauma happens to adults in these circumstances, how often do children with young sensitive souls experience trauma in their childhood homes or in elementary schools? A lot more than we, in the past, have realized. Why does God allow these life-threatening traumas to happen, especially when they cause such damage to our soul and body? Such trauma destroys our trust in the goodness in life and in the goodness and faithfulness of God. Very few people truly trust the goodness of the flow of Life and God’s spirit within their life. Instead, people look to themselves or wealth or power or medical professionals or family or their community of friends or government or job security or insurance, and the list goes on, to protect them from the uncertainties of life. There is nothing wrong in looking to these to experience some security in life but the reality is that nothing can provide us total security in life. This is especially evident as we face the reality of dying and death for all our earthly securities begin to break down. Now, we have to lean into our trust of life and God, and it is here that many people struggle for this trust is often missing or very fragile. That lack of trust and faith in God within us tells us that many of us have a need to forgive God for the times that God has failed to protect us from the traumas of life. This forgiveness journey is a journey I know well from watching my two younger hemophiliac brothers die both of HIV/AIDS, Jamie in 1992 at the age of 24 and Kevin in 1997 at the age of 32. I remember preaching a sermon as a student pastor a month before Jamie died where I expressed my anger and lament with God for what was happening to my youngest brother. During the years between my two brother’s death, I developed the “Why Workshop” where I explored with participants various reasons for why God allowed suffering and death to be part of earthly life. In wrestling with the why question with many people and scholars, I came to see cognitively the gift side of suffering in this world. Dr. Paul Brandt and Philip Yancey capture well this point in their book titled “Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants” (Dr. Paul Brandt and Philip Yancey, 1993). But while my mind was somewhat satisfied, my heart was not. From my heart’s perspective, no right theology or belief could take away the feeling that it was wrong that my brothers died so young in their lives. My heart does not want God to rationalize away the pain that has happened. This pain should never have happened in the first place, period. Instead, my heart wanted God to admit to me that I was right, that my brother’s death was a tragedy that should never have happened. If God could admit that, then possibly my heart could find the compassion and courage to forgive God for failing to protect us from evil, sin, illness, and trauma. In the Old Testament, there is the story of Job who wrestled profoundly with the issue of suffering and the why question. He is portrayed at the beginning of the story as a good family man who God blessed with children and a thriving farming operation. And then he loses everything. His farming operation of many herds of sheep and camels is destroyed by a powerful thieving tribe. A freak wind storm causes his home to collapse killing all his sons and daughters. Then Job himself becomes physically sick with painful sores on his head and feet. In the midst of all of this suffering, I can imagine Job being very angry at the unfairness of life. These tragedies should not have happened...and yet he seeks to hold onto his faith in God. Throughout the Biblical story of Job, people challenge Job about his faith in God. First, it begins with his wife who says, “how can you believe in God when God has does this to you?” Then three friends come to comfort Job, but all three of them believe in some form that Job must have done something sinful in the eyes of God. For them, suffering is seen as a consequence from God for doing something wrong. Job totally disagrees with them for he believes that he has been a good and upright man before God. And yet Job cannot make sense of his suffering. Such painful suffering should not be happening to him who has been good and faithful. It does not make sense and so Job is in many ways questioning the ways of God. He may be possibly even looking for a way to forgive God for all the tragedy that has happened in his life. In the end of book, the author of Job has God appear to Job through a whirlwind and God confronts Job, “What give you the right to question me? Let me interrogate you and see how you respond” (Job 38: 3). In the end, Job is humbled, and says “I am of little worth. How can I answer you?” (Job 40: 3) Clearly within the book of Job, there is no room within the theology of its author for the forgiveness of God...where God is forgiven for allowing tragedies in life that should not have happened. I have come to realize that this is Old Testament thinking... older theology before God is revealed more clearly through the person and life of Jesus. There is a gospel story where Jesus is asked directly the why question around a tragedy, the death of a brother who died before his time. I want to turn to this story in the gospel of John now for I think it sheds light on what it means for us to forgive God. The gospel of John is challenging to interpret for it is clearly more than a history of Jesus’ life. Being written a few decades after the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, it has a very different flavour and goal than the other gospels. We see within John's gospel a theology that reveals how the early Johannine Christian community came to understand Jesus and his life. As a result, we should treat these stories as based less on historical fact and more on the theological truths that the author of John’s gospel wanted his Christian community to believe, that is, "Jesus Christ is the Son of God." With this lens in mind, let us turn to this story of Lazarus. . In the gospel of John, we read how Lazarus, the brother to Mary and Martha, is quite sick. It is also apparent from this story that Lazarus, Mary, and Martha are very close friends to Jesus. In fact, when the sisters sent a message to Jesus to quickly come here for Lazarus, they described Lazarus as “the one who you, Jesus, love.” When Jesus finally arrived at Mary’s and Martha’s home, his close friend Lazarus has already been dead four days. It is here that Jesus is faced first with Martha’s version of her why question. “Jesus, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). The author has Jesus respond, “I am the resurrection and life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die...Your brother will rise again.” These words placed in Jesus’ mouth by the author of John’s gospel in response to Martha’s question are theological promises based on what the Johannine Christian community had come to believe about Jesus based on his resurrection. Then Mary, Martha’s sister, comes to where Jesus is and upon seeing him, she kneels at his feet and asks Jesus the same why question, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). This time Jesus does something totally different. No theological platitudes. Instead, we see a very different person. The gospel writer writes, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Lord, come and see.' Jesus began to weep." (John 11: 33-35). Jesus was so greatly disturbed in spirit that he wept. Jesus wept. Those two words have become very significant for me. I remember after my brother Jamie died that I was numbed. Those words “God, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” echoed so true to my heart then. I felt so abandoned by God, alone, by myself. I remember going through 4 funeral visitations, trying to put on a brave face as people shared their condolences with me and my family. Even though I was surrounded by all those caring people, my heart felt frozen and alone. I was in too much pain to sense God's presence or have any faith in God. Then the funeral service finally came. The church sanctuary in Lucknow United Church was full...easily over 200 people. Just before the memorial service began, my family walked in to sit on the front benches. As I came in, I was struck by how everyone in the sanctuary seem to be crying. Then it hit me. I realized that all those tears I was seeing were signs of God crying with me in my pain...that God, like Jesus, was disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. God was in as much pain as I was over the tragedy that had happened to my brother Jamie. God too saw his death as wrong, that it should never have happened. In that moment of realization, I began to sobbed deeply and as I did so, I felt a profound love of God flow into me, a Divine love that I had not felt for a long time. In that moment, I realize now that my heart had forgiven God for the tragedy that had happened to Jamie. And with that forgiveness, my life was spiritually resurrected. I felt alive again. My soul had risen to life. In some ways, I wish the story of Lazarus ended in John's gospel very differently then having Jesus raised Lazarus from physical death. Instead, I wish we read about Jesus weeping with his friends Mary and Martha as they remembered and celebrated Lazarus’ life at his Jewish funeral service. However, the gospel writer John had more important theological purposes in mind when he wrote his gospel. He needed to prove that Jesus was the Son of God for first/second century Christians were in conflict with the dominant Roman culture who had come to see their Roman Emperor as Son of God. Today, scholars are divided around whether this Lazarus story actually happened historically. As a spiritual care provider who see palliative care clients every day of my work, the good news of the Lazarus story for them, who are in pain, is not Jesus raising Lazarus from the physical grave. Rather the good news in this story is that fact that Jesus wept when he saw Mary, Martha, and the Jewish community weeping over the loss of Lazarus. He felt their pain...his spirit was deeply disturbed...and as a result he wept. When we realize that God feels our pain as deeply as we do, and we see signs of this incarnation through faithful people of God caring and crying on God’s behalf, our hearts begin to soften. This softening opens the door to us beginning to forgive God for not protecting us from the tragedies that have happened in our lives. Until we forgive God, I am not sure we can fully embrace the experience of the resurrection. This is a key role I play when I visit people who are dying. I help them experience forgiving God through my ability to feel and hold their pain, and as result, they begin to hope that God will be there for them when they die. There is a teaching in John’s gospel that has taken on a whole new meaning for me as I understand more fully how we experience forgiving God. The gospel writer of John has Jesus teach, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” (John 15: 5). When Jesus says that each of us is connected to the vine of God, that means that God experiences everything we experience in life. We often see this connection to God as the source of our experience of love, peace, joy, compassion, strength, power, value, grace, and so on. That is very true. But our experiences in life also flow the other way meaning that the vine, which symbolizes God, feels everything that we, the branches, feel. When we feel pain, God feels our pain. And that is not only true of pain, but of all the negative experiences and thoughts including guilt, shame, worthlessness, helplessness, fear, despair, depression, grief, etc.. Everything that we experience in life, God also experiences. Most of us managed these negative experiences that we judge as wrong. God doesn't. When God experiences our many painful struggles, the spirit within God becomes deeply disturbed. God's heart fills with compassion and God weeps with us. Can you imagine what God experienced on that day when he saw Jesus, one of his faithful children, being crucified on a cross by his supposedly faithful religious leaders who believed they were doing God’s will? It must have been torture for God to see this. God witnessed trauma firsthand that day, a trauma he wished never happened and was powerless to stop. God wept profoundly that day when Jesus cried out on the cross his why question, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). I cannot imagine Jesus experiencing the God that Job supposedly encountered, the God who scolded Job saying, “What give you the right to question me? Let me interrogate you and see how you respond.” Clearly, God felt the trauma that Jesus experienced that day as he was a crucified, a trauma that never should have happened. When I was a pastor, I saw the Good Friday service as an opportunity for my congregants to relive the tragic story that led up to Jesus’ crucifixion. Through reliving this story, we begin to feel what God experienced on that day through Jesus, through Judas who betrayed Jesus to the religious leaders, through Peter who denied knowing Jesus, the scheming religious leaders, the Roman governor, the thieves on the cross, etc. It was a very tragic day...trauma at its worst. And God saw it all... experienced it all...and God’s heart was so deeply disturbed that day, just like the women's hearts who beat their breasts and wailed as they followed the convicted Jesus to the hill where he would be crucified (Luke 23: 27). When we sense God experiencing deeply our pain with us, it opens the door for us to forgive God for the trauma that has happened to us. If you look at all the Bible stories connected to Easter through this framework, you soon realize that each character goes through a process of forgiving God. All of them are in shock for they can’t believe that Jesus is dead, that God allowed Jesus to die on the cross. They all believed in the same why question as Martha and Mary did, “Surely, God, if you had been here, Jesus never would have died.” A major trust with God had been broken. But as each character encounters the risen Christ, God meets them in their place of pain. For Mary Magdalene, it was her grief. For Thomas, it was his doubt. For Peter, it was his guilt for denying Jesus. For the two on the road to Emmaus, it was their disillusionment for they believed Jesus would free their Jewish people from Roman oppression. As these characters felt the presence of God at their point of pain, that is, God experienced their pain, they soon forgave God for the trauma that had happened in the painful death of Jesus. They were now able to embrace the profound truth that Jesus is alive, that death is not the end of life. Rather, life continues on beyond the grave, that death is merely a doorway to a heavenly life beyond this earthly life, as revealed in their experiences of the resurrected Jesus.
It is very apparent to me that God’s Love is far more powerful than we realize, but not in the way the world understands power. When we experience this love, not only can we forgive others and ourselves; we are also able to forgive God. For this “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. It never ends. This love is eternal” ( 1 Cor 13: 7-8a). This love that allows God to bear all pain opens the door for us to forgive God for the trauma that has happened to us. Amen. Questions to Ponder: 1. What is your response to this idea of forgiving God? Does it resonate for you, and if so, why? If it does not resonate for you, explore why. 2. Explore the areas in your life where you don't trust the flow of Life and God. When did you lose that trust? What possible trauma is behind this lost of trust? 3. What is needed for you to regain this trust? What experiences of life do you hold God responsible for and thus need to forgive God for? 4. How does remembering the events of Good Friday and Easter help you in your journey to forgive God? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator Forgiveness is a dominant theme within the Christian tradition. There are many Christian teachings about how we are to practice forgiveness to others. But the primary Christian teaching focuses on our relationship with God, how this God-human relationship is in need of forgiveness and reconciliation. This means that due to mistakes we have made or due to deep hurts that have happened to our life, we find our relationship with God in need of repair. As a psychospiritual therapist, I find that the forgiveness taught in our faith institutions does not adequate address the fact that many of our hurts and sins are traumatic in nature. These painful wounds in our soul cannot be simply healed with prayers or words of forgiveness for the experience of trauma often injures severely our relationship with God. In this blog, I want to explore a trauma-informed understanding and practice of forgiveness. Many Bible scriptures teach that forgiveness is a regular spiritual practice of a faithful Christian or faith-based person. Since forgiveness is seen as an ongoing practice, it is easy to assume that forgiveness is easy do and practice, that forgiveness happens simply by saying “sorry” to the person we have wronged, or admitting our failure and guilt to God. These simple forms of forgiveness work when you have made a simple mistake or someone has injured you with unkind words, but what about traumatic events like the following:
This suggests that there is something missing in our understanding of how forgiveness works. This is where a trauma understanding of harm may be useful. There is a Jesus story found in the gospel of Mark that illustrates, I think, how forgiveness can heal trauma. I Here we read of four people bringing their paralyzed friend on a stretcher to Jesus for healing. Since they could not access Jesus because of the crowds, they went up on the roof of the house and created a hole. They then lowered their paralyzed friend to Jesus through the hole. Jesus is amazed at their friends’ faith in God. Seeing their faith, we read that Jesus proclaims, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” This proclamation creates quite a commotion among the religious leaders in the crowd for these leaders believe only God can forgive sin. Seeing their doubt, Jesus says to them, "Why do you fill your minds with these questions? Which is easier—to say to a paralyzed person, ’Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk’? But so you will know that the Human One has authority on the earth to forgive sins", he says to the man who was paralyzed, "Get up, take your mat, and go home” (Mark 2: 1-12). Upon saying these words, I imagine Jesus reaching down and pulling the paralyzed man to his feet, and amazingly the man is healed and picks up his mat and walks through the crowd home. As a pastor, I have preached on this Jesus story many times, but never with a trauma lens…which I think helps us understand how forgiveness actually happened in this story. Have you ever considered how forgiveness actually healed a man who was paralyzed physically? It makes no sense unless his paralytical condition was psychologically based, that is based on his beliefs and emotions that arose from a past experience of trauma. Based on how our soul and body processes trauma, we now know how guilt, shame, anger, hatred, and other negative emotions can lead to a paralysis of our soul and in some extreme cases, a paralysis of our physical body. How I wish the Bible contained the full details of this healing trauma story, especially the intimate details of how Jesus ministered to this young man, and how this man experienced these deeply personal interactions. Such information would reveal a lot around how forgiveness truly happened for him. This is where I have found counselling insights around healing trauma so helpful. Let me share what insights a trauma-informed psychology might bring to this Jesus healing story. Trauma arises when we experience life as too overwhelming, too scary, too much for our sense of Self to handle. It feels like we are going to explode internally...like a balloon is going to pop. When this happens, our soul naturally goes into crisis mode. Our soul divides into parts. One part of our soul, called the Exile part within Internal Family System (IFS), contains the pain of the traumatic experiences so that our sense of Self no longer feels this pain. This Exile often becomes frozen in that time in history when the trauma happened; it never grows up or moves on. If this trauma occurred when we were a child, then that Exile remains a child and finds itself experiencing life now from that traumatic period of history. If this trauma happened as an adult, like in a tragic death, then our Exile remains trapped in the shock along with the emotional pain connected to that death like fear, anger, hatred, guilt, shame, and other aspects of grief. Now, this Exile contains the extreme pain of the trauma, a pain that our sense of Self at the time of trauma found too overwhelming, and thus our soul needed to package it away. However, based on IFS, our soul also created another part, a Protector part whose goal is to keep us from feeling the traumatic pain found in our Exile. The reason this Protector formed within our soul is because Life, our Caregivers (parents, teachers, etc.) and our sense of Self failed to protect us from the trauma. A huge trust was broken. As a Christian, one could say that God (the God-part within life, our caregivers, and ourselves) failed to protect us from the trauma that hurt us, that God betrayed us in not shielding us from this tragedy and pain. In other words, our internal Protector formed because God failed to protect us. As a result, our Protector often distrusts God/Life, others, and ourselves along with intense feelings of anger, even hatred. Now you can begin to see why the forgiveness teachings in the Bible are so intimately connected to our relationship with God. Until this trust relationship with God is healed through forgiveness, it is very hard, maybe impossible, to forgive those who have broken our trust and betrayed us. Our Protector uses many strategies to keep our sense of Self from feeling the pain of our Exile. It frequently uses numbing which occurs when our soul and physical body contracts—a contracted body experiences far less pain than a relaxed, open body. Our Protector often contains a lot of hatred or anger toward Life/God, others, even ourselves, and it uses these intense feelings to protect us from getting hurt again. Another coping strategy is moving our sense of Self to the thinking centre located in our heads. We normally feel emotions in our body so when we move to thinking about our trauma rather than feeling it, we experience a lot less pain. Another coping strategy is when we use food, alcohol, drugs, and medication to soothe our pain. Distraction is another popular coping technique whether it be television, shopping, sex, smart phone activities, or surfing the internet. The number of pain coping strategies are endless. However, our Protector has its favourites, ones that it uses regularly to keep us from feeling of our Exile that contains the pain of our trauma. In summary, when we experience an overwhelming trauma, our soul creates two parts, an Exile that contains the traumatic painful memory and a Protector that shields our sense of Self from feeling the pain of our Exile. But there is one more aspect of the human Soul, namely our sense of Self. This sense of Self is how we experience ourselves when we are aware of our experience. When we are centred in our awareness, we may notice ourselves thinking or having thoughts/images enter our minds, feelings arising or present in our hearts, or sensations emerging within our gut or other parts of our body. Our sense of Self is our sense of “I” or “me”. When our Self is centred, we can notice within our body and soul our Exile part, which holds our painful traumatic memory. Our Self can also notice our Protector part, which seeks to protect us from experiencing the pain of our Exile part. However, often when our Exile and Protector are very active, our Self merges with these parts causing us to lose awareness and either become lost in the pain of our Exile or the critical angry thoughts of our Protector. This merging is why we don't often see ourselves as having structured parts within our souls for we see these parts as us, as a our personality. When that happens, our Self is no longer available to compassionately hold the pain of our Exile parts or notice the angry thoughts and coping patterns of our Protector. Seeing how trauma fragments our soul into two parts, this means forgiveness must bring healing to both the Protector and Exile parts within our soul. In other words, forgiveness involves two steps, one involving our Protector and another connected to our Exile. Simple words of apology and actions of repentance will not restore a fragmented soul. In our Jesus healing story, we see a man totally physically, emotionally, and spiritually frozen by the trauma in his life. Because of his paralysis, it is evident that the pain at the root of his paralysis is and was extremely severe. However, I am curious whether this paralysis grew over a period of time, possibly years, beginning first as a mild paralysis, and then deepening over time. Often, our experience of trauma can expand its hold on us. For example, in a tragic or unexpected death, we experience profound shock, grief, and loss. To cope, our Protector protects our Self by numbing our grief through contracting our body and soul. However over time, we will naturally feel anger and hatred toward the person or issue we believe caused our loved one to die, a very uncomfortable feeling for our Self to live with. To cope with this feeling, our Protector will contract our soul further so we don’t feel these negative feelings. However, these feelings of hatred will breakthrough occasionally causing us to feel guilt and intense shame toward ourselves. Again, our Protector will come to the rescue numbing our body even further so our Self doesn't feel the intensity of this shame. Over time, trauma can deepen its hold on us…due to an overactive Protector part…like it probably did to the man in the Jesus story causing him to become fully paralyzed. It is apparent that this man’s sense of Self has fully merged with his Protector that is paralyzing his body/soul. He saw himself as paralytic, probably being crippled for life, until Jesus entered the picture. No longer able to walk, four of this man's friends take him to Jesus, a travelling teacher and healer, with the hope that maybe Jesus could heal him. It is here that I wish we had all the details of how Jesus interacted with this paralyzed man so that we could understand how forgiveness happened. From our understanding of trauma, Jesus had to accomplish two key things with the man, one related to his Protector and one related to his Exile. a. The first step of Forgiveness: Ministering to the Protector For this man's Exile part to experience the freedom of forgiveness, Jesus had to first minister to his Protector. Within the counselling room, this is no easy task for the client's Protector is often quite resistant to letting anyone have access to this Exile's painful experience. Protectors often carry much anger and hatred and so it is often not easy for our client's Self to be curious, let alone be compassionate toward their Protector. Counsellors spend much time helping the client’s Self understand with compassion and curiosity the workings of their Protector with the hope that the Protector will eventually trust the healing process. This takes time for the Protector has to learn to trust God again through trusting that the psychotherapist and the client’s Self can truly hold the pain of their Exile part. In many ways, we are helping the client's Protector get to the place of forgiving and trusting God enough so that it will allow access to the Exile hidden underneath it. Something similar in nature had to happen between Jesus and the paralyzed man’s Protector that was causing the paralysis of the man’s soul and body. It is apparent from our Jesus healing story that the crippled man’s friends believed in Jesus’ ability to heal their friend of his paralysis. This suggest to me that this paralytic’s sense of Self was already hopeful and open to the possibility that Jesus could heal him. With this faith present, Jesus would have been more able to help the cripple’s man’s Self interact with his Protector with curiosity and compassion. As the Protector began to trust God within Jesus, it would have allowed Jesus to have access to the traumatized Exile below. But remember, forgiveness, within the Christian context, flows both ways...we, humans, forgive God, and God forgives us. These two experiences together make up the process of forgiveness. It is here in the Jesus’ healing story that we see evidence of this second aspect of forgiveness, God forgiving the paralytic man. Jesus says to the man, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” When you understand how trauma affects us, you soon realize that both our Protector and Exile feel the need of forgiveness. For example, our Protector is often distrusting and quite angry, even hateful, toward God/life, others and self. As a result, our Protector's thoughts and behaviors are often quite troubling to itself and yet this is the only way it knows how to protect us from feeling the pain of our Exiles. Our Protector desires forgiveness. However, as counsellors, we see this Protector's coping pattern as the best coping pattern available when the trauma happened. Despite how unhealthy this negative coping pattern is now, it was the best one available at the time. This insight is important for Protectors to hear. Furthermore, our Protector is many times critical of our Exile and often calls it stupid, weak, and worthless. As a result, our Exile is filled with guilt and shame and longs to be free of this pain through forgiveness. Now, you can imagine how Jesus’ healing words were heard by the crippled man’s Protector and Exile when Jesus said to him, “Child, your sins are forgiven.” b. The Second Step of Forgiveness: Ministering to the Exile However, forgiveness is not complete yet for this paralytic man---he is still paralyzed. A second step is needed for his Exile is still frozen in its traumatic past. While we experience the present moment of history, our Exile is still stuck in the past, experiencing life with all the beliefs, emotions, and stories of the little boy who experienced the trauma many years ago. The Exile within the crippled man needs a safe person to share all of this traumatic pain to, as Jesus did for the Exile within the paralyzed man. Again, trust issues will arise for this Exile felt totally abandoned by God/Life, caregivers, and the man’s Self who was overwhelmed by the trauma as a child. This Exile will only share of its pain when it believes that Jesus along with the crippled man's Self can hold this pain. Here, we again see the need for forgiveness, this time between the man's Exile and the aspects of God found in Jesus and the man's Self. As his Exile begins to trust God again, it will slowly share its painful story. As Jesus and the paralyzed man's Self witness and hold this trauma, the man's Exile feels supported, understood, and validated. However, that sharing alone often does not bring full healing. The Exile’s painful emotions, while losing some of its intensity due to being heard and held, will remain for the Exile still believes that this trauma can happen at any moment for it is still living in its past. And if it senses that this trauma could happen again, this cripple man’s Exile part will believe that God could abandon him causing him to relive this overwhelming pain all over again. This reliving would probably trigger his Protector who would numb and paralyzed his body and soul again. This means that even if this man's Exile's tramatic experience was held perfectly, along with the words of forgiveness, the healing evident in this story would not have happened. Another step of healing was needed. Here the Jesus’ healing story actually provides evidence of what caused the man to be healed of his traumatic past and paralysis. Jesus said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat, and go home”, and with those words, I imagine Jesus reaching down and pulling the man to his feet. Something very significant happened when Jesus said the words, “Get up, take your mat, and go home.” Remember, this Exile is frozen in time and thus experiences everything in life from that point of view. Often, when psychotherapists do this IFS work with a client’s Exile part, we reach a time in the healing process when we invite the Exile part to look into their client’s face. In doing so, the Exile is often surprised that the person looking back is a compassionate adult, and not a child who they think the person is. Once the Exile realizes this, they are more open to allowing the client’s Self, along with the counsellor’s support, to hold their pain and look to their Self for comfort. Having reached this point, the counsellor invites the client’s young Exile to join their client in the present moment which is free of the traumatized pain of the past. In doing so, the Exile steps out of its painful past and discovers a very different present world that is lacking the triggers of trauma that were everywhere in the frozened Exile’s previous world.
When Jesus uttered the words, “Get up, take your mat, and go home” and pulled the crippled man to his feet, Jesus invited the Exile to come join him into the present moment with Jesus and his man's Self. When the Exile did this, it literally step out of painful past and into the Present Moment leaving all trauma pain behind. Once this happens, there is little need for his Protector to numb his body and soul for the emotional suffering is gone. I am sure that this healed man didn’t walk with much strength through the crowd that day when he was healed but rather was quite weak and probably needed some support from others to keep his balance for his muscles would have atrophied due to years of non-use. But still, seeing a local man paralyzed for years being healed and able to walk at all would have amazed his town community. When you see this Jesus healing story through a modern traumatized lens, you see how forgiveness and physical healing are often closely connected. It brings new meaning to Jesus’ words to the crowd when he proclaims, “Why do you fill your minds with these questions? Which is easier—to say to a paralyzed person, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, take up your bed, and walk’?” In saying those words, Jesus shows how forgiveness and physical healing are deeply connected and even can happen simultaneously. Questions to Ponders: 1. How does your life connect with the paralyzed man's story? What aspects of your body or soul carry pain of your traumatized past? What are the various ways your soul copes with or numbs pain? 2. Since most of us have been traumatized, how would you described your Protector part? How did it feel betrayed by God/life, others, and even yourself? What feelings does your Protector carry toward God/Life, others, and yourself? What is the narrative it often tells you to keep you in a place of protection? 3. How would you describe your Exile part? What emotions does it carry and wish it could let go of? How is your Exile treated by your Protector? 4. When are you aware of your sense of Self (awareness, compassion, curiosity, strength, insight, spaciousness, grace, resilience, patience, trust, etc.)? What happens when your sense of Self merges with your Protector or Exile? 5. Seen through this trauma lens, how does your soul long for forgiveness? How can you begin to work at it? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator As a spiritual care provider for people in palliative care and hospice, I am constantly helping people face death. As people face their death, they often share fears and questions about the afterlife. What happens to me at death? Will I face some sort of judgement? What will happen to be in the afterlife? Will I suffer or will I be in paradise? As I sit with and reflect with them around these questions, I have been forced to do a lot of rethinking about the common Christian theology of Heaven and Hell that I and most Christians have been taught in the church. In this blog, I plan to share how I have come to understand the mystery of the afterlife. It is still a theological work in progress. The Afterlife Black Box I have come to see the Afterlife as a black box, a box full of darkness, mystery, and unknowingness. Our understanding of what happens in this black box is shaped by the metaphysical framework we believe in. If we believe in materialism, that humans are only physical creatures and that nothing exist beyond death, then that is what we believe happens within this black box. But if we believe that humans are both physical and spiritual creatures, like I do, then our metaphysical framework that we have adopted shapes what we believe happens after death within this Afterlife black box. Because this Afterlife black box is so unknown and mysterious, it is easy for religious institutions and leaders to project metaphysical frameworks onto the Afterlife that fit their earthly agenda but have little to do with the dynamics of the Afterlife. We see this within the history of the Christian Church at times when church leaders created doctrines of Heaven and Hell based on a fear of God’s judgement that motivated people to become “saved” or give larger donations to the church so they, or their loved ones, would end up in heaven. Due to the potential of mistruths and abuses, it is important that we use all tools available to help us understand the black box of the Afterlife. As a Christian, these tools include comparing our Christian metaphysical system with metaphysical systems of other religions for each religion is trying to understand the same Afterlife black box. Some religions like Tibetan Buddhism with its “Tibetan Book of the Dead” have an extensive afterlife metaphysics. There are also certain psychologies like transpersonal psychology and parapsychology that seek to do scientific studies of spiritual phenomena that may be tied to the afterlife like death-bed visions, near-death experiences, or insights from hypnotic research into experiences connected to the afterlife. There are also religions and sacred psychologies like The Diamond Approach that teach about and inquire into the spiritual dimension within our earthly lives. If it is true that the dynamics of Heaven are also seen on Earth, as is taught within the Christian tradition (eg. Lord's prayer: "on earth as it is is Heaven"), then these spiritual experiences also provide a glimpse into what happens within the Afterlife blackbox. As I did my research, I found that there is much diversity among Canadians about what happens within the Afterlife black box. In a major 2015 study, Reginald Bibby, well-known researcher of Canadian religion, found that, within the Canadian population, 30% embrace formal religion, 25% reject religion, and 45% are uncertain toward religion. Bibby then explored how these three groups of Canadians understood the Afterlife. 87% of the religiously devoted believed in the Afterlife, 94% believed in Heaven, 73% believed in Hell, and surprisingly 34% of these religiously devoted people believed in reincarnation. In contrast, among those who rejected religion, 35% believed in the Afterlife, 5% in Heaven, 4% in Hell, and 21% believed in reincarnation. Among the middle lukewarm group, 70% believed in the Afterlife, 68% in Heaven, 35% in Hell, and 38% in reincarnation. In the past, the Christian Church has taught that there are two destinations within the Afterlife: Heaven for those who God judges as good and Hell for those God judges as bad. The Christian Catholic tradition includes a third temporary destination, the place of purgatory where some people go for transformation work so they can become good enough to enter Heaven. Since many people have fears around God’s judgement and Hell, let me begin with questions in this area. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Hell. Traditionally, Heaven was seen as a physical place of paradise involving beauty, love and oneness with God while Hell was a physical place of fire and punishment and God was totally absent. Now, many Christians reject such physical understandings of Heaven and Hell and understand them more as mental states, Heaven being unending happiness and Hell involving mental anguish and suffering (1). This makes sense to me for the physical nature of life is what what makes earthly life different from heavenly life. When we die, our soul detaches from our physical dead body, and acends into the Afterlife. With these notions of Heaven and Hell being the primary metaphysics of our Western culture, the issue of destiny is often on people’s minds when they approach death. How does one discern God's judgement line between going to Heaven and Hell? I remember a wife who was concerned that her husband would go to Hell because he was not a very religious man. To calm her fears, she got him to repeat the baptismal vows that were used in her Christian denomination. Did repeating these baptismal vows spiritually move her husband to the Heaven side of the judgement line? Within the Bible, we read Jesus telling a surprising parable about the final judgement to the religious leaders of his time. In this parable, the judge divided people into sheep and goats. This judgement was based on how people treated the “least of their brothers and sisters,” how they gave food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and hospitality to the stranger. The sheep experienced the blessings of eternal life while the goats experienced eternal punishment. (Matt 25:31-46). This parable teaches that the judgement has little to do with our confessions of faith and more connected with the condition of our heart, soul, or character. This is why I listen carefully to see how people have tried to live their lives, how their lives express a concern for family, others, the world, and God. But still the question remains, how bad can a person be before they can no longer enter Heaven? Within the Christian tradition, there is teaching about the unforgivable sin. Interestingly, this unforgivable sin is not tied directly to how sinful or evil a person is. Rather, the unforgivable sin is connected to how hard or resistant our heart is to the influence of God’s spirit (Matt. 12:31-32). If our hearts are totally resistant, then we will not be open to feeling any sense of compassion, grace, new insight, or conviction from God’s spirit whether it comes from God directly or through people around us. If we apply this notion of the unforgivable sin to the process of death, then our destiny in the Afterlife is not determined by God, but by the hardness of our spiritual heart. If this is true, we experience Hell because we resisted going to Heaven. Based on this theory, God is not the judge, but we are our own judge at death and thus determine our destiny. Seeing the judgement process at death in this way provides a helpful lens for me as a spiritual care provider. When I am caring for dying person, I am listening to see if their heart has any sense of longing to experience God’s gracious loving presence. If that longing is evident, then clearly this person will be responsive to God’s spirit at their death. If that longing is missing, then I am curious why and look for ways to understand why this dying person’s heart is so resistant to the sacred with the hope that some healing work can happen that will reawaken this longing. However, the reality is that some people will die very resistant and thus not be open to any experience of God’s compassion and grace at their death. Does that mean these people will experience Hell upon death? The church historically has stated clearly yes but the answer is not so clear for me. Let me explain. At one time, the church saw suicide as an example of a resistant heart, one that was not open to receiving God’s grace. As a result, the church often insisted that the body of this deceased person had to be buried outside the gates of the church cemetery. Today, through advances in psychiatry, psychology, and counselling theory, we now know that suicide has its roots in trauma due to different forms of violence and abuse that has shaped the biology, psychology, and spirituality of one’s brain and soul. This means that people commit suicide due to the emotional and spiritual pain caused by traumatic events that they had little or no control over. In other words, they were victims. Seen in this light, would a gracious loving God, which is the foundation of a Christian understanding of God, allow such a person to suffer in Hell when they have already suffered for years during their earthly life due to trauma beyond their control? I think not. But as psychology is discovering, this connection between trauma and suicide flows also into many other issues in life like addictions, serious mental health conditions, crime, and violent behavior. All the people who are judged as evil often have much trauma and pain in their background. There is a reason why they have become the persons they have become, and many of these reasons are outside their control. Would a gracious loving God condemn all of these people to Hell, and if not, where is the dividing line between those who go to Hell and those who don’t? Suddenly, the unforgivable sin rule no longer makes much sense as a deciding factor between Heaven and Hell. If we see God’s primary character as unconditional eternal love, is there any place for Hell within the black box of the Afterlife? If we understand Hell as a place where “evil” souls suffer for eternity with no hope of transformation and healing, my answer is “no”. Our God is not dualistic in the sense that God loves those who are good and rejects those who are evil. No, our God loves unconditionally everyone regardless of the state of their soul, just like the loving Parent in the Prodigal Son story in the Bible (Luke 15:11-32). If we understand the Afterlife in this way, there is clearly no Hell in this black box. And so my message to those who are dying is that there is nothing to fear from God when we die. This truth echoes the truth noted in last month’s blog when I shared a study of deathbed visions of dying inmates which highlighted that such “bad” people have as many positive deathbed visions as the general population. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Heaven If there is no Hell, then does this mean all people are going to Heaven? Many religious people disagree with the notion of “universal salvation”, that is, all people are “saved” regardless of how good or bad you have lived your life. This rejection of universal salvation is often used as part of the argument that Hell must exist. This concept of “universal salvation” makes a big assumption about the Afterlife black box, that there is only one room in Heaven and that we all experience Heaven the same way when we die. Is that really true? Does this even make sense? Think about it. Will we abruptly become a different person in the Afterlife then we were in our earthly life? Will we immediately think and believe differently after our death then we did during our life? Will we experience life differently when we pass over into Heaven? Will we suddenly become a Christ-like or holy person upon our last breath? It seems to me that who we are in our earthly life follows us, to some extent, into the Afterlife. If that is true, then each of us will experience the Afterlife differently. I have been intrigued by the teaching of Jesus in the Bible where he taught that there are many dwelling places or rooms in God’s house in the Afterlife (John 14: 1-2), not one room but many rooms. It also seems from this text that Jesus has access to all of these rooms for he said he will come and take us to the place he has prepared for each of us (John 14: 3). Thomas, one of his disciples trying to understand Jesus better, asks, “Jesus, we don’t know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus responds, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6). Often, this verse is interpreted in a very narrow way, that we have to mentally believe in the historical person of Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. I understand this teaching of Jesus far more broadly but at the same time more deeply. Jesus is inviting us to live our lives in the same way as he did, believing the same truths as he did, that is, putting on the mind of Christ and becoming like Christ (Phil 2: 1-8) in how we live our lives. If this is true, how many of us, even as Christian leaders, truly live our daily lives in this Christ-like way? I suspect not many of us do this perfectly or even consistently, including myself, and so that begs the question: where will we learn to become a person or soul who is Christ-like in our thinking, experiencing, and being? If we didn’t fully develop our Christ-like nature during our earthly life, will God magically change our mind, heart, and soul upon our death so we become instantaneously Christ-like, or does this growth continue on after our earthly life and during our Afterlife? Maybe Christ takes us to the room that God has chosen for each of us in God’s house based on our soul’s development at the time of our death so that we can continue our journey of growth? If we have lived a life involving much sin and moral evil, we will find ourselves in a room with others who require a lot of spiritual rehabilitation. If we have lived a more holy life, we will discover ourselves in rooms with others who have a similar spiritual maturity. If we begin to see Heaven in this way within the Afterlife black box, then we begin to perceive Heaven having two levels or stages to it. One level of Heaven could be seen as soul graduation, the final room where souls are fully “saved”, healed, whole, enlightened, and at-one-ment with God. Rather than all people arriving in this room, only those people whose earthly lives have revealed well the holy character of the Sacred will find themselves in this heavenly room. The rest of the people will find themselves in the many other rooms in God’s house where we have the opportunity to continue to develop and grow until one day we too will find themselves in this graduation room. I realize that this two-level view of Heaven in the Afterlife black box is foreign to many Christians. And yet, when we look at the metaphysics of other religions, in particular Eastern religions, and transpersonal psychology, we see similar understandings of the Afterlife although with different language, frameworks, and images. However, if we look to the Catholic Christian tradition, we do see the Afterlife black box having a section called purgatory where souls can develop in the Afterlife and eventually graduate into Heaven. Looking Inside the Afterlife Black Box: Rethinking Purgatory Based on the Britannica Encyclopedia, purgatory is “the condition, process, or place of purification or temporary punishment in which, according to medieval Christian and Roman Catholic belief, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for heaven.” Now, “modern Catholic theologians have softened the punitive aspects of purgatory and stress instead the willingness of the dead to undergo purification as preparation for the happiness of heaven” (Wikipedia, “History of Purgatory”). It is here where I find C.S. Lewis’ view that purgatory is not a “temporary Hell’” but a “training camp for Heaven” so useful. “Our soul demands purgatory”, writes Lewis to Malcolm in “Letters to Malcolm, a book of letters to a fictitious friend published just after Lewis died”(2). Lewis says that “the process of purification will normally involve suffering.” “Most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it.” However, he continues, “I don’t think suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less or more... The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much” (3). It is a common belief that suffering happens in purgatory as a punishment by God that causes our souls to change their thinking and ways and grow as spiritual beings. However, in our earthly world, suffering by itself does not bring about healing; suffering only causes us to seek out help for our pain whether it be guilt, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, powerlessness, worthlessness, etc. What I am suggesting is that the suffering and the healing that occurs in purgatory is similar to the suffering and healing I see occuring in my counselling office or spiritual care visit. Yes, we will experience suffering in the Afterlife, but this suffering is suffering we are already experiencing due to the pain we are carrying in our soul. Suffering alone does not create the conditions for healing. Rather, spiritual transformation slowly happens when we find a trusted person who can help us hold our pain and suffering in a compassionate, loving, and gracious way. In Purgatory in the Afterlife, the agents of God who hold and care for our injured souls function in the same way as this caring trusted friend or psychotherapist. When we experience this gracious caring space from another, our soul becomes even more vulnerable allowing for new understanding, healing, purification, and spiritual wholeness to occur. In other words, through that special moment with that trusted friend or counsellor, we experience a healing moment of heaven here on earth, a moment similar to the many healing moments that happen in purgatory. One of the surprises in my work as a Spiritual Care Provider is that many people toward the end of their life are looking for a trusted sacred person to unburden the pain within their soul. As I listen to the stories of palliative people, I am finding that people want to share with me the unresolved traumatic experiences of their life, pain they have carried for many years, but now their soul wants to release this pain so they can settle into a place of greater peace before they die. In other words, they want to begin their purgatory process with me, a process that will continue beyond their death in the black box of the Afterlife. Further Questions and Wonderings Due to my current spiritual care ministry, I now sit with many unanswered questions about the Afterlife black box and purgatory. One involves how the experience of the Afterlife is different than our experience of physical life on Earth. So much of our life experience is tied to our beliefs, emotions, and sensations all based in our physical body. With our physical body including our brain gone, what makes up our experience of our soul in the Afterlife? Another question related to this first one involves how much of a person’s trauma follows them into the Afterlife. We know through scientific research that trauma affects our biology, both the biology of our brain in our skull, but also the major nerve centres found in our heart and gut. (Dr. Gabor Mate's book, "When the Body Says No" is one such example of this research). But we also know that trauma structures the nonphysical mind or soul that interfaces with our physical brain and body through beliefs, emotional patterns, and pain coping strategies. Both the physical body and the soul carry our trauma. When our physical body dies at death, it seems logical that the traumatic patterns embodied in our physical body will disappear with it. This is good news for it means that the intense suffering connected to our past traumas in this life lessens considerably at death. And yet, since our soul is also affected by this trauma, it would seem logical that some aspect of this injury follows us into the Afterlife. I am suspicious that the notion of karma present in Eastern religions is related somehow to these trauma patterns in our soul that still need to be healed and transformed. Another question I have is similar to the last one. As we do spiritual transformational work and healing, we come to realize that our structured personality, shaped by our history and holding environment as a child on earth, is different from the character of our soul. We often assume that they are one and the same, but they are not. Yes, our soul has vulnerabilities and weaknesses that are related to how our personality formed but our soul is far more open, flexible, unstructured, and vulnerable than our personality that formed during our earthly life. One could say that our personality is the outer shell and our soul is the inner centre within this shell. Upon death, does our structured personality follow our soul somehow into the Afterlife, and if so, how, and how does this personality transformed in purgatory? Again, I wonder if the Eastern religious concept of karma is tied to this transformation process. And finally, there is the question of reincarnation, a doctrine that appears in many Eastern religions and and within studies within transpersonal psychology and parapsychology, and yet this doctrine is often avoided in Western religions. (One such example from transpersonal psychology is the research work of Dr. Michael Newton, a counselling psychologist who has focused his research on understanding the afterlife through hynoptic regression. I find his research quite interesting, both in how it affirms what I have written in this blog, but also the many questions it raises about the workings of the Afterlife black box.) In some ways, reincarnation is a natural extension of the process of purgatory. Since the Afterlife is a mysterious black box full of many unknown mysteries, I think we have to accept that the metaphysics of reincarnation could be a real possibility. Questions to Ponder: 1. I have described the Afterlife as a black box full of much mystery. What beliefs do you have about what happens within this black box? What wondering questions do you have? 2. What do you believe about the dynamics of Hell? What parts of my discussion of Hell do you resonate with? What parts do you question or wonder about? 3. What do you believe about the dynamics of Heaven? What parts of my discussion of Heaven do you resonate with? What parts do you question or wonder about? 4. I have compared the dynamics of Purgatory to the dynamics of healing that happen within a therapeutic relationship with a trusted friend or counsellor. Do you resonate with this idea or do you question it? 5. How do you imagine your sense of being in the Afterlife in relationship to your sense of being as a human on Earth? How will you be the same? How will you be different? Footnotes (1) https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zdhmtv4/revision/9#:~:text=Many%20Christians%20believe%20that%20all,sin%20will%20go%20to%20Hell (2) https://aleteia.org/2018/08/02/c-s-lewis-tells-you-why-you-should-like-purgatory/ (3) https://aleteia.org/2018/08/02/c-s-lewis-tells-you-why-you- should-like-purgatory/ Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator As people approach the last days of their life, I am surprised by how many people have what are called Deathbed Visions (DBVs). I remember visiting a man who was dying in a hospital bed in his living room. He was still quite mentally alert and bright and yet he told me about how he was seeing his deceased mother and grandparents. These visions brought him much comfort and totally removed his fears of dying. A couple of days later he died. How do we make sense of such mysterious experiences? As a Christian, the Bible shares little about deathbed visions. The closest example I could find is the story of early church leader Stephen who, before or during his stoning death, saw “the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7: 55) and upon his death said “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7: 59). At a more general level, the author of Hebrews writes how we, as followers of Christ, are surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12:1). In this Biblical context, this cloud of witnesses refers to the major people of faith highlighted in the Old Testament, but within our context, this term could also include our key ancestors of faith, like our parents or grandparents, who are no longer with us but we still treasure and love, and look to for inspiration and support. However, the general phenomenon of visions is one that appears often in the Bible, and their source is often attributed to God. In fact, both the Old and New Testaments talk about a time when God “will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young people shall see visions, and your old people shall dream dreams” (Joel 2:28; Acts 2:17). As a result, I have come to see deathbed visions as important ways that God or the Creator of All helps people prepare for their dying. To help me understand these DBVs better, I have looked to two main researchers, David Kessler and Dr. Marilyn Mendoza. David Kessler, a well-known expert on grief and modern-day thanatologist, wrote the book, Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms, a book based on his study of DBVs. Dr. Marilyn Mendoza is clinical instructor in the psychiatry department at Tulane University Medical Center and a private practice psychologist specializing in bereavement. She is also the author of We Do Not Die Alone. In this blog, I plan to summarize some of their key learnings. In his book, Kessler notes that “those outside the hospice and end-of-life medical establishments have long minimized and discounted the experience of dying; and they often attribute deathbed visions to pain medication, fever, or lack of oxygen to the brain” (p. 2). And yet Kessler notes, that within the US Court of Law, deathbed confessions are assumed to be true, especially in deciding a murder case (p. 13). An interesting contrast to how the experiences of the dying are often held by others. While the narratives around dying people being visited by deceased relatives has been around a long time, it first appeared in scientific literature in 1924 in an article written by physics professor, William Barrett (p. 5). The story that appeared involved a mother who bled to death after Barrett’s wife, an obstetrician, delivered her healthy baby. Just before she died, his mother had a DBV where she saw and talked to her deceased father about whether to stay with her baby or go to her father in the Afterlife. Along with her deceased father, she also saw her aunt Vida, which puzzled her for she believed her aunt was still alive. At first, Barrett was skeptical about this DBV but when he learned that this mother’s Aunt Vida had died three weeks earlier, unknown to the mother, he realized that this vision could not be a hallucination (p. 6-7). There was no explanation for this mother’s puzzlement except that the DBV was real. In studying these DBVs, Kessler has noted that there are three kinds of deathbed experiences: visions of deceased people and religious figures, the dying person’s need to pack for a trip, and the dying person’s sense of being in a crowed rooms. Kessler focuses three chapters in his book on the visions that involve dying people seeing family members who are no longer alive or religious characters. In reading these stories, he shares many DBVs that feel very real, either due to the detail people experienced, or due to circumstances in the visions that could only be experienced if the visions were true. Some of these visions are shared by doctors and nurses who cared for dying persons. Others are from professional licensed counsellors who have walked with dying people as they prepare for their death. While most of these DBVs involve deceased loved ones appearing to those who are dying, many of these vision include angels, the angel of death, and other religious beings like Christ or Mary. Dying persons find much comfort from having these visions and their fears of dying often evaporate. Marilyn Mendoza has found similar calming affects when people have DBVs. Here is one such example: Mendoza has found from her own study of these experiences that 57 percent of the visions were of deceased relatives. The second most frequently appearing figures in DBVs are angels or religious icons, even with people who are not religious as this next story illustrates. (//www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/understanding-grief/201610/deathbed-visions-part-i) The fact that this non-religious man had a Christian DBV only reflects, I believe, how his mind has been shaped by the Western Christian culture he grew up in. I went looking for scientific studies of DBVs in other cultures and found an extensive 2016 study that occurred within Japan. This "nationwide questionnaire survey was conducted involving 3964 family members of cancer patients who died at hospitals, palliative care units, and home" in Japan. In reviewing over 2000 responses, the researchers found 21% of these responses reported DBVs, and of these visions, God or Buddha appeared in 9.7% of them (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27660082/). A second common deathbed experience is that of preparing for a trip. Kessler shares the story of Mark who was dying at home. When he became bedbound, his family would share memories and tell him what a wonderful father and husband he had been. As time went on, he slept more and more. Hours before he died, he opened his eyes and asked his wife, “Is everything ready?” Not knowing what to say, she responded, “Mark, we are all here.” “Are my bags packed?” “What bags, dear?” “The bags for my trip—it’s almost time” (p. 116). Kessler notes that this common deathbed experience can take many forms. For some, it is about “packing their bags”; for others, it is getting their tickets, while still for others, it is about “preparing themselves to go” (p. 117). For us who are witnessing, “these trips may seem to be all about leaving, but for the dying, they may be more about arriving” (p. 118). The final deathbed experience that Kessler notes is that many dying people find themselves in a crowded room. Here is one example from many that Kessler shares. While talking to an 80 year old man who was palliative, the man described this experience: . To help the man understand why there were so many people in his DBV, Kessler got the man to name all the people who had died during his lifetime: his wife, parents, in-laws, work colleague, a student who had died 20 years before in an accident, grandparents, etc. These were the ones he was aware of but what of all the students you taught during your 40 years of teaching and left a positive impression with? (p. 132-134) So far, all DBVs we have discussed have been positives one. What about negative ones? As Mendoza discovered in researching for her book, “We Do Not Die Alone” on DBVs, not all such visions are positive. Here is one such example she found. (http://www.eternea.org/PDF/AngolaPrisonStudy-MarilynAMendoza.pdf). Such distressing DBVs are rarely documented either because they are uncommon or because family members are reluctant to share experiences of their dying loved ones. “It is estimated that approximately 2% have distressing experiences”(http://www.eternea.org/PDF/AngolaPrison Study-MarilynAMendoza.pdf). To get a better sense of these distressing DBVs, Mendoza did a study of DBVs within the Angola Prison, one of 17 prisons that has a hospice program. “Angola is a maximum security prison that has been called the bloodiest prison in America. It houses 5000+ men whose crimes range from murder, rape, armed robbery to drug offenses. The majority of men who come to Angola die there. Prisoners, like many of us, not only have a fear of dying alone but have an even greater fear of dying in prison." She interviewed 29 hospice inmate volunteers, that is, “inmates <who> go through a rigorous screening and training process before they begin working with the dying.” From this study, she discovered that distressing DBVs among inmates was as rare as it is among the freed general population. The study revealed “that the dying saw mothers, grandmothers, sons, fathers and other family members. The dying spoke of people waiting for them and calling them to come home. They told the caretakers about waiting for a bus and walking through a gate. One even spoke of seeing family coming to get him in a Cadillac. The dying also spoke of angels, beautiful gardens, gates and the Light” (http://www.eternea.org/PDF/AngolaPrisonStudy-MarilynAMendoza.pdf). (Picture from Angola's Hospice in Louisania State Penitentiary, USA)
Knowing that DBVs are common, I find this knowledge helpful in my role as a spiritual care provider with those who are dying. Here are some questions for you to ponder that I have used to help dying person's ponder what they might see if they have a deathbed vision: 1. What is your response to deathbed visions? What is the basis of your skepticism or faith? What has caused you to question or embrace the sacred mysteries of life? How does the experiences of DBVs affect your fears around dying? 2. If you were to have a deathbed vision, what deceased loved ones do you hope to see? If you saw them, what would you say to them? 3. Who are the people that you have made a positive impact in their life? Who are the people who have already died, that you may see in a DVB or in the afterlife? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator 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 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 Within our world, at many different levels, I see the rise of hatred everywhere. I preceive it throughout our world in all the divisions, conflicts, and extremisms present. I observe it in our country as we struggle with the realities of COVID and climate change. I notice it in my professional work in the health care field as we deal with health care limitations and difficult clients. I witness it arising within myself when I feel judged or dismissed by others including palliative clients I visit in the community. Unless we come to understand the dynamics of our hatred and what is driving it, this hatred will someday consume and destroy us. In this blog, I want to explore the dynamic of hatred and how we can tame it with love. Last month at the Canadian Association of Spiritual Care Annual Meeting, I heard Little Brown Bear (Ernest Matton), a respected Metis elder, share a story of the two wolves similar to the following. “An old Cherokee Indian chief was teaching his grandson about life. He said, ‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he told the young boy, ‘a fight between two wolves. The Dark one is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.’ He continued, ’The Light Wolf is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you grandson…and inside of every other person on the face of this earth.’ The grandson ponders this for a moment and then asked, ‘Grandfather, which wolf will win?’” (//www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-wolf-you-feed-jean-michel-wu/) Then Little Brown Bear asked me directly in the Zoom video session consisting of 40 screens which caught me by surprise. “Gord, which wolf will win?” Thankfully, I knew this story and answered, “The one we feed.” The reason we have so much hatred evident in our culture is because more and more of us are feeding the Dark Wolf within us rather than the Light Wolf. Why is that? Within the Diamond Approach, which I have followed for 15 years, I have learned that hatred arises from our experience of powerlessness. Almaas, the founder of the Diamond Approach states it this way, “Hatred arises when you feel powerless, for it is an attempt to eliminate the frustration by annihilating it. You want to annihilate whatever problem you have, whatever is in your way, whether it is an inner or outer frustration. You want to make it disappear” (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 328). I have found this connection between hatred and powerlessness quite profound. Think of all the ways we have experienced powerlessness during this time of COVID. Think of those who have gotten COVID and found themselves in hospital fighting for their lives and many times losing...and their families and friends who have supported them. Or the people who are living with long-haul COVID where they live with the affects of COVID for months, maybe even years. COVID has made all of these people powerless and so they will naturally feel hatred toward COVID. But the hatred connected to COVID goes far deeper than that. Think of all the businesses who have been affected, by COVID, who had to close their doors for months due to the health restrictions imposed by our government, and are only now beginning to open their doors and move slowly toward full operations. For some like the travel industry or office rental industry, it will be months, possibly years before their businesses return to normal. And how many people have lost wages due to their work places closing and now struggle to pay their mortgage or rent. All of these many people feel totally helpless, powerless. No wonder there is so much hatred toward government policies and health care restrictions and the science behind these rules, even though they are necessary. But the hatred is even more wide spread. Think of the powerlessness we felt, and still feel to some extent, in living with the existence of COVID. Our whole way of life in Canada was upended. And then the vaccinations finally came but not everyone wanted to take them for various reasons. Those who are against vaccines feel powerless as their jobs are threatened by government or business rules requiring all workers to be vaccinated. No wonder they feel hatred toward those creating, enforcing, and supporting these rules. And yet, those who are vaccinated feel helpless when anti-vaccers will not take the vaccinations. Their hope for a return to normal life is threatened. No wonder they feel hatred toward anti-vaccers. All because of powerlessness. Now COVID is just one source of powerlessness in our world, one reason why we feel so much hatred. But there are many other issues in our world and in life in general that are huge or beyond our personal control like:
But there is another dynamic tied to hatred that is often not recognized, and it is tied to the aboriginal teachings about the two wolves and which one we feed. Do you remember what the purpose of hatred is based on the Diamond Approach’s understanding? As I quoted earlier, hatred ...”is an attempt to eliminate the frustration by annihilating it.” Lets explore a simple way we often express hatred with the goal of removing that which frustrates us or threatens our sense of well being. This simple expression of hatred is also a common way we feed the Dark Wolf. How of many of you have experienced someone dismiss or ignore you, not take you seriously, or totally criticize something that you appreciated? Do you like such occurrences? No, we “hate” such experiences, at least I do. I use this word “hate” intentionally for that is exactly what I feel when someone dismisses me, but it turns out that this is a universal experience. We experienced that personal act of being dismiss as an act of hatred against us. When this happens, we have a choice to make based on the aboriginal tale. We can either feed the Dark Wolf or we can feed the Light Wolf. When we feed the Dark Wolf, we will express our hatred right back at the offender through dismissive conduct (bully behaviour, rejection, criticism, flippant comments) or in more subtle ways (ridicule about them with others, gossip, despising thoughts about them). Now, when I suggest to people that they are experiencing hatred, they often quickly deny it for hatred is seen as something no one should feel. It happened again this week when I suggested that a client was possibly experiencing hatred. He quickly denied it. He equated hatred with killing or abusing or bullying someone or structural oppression, like what we see in Israel where Jewish Settlers dismiss the legal rights and existence of Palestinians. However, that is hatred in its more severe forms. This is what happens to hatred when we feed our Dark Wolf for a long time. This denial dynamic is also what happens when we “hate” our experience of hatred. When we hate "hate", we deny its existence, and as a result, this hatred festers unconsciously underground within the psyche of our individual soul or our national soul. Over time, this hatred becomes more powerful and structured. Even then, when this hatred becomes more evident for outside people to see, the temptation within our culture is still to hate these acts of hatred, that is, to deny that these acts are as bad as other people think. I believe this denial is part of the dynamic right now around how hard it is for we, as Canadians, to own the acts of hatred that occurred within our nation's painful history with First Nations people. It is becoming clear what it means to feed the Dark Wolf. But what does it mean to feed the Light Wolf when we feel dismissed and notice hatred emerging within us? It means to “love” the feeling of dismissal and hatred. In reading this, you probably asking, “Gord, how can anyone "love" the feeling of rejection and the associated emotion of hatred?” Often, people reduce love to the feeling of love, but love is more than an emotion. Within the Christian tradition, the ground of all love is agape love, an unconditional God-like love, a love that keeps loving regardless of what is being loved. This means that true love cannot contain any rejection within it. To feed the Light Wolf is to practice this type of love with all our experiences of life including our experiences of being dismissed and the hatred that arises from them. To love our experience of hatred means to validate its existence for this hatred arose for some valid reason. One of the first things we will notice when we love hatred is that hatred arises from our experiences of powerlessness. So, if we want hatred to disappear, we have to address the dynamics that are making us feel powerless and others powerless. This connection between powerlessness and hatred has help me understand better some of the dynamics currently playing out around COVID in our country including those who are anti-vaccers. Seeing this connection to helplessness has caused me to extend more grace toward people who are expressing hatred in our world. I want to understand more the roots of the powerlessness behind their hatred. Many times the roots of their powerlessness has a long history to it within a person's life, a history that has its beginnings within childhood powerless experiences often involving trauma. Nurturing this Light Wolf means we seek to validate people and their experiences whenever possible, instead of dismissing them which is what happens if we feed the Dark Wolf. Here I have found the practice of “yes, and...” a helpful guide when interacting with someone I hold different views. In practicing this discipline, I first share ways I appreciate what they value but then add something that is important to me that I think could also be relevant to consider. I run across this connection between love and validation in many places in my work. This past month I have been digging deeper into Internal Family System (IFS), an evidence-based psychotherapy that helps people deal with past trauma in their lives. One of its principles is that every behavior, regardless of how bad or painful it is, is a coping tactic around trauma. In other words, every behavior, even cutting or suicide ideation, can be validated as a managing pattern around traumatic pain. It may not be the best coping approach now, but at one time in that person’s life when it first appeared, it was the best survival strategy available. In fact, that handling pattern may be why this person is still alive. Furthermore, IFS teaches that the validation of this behavior is key to the healing of this person’s painful traumatic past. No transformation is possible without this compassionate validation. Again, we see that validation is a key aspect of feeding the Light Wolf. How would our world change if we perceived people’s unhelpful behaviors, like rejecting authorities that demand people take vaccinations, in this same gracious light? While their managing tactics may be causing our culture much grief today, this coping pattern may have been a key survival strategy that made it possible for them to survive, maybe even thrive, despite their challenging past? It is only when we validate people’s experiences and coping patterns that understanding deepens opening the door for further transformation for all people involved, including ourselves. I just discovered today, as I was working on this blog, that there is a second Cherokee version of this two wolf fable. This version captures what it means to love our Dark Wolf inside of us. Instead of ending with the words, “The wolf you feed wins”, the Cherokee Chief says to his grandson, “If you feed them right, they both win” and then story goes on... The Grandfather continues, “You see, if I only choose to feed the Light wolf, the Dark Wolf will be hiding around every corner waiting for me to become distracted or weak and jump to get the attention he craves. He will always be angry and will always fight the Light Wolf.” “But if I acknowledge him, he is happy and the Light Wolf is happy and we all win. For the Dark Wolf has many qualities — tenacity, courage, fearlessness, strong-willed and great strategic thinking–that I have need of at times. These are the very things the Light Wolf lacks. But the Light Wolf has compassion, caring, strength and the ability to recognize what is in the best interest of all.” “You see, son, the Light Wolf needs the Dark Wolf at his side. To feed only one would starve the other and they will become uncontrollable. To feed and care for both means they will serve you well and do nothing that is not a part of something greater, something good, something of life.” “Feed them both and there will be no more internal struggle for your attention. And when there is no battle inside, you can listen to the voices of deeper knowing that will guide you in choosing what is right in every circumstance” (//www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-wolf-you-feed-jean-michel-wu/). The next time you feel hatred arising within your heart, you have an important choice to make: do I feed the Dark Wolf or do I feed the Light Wolf? The truth is, as the second Cherokee teaches, that if you feed the Light Wolf properly, both the Light Wolf and Dark Wolf receive the love and validation they need, and thus they eventually become friends to each other working together in harmony.
Questions to Ponder: 1. What are the different ways you have felt powerless during this time of COVID? In what ways has that powerlessness caused you to experience and express hatred (dismiss those we disagree with, despised them, etc.)? 2. How have you fed the Dark Wolf within you? How has that led the Dark Wolf to become stronger within you? What are the different ways you reject or dismiss this experience of hatred within you, and cause it to go underground? 3. How have you fed the Light Wolf within you? When have you shown validation and love to the Dark Wolf part of you? How has that changed your experience of your hatred and those you tend to hate? What are the gifts that have arisen from your Dark Wolf part when it is fed with love and validation? For many decades now, the focus of grief has been on closure, acceptance and moving on. As a result, there has been a hesitancy by many to admit years later that they still have emotional ties to their loved ones who have died. In the 1996, the academic book “Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief” authored by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman was quietly released (Death Education, Aging and Health Care), and it brought a revolutionary stance to grief work. Instead of seeing grief as acceptance and moving on, they “suggested a new paradigm, rooted in the observation of healthy grief that did not resolve by detaching from the deceased, but rather in creating a new relationship with the deceased” (https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/). In this blog, I want to explore this new theory and how it adds a helpful relational component to the grief process. Before this understanding of grief arose, the process of grief was often seen as a linear emotional progression from intense grief to a place of more inner peace. Kubler-Ross’ grief model of 5 stages (denial, anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance) or other similar models often were seen in this way. While I think there is some truth to this progressive model of grief, it didn’t take seriously the relationship dynamics behind a person’s bereavement. Here is a 30 second summary of the Continuing Bonds model taken from “What’s Your Grief” website, a website dedicated to grief education. Litsa Williams (Feb, 2014) describes the Continuing Bonds model in this way” “under this model, when your loved one dies, grief isn’t about working through a linear process that ends with ‘acceptance’ or a ‘new life’, where you have moved on or compartmentalized your loved one’s memory. Rather, when a loved one dies you slowly find ways to adjust and redefine your relationship with that person, allowing for a continued bond with that person that will endure, in different ways and to varying degrees, throughout your life. This relationship is not unhealthy, nor does it mean you are not grieving in a normal way. Instead, the continuing bonds theory suggests that this is not only normal and healthy, but that an important part of grief is continuing ties to loved ones in this way. Rather than assuming detachment as a normal grief response, continuing bonds considers natural human attachment even in death” (https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/). In discovering this model of grief this spring, it helped me explain something that happened in my family last fall. As some of you might know, my two hemophiliac brothers died from HIV/AIDS, Jamie in 1992 and Kevin in 1997. When Jamie died, my oldest child was 4 years old, my middle child was 8 months old, and my youngest child had yet to born. Five years later when Kevin died, my youngest child was 2 years old. To my surprise, my youngest two children brought to my attention last fall that they were quite bothered by the fact that we, as a family, never talked about my two brothers. To them, it seemed like we, as a family, had purposely swept away the memories of my brothers and kept them from knowing each of them. In response to them, I said that I, as their father, didn’t want them to be negatively impacted by the painful tragedy of my family, and so I had put this painful past in the past. I also believed back then when my brothers died that this was the goal of grief, to get to the place where I could emotionally let go of the pain connected to the loss of my brothers, that is, essentially have no ongoing relationship with my brothers. Upon hearing my children’s desire to know their uncles, I contacted my parents and they were thrilled to have the chance again to share stories about Kevin and Jamie. For our Christmas family gathering last year, my parents brought down the photo albums and I found old family videos and we spent many hours with my three adult children reminiscing about my brothers. Instead of being a time of painful grief, it was a time of remembering and cherishing my brothers through the many memories we had of them. It was a time to reawaken my relationship and my family’s relationship to my brothers. I now wonder how we might have grieved differently over these many years if we had known it was acceptable and normal for us to maintain bonds with my brothers after their deaths. I found it interesting how this summer my parents brought up the idea of doing something special in memory of the brothers. This made me realized that my parents still had a continuing bond with their sons and my brothers despite them being dead so many years. With next year being special death anniversaries, 30 years for Jamie and 25 years for Kevin, we decided to plant a memorial tree fall with a special plaque near their graves last month. With the emergence of the “continuing bonds” theory of grief, I have come to realize that we need to understand Kubler-Ross's framework of grief differently. Instead of seeing grief in terms of emotional stages, we should see grief in terms of shifts that occur in our relationship with our deceased loved one. Lets review Kubler-Ross’s model through this relationship framework. The first aspect of grief within Kubler-Ross’s model is denial. Seen through a relationship lens, this means that the grieving person is denying that their relationship with their loved one is changing. I see this denial in my palliative care chaplaincy work when a family member refuses to accept that their loved one is physically dying. After death, we have to be careful about how we understand this denial stage. I am suspicious many people have been accused of being in denial when in reality they are rejecting our culture’s belief that death means our relationship with our loved one needs to end. This is the belief that the “continuing bonds” model of grief challenges. While we can no longer have a physical-based relationship with our deceased loved one, we can still have a nonphysical relationship with them based on our feelings, thoughts, memories, etc. of them. In fact, it is necessary that we do maintain our “continuing bond” with them for grief work is a relational process with them. Kubler-Ross’s model suggests that eventually, as we spend less time in denying our loved one is physically dying or dead, we begin to spend more time experiencing anger. This anger can have many relational elements to it. One key aspect of anger is that we are angry at God/Life/Death for we don't want our relationship with our loved one to change. This anger may be caused by the painful hole in our psyche left by our loved one’s death, a hole that our loved one filled all our life, the person who always praised us or who was our rock whom we depended on. This anger maybe tied to unfinished business due to unforgiven hurts and or promises left undone. This anger can only be resolved through us maintaining a “continuing bond” with our deceased loved one and working it through. Psychotherapists who use the empty chair technique within the Gestalt theory of counselling are using this contining bond between their client and their deceased loved one as a way for the grieving person to process their anger with them. As we process our anger, and relational shifts happen, Kubler-Ross suggests that we begin to spend time in the bargaining stage of grief. With anticipatory grief (grief before death), we find ourselves bargaining with God or life with the hope that we can change our loved one's future. When we are experiencing bargaining in our grief process after the death of our loved one, bargaining involves us processing our "if only" questions driven by our guilt. "If I had done this, my loved one would never have died." "If I had spend more time with my loved one, he would never have died alone." "How I wish I had never had said those words in anger when we talked last." Again, this bargaining stage is really a relational task, aspects in our relationship with our deceased loved ones that we need to process after their death. After we work through aspects of our guilt, we begin to experience the despair component of grief. I often equate the emotion of powerlessness with this stage of grief. In terms of our relationship with God or Life, we realize that we are powerless over death and how death happens. In terms of relationship with our deceased loved one, we believe we are powerless to change our past relationship with them, and what happened within that relationship. We also believe we cannot change the fact of the painful holes in our lives that had been filled by our loved one because they are no longer physically here. Nor can we insist they do their part in fixing the unfinish business that we have with them. Within our relationships with God/Life and our deceased loved ones, we feel lots of despair due to our beliefs that we are powerlessness to change anything. It is here at this place of despair that the Continuing Bonds theory of grief opens up a way forward in processing our pain with our deceased loved ones. While our loved one is no longer physically here, we still have an active non-physical relationship with them through memories, feelings, thoughts, sensations, etc. Once we see that we still have a relationship with our deceased loved one, we realize that we are no longer powerless to change this relationship. Yes, they are no longer physically with us, but as the Continuing Bond theory of grief attests, they are still with us through a nonphysical relationship, a relationship that has the possibility of change, a relationship that can be healed from the pain within it. As we think about or talk to our deceased loved one, write letters to them, journal about them, or relate to them with the help of a counsellor, our non-physical relationship with them begins to transform. After we have sort through the various relational dynamics connected to the despair stage of grief, Kubler-Ross suggests that we eventually spend more and more time in the place of acceptance. This acceptance is not a sign that our relationship to our deceased loved one has ended. Rather, our non-physical relationship with them has changed so that it carries less and less pain and we are able to relate to them with more love, gratitude, and peacefulness. One way to understand this continuing bond with our loved one in this acceptance state is to compare this relationship to a friendship of someone we have not seen for a long time. When our friend moves away to a new community, we still have a non-phyiscal relationship with them through our thoughts, feelings and memories of them, but these fall into the background. However, once this friend visits us, we find that we can start up right where we left off and continue the rich or complex relationship we had before. I see these continuing bonds with our deceased loved ones working in the same way. Things happen that trigger memories of our loved one and we find ourselves right there again in the present moment relating to our loved one. It may be painful memories, pleasurable memories, or feelings of gratitude. But after a while, the experience of our continuing bond with our loved one fades into the background in the same way our life returns to normal after a good friend heads back to their home. Within Kubler-Ross’s model of grief, problematic grief arises when people become stuck in one of the states of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, or despair. Within the continuing bonds framework of grief, problematic grief is tied to when our relationship with our deceased loved one becomes locked or frozen in time. A healthy relationship with a loved one, while reasonably static, still undergoes change over time. This change happens because our loved one changes or because we change or a change happens in the relationship, like a physical move. Undoubtedly, death is experienced as a big change in a relationship. However, instead of our relationship being based on a connection between two physical beings, it now must shift to a relationship between a human and a nonphysical presence. The temptation in any of the grief stages is that we become stuck here, that is, our continuing bonds with our loved one and God/life become frozen, that is static and thus lose their dynamic nature. For this frozenness to be transformed, it requires relational work to happen between both parties in the relationship, between ourselves and our nonphysical loved ones or God/life. This is why the Continuing Bonds view of grief is so important. It teaches that grief work is relational, not just cognitive or emotional, and that a relational approach is necessary for grief work. With the rise of the Continuing Bonds model of grief, professional grief counsellors now help people explore how they can nurture their relationship with their loved one now that their loved one is dead. Here are some ways Litsa Williams suggests we can continue our relationship with our deceased loved one:
Questions to ponder:
Here are five blogs from the "Whats Your Grief" website that discuss the Continuing Bonds theory of grief. https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-shifting-the-grief-paradigm/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/16-practical-tips-continuing-bonds/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/grief-concept-care-continuing-bonds/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-grief-journal-exercise/ https://whatsyourgrief.com/continuing-bonds-would-have-loved-this/ Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
If we, as humans, are children of God, how can we think, say, and do terrible things? This is a very good question, and one that philosophers and religious people have been wrestling with for thousands of years. This past summer I read John Hick’s excellent book, "The Fifth Dimension" (2004), that “deftly weaves together a case for the existence of a bigger, more complex picture of reality in which a fifth -- spiritual dimension – plays a central role” (book cover). Within that book, he introduced me to the philosophical term “privation”, a term that I had never heard before. This term was used by St. Augustine, a prominent Christian theologian and philosopher of the 5th century, to explain the origin of evil, how evil could arise in a world created by God. This concept of privation captured for me a fresh way to understand the fallen nature of humanity, and explained how we, as humans created in God’s image, can do such terrible things. Let me explain. Evil has always been a major theological issue for God-based or theistic religions. How can a God, who is understood as unconditionally loving and good, create a world in which evil exist? St. Augustine rejected the notion that evil existed independently, that is, something that God created. Rather, he proposed that the reality of evil is the privation of good, or a corruption of humanity's Divine nature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy). To help you understand what privation means, let me provide an image. Two essential qualities of the Earth’s sun are light and heat. Our sun is constantly providing light and heat to our planet. However, what happens when clouds appear in the sky and block this light and heat from affecting our world? The brightness of light and level of heat that get to the earth’s surface lessens and we experience dullness and coolness. And if the sun’s rays are completely blocked, like what happens each night, we experience darkness and coldness. The experience of darkness and coldness arise on Earth from the privation of the sun’s light and heat. This is how St. Augustine understood the reality of evil arises within humanity. He saw evil as the privation of God’s goodness, that is, evil arises when the goodness within humanity’s Divine nature becomes block or “corrupted”. “Both moral and natural evil occurs, Augustine argued, owing to an evil use of free will” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy). “He believed that this evil will, present in the human soul, was a corruption of the will given to humans by God making suffering a just punishment for the sin of humans” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy). However, this privation theory of evil by St. Augustine’s never gained prominence within Christian theology. I suspect today most Christians, even pastors, have never heard of this theory of evil. I don’t remember it being part of my theological training. However, when I encountered Augustine’s theory of privation in John Hick’s book, who is not a supporter of this theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy), it struck a chord with me, although I would frame it differently. Rather than evil arising from the privation of God’s goodness, I see bad actions arising from the privation of God’s Divine nature that exists within all humans. Privation, understood in this way, explains the existence of evil and fallen human nature quite well. The reason this concept of privation spoke deeply to me is because it echoes of the Theory of Holes as understood within the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology developed by A. H. Almaas. The Diamond Approach has spiritual work schools throughout the world, one of them based in Toronto that I have been a member of since its inception in 2006. I have been working with the Theory of Holes for years now, both within my personal work but also in my spiritual direction and counselling ministry. Let me summarize the Theory of Holes for it illustrates quite well how the process of privation works. The Theory of Holes A hole within the Diamond Approach “is nothing but the absence of a certain part of our essence. It could be the loss of love, loss of value, loss of capacity for contact, loss of strength, any of the qualities of Essence” (https://www.diamondapproach.org/public-page/theory-holes). For example, “when you are cut off from your value, the actual experience is a sense that there is a hole inside that feels empty. You feel a sense of deficiency, a sense of inferiority,” a sense of lack of value, worthlessness, the opposite to your experience of essential value (www.diamondapproach.org/public-page/theory-holes). Since this loss of value is hard to live with, “you want to fill this hole with value from the outside. You may try to use approval, praise, whatever. You try to fill the hole with acquired value" (https://www.diamondapproach.org/ public-page/theory-holes). Many times, we get holes filled through our relationship with others. For example, “you may feel valued because this person appreciates you. You don’t know consciously that you’re filling the hole with their appreciation. But when you are with that person, you feel valuable, and unconsciously you feel the other person is responsible for your value. Whatever this person is giving you feels like a part of you; it is part of the fullness that you experience. Except that the value you now feel is dependent on the presence of the other person” (https://www. diamondapproach.org/ public-page/theory-holes). However, at the unconscious level, the unconscious part of your soul “does not see as separate that part of the person that makes you feel valuable; you see it as part of you. When the person dies or the relationship ends, you don’t feel that you’re losing that person; you feel you’re losing whatever is filling the hole. You experience the loss of a part of yourself. It feels like you’re being cut and something is being taken out of you. You may feel as if you lost your heart, your security, your strength, your will—whatever the person fulfilled for you. When you lose a person close to you, you feel whatever hole that person has filled” (https://www. diamondapproach.org/ public-page/theory-holes). The pain associated with losing whatever is filling our holes is very painful, so painful that we do whatever is necessary to avoid this pain or take away this pain. These coping behaviors are no longer driven by our essential nature but by our egoic structured nature that has developed within our soul to help us cope with the pain from the holes in our Divine nature. Now you can begin to see how evil or immoral behavior can arise from us, as humans, who all have a Divine nature. We do evil as a way to cope with or avoid the pain and suffering due to holes in our soul. Almaas notes that “these holes originated during childhood, partly as a result of traumatic experiences or conflicts with the environment. Perhaps your parents did not value you. They didn’t treat you as if your wishes or presence were important, or act in ways that let you know that you mattered. They ignored your essential value. Because your value was not seen or acknowledged, you got cut off from that part of you; what was left was a hole” (https: //www. diamondapproach.org/public-page/theory-holes). One could say that each hole, caused by the egoic structures from our childhood, is an example of the privation process. Each hole prevents us from experiencing fully a certain aspect of our human Divine nature. Instead, because of that hole, we experience the lack of that Divine quality usually felt as a deficiency or the opposite of the original essential aspect. To help you comprehend more fully how this is true, I plan to explore how the dynamics of privation affect some key elements of human Divine nature, namely compassion, strength, truth, and will. The Privation of Divine Compassion As I indicated in my last blog, the experience of Divine Compassion naturally happens in response to the experience of pain and suffering. As a child, we are quite sensitive to pain, both the pain of others and our own. It does not take much pain to cause a child to tear up, a sign of Divine compassion arises. As we, adults, hold the physical and emotional pain of others or ourselves, we sense this Divine Compassion emerging as our soul softens, becomes more vulnerable and feels tenderness and caring. Tears may also appear. However, if our childhood holding environment didn’t hold our tears well, then the process of privation would start occurring around the quality of Divine compassion. Maybe we were scolded for crying as a child. Maybe we were told, “big boys don’t cry.” Maybe there was no one available to hold and respond to our tears and so we learned that it was pointless to cry. If this was the case, then we developed beliefs and coping patterns that would keep us from crying, softening, and becoming vulnerable. Over time, we would slowly lose full access to our compassionate Divine nature, and a hole would exist to some extent where Divine compassion would naturally surface. Not able to access our own Divine compassion, two dynamics often happen. One is that we often become dependent on others to provide us the compassion we can’t feel ourselves. We marry a very caring spouse or surround ourselves with compassionate friends. With this dependency in place, you can imagine the reactive behaviors that occur when our compassionate caregivers disappear due to death or relationship break-ups. Two, the opposite experience of compassion could begin to surface in us when we see someone in pain. Instead of being sensitive to the suffering of others, we become indifferent, critical, and judgemental toward them. We tend to downplay and ignore downtrodden people rather than allow ourselves to feel their pain. The Privation of Divine Strength Divine strength, like Divine compassion, also happens naturally except in this case it occurs when we see injustice or unfairness happening, or when truth is dismissed or not heard which is usually at the root of injustice and unfairness. This Divine strength first appears as the experience of anger. As we stay present to our anger, we soon see how our anger transforms into a Divine strength that causes us to speak our truth or the “truth” and act in ways that protect ourselves or others who are being be hurt by injustices. However, very few of us had caregivers in our childhood environment that held our anger well. Instead, as children, we were often scolded by angry parents for our inappropriate anger, sometimes excessively. As a result, most of us develop unhealthy beliefs and coping patterns around our anger, and again these ego structures formed in opposite unhelpful directions. For some of us, because of our fear of anger, these ego structures block the flow of anger and Divine strength in our lives and we struggle a lot with the opposite of strength, namely weakness. Every time, we find ourselves dismissed or treated unjustly, instead of feeling Divine strength arise, we unconsciously bury this anger and experience profound weakness and thus find ourselves unable to confront the bad things that are happening to us. Because of our struggle with weakness, we may seek out friends who are more in touch with their anger and Divine strength and thus protect us. For others, we saw how rage can be quite powerful through dominating others. So we came to believe that rage was a powerful weapon to use, especially when we felt wronged or hurt in some way. However, this rage often broke relationships or got us in trouble. Furthermore, and unexpectedly, we found ourselves struggling with weakness for we found ourselves often unable to control our anger. The Privation of Divine Truth Divine truth arises as we learn to listen to our mind, heart, gut and body in the Present Moment. Now, as children, we were sensitive to the different thoughts in our minds, feelings in our heart, and sensations in our gut and body. At first, we didn't have words or understanding for all of our experiences. This is a key purpose of healthy parenting, to help children find language so they can begin to understand their experience in the Present Moment, their thoughts, feelings, and sensations in their body and soul. This is the process of helping people develop their sense of Divine truth, that sense of knowingness around what is true for them. However, by the time we become adults, we struggle in knowing how to discern Divine truth. We have many holes or places of privaton around Truth. There are many reasons for our inability to discern Truth. One involves how truth has been reduced to knowledge within our Western culture, knowledge that we learn from others about the world and how it works. By seeing truth as knowledge, we learn to gather tons of knowledge from the Internet, books, education, and others, but how do we apply this knowledge, sometimes conflicting knowledge, to our own lives? By always looking outside ourselves for Truth causes us to disconnect from our inner Divine truth. This deeper truth is something that we can only discern through listening to our heart, body, and soul. Another factor that forms this hole around Truth involves parents having a hard time being truthful to their children. We tend to protect our children from hearing bad news or suffering, and yet children, due to their sensitive nature, are often more in touch with the Truth than their parents. How does a child make sense of a parent's comment that "everything is fine" when they sense their parent is sad or anger or anxious or depressed? No wonder then that when we become adults we struggle with self doubt and don't trust the experiences of our soul. It is even more confusing now since our Western culture itself is struggling with the privation of Divine truth. It seems that lying and false truths have become so epidemic that our heart and soul find it extremely hard to discern what Divine truth truly is. A further example of this privation around truth involves the opposite of self doubt, namely certainty. When people think they possess the truth, that is, they have “certainty” around what is true in a particular area in their life, they stop listening to Divine truth. They believe Divine truth is static, unchanging, when in reality Divine truth is always unfolding in the Present Moment within every aspect of their life experience. True, many times Divine truth maybe unfolding in the same way over and over again, but because our experience of Reality is always changing, it is essential that we discern Divine truth in each and every moment. The Privation of Divine Will Let me explore one final aspect of God’s character, namely God’s will or Divine will. St. Augustine saw privation of God’s goodness caused by humans using their “free will” in evil ways. As we have seen through looking at different forms of privations, the reason these ego structures form in our soul in our childhood has little to do with human free will. Most of these coping patterns were the best behaviors available for our child’s soul to use when dealing with the discomfort, fear, hurt, and pain from our childhood. However, there is truth in what St. Augustine concluded, that evil arises from humans exercising their “free will” in immoral ways. To perceive this truth, we have to understand the privation of Divine will. St. Augustine had it right, the essential nature of Divine will is “free will.” When we are living from the place of pure Divine will, we are living from a place of freedom, free of any compulsions, addictions, impulsions, or structures of our human will. This free will is that state that all of us found ourselves living from as young children. With each experience of the Presence Moment, we, as children, followed the natural flow of our curiosity, feelings, and life which were shaped by the opportunities and limitations of our childhood environment. Part of our experience of Divine will includes our desires, determination, steadfastness, and confidence that naturally arise as we confront both positive and negative aspects in life. Children simply surrender to the flow of what is happening in their life. However, by the time we enter our adult years, many of us struggle with the privation of Divine will. Rather than having “free will”, many of us find our willpower highjacked by different beliefs, coping patterns, and compulsions/impulsions as we seek to negotiate both positive and negative aspects of life. We struggle with loss of control and feelings of hopelessness. For others, instead of surrendering to the flow of our experience of life, like we did as children, we find ourselves seeking to control our life at every turn, through seeking pleasure and avoiding suffering. It is this fallen human will, what Augustine labels as the “evil use of free will”, that causes both moral and natural evil. However, I am hoping you are seeing by now that sinful and evil behaviours are not due to just the privation of Divine will. Sin and evil can arise from the privation of any of the aspects of Divine nature found within humanity. In the chart below is a summary of how the process of privation affects the many different aspects of Divine nature within humans. Seen in this way, you can begin to see how privation is a major dynamic behind human sin and evil. (Please note that sinful and evil actions don't arise when we get our essential needs met through merging with others to experience what is missing in our lives due to the process of privation. Rather, the risk of sin/evil arise when this merge breaks with the person we are merged with due to death or broken relationship and we find ourselves feeling intensely the pain of our exposed hole.) Conclusion
In the previous blog, I showed how each person is a child of God, that each of us possesses God’s Divine nature within our soul. In this blog, I sought to explain how humans created in God’s image can do such terrible things. The answer I propose to this complex question is the reality of privation. As we, as humans, lose contact with the different aspects of our Divine nature, we experience much suffering due to the lack of these God-like qualities affecting our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. As a result, we are tempted to commit many sinful and evil acts to cope with our suffering despite deep down still having a Divine nature. Questions to Ponder
Within the Christian tradition, the Bible teaches that all people, both male and female, are made in God’s image (Gen 1: 27). This suggests that all people are children of God. But how can this be when we see humans say and do so many things that are not reflective of God’s character? As the Bible says so well, we can tell by people’s actions if they are children of God or children of the devil (1 John 3:10). In this blog, I plan to explore what it means for people to have a Divine nature and how these spiritual dynamics manifest in our lives. In better understanding the dynamics of our Divine nature, we can then theorize more accurately how this human Divine nature falls causing people to think, say, and do terrible things. This will be the topic of next month's blog. So lets turn to the theme of this blog, what does it mean for humans to have a Divine nature? Let me highlight 8 aspects of humanity's Divine nature.
2. Divine Nature arises within the Human Soul. I have come to realize that being born in God’s image means that we, as humans, have the potential to experience life as God experiences life, that is, our experience of life and God’s experience of our life can be one and the same. In making this claim, I am risking “anthropoligizing” God, that is, reducing God to human experience or making God in my human image. And yet, what makes humans different from other animals is what is called the human soul, the field of human consciousness that is connected to our physical body. This human soul aspect of humanity is what makes it possible for us to notice all the different aspects of life including our experiences of God’s spirit. It seems logical to claim then that the Divine nature of humanity manifests or is revealed through our soul’s experience of life. So which aspects of our experiences of our life are also experiences of God’s spirit manifesting in our soul? 3. Divine Nature as Child-like. Often when we answer this question, we look toward certain adults known as spiritual giants like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, etc. or saints or gurus from our various religious traditions as models of how to live from one’s Divine nature. But within the Christian tradition, Jesus invites us to look in the opposite direction. He “called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 18: 2-4). As I noted in my July blog, developmental psychologists have discovered that the human soul passes through four major stages of fallenness. By the time we are adults, we experience life primarily through four major dualisms or filters: the subject/object lens, the life/death and past/present/future lens, the mind/body lens, and the good/bad lens. As a result, adults find it hard to sense a oneness with life, others, and God; find it hard to experience the Present Moment where all sacred occurrences arise; find it hard to perceive Spirit outside our thinking minds within our heart and body; find it hard to see God at work within all aspects of life, not just the good but also the bad. Yet, young children spend most of their life living from this place of oneness, the Present Moment, in their bodies, and having little sense of good and evil prejudgment. No wonder Jesus encouraged his listeners to become like little children for he sees this child-like state of consciousness as reflecting the image of God within humans. This means that when we experience life freely, as children do, with curiosity and openness and no coping patterns active, those moments in our lives reflect times when we are participating in God’s nature, when our experience of life reflects an aspect of God’s experience of life. 4. Divine Nature as Unconditional Loving. Another aspect of God’s character that is dominant within the Bible is God’s unconditional love. Apostle Paul describes God’s love is in this way: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Cor. 13:4-7). Jesus pushes this Divine love even further by insisting that as children of God, we should “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt 5: 44-45). For many years, I struggled as a Christian about what it means to practice God’s unconditional love in my life. It was not until I became a psychotherapist where I had to create a counselling space filled with nonjudgement for my clients that I finally realized that unconditional love cannot contain any sense of cognitive judgement. Schools of psychotherapy stress the necessity of unconditional positive regard when working with counselling clients. This has been re-enforced during my 15 years of being part of a Diamond Approach spiritual work school where I have realized over and over again the truth that unconditional love cannot contain any notion of mental rejection. But there is a catch here. We cannot make unconditional love arise through human effort; it is not possible. Unconditional love only emerges from deep within our soul from God. We have to learn to allow this unconditional love to arise within us and then allow this love to flow into our lives to those around us. Every time we allow this unconditional love to flow through us to others or ourselves, we are participating in God’s Divine nature. 5. Divine Nature is Truth focus. Some Christians have struggled with this notion that God’s unconditional love does not include judgement for it challenges many aspects of their theology. However, when one reviews the Biblical myth of the Human fall (Gen 3) in the Bible, it is evident that judgement of good and evil is the root of all human sin. Upon eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the humans (Adam and Eve) began to judge all their experiences into good or bad categories, including their experience of nakedness. Since they no longer were able to experience God’s unconditional love or Divine grace flowing in their lives, they began to cover their bodies and souls up with clothes and other mental structures so people could no longer see their vulnerability. One could call the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as the Tree of Judgement or the Tree of Conditional Love. Every time you find yourselves mentally judging any experience into good or bad categories, you know you are not living from your Divine Nature. However, at the experiential level of life, we do experience some aspects of life as joyful, life-giving, positive, or good while other aspects are painful, life-denying, negative, or evil. Clearly, there are good and evil moments in life and so the question remains, how is God’s spirit tied to these very differing experiences of life? Since God does not morally judge these dynamics, that is, eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, then how does God’s spirit emerge from these experiences? Instead of moral judgement, it comes down to the issue of truth. Jesus understood truth as not connected to what is right or wrong. Rather truth is all about freedom and life. Jesus taught his followers, “you will know the truth for the truth will set you free” (John 8: 32). If we, upon hearing truth, do not feel our heart say “yes” through the freeing sensation of softening or relaxing in our heart/soul, then this truth is not the truth that God wants us to hear at this moment. As I have heard many times on my Diamond Approach retreats, our heart functions like a compass around truth. A heart tells us when something is true (softens) or not true (hardens/contracts). This means that when we encounter “good” and “bad” experiences, we need to ask ourselves, “what is the truth that God wants us to learn from both types of experiences?” Not all good experiences are necessarily good nor bad experiences necessarily bad. However, if we can understand the deeper truths behind each of our experiences, these truths will always lead us to greater freedom and life. When we live our lives based on what our heart reveals as true for us in the moment, we are living from our Divine Nature. 6. Divine Nature is tied to our experience of oneness. This oneness aspect of Divine nature arises when we experience a oneness with nature or God as we watch a sunset or listen to the waves on the beach or experience a close connection with a friend. Developmental psychologists have found that babies and very young children naturally sense this sense of oneness with reality for their minds don’t yet experience life through a subject/object lens. Once that subject/object lens hardens, we mentally experience other, life, and God as external to us which means it is very hard for us to sense our Divine nature where we are connected to everything at the experiential level. Yet, that oneness with life and God is what Jesus is getting at when he says God is the vine grower, he is the vine, and we are the branches. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15: 5). When we feel this sense of abiding or oneness, those are times when we are aligned with God, when our human soul is connected with God's Divine nature. What this suggests is that God’s Divine nature flows within and beyond the individual sense of self. This may sound strange to us for we are very individualistic in our thinking about how we experience life. But as many psychotherapists know, the therapeutic relationship involves not just two independent souls (counsellor and client), but also a counselling field that arises between them that makes it possible for counsellors to feel and sense their client’s experience to some extent. In other words, the Divine nature exists not just within our individual souls but also within the counselling field. As Christians, we have Biblical teachings that state this truth, although rarely is it interpreted in this way. For example, in terms of marriage, the Bible teaches that “two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2: 24). Often this oneness is interpreted in terms of the sexual union, but I think this union is also true at the soul level when couples are closely connected to one another. They are sensitive to each other thoughts, feelings, and experiences; they are sensitive to the Divine nature of their partner. This common soul is not just true for married couples but for any set of people who are close to each other including families and friendships. Another Biblical example of this broader notion of soul is highlighted when Jesus says to his followers, “when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I am there among you” (Matt 18:20). When we, as a group of people, are attuned to the present moment, the place where the Sacred is noticed, we will share a common experience with one another of the Divine. This is the purpose of caring small groups or worship services within our religious institutions. This common soul that arises among individuals is why the Bible calls the church the Body of Christ. When a Christian community is functioning at its best, there is congruence between the Divine nature of this communal soul and the activities of God’s spirit within this congregation. Within this larger communal soul, there are still individual souls but when these individual souls are experiencing this sense of oneness, the boundaries of these individual souls are very permeable. This permeability allows the experience of Divine nature in the larger communal to flow into the various individual souls. 7. The Different Qualities of Divine Nature. This Divine nature that we experience in our soul has many different qualities. Sometimes in the Bible, these qualities are seen as the character of God. A common expression of God’s character in the Old Testament is that God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34.6). Sometimes these qualities are seen as fruits of God’s Holy Spirit including “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5: 22-23a). We also see in the human Jesus, as portrayed in the Bible, character traits that reflect other qualities of Divine nature including compassion, grace, faith, trust, wisdom, power, strength, etc. Within the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology, the qualities of Compassion, Strength, Power/Peace, Joy, and Will are seen as the key qualities of Essence along with Love and Truth. Love and Truth are qualities that are always present and flowing within Divine nature while other qualities are more responsive, that is, they arise in response to certain experiences in life. The Diamond Approach has helped me understand what some of these relationships are that exist between life experience and Divine nature. The chart below captures some of these key relationships. 8. Divine Nature is eternal and everlasting. God is often described in the Bible as “eternal” or “everlasting” (Ps 90:2). This means that God’s presence has no beginning or end. In other words, God’s spirit is always active and present in our lives even though we may not sense it, just like the sun that is always shining on our earthly world regardless of what the weather maybe. This sun metaphor provides an accurate of understanding of the eternal and everlasting nature of God’s love and truth. However, for responsive divine qualities around compassion or strength, the concept of gravitational field works better. While the field of gravity is affecting us all the time, we are oblivious to its presence until we drop something or lose our balance and fall. It is then that we see the affects of gravity.
This is true about the essential quality of compassion. Divine compassion is always flowing within our lives but we don’t feel it until we experience pain, hurt, or suffering in our lives. Then, this eternal or everlasting compassionate nature of God emerges into our awareness. The same pattern happens with the Divine quality of Strength. This Strength is always flowing within our life but we are unaware of it until we see injustice or someone disregards our voice, or sense of boundaries or truth. Then, suddenly this eternal anger-like strength of God emerges into our consciousness which causes us to speak our truth or defend our boundaries, or the people we care about. Conclusion Throughout this blog, we have investigated different aspects of Divine nature and how it manifests within our human experience. We have highlighted the following:
Seeing how every human being has a Divine nature, how is it possible that humans often think, say, or do things that are quite hurtful and bad. How can children of God do such terrible things that have nothing do with their Divine nature? That will be the topic of my next blog. Questions to Ponder: 1. When have you experienced the child-like aspects (no judgement, freedom, playful, curious, etc.) of your Divine nature? What was it like? 2. When have you noticed unconditional life flowing in your love toward others or yourself? What was it like? How was it different from other times you have received or shown love? 3. When have you discovered the gift of discovering a truth that sets you free? How is this experience of truth different then the experience that comes from being judged? 4. When have you felt the oneness that can arise between us and nature, others, or God? What was that like for you? 5. I have listed many different qualities of True nature (compassion, strength, power, love, truth, oneness, joy, peace, steadfastness, value, grace, kindness, generosity, self control, etc.). Which ones arise often in your life? Which ones don't? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator Kathleen Dowling Singh has been seen by some as the “new Kubler-Ross” (back of book jacket). Elizabeth Kubler Ross was the Swiss-American psychiatrist who developed the prominent stage theory of grief, namely that people pass through five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, despair, and acceptance. This model of grief has shaped our understanding of grief for decades. Based on Singh’s research and training in transpersonal psychology and the various spiritual traditions along with many years of ministering in the terminal illness context, she has observed that the dying process has many of the “special conditions” that are found in the contemplative traditions of the various religions. These special conditions lead dying people to experience what Singh calls the Nearing Death Experience. Singh outlines her thesis and research in her book, "The Grace in Dying" (HarpersCollins, 1998). I have found Singh’s observations quite helpful in my work as a psychospiritual therapist with palliative clients. Let me share how Singh understands the spiritual transformation process that occurs within the dying journey. Understanding the Human Spiritual Flaw Behind Spiritual Transformation Within Singh’s framework, we are not born with this human flaw that sets up our spiritual transformation journey. Rather it is a flaw within the human psyche that develops naturally as we pass through the human development stages of infancy, childhood, teenager and adulthood. Singh understands this flaw as the egoic self that forms during these years and causes us to feel very separate from others and Reality/God. The development of this egoic flaw involves 4 key stages of formation or what Singh labels as dualisms. These four dualisms could be seen to Christians as the 4 steps or "falls" that lead to the ultimate formation of the human fallen nature. 1. The First Fall The first stage of egoic development happens in the first or second year of life. As babies, we experience reality as one with us. There is no sense of me and the other and thus no sense of mother or father, or cat or blanket. As babies, we experience everything as part of us and our experience. However, slowly but surely, our infant souls begin to notice in our experience that there is a “me” and there is an “other” that is separate from me. Singh calls this first dualism “the Grand Canyon of dualisms, the virtual unbridgeable chasm between self and non-self” (31). The truth is that the original experience of oneness with all reality including mother/parent is still there but due to this dualistic split, we, as young children, begin to experience life less and less in this unitive way. This is the first step toward the formation of our human fallen nature. 2. The Second Fall With the rise of this first dualism, physical, emotional, and psychic structures begin to form between us and others, between subject and object. With this arising of space in reality, we become aware of time. “As soon as the self begins to live in space, it lives in and experiences time. Within this matrix of time emerges the conscious distinction between past, present, and future” (31). We now mentally and physically begin to structure our experience into past, present, and future. No longer do we experience the oneness of the present moment which merges past, present, and future into one. With this divided awareness comes the emergence of another dualism, that of life and death, that of existence and non-existence, that of physical reality and non-physical or spiritual reality. Singh notes that this second dualism, or the second step in the fallen process of humanity, “sets the stage for humanity’s fear of death” (31) and “this by the age of two” (32). 3. The Third Fall Now that our egoic self sees itself as separate from reality, it begins to manage our reality, both externally and internally, by acting on anything that it objectifies. We begin to manage our experience of Reality by seeking positive objects/experiences and avoiding problematic objects/experiences. “With the emerging recognition of self versus non-self, the needs and desires for flowing, intermingling love begin to be felt as vulnerabilities,” (33) and thus potentially dangerous. To manage all of these vulnerabilities and feelings that arise from them, our sense of self moves from being centred in our whole body to our head, the centre of our thinking mind. This leads to the third dualism, the mind-body split, the third step in the process of human fallenness, which allows us to cut ourselves off from our experience of the Present Moment through thinking about and managing our experiences of life. When we think about our experiences of life, we no longer directly feel them. Because of our egoic self is now identified with our thinking mind, we are further alienated from the experience of Reality experienced in the Present Moment. 4. The Fourth Fall With our mental egoic self now in place, our ego begins to develop an ideal self image of who we are and want to be. This sets the stage for the fourth and final dualism, that last step involved in forming our human fallen nature. We seek out and embrace any experiences that supports this growing sense of ideal self image. All of our mental chatter are signs of our egoic self seeking to manage our experience in certain ways. Any experiences that don’t fit this ideal self image, our egoic self quickly splits off, represses and buries within our unconscious. What I have described is Singh’s fourth dualism within human development, “in Jung’s terms, the persona, our acceptable self image, and the shadow, all those parts of ourselves that we disown” (37). These four dualisms that Singh highlights are the four major levels of egoic development that every human passes through during their childhood developmental years. If people have experienced much trauma during these childhood years, which many people do, then my sense is that these traumatic experiences add extra fire to our egoic development. As a result, our egoic structures are often more rigid and controlling than normal for they must contain and manage the added powerful emotions and energies that come from these painful moments. Realizing Our Tragic or Flawed State Singh claims that we don’t often see our tragic or flawed state until we get a terminal illness (90). Even then, It takes us awhile to realize this flawed state for “death is the ultimate threat to ego. The mental ego cannot even conceive of its own nullity” (53). Singh claims that this “fear of death is grounded in a strong sense of the “I”, an attachment to a finite and separate self” (57). When our mental ego collides with the reality of terminal illness, Singh notes that “hope is almost always the first powerful dynamic to come to the forefront” (95). To our ego, ‘hope typically signifies one thing: the continuance of self” (95). However, this hope gets broken over and over during a terminal illness until finally hope is “seen for what it is: a clinging to a wish for something other than what is. When hope evaporates, we are left with the here and now” (96). While the physical dying process is usually quite peaceful, Singh asserts that “the suffering of the mental ego prior to entering the dying process is enormous. It is the suffering of the dismantling of the structure, the identity, the beliefs, the hopes, the dreams, the cherished memories, the fancied ‘proofs’ of the self” (104). Many of us in the Western world have an ideal self-image that is all about being in control and avoiding negative experiences such as powerlessness, sadness, anger/hatred, weakness, despair, etc. So when we find themselves on the palliative journey that causes us to lose control of our life and forces us to experience many of these unacceptable feelings, no wonder our mental ego hates this suffering. However, Singh continues, “living with terminal illness is living in a crucible of transformation” (105), a place where one is held in place, to endure, and experience the present moment (105), which will include much suffering at first. “The mental ego hates to be held, to be pinned down, to be unable to run away from the ‘this-is-what-is’ nature of reality. The mental ego loves an escape clause” (106). But there is no escape with terminal illness. Instead, when we finally come to grips to the fact that we have a terminal illness and that we are going to die, that is when we realize our “tragic state,” when we “recognize with honesty that we live our lives in a dispossessed state, far from our home in the Ground of Being” (90). Once accepting our tragic or fallen state, the experience of our palliative illness can provide the container from which “radical psychic deconstruction” can happen followed by a “regenerative process of psychospiritual reconstruction” (106). Within the Christian context, this would be described as the experience of the crucifixion, the dying of the egoic self, and the resurrection, the re-emergence of our essential self or Divine nature. The Path of Return Singh calls this transformation journey “the Path of Return” which involves healing each of the four dualisms that led to the formation of our egoic self: the ideal/shadow dualism, the mind/body dualism, the life/death dualism and finally the foundational self/no-self dualism. She sees this pathway as the journey “from tragedy to grace. Although this transformation appears to occur more easily for some <dying> people than for others, this seems to be a universal process” (87). Normally, when we think of spiritual transformation, our minds conjure up images of religious people like monks and nuns intentionally doing spiritual practices like meditation, prayer and rituals that facilitate the dying of our egoic self. These spiritual practices create the special conditions necessary for personal spiritual transformation to happen. What I find interesting in Singh’s research is how she see death as also creating the “special conditions” necessary for spiritual transformation. She writes, “death has always and unmistakably imposed a set of ‘special conditions’ that are transformative in nature. Dying is the enabling energy for an awesome and profound jump in level of consciousness. Recognizing this, the path of meditation has intuitively sought to replicate many of the special conditions of the dying process, so as to accelerate the realization of our inherent potential and inherited destiny” (124). So what are the special conditions that death brings that leads to spiritual transformation? Singh has deciphered nine special conditions. Lets look briefly at each one. a. The Practice of Focusing on the Present Moment In meditation, we sit with our experience and simply notice it without thinking about it, managing it, and or doing anything with it. Eventually, with continued and sustained practice of meditation, “the First Dualism, the dualism of self and other, is healed” as we slowly discover again our experience of oneness with all reality (119). Terminal illness, Singh claims, demands the same thing of us as meditation. It “takes away anything that in the past or the future we might have, it brings to an end our ability to do, throwing into chaos our ability to think in our accustomed and familiar ways, and forcing us to <simply> be” (126). The reality of our death pushes us to experience the present moment for that is all we got. b. The Practice of Withdrawal and Retreat Many religious traditions stress the importance of the practice of withdrawal from the busyness of life and all our attachments. “Withdrawal allows us,” Singh notes, “to step out of membership in the biosocial bands of our culture and, in doing so, <we> begin to have a more direct and present-centred, less mediated experience of reality. The world of consensual reality begins to de-realize” (131). Something similar happens in dying, Singh has observed. “The aloneness of dying pierces many an illusion held consensually. A profound process of simplification occurs. Old values lose their appeal, their urgency. Nothing in the world of appearances attracts as it used to” (132). The fourth dualism between the ideal self and shadow self, and all the attachments and aversions connected to this dualism, begin to dissolve. Relationships also change. “Parties, gatherings, sports, hobbies, focus on careers, former activities that gave meaning in the world gradually cease” (132). As one gets closer to dying, we slowly stop seeing acquaintances and neighbours, then friends and family members from the outer circle, and in the end, only the inner circle of close family are left at the time of death (132). “This period of withdrawal, of ‘dying to the world’...is a period that precedes and helps to precipitate the lifting of primal repression and the subsequent inpouring of the power of the Ground of Being” (132). c. The Mind-Body Merge Singh notes that “terminal illness amplifies body awareness” (134). In these overwhelming processes of the body that occur in death as well as birth, our purely mental ego is engulfed (134). “We become conscious of ourselves organismically; that is to say we begin to experience our existence” (134). Through the many pains and symptoms caused by medical treatments, illness, and the dying process, we become very aware of our bodies and what our bodies are experiencing. No longer do people experience themselves as only a mind separate from their bodies; mind and body slowly become reunified. With the healing of this Third Dualism between mind and body comes “major explosions of deeply repressed memories and powerful feelings. Primal regression erodes and the self is infused with the Power of the Ground of Being” (138). This results, Singh notes, in “the sense of self, larger now, yielding to Spirit, beginning to reinhabit the body” (138). d. The Practice of Humility Humility and the practice of ordinariness is another special condition that wisdom traditions use to work at transforming the “ideal self image” so that we can regain our authentic human nature of oneness with all. Singh notes that “humility is forced upon us by the helpless and uncontrollable aspects of the dying process...No exception will be made for our specialness, our extraordinariness. Death is completely humbling” (140) thus healing further the Fourth Dualism between our ideal self image and our shadow. e. The Practice of Silence Vows of silence are often made by nuns and monks as another special condition to nurture their inner life. Singh highlights that “with the weakening of the entire mind and body as we enter the dying process, silence increasingly ensues...Silence allows the slowing and eventually the cessation of internal dialogue that maintains the structure of the mental ego” (143). As these ego-based thoughts stop, the various dualisms weaken for there is less mental activity happening to support them. f. The Practice of Mindful Breathing Mindful breathing is another spiritual practice used by the various Wisdom tradition to encourage spiritual transformation. Furthermore, breath is often seen by the many religious tradition as life itself or as Spirit (146-147). When a person is actively dying, Singh notes that “the only sound that can be heard in that silence is the slow breathing in and breathing out...The dying person, participating in Divine Life, is simply breathing the breath” (146). Many family members or close friends spend time in vigil as they mindfully wait and watch their dying loved one breathe their final breaths. Singh concludes that “breath, the act of breathing, is one of the points of intersection between the world of form and the world of the formless” (148), that spacious empty place from which all dualisms arise. g. Images, Visions, and Archetypes Singh has observed that images, visions and archetypes are as apparent in the dying process as they are in meditation and religions traditions. As people approach death, she notes that our focus shifts from aspects of our “self” and our more worldly identity based on logic, rationality and repression from our egoic mind, and becomes more directed toward the “deeper and more interior functioning” of our soul (151). From here arise “images of alienation, death, resurrection, purgation, angels, demons, liberation and forms of Deity” (150). Singh claims that such “transpersonal archetypes are images of such power that they can, gently or urgently, break apart the resistance of normal egoic consciousness and allow a growing intensity in the infusion of the power of the Ground of Being” (149). As a result, the different dualisms within our egoic self begin to dissolve. h. The Practice of Surrender Surrender is a key aspect of various religious traditions where we practice surrendering to some understanding/experience of Reality/God and the spiritual practices that nurture this oneness. The opposite to surrender is resistance. Resistance, Singh observes, is “the refusal to accept what is” (156), that is, we create a boundary between ourselves and what we are rejecting. In contrast, “surrender is the end of the boundaries delineating what I will and will not accept.” It is the end of resistance, which is at the very heart of the separate sense of self. “It is the end of two, and the opening into One” (156), the transformation of the First Dualism that formed the foundation of our egoic self. Singh has discovered that during the process of dying, “surrender, at first, is completely entangled with the concepts and accompanying feelings of hope and despair and giving up and fighting and pleading and dying” (157). Eventually, after many attempts of false surrender where we try to surrender in ways that allow us to stay in control, we get to the place of true surrender, where we stop resisting and accept what is happening to us, that we are dying. i. The Practice of Self Inquiry
“Who am I” is a question people often ask themselves as they do intentional spiritual work within their religious traditions or spiritual work schools. In asking this question repetitively throughout our spiritual pilgrimage, we notice how our sense of “I” changes and deepens becoming less dependent on our external activities (work, hobbies, relationships, achievements, etc.) or personal attachments (possessions, status, self images, beliefs, etc.) and more shaped by who we discover ourselves becoming. Singh has noticed the same self inquiry process happening for people who are traveling the dying journey. At first, our answers to who we are are based on our mental ego identity projects that includes all our accomplishments and beliefs from our past, but what happens when we, in our dying process, realize that we are no longer this? (161). A similar struggle arises when we look forward and our mental ego realizes that there is no future, no one to become. So who are we really? This “not-knowing” Singh highlights is the “beginner’s mind”, “the open space in which wisdom can arise” (161), that place where we begin to explore who we really are beyond the mental dualisms that formed during our earlier years of life. The Nearing Death Experience As people slowly physically die and travel along this journey of spiritual transformation, Singh has observed that people eventually experience what she calls a “Nearing Death Experience.” “The Nearing Death Experience is an apparently universal process marked primarily by the dissolution of the body and the separate sense of self and the ascendancy of spirit” (7). Singh has found that these Nearing Death Experiences “can occur anywhere from several weeks to several days, even hours or minutes, before death” (7). She has also discovered that a Nearing Death Experience “is characterized by certain subtle signals or ‘qualities’ ...that indicate the dying person has entered a significant and transforming field of experience” (7). These signals include a “quality of relaxation” (7), a “quality of withdrawal” (7), a “quality of radiance” (8), a “quality of interiority” (8) , a “quality of silence” (8), a “quality of sacred” (9), a “quality of transcendence” (9), a “quality of knowing” (10), a “quality of intensity” (10), a “quality of merging” (11), and a “quality of experienced perfection” (11). These qualities, Singh claims, are “not ordinarily known to or experienced by our separate sense of self. They are the qualities of grace”, qualities of an expanded state of consciousness, qualities that suggest Spirit is their source (11). Questions to Ponder:
with reality or nature or others? b. When do you notice the life-death dualism at work? When do you experience life as totally in the present moment, when past, present, and future disappear, when life and death disappear? c. When do you notice the mind-body dualism at work, where you find yourselves operating and managing life from your thinking mind? When do you experience your mind and body as one, when your mind becomes a servant (simply observing and naming, but not managing) to your soul? d. When do you notice the “ideal self” and shadow dualism at work? When have you experienced yourself as just as you are without any judgement and thus no ideal or shadow side present? 2. Singh has noticed that the dying process creates the “special conditions” for spiritual transformation to happen. What other aspects of life cause you to experience these special conditions (focus on present moment, withdraw/retreat, mind/body merge, humility, silience, mindful breathing, images/visions/archetypes, surrender/acceptance, self inquiry)? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator One of the themes explored during my recent Diamond Approach retreat was “the road less travelled.” Within the Christian tradition, this term points to the teaching of Jesus found in the gospel of Matthew. Here Jesus teaches his listeners to “enter <the reign of God> by the narrow gate. The gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. However, the gate that leads to life is narrow and the way is hard, and those who find it are few” (Matt. 7: 13-14). Being raised in the church and also a pastor for 30 years, I have wrestled many times with what this teaching means. During my retreat, my Diamond Approach teacher, Dr. Thomas Weinberg, brought a new perspective that helped me, as a Christian, see how this Jesus teaching gets at the essence of what is the spiritual path of transformation and enlightenment. In this blog, I plan to explore this fresh interpretation of the road less travelled. Within the Christian Church, the road less travelled has been understood in different ways. Within conservative Christianity, the road less travelled is the conservative approach to being a Christian with its emphasis on the Bible, the cores doctrine of the Christian Church, and its suspicion of change and progress. Liberal Christianity sees the road less travelled as being about “bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives, recovering sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free” (Luke 4: 18). This road less travelled involves taking care of the poor and working for justice. As a member of the Mennonite or Anabaptist faith tradition, the road less travelled involved me following the way of Jesus both in how he lived a counter-cultural life but also in how he centred himself in his relationship with God’s Spirit so that he could live this counter-cultural life. The temptation in all of these Christian approaches to understanding the road less travelled is to see ourselves, and those like us, as those on the narrow way. We tend to become identified as the people of the road less travelled, that is, God’s holy people. The road less travelled often becomes part of our Christian identity. All others, including people of other religions, even members of other Christian denominations who we see impure compared to us, we see as potentially travelling the wide road that leads to destruction. These interpretations of the road less travel don’t work for me for I see many Christians following what appears to me to be the wide road away from life. At the same time, I also notice many people who don’t identify as Christian seemingly walking on the narrow road that leads to life. There has to be another understanding of the road less travelled that transcends this issue of religious identity. It is here that I have found the Diamond Approach’s understanding of the road less travelled quite helpful. Building on the insights of different psychological models (attachment theory, object-relations theory, self psychology human development theory, etc.), the Diamond Approaches teaches that how our soul and personality developed during our childhood years determines to a great extent what road we travel on as adults. Object relations theory teaches that a child’s mind naturally creates a representation of its life experience through object relational structures. There is a mother-me object relation, a father-me object relation, a friend-me object relation, a stranger-me object relationship, a teacher-me object relationship, a world-me object relationship, and a reality/God-me object relationship, and many more. What is significant is that since the mother-me, father-me, and the reality/God-me object relationships form first in our soul as a child, they become the template for all our other object relationships. Self psychology stresses the importance of parents and caregivers meeting the mirroring, validating, and twinning needs of their children. When this does not happen well enough, these primary object relationships carry all our unresolved painful experiences along with our child-created beliefs and interpretations from these painful experiences. Furthermore, psychologists have learned that a child’s soul is far more sensitive than an adult's soul. Therefore, what our parents may judged as reasonable behaviour (eg. acts of discipline) was sometimes experienced by us, as children, as traumatic. All of these painful traumatic experiences, big and small, are stored in in these object relationships within our soul. What is important to understand is how these object relations work within our soul. When we encounter an interaction with someone that resembles one of our painful object relations, that object relation is triggered. All that stored pain and associated interpretation flow into the present moment and we find ourselves reliving that past experience with the current person we are interacting with. When this happens, we naturally begin to resort to one of many pain coping strategies that we learned as a child like numbing, soothing (eating, drinking, shopping, medicating, merging, etc.), distraction, isolation, avoidance, attacking with anger, pleasing, performing, agreeing, etc. And we also adopt many survival strategies or compulsions to keep us from triggering these painful times in the future. By the time we entered our adult years, our soul is filled with many object relations, coping/survival strategies, fixed narratives about others, self, and reality/God, etc. As a result, it is really hard for us to experience the present moment freely, the place where we can just be ourselves and experience reality as it really is, including all the dynamics of God spirit. As a reader, you are probably wondering what all of this psychological talk has to do with the wide road and the road less travelled. The wide road, based on the Diamond Approach, is the road we tend to automatically travel due to our historical conditioning from our past. When we walk on the wide road, we are following all our narratives, coping strategies, object relations, self images, and identities that we have developed from our upbringing. Most of the time, we are unconscious to the fact that we are walking on this wide road for it is our normal way of operating until something happens that wakes us up and we have an experience of the present moment. During these present moment times, we feel more alive and we experience life, others, and ourselves as more real, more authentic and more true. As Christians, we describe these moments as "God-" or holy moments, times when we might sense Christ or Jesus interacting with us, times when we sense God’s spirit moving in our lives. If this is the first time you have recognized such a moment, like I did in September, 1983, you might see this as a conversion moment, as the moment you first realized God was real, that God was more than a belief. Now knowing God was real, I now had a deep longing to experience more of this God reality and discover for myself how to walk this road less travelled, and help others do it too. But there are good reasons why this road is less travelled. As Jesus says in the Bible, this is not an easy road to travel. Let me share some factors that make this road hard to follow and thus less travelled. Some are probably evident to you by now. The first set of factors are tied to the fact that we naturally want to walk the wide road. It is the road we travel without thinking about it based on all our conditionings from our past. There are very good reasons why we are loyal to these past conditionings. First, our coping patterns were needed for us to survive and thrive as much as we did as children. In fact, these coping patterns were the best ones available at that time when they formed in our childhood; that is why our child’s soul pursued them. And so, our soul is loyal to these coping patterns, even though now, there are times when these strategies don’t work well. In fact, they now may cause us much discomfort. Take for example the coping strategy of numbing. Every time, you start to feel any negative emotion, you quickly numb yourselves through physically contracting where you are feeling that emotion in your body. This strategy worked well for us as a child when it was unsafe to feel and show our feelings with our caregivers or others around us. But as an adult, this compulsive coping strategy of numbing keeps us from feeling our emotions. We lose the ability to feel deeply the dynamic emotions of the heart like love, compassion, sadness, joy, anger/strength, anxiety, fear, hatred/power, etc., the dynamics that make us feel alive in the present moment. Instead, through numbing we bury the energy of these emotions in our physical body causing us to feel physically tired more often, or have physical symptoms like severe head aches, high blood pressure, nervous stomach, agitated bowels, or unexplained painful conditions like fibromyalgia. Every time you are following a coping strategy, like numbing, you are on the wide road. You are no longer connected to the present moment which is what the narrow road is all about. Second, we are often very attached to our belief systems and narratives that are connected to these coping strategies. When we found ourselves in painful chaotic places as a child, our mind looked for ways to organized it and make sense of it. We formed beliefs about ourselves, beliefs about others, and beliefs about how God and reality works. The more chaotic our childhood was, the more black-and-white and emotional our belief systems became. When elements of our belief system become fixed, we, as adults, lose our ability to be open, curious, and thus question our beliefs. We lose our ability to discern in the present moment what God’s spirit may be teaching us through our experience. Instead, our beliefs function as facts to us. As a result, we tend to bend our experiences of the present moment so they fit our rigid belief systems rather than be open to adjust our beliefs so they align with the truth of the reality we are experiencing. This bending of reality to fit our belief systems is the way of the wide road. People, in general, are very attached to the interpretative frameworks of their past. People prefer to interpret reality so it fits their beliefs. Few people are curious about what God’s spirit may be revealing when the truths of reality don’t fit their beliefs. Much of the conflict we see in the world is due to this disconnect between the truths of reality and the beliefs people hold whether it be the Israel-Palestine conflict or the Trump-Anti-Trump conflict in the United States or the conflicts we are facing now around the world with COVID. People are quite attached to their beliefs and positions and not very curious to what the actual truths may be that need to be honoured and followed. The conflicts within our families often have a similar flavor. We often experience people through our judgements and beliefs about them. That is way of the wide road. To journey on the road less travelled means to actually experience in the present moment our family member as they really are with a curious mind and open heart. Third, the fact that people often trigger us tells us that our historical conditioning is very active in our current life. I suspect all of us have experienced being triggered by others. Depending on the situation, we may become super anxious by someone’s presence or behavior, or become filled with unexplained anger by how someone is treating us. What is common in both of these situations is that our intense feelings do not fit the current circumstances. The reason this triggering happens is because something in the present situation resembles closely an unresolved memory stored in the object relation structures found in our soul. This is an obvious case of our past conditioning shaping our present experience, but the reality is that all of the object relations in our soul are shaping our current experiences in some way, sometimes in helpful ways but many times in unhelpful ways. When our internal object relations keep us from experiencing in authentic ways our relationships in the present moment, we are unconsciously living on the wide road. We have focused so far on the internal factors that make travelling the road less travelled hard. But the reality is that we find ourselves living in a Western culture that is shaped by the dynamics of the wide road. We are constantly bombarded with marketing strategies that are geared toward the vulnerabilities based on our past conditioning. I think of all the products that are designed to soothe our negative feelings whether it be through eating, smoking, drinking, medication, shopping, etc. Consider all the products and experiences that are designed to distract us from the pains of life whether it be shopping, entertainment, sports, travelling, etc. Every time we purchase a product or experience to avoid feeling the struggles of life, we are walking on the wide road.
Hopefully by now you are realizing that all of us spend a lot of time walking on the wide road. All of us. There is no truth to the belief that one religion has a special passport to the road less travelled and the rest are travelling on the wide road. Rather, the truth we need to be curious about is this: how does one spend more and more time living on the road less travelled that leads to a more abundant experience of life and less time on the wide road that leads to more conflict, pain and suffering in life? I see this as the role of a religious or spiritual community when it is functioning at its best. It helps people work intentionally at transforming their soul so that they spend more time living on the road less traveled. Questions to Ponder: 1. When have you found yourselves living life on the less travelled road of life? What was it like? How was it different from experiencing life on the wide road of life? 2. Explore the different aspects of your personality that keep you living on the wide road. a. What coping patterns and pain avoidance strategies (numbing, avoidance, pleasing, soothing, thinking over feeling, medicating, merging, arguing, shopping, pleasing, performing, agreeing, watching TV/videos, etc.) do you often use? b. Explore your beliefs, images of self and others, and narratives you tend to follow without questioning them. What aspects about yourself, others, life, and God are not captured well by your beliefs and the narratives you tell yourself? When do you bend your experiences to fit your beliefs? When do you allow your beliefs to change as you realize the truths behind your experiences? c. Review the people who emotionally trigger you and cause you to walk on the wide road. What aspects of them remind you of past painful moments from your past? 3. How does our western culture make it hard for you to follow the road less travelled? What people (friends, authors, bloggers, people you respect, religious/spiritual people, etc.) have you found supportive in helping you walk more often on the road less travelled? Last month we looked at the naturalness of death, how death, when not sudden, follows a predictable pattern that leads to physical death. While this is the case, people often are quite resistant to joining this natural physical dying process. We often forget that physical death is an essential part of life, one that we will all experience. Despite this truth, people resist death at every turn, which makes the dying process often a more painful process. What would it look like for people to embrace the dying process and turn it into a meaningful time full of much richness, love, and grace? This is the task of spiritual care in the field of palliative care. The Distinction between the Physical Body and the Eternal Soul Below is a Biblical text that I read at many funeral or burial services. This is my paraphrase of these verses. These verses teach that the human person consists of two parts, the outer nature or physical body and the inner nature, which is commonly called the human soul. This two-part nature of humans found in religion is also found in psychology, the physical body and the psyche. The Body-Soul Merge I find in my spiritual care ministry in Palliative Care and Hospice that most people don’t experience themselves as a body and a soul. They experience themselves instead as simply one entity where their sense of body and soul collapse into one. This collapse between soul and body is not just prevalent within individual human experience. It is also evident within our culture where most people see the world and reality as simply a physical reality. Mainstream society has little space for believing that there are actually two dynamics at play within reality, a physical reality shaped by the rules of science and human will and a spiritual reality that is constantly interacting with and trying to transform physical reality toward certain values and experiences of life. With little sense of life beyond earthly life, it makes sense why our culture and the health professions reduce the soul/body system to just the physical body. With life being reduced to only physicality, no wonder death is viewed as the end of human life and thus an enemy to beat, or a failure when death happens. Suffering caused by the Body-Soul Merge When we see ourselves as only a physical body, death becomes quite scary for we believe death is the end of us. When this happens, people tend to follow one of two narratives in the dying process. Some people join the narrative of fear, “don’t let me die” or “don’t let them died.” They do everything possible to fight, avoid, or deny the dying process. I have had clients who only saw me once because when they discovered that I wanted to help them process and explore their experience of dying, they had no interest in seeing me again. However, since the reality of death is often denied, it means that all of the common experiences related to the dying process cannot be truly experienced, discussed and processed. Instead, life must be managed and everything connected to dying and death is bracketed out of their life. The focus becomes the next treatment and maintaining a façade that everything is OK and will work out well, until one day it doesn’t. Other people join the narrative of despair, “I am going to die” or “they are going to die.” People caught in this narrative often become lost in their grief and gloom. When people follow this path, every conversation around dying soon ends in a place of despair, and they are not able to work at many of the tasks that the dying process requires of them. As a result, family and friends around these people feel powerless in knowing how to discuss and process the many questions and experiences that arise in the dying process. Instead, the dying process often becomes heavily managed to protect those who quickly fall into despair and deep grief. When people join either of these two narratives, they can’t truly live and experience what life is trying to offer them in the present moment in the midst of the dying process. They see no blessings possible in the dying process, all because they see themselves or their loved one as only a physical body that dies. It is true that our physical body is wasting away, as the above Biblical text teaches. However, this scripture also teaches that, while this dying process is happening, something else can happen to us, namely that our inner or divine nature can be renewed each day. This inner nature is the soul part of us that passes through the transition of death and enters the afterlife. To experience our inner or divine nature, we must break this body-soul merge that most people follow as they live life. Not all experiences of life are tied to our physical body. Many in fact have their roots in our non-physical soul. Breaking our attachment to the Physical Body Within Theravadin Buddhism, it is very intentional in breaking this attachment to the body. As part of their formation, monks are usually sent to a cemetery for a full night to meditate on the decaying body of a deceased monk (Dass and Bush, 159). The purpose of this exercise is “to let go of the attachment to the concept of life being the body, so that during the dying process, instead of being filled with ‘I’m dying’ or “Don’t let me die’, the monks would be attentive to the moment as each part of the dying process unfolds” (159). In other words, the monk would be paying attention to each present moment in the dying process with the goal of noticing, contemplating, understanding and fully living each moment. This is the gift that Western people have when they enter palliative care. They are blessed with having time to do what the Buddhist monks do, to become attentive to the moment by moment unfolding that happens within the dying process. And as they do so, the merge between the body and soul begins to break down. They began to notice dynamics in their life experience that are not rooted in their body or by their human choices, dynamics that lead to the renewal of our human inner nature. What could some of these soul dynamics be? The Renewal of Our Inner Nature a. Compassion and Grief This past year I visited a man who had a long term terminal disease. During my second visit, I decided to ask him if he wished for me to end our time with a prayer. He said I could but that I could not pray to a deity. I explored what he meant by this and found that he was comfortable in praying to the Sacred Mystery and Source of Life. I prayed with him and when I finished, I found him sobbing. In exploring what he was experiencing, he said that he was experiencing a profound compassion toward himself around his illness and situation. He was totally embarrassed by his tears and I quickly got him some tissue so that his wife would not know he had been crying. Sadness and tears commonly arise when we begin to pay close attention to our experience of dying. This experience is commonly called grief where people finally give themselves permission to mourn the many losses connected to their failing health. That is often how grief is understood within our western world, as an emotional expression created by our body. In fact, this is what this man believed and expected until he had this experience which was so surprising to him. In this case, he felt compassion emerging from the depths of his soul and that this compassion was directed toward him. He was the recipient of this gift of Divine compassion; it was not a feeling that he or his body created. Divine Compassion is a gentle energy that softens our mind, heart, and will allowing ourselves to become more vulnerable. When we become more vulnerable, we allow tenderness, kindness, grace, and insight to arise within our soul in response to what we are experiencing, in this case, the many feelings this man was feeling in relation to his terminal illness. Without this softening and vulnerability, we remain oblivious to the subtle dynamics of our soul. b. Love, Connection, and Forgiveness Ram Dass, a prominent spiritual teacher of the late 20th century, taught that “grief is one of our greatest teachers. It cracks us open—that’s how the light gets in...it reveals the great healing power of love” (140). His friend Norman Fischer said that “loss wounds the heart, causing it to fall open. Love rushes into and out of this opening. Love that was probably there all along, but you didn’t notice because you were too busy with so many things that you couldn’t feel it. Love rushes in to the absence left by the loss. And that love brings inspired action. If we are able to give ourselves to the loss, to move toward it instead of away, our wounded heart becomes full” (141). When people move toward their grief rather than away from it, I find in my palliative care ministry that many words of love are expressed between the dying loved one and their family and friends, and vice versa. And with this greater desire to express love and experience connection and oneness, there is also a longing to work at reconciliation. People begin to talk about regrets, not being the mother or father they wish they were for their children, or the mistakes they made that had big impact on those they loved. Forgiveness becomes a prominent desire as end-of-life approaches. c. Addressing the Fear of the Unknown One question I always ask clients concerns fear: “As you contemplate your death, is there anything you fear?” I get two common answers. One involves the physical body and one surprisingly involves the soul. One fear revolves around the fear of the pain they may experience in the dying process, the fear of physical and emotional pain. With the improvements in pain control and anxiety management, the medical profession is getting better and better at reducing the risk of severe pain during the dying process. The other fear involves the fear of the unknown, the fear of what they will experience beyond physical death. This question is actually a soul question. It is interesting to note that those people who have had many soul experiences in this earthly world don’t wrestle in the same way with this fear of the unknown. It is because these people have learned to do what our Biblical scripture suggests, that is, “to focus our attention on what is unseen for what is seen is temporary, but what is invisible to our naked eyes, we experience as rich, deep, and eternal.” In having this focus, people notice many sacred or soul moments in their earthly life, moments that give them a taste of heaven on earth, a taste what the afterlife is like. This is one of the key tasks in my spiritual care ministry, helping people pay close attention to their life experience, especially the subtle aspects of their experience, that which is unseen and often invisible to our five senses. I get people to explore those moments where they felt truly alive, where they sensed they were part of something bigger than themselves, when they were awed by the wonder, beauty, or mystery of life, or when they realized a oneness with nature, a person or group, or with all reality. These are some of the sacred times that people experience in life, often unconsciously until they pause and contemplate the deeper aspects of life. This is why the spiritual practice of mindfulness/prayerfulness/contemplation are often encouraged in the field of palliative care. These practices help people learn what it means to walk by faith and not by sight, which is really important as we face death. When we die, our soul detaches from our visible physical body and transitions into an invisible but real spiritual world, one that we get hints of in this earthly world when we have a posture of faith and an openness to the subtle. d. Restoring Our Trust in Reality and the Source of Life As each of us approaches the end of life, we will be faced with the task of ultimately surrendering to the Source of Life and Reality. People who are identified and attached to their physical body will fight this surrender until the very end, until they can no longer keep their body from dying. However, as all Buddhists know, such attachment creates immense suffering. The greater the attachment, the greater the suffering. Knowing that there is a Sacred Mystery or God involved in life that we are surrendering to is not enough to remove our fear of the unknowingness surrounding death. Our fear goes deeper than that. In many cases, our fear is tied to our distrust in who and what God represents for us. There are very good reasons why many people no longer trust in the Sacred. People often raise the questions around why God allows suffering in this world. This field of theological inquiry is often called theodicy, the explanation of why a good and loving God permits evil to exist in our world. However, for many of these people, they are not looking for abstract answers for such questions for these questions are quite personal. No theological answer, regardless of how good it is, will take away the pain behind these questions. These people have experienced much personal trauma in their life often beginning in their family of origin and childhood years at school, and continuing in life through traumatic experiences in their adult years, like what is happening right now through this COVID pandemic. How can people trust God when they surrender into death when they believed God has failed them at key points in life, especially during those times when they were traumatized? It is here that the earlier Biblical text provides a clue to how the Sacred Mystery heals our trauma, renews our inner nature, and restores our trust. Apostle Paul writes, “the one who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us from the dead, and bring us into God’s heavenly presence.” The word “dead” in this text could easily be replaced with world “trauma” for trauma deadens the soul. In his death, Jesus experienced the most intense trauma one could ever imagine, a time when Jesus felt totally abandoned by his closest friends, his religious community, his government, even God. But Jesus was not just a human body; he was also a human Being where his soul was connected to God. This divine-human connection means that this trauma that Jesus experienced was also experienced by God, that God felt profound traumatic pain that day just as Jesus did. And when Jesus realized this truth, that God was with him in his trauma, that he was not alone but God was with him, Jesus released his attachment to his painful body. This is one way of understanding Jesus' crying last words on the cross, "God, into your hands I entrust my spirit” (Luke 23:46). He then died and his soul transitioned into the heavenly afterlife. It is important for people to realize that just because they experienced trauma in their past does not mean that God abandoned them during those painful times. It was just that there was no one present who was receptive enough to the spiritual guidance God was providing to keep the trauma from happening. Since the Sacred Mystery can only work through the process of physical incarnation in our earthly world, that is, though the minds, hearts, wills and hands of people and dynamics of nature, there are limits to what Divine Reality can actually do in our world, despite what our Chrisitan theology might profess. In those cases, when nothing can be done, God suffers with us, and as we realize God feels our pain with us, just as God experienced Jesus' pain on the cross, our trauma begins to transform. So my goal as a spiritual care provider is to help people notice that God is with them in their dying process, that God understands and feels the struggle and pain they are going through, that they are not alone, and that God would never abandoned them. As they sense the Sacred Mystery with them, their distrust begins to melt and their heart that longs for this gracious connection of love to the Divine opens up. Now, they are in a place where they can truly surrender into death.
Questions to Ponder 1. When have you experienced yourself as more than your body? What are these moments like? How do these moments help you when you realize your body is groaning and wasting away? 2. Compassion, grief, sadness and tears are closely related. What is your relationship to tears and compassion? When have you experienced Divine Compassion in the midst of your grief? 3. I note how grief is what makes it possible for love to be expressed and shared in the midst of the dying process. How has grief made this sharing of love possible between you and your loved ones? 4. What spiritual practices make it possible for you to see beyond the visible to the subtle dynamics of life that are often full of meaning? What have you noticed through these times of attentiveness? 5. How have your experiences of trauma affected your trust in the Sacred Mystery? What has helped you with this broken trust? What would help you now heal this broken trust with the Divine? Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor Educator Bibliography Dass, Ram and Bush, Mirabi. Walking Each Other Home. Boulder: Sounds True, 2018. We all know that death is part of life, and yet our western culture does not treat death that way. Instead, death is often seen as a medical failure or something that should be hidden away out of sight in a nursing home, hospital or hospice. Because we have so little exposure to death, except when we see it on our televisions or movie screens, where death is often over-dramatized, most people know little about what normal death actually looks like. This unknowingness causes people to have many fears and unhelpful beliefs around death. In this blog, I want to explore how death is a natural part of life. Our attitudes toward death are often shaped by the experiences of death from our past. Being raised in rural South-western Ontario, death was a normal part of my life on the farm. Every so often, I would see the “dead truck” come to pick up a dead livestock. When my family got into egg farming, part of my job was to search for and remove any dead chickens I found in the cages. I have childhood memories of my family having a bee where we would kill capons, defeather, clean, and bag them, and then put them in our freezer. From this experience, death was seen as a normal and sometimes necessary aspect of life. Death became more personal for me through the death of pets. I remember as a young boy watching my dad bury the family dog Peggy in the bush when she had died from a farming accident. I recall finding my next dog dead in the machinery shed when I was looking for her one day; she had been sick and was missing. As a father to 3 young children who had many pets, I have memories of them experiencing the death of baby rabbits, guinea pigs, fish floating in the pond, and budgies. I still remember the shock of finding our “pet” snapping turtle dead after placing him in an empty tub overnight while I dug the pond deeper. An owl or hawk had gotten him for a meal for all that was left of him the next morning was his empty shell. From all of these deaths of pets, I came to see death as a tragic but common experience of life. The first human death I remember was my grandmother who died of Alzheimer when I was five. I can picture myself standing with my family and upon seeing my parents crying, I broke down and cried myself. Both of my brothers had a blood clotting condition hemophilia which meant many trips to the hospital for urgent medical treatment. Due to the seriousness of their blood condition, there was a natural anxiety around the fragility of life in my home. This anxiety took on a heavier feel when my uncle George died due to complications from his hemophilia condition at the age of 37. I was aged 9 at the time. The next significant human death for me was my grandfather’s death. On Christmas Day in 1982, my two brothers and I visited him in the nursing home. His heart was failing. We knew he was not well and that we were probably visiting him for the last time. He was conscious and I do have memories of him talking briefly to us and we sharing words of care back to him. In 1985, my family learned that my brothers both were HIV positive due to the contaminated blood they had been taken for years due to their hemophilia. Now with the reality of AIDS, early death was no longer a possibility but a high probability for my brothers. Jamie showed early signs of AIDS in 1989 and died in August, 1992. This was the first human death I witnessed personally. My other brother Kevin died from AIDS five years later. All of these experiences of death have taught me that death can be very personal. It is a time of emotional pain involving sadness, anger, despair, and meaninglessness but paradoxically it was also a time of gratitude, laughter, caring and love, and much meaningfulness and growth for me. Being a church minister since 1993 and becoming a chaplain and psychospiritual therapist during my professional years, I have walked with many people and families through the dying and death process. Now, as a spiritual care provider in the Hospice and Palliative Care environment, I see the dying process playing out all the time. My personal history with dying and death shapes my attitudes and beliefs and how I experience death and dying now. I suspect this is true for each of you. I also know, due to my history, that I have a comfort level and acceptance of death that most people in our culture don’t have. People and families have a hard time facing the reality of dying let alone talking about. This is also true in the medical system where the whole focus on health care is fighting death at every turn. This belief is not only rooted in our medical system; it is also the expectation of our culture, and every person seeking care from our health system. We expect our health system to make us healthy again, and when it doesn’t, we believe our medical system has failed us. We become disillusioned with life for we believe death should not be part of life, and yet it is. As a result, death is often hidden away in nursing homes, hospitals, and hospices and not talked about. While death is a natural part of life, within our Western culture, death is seen as something that should not happen. As a member of Western culture, it is hard to see how one could understand and hold death in any other way. How would we experience the dying process differently if dying was seen as normal and a natural part of life? In his book “Walking Each Other Home” (2018), Ram Dass, a psychologist and well-known spiritual teacher, shares a story where he was confronted by a very different view of death lived by the Hindu people of India. During his first time in India, he was shocked by all the sick people walking the streets of Benares, “lepers, emaciated people with only one cloth wrapped around them squatting or lying in the street” (15). He talks about feeling “superiority, Western pity. ‘Why don’t they have hospitals? Why don’t they help these people?’” (15) That night when he got to his hotel, he shares how he was so overwhelmed by what he experienced that he hid under his bed (15). After becoming a student of the Hindu guru Maharar-ji, Ram Dass began to understand this experience differently. He returned to Benares and discovered what really was happening there. Hindus go “to Benares to die, to release their souls. It is a great blessing for them to be there” (15). At night, Ram Dass “would spend nights on the burning ghats, the stone-slab steps along the bank of the Ganges River, which are the sacred place where Hindus cremate the bodies of the dead in open fires” (17). Ram Dass writes, “the air is filled with prayers, chants, music and incense. Sometimes there would be bodies burning around me in the dark, lit by fires. I’d just spend the night there watching them turn to smoke. I could smell the charred flesh. I would watch as the eldest son of the dead person split the skull before the fire consumed the body. I felt like I could see Shiva (a God with Hinduism) put his hand out and take the person in his realm” (17). Ram notes that India is a place where death is not put in a closet out of view. In the villages, people die at home with their extended families. “When they died, they were wrapped in a sheet. The family would call a rickshaw, and they’d put the body on some sticks and wrap it, put it on a rickshaw, and take it to the burning ghats, right through the streets, chanting the name of God…everyone, including children, would stop and notice” (17). Ram Dass concludes, “death was right out in the open, a natural part of life. It wasn’t an error or failure. It was part of life” (17). This Hindu understanding and experience of dying is very different than our Western culture, one that shocks our sensibility but helps us realize that there are different ways one can approach the reality of death. Death does not need to be seen as a failure or something in life that should not occur. In discovering how death happens often in the homes of Hindu families, I have been surprised by how many people I meet in my current role as spiritual care provider have a similar wish to die at home in Waterloo Region. My experience is supported by an article written by Celina Carter (Registered Nurse and PHD candidate at University of Toronto) based on a 2018 report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. She states that “three-quarters of Canadians say they want to die in their homes, yet just 15 percent manage to do so” and a “majority—almost 60 percent—die in hospitals, according to Statistics Canada data from 2017” (https://healthydebate.ca/2019/06/topic/dying-at-home/). Why is this the case? Why do not more people die at home, if that is their wish? The reasons vary. Carter notes, “symptoms become unmanageable. Publicly funded services are not frequent enough to meet patients’ needs. Family members become overwhelmed by the unceasing demands. ‘Most people at the end-of-life need 24-hour supervision,’ says Shan Mohammed, professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of nursing, whose research specializations include palliative care and family caregiver supports. ‘Many families often wind up wishing their relative had spent their last days in a hospice, allowing loved ones to spend more time being with them rather than worrying about symptom management and scheduling care’”( https://healthydebate.ca/2019/06/topic/dying-at-home/). I am finding that this need for 24 hour supervision with basic health care toward the end of life is why many people come to hospice for their remaining days of life. In being a spiritual care provider at the Lisaard and Innisfree Hospice, I have witnessed what dying actually looks like. I see many residents sleeping, sometimes unconscious, in their rooms with family members often sitting in vigil with them. Seeing this pattern has brought memories of what I observed when both my brothers were dying in the hospital. Dr. Kathryn Mannix, a palliative care and hospice doctor in England, describes this pattern in detail in one of her chapters in her excellent book, “With the End in Mind” (2018). She describes, from her early days of training in becoming a palliative care doctor, how she had a mentor doctor who told his clients exactly what dying looked like. This totally shocked her for she had seen no one do this before, and yet the patient was so thankful in being told this information. Now Dr. Mannix makes it her standard practice when supporting palliative care clients. Her mentor doctor told his patient “that you can be sure that we will help you keep any pain manageable” (19). Then he went on to describe what happens. “The first thing we notice is that people are more tired. Their illness saps their energy…As times goes on, people become more tired, more weary. They need to sleep more to boost their energy levels…As time goes by, we find that people begin to spend more time sleeping, and some of that time they are even more deeply asleep, they slip into a coma. I mean that they are unconscious...We see people spending more time asleep, and less time awake. Sometimes when they appear to be only asleep, they are actually unconscious, yet when they wake up they tell us they had a good sleep. It seems we don’t notice that we become unconscious. And so at the end of life, the person is simply unconscious all the time. And then your breathing starts to change. Sometimes, deep and slow, sometimes shallow and faster, and then very gently, the breathing slows down, and gently stops. No sudden rush of pain at the end. No feeling of fading away. No panic. Just very, very peaceful” (20). One common experience toward the end of a person’s life is what is called Cheynes-Stokes breathing that often includes what people call a death rattle. This death rattle often makes attending family and friends believe that their loved one is struggling. If a dying person was conscious, they would naturally swallow when any saliva builds up at the back of their throat. However, when Cheynes-Stokes breathing is happening, they are unconscious and thus have no awareness and therefore are not suffering when this rattle happens (https://caregiversns.org/resources/peolc/when-death-is-near/#6). If you wish to hear Dr. Mannix describe what dying normally looks like, please click here to watch an eight minute video. I hope you are beginning to see that death is a natural and important part of life. Rather than something to resist at all costs, it is important to see death as a normal part of life, a part of life that can bring much meaning and gratitude to our lives as we embrace it fully.
Questions to ponder:
Within the Christian Church there is a fascination with Easter. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the notion of Eternal life are often seen as the centre of the Christian good news. As a result, the stories and events that lead up to Jesus’ death on the cross are often glossed over in our excitement to get to the celebration of Easter. And yet, the secret to people having resurrection experiences, that is, tastes of eternal life here on earth, is tied to the pathway that Jesus followed that led him to the cross. I think this is why Jesus stressed to his listeners, “If you want to become my followers, you must deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). But what does it mean to take up the cross and follow Jesus? What does it mean for Jesus to die for the sins of humanity so that humans can experience Eternal life? In this blog, let me share a different response to what has often been taught in churches. The theological term “cross” is one that is used a lot in the church. The Christian Church throughout history has often stressed that the cross points to the death of Jesus on the cross, but many of the scriptures in the New Testament don’t use the cross in that way. As is evident when Jesus preached to the crowds, “If you want to become my followers, you must deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me”, the term cross has a totally different meaning, since is Jesus alive and well and has not died on the cross yet. So what does the term cross mean in this context, and many other places in the New Testament? The cross, as I have come to understand it, is a symbol that points to the pathway of death, but it is the pathway of spiritual death, not physical death. As Jesus suggests in his teaching above, the pathway of the cross involves a denying of self, or the dying of the egoic self. Furthermore, Jesus says, if we want to be one of his followers, then we have to take up this cross just as he has. In other words, the cross points to the pathway of many egoic deaths that Jesus experienced leading to his spiritual development and maturity as a human being. How I wished we knew the details of Jesus’ life between the age of 13 when Jesus was presented at the temple for his Jewish Bar Mizpah and the age of approximately 30 when Jesus began his ministry as a prophet/healer. The Bible is silent about those years, and little can be gleaned with certainty from other historical sources. All we know is that when Jesus suddenly appeared out of nowhere for his baptism and began his ministry, the crowds responded to his wise teachings, healing abilities and powerful spiritual presence. (There are lots of theories about where Jesus was in those missing years and how he became this wise spiritual teacher/healer.) What is clear is that when Jesus began his ministry, he was already travelling the journey of the cross. He was already practicing what he preached. He was already denying himself, dying to his egoic self, and walking the journey of the cross. But what does it mean to die to one’s egoic self? What does it mean to travel the pathway of the cross? So often the focus of the cross within the Christian Church has been on the suffering of Jesus, how Jesus had to suffer for the sins of humanity. While there is some truth to that statement, it is also very misleading. It misses totally the motivation behind why Jesus experienced this suffering. Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. For those of us who are parents, what happens when our children make a mistake, like when my son as young adult caused an auto accident? We suffer, don’t we? Now why do we suffer? Is it because our children have made a mistake, sinned? No. In fact, the “sin” piece has little to do with it. The reason we parents hold the suffering of our children is because we love our children. We don’t like things happening to them that may cause them to suffer whether it is due to mistakes/sins they have made or simply the negative realities of life like losing a job, illness or potential death. The very nature of love means we suffer when the people we love suffer. The more we love others, the more we are willing to hold the suffering of others. This is a story in John’s gospel in the Bible where we see this connection between love and suffering highlighted in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus has just arrived to the home of his good friend Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha. Upon learning Lazarus has died, we read that Jesus was moved deeply and then he weeps. This is how the gospel writer John describes it: ‘When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”’ (John 11:32-36). While the pathway of the cross is often seen as a journey of suffering, it is really a journey of learning to truly love. The more deeply we are able to love and hold the suffering of others, the more we have learned to die to ourselves and follow the cross, just as Jesus did. This is what it means, I believe, when the church teaches that Jesus had to die for the sins of humanity. Jesus had to die to his egoic self so that he could truly experience and hold the sufferings of those he loved, which in the end, including loving everyone. Jesus actually taught that the spiritual path of life is all about love. He summarized the religious path down to two commandments about love: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:29-31). This is why Jesus invited his followers and us too to follow the way of the cross. Jesus wanted us to learn how to love as he loved, a love that is unconditional like God’s love. In the past month, I have been reading the book “Being Ram Dass” (2021) which is an autobiography of Ram Dass’ life. Despite him being a prominent spiritual teacher for the last 40 years, I actually knew little about him. In his book, he describes compassion in this way: “Compassion is seeing others as ourselves, expanding our identity to include the other person. When I sit with an AIDS patient, I know it could be me. With I sit with a dying person, I know that I to will die. Sitting with the women in Guatemala, their suffering was also mine. Behind our suffering, we share love” (315). When we have compassion for someone, which is a form of love, our sense of self expands allowing us to sense and experience to some extent the experience of those we love. I often describe this love as the relational field that can potentially arise when two people meet and interact with one another. This is very true in the therapist’s office if counsellors have learned to hold and work within this relational field. When our client feels sadness or anxiety or anger or hatred or depression or powerlessness, we, as their counsellor, can also sense these experiences in the field. The experience of the other becomes part of our experience. Due to our ability to love, our sense of self will expand so that we are able to hold and thus feel the experience of those we love. For us to love in this deep way like Jesus did, with an expanded sense of self, requires us to travel the pathway of the cross that Jesus walked everyday during his three years of ministry up until his death. So, how do we practice this pathway of the cross, this journey of self denial and dying to the egoic self? To be honest, it is not easy. This is the reason why Jesus described this journey of the cross as narrow, a path that few people want to travel (Matt 7:13-14). I suspect this is one of the reasons why many churches skim over the teachings of the cross and the tragic events of Good Friday so they can get to celebrating the blessings of Easter and the resurrection. However, Easter, in many ways, is a celebration of what happens when love is embraced fully, when the way of the cross is lived to its deeper levels. Recently, I have also been reading Matt Licata’s book “A Healing Space” (2020). Licata is a psychotherapist, poet, and writer who I deeply value for his wisdom in integrating spirituality with psychotherapy. He has helped me see how the cross is connected to the resurrection. In his book, he does not talk about the cross but he does describe the process of dissolution, the dying of the egoic self. He connects the process of dissolution to the process of rebirth. He writes: “In the face of this dissolution, the question isn't so much how can we be reborn, but will we participate in death fully, and with an open heart, paving the way for new forms to emerge, trusting that rebirth will take place.... In times of transition, our tendency is to rush to rebirth, back into the known, in an urgent attempt to cure, maintain, or heal that which is dying, that which longs for transformation [within us.] It is so natural to resist falling apart in our need to put it all back together. But it is only from the core of the womb of death – a death tended to consciously - that rebirth can come into being” (https://mysticmeandering.blogspot.com/2019/01/death-and-rebirth-matt-licata.html). Three things in this quote capture my attention. One is that the process of rebirth in our life is determined by how much we “participate in death”. In other words, our ability to travel the path of our rebirth is dependent on our ability to participate in our spiritual dying process fully. The deeper we learn to die to our egoic seld, the deeper our rebirth or resurrection experiences will be. This is what Jesus meant when he stressed to his listeners, “deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me.” Two, Micata highlights that there is huge temptation for us to rush to rebirth, to return to the known, in the hope of curing, maintaining or healing what is dying within us. Therefore, it is no surprise that many churches rush to celebrate Easter. This is what our western culture wants, a quick path or fix that allows us to hopefully experience rebirth type experiences in our lives without having to experience too much dying or experiences of the cross. I suspect this is a reason why the path of the cross has often been reduced within the Christian Church to believing in Jesus’ crucifixion on the cross or that “Jesus died for our sins.” We are looking for a quick answer to deal with the suffering we experience in our lives. However, such mental beliefs don’t lead people to the egoic deaths and kenotic moments that are necessary for people to travel the journey of their spiritual rebirth. The reality is that “we have to die” to our egoic self over and over again in a similar way that Jesus died continuously to his egoic self. And third, this process of dissolution, what Christians could call the pathway of the cross, is a journey that requires an open heart. It is a journey of love. The more we are able to go through the process of dissolution by dying to our egoic self, the more we are able to be reborn with the ability to love beyond ourselves by holding deeper the suffering of those we love. The more we die to ourselves, the deeper we are able to love. With these thoughts about the cross in mind, I invite you this year not to skip over the stories that teach about the journey of the cross, especially the stories that happen during Jesus’ last day on earth. It is in these painful stories of love that we see Jesus living the pathway of the cross, even when in the midst of his dying process. There are key events during Jesus last day of life where Jesus lived out the pathway of the cross by expressing profound love to those he cared for. Contemplate how Jesus lived love when he discovered that his disciples were unable to stay awake and pray with him as he was struggled in prayer with what his future held (Mk 14: 32-40). Meditate on how Jesus struggled with what it meant to love when he wrestled in prayer with God in the Garden of Gethsemane, “please take this cup of suffering from me, yet not what I want but what is required of my life for your greater purposes of love” (Mk 14:36). Consider how Jesus practiced love when he realized that one of his beloved faithful followers would betray him (Mk 14:18). Deliberate on how following the cross of love helped Jesus resist the temptation of supporting one of his disciples who wanted to fight and use violence to stop the Roman and religious authorities from arresting him (Matt. 26:51-52). Think about how Jesus practice love when he looked into Peter’s eyes after Peter had denied knowing him three times (Lk 22:61). Consider how Jesus embodied love fully when he, dying on the cross, looked out over the soldiers and all the people, some who were taunting him, and said, “God, forgive these people for they don’t realize what they are doing” (Lk 23:34). Contemplate also how Jesus experienced the pain of love when he cried on the cross, “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” (Mk 15:34). Finally, just before Jesus died, Jesus cried out to God, "“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Consider, in the end, how Jesus realized God's love in following the pathway of the cross. Those events in Jesus’ last day provide a glimpse into how Jesus personally took up the cross of love in his life, how he denied himself and died to his egoic self. Because he participated in the dying process fully throughout his life, he experienced many rebirth experiences that transformed him and made him into a wise spiritual teacher, healer and prophet. Ultimately, it led him to his experience of the resurrection and Eternal life.
But these stories and teachings of Jesus also provide a roadmap for us on our spiritual journey. This is why Jesus taught his disciples, and all those who seek to follow in his footsteps, “If you want to become my followers, you must deny yourself and take up the cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34). As you approach this Easter season, may you discover the blessings that arise as you walk the cross of love in your life. Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator Hatred is a feeling we rarely talk about, and yet we see signs of hatred all around us. Anytime we see people divide our world into sides due to politics, race, sexuality, religion, wealth, or even wearing or not wearing a mask, we are seeing hatred at work. The deeper the divide, the deeper the hatred. We may call it by many other names but anytime we reject someone or a side, we are practicing hatred. That is what hatred does: it rejects. But this hatred is not only around us. Hatred can also live within us. Any time we reject a part of our personality or an aspect of our inner experience like certain emotions, thoughts, longings, etc., we are practicing hatred, in this case, self hatred. In this blog, I want to explore what Jesus possibly when he taught that we are to “love our enemies”, including the enemy within us. In the Bible, we read Jesus teaching about loving our enemies. He says, ““You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your God in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt 5: 43-48). What was Jesus getting at in teaching us to love our enemies, the very people or aspects of ourselves that we hate? He was teaching us to practice unconditional love with our experience of hatred. How to Practice Unconditional Love Before we work with the experience of hatred, we have to understand what it means to practice an unconditional love that can hold even hatred. As a psychospiritual therapist, one of my goals is to develop a therapeutic relationship with my client where they experience an unconditional love, a love that allows them to feel safe enough to share of their struggles and pain with me. Self psychology teaches that there are three aspects that clients need to experience to feel unconditionally held by their counsellor, namely mirroring, idealizing, and twinning. Personally, I believe that as we meet each of these needs within our client, our client’s experience of unconditional love from us deepens. Lets look briefly at each need. When we mirror our client’s experience, we reflect back to them what we are seeing and hearing them say. As we fulfill this mirroring need, we reflect back a sense of self-worth and value to our client (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 8). This is significant for often other people in our client’s life fail to listen to them and see their suffering. When we mirror well, we begin building a therapeutic relationship with our client, the first stage to creating a setting of unconditional love. Idealizing goes one set further than mirroring. Not only do we mirror back our client’s experience but we also validate it. We meet this idealizing need when we tell our client that their pain or struggle makes total sense to us. (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 9). This validation is so important to our client for often their struggles are invalidated through people giving them advice or downplaying their experience (“it is not as bad as you think it is”). Through this validation, our therapeutic relationship with our client deepens further. They become more vulnerable sharing more of their experience for they feel safer with us, more held by our unconditional love for them. Finally, through twinning, this therapeutic relationship deepens even further. Self psychology suggests “that people need to feel a sense of likeness with others” (//www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/self-psychology, par. 10). As we explore our client’s experience of suffering further, we become aware of the counselling field that has formed between the client and ourselves. Within this counselling field, we, as counsellors, feel within ourselves the emotions and pain that our client is experiencing as they share their struggle with us. This is how I understand the twinning experience in the counselling office. As we reflect this suffering "twinning" experience back to our client, our client feels deeply held by this unconditional love that we share together in the counselling field. Consequently, our client is willing to become even more vulnerable allowing insights and new experiences to arise within the counselling field leading to healing and transformation. (for those of us from the Christian tradition, this deep twinning dynamic is what Apostle Paul maybe getting at when he says he has learned to “become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor. 9: 22)) If one understands the development of unconditional love in this way, through the lens of self psychology, what does it means to help our client love the enemy that lives in the world, but also lives within them. What does it mean to hold the experience of hatred within a posture of unconditional love through a self psychology lens? The Importance of Seeing Hatred The first step to working with the experience of hatred is helping people see it. People have no problem seeing hatred in the outside world or in the behaviors of others they judge as bad or evil. But people are often blind to their actions and attitudes that reveal the hatred that dwells within them. They cannot imagine hatred living within them for that would suggest that they are bad or evil somehow, and that is not possible. People are very resistant to having this dynamic of hatred mirrored back to them through their counsellor. And yet, for us to hold this hatred with unconditional love, we first have to help our clients see its existence. This blindness within our client means that teaching is an important first step to helping people see their hatred. To work at this teaching, I have found the Diamond Approach, taught by A. H. Almaas, a useful psychospiritual framework to help my clients understand how hatred works. The Diamond Approaches teaches that there are two causes of hatred. One is related to our relationship with love. Love, at its deepest level is nondual reality. Nothing is rejected. Almaas writes that “love, by its very nature, tends to melt away duality and bring about union and unification.” ( Love Unveiled, pg. 27) This means that everything is included in the experience of unconditional or Agape love. There is no rejection within the reality of unconditional love. However, when this love becomes blocked or resisted, Almaas teaches that the experience of hatred naturally arises. (Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 198). The deeper the hatred and rejection, the more resistance there is to the love that is trying to arise. That is why often the people we hate the most are often the people who we have, at one time, loved deeply. It is important for clients to see that there is a close and natural relationship between love and hatred. The more deeply we love, the more sensitive we are to the dynamics of rejection to this love, both in the world but also within our own experience. This means that hatred will be a common experience in life, even for those who love greatly, maybe even more so. The second cause of hatred is related to our experience of power. Almaas writes that “hatred arises when you feel powerless, for it is an attempt to eliminate the frustration by annihilating it. You want to annihilate whatever problem you have, whatever is in your way, whether it is an inner or outer frustration. You want to make it disappear“ (Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 328). So every time, our sense of inner peace is disturbed or our survival is threatened, we will feel a natural hatred arise toward its cause if we feel powerless to change it. Since many people feel this powerlessness, especially as children, hatred is a very common human experience. To deny or reject this hatred, that is hate hatred, only fuels this hatred and makes it worst. This means that hatred is a common human experience that everyone senses to a greater or lesser experience. For people to love their enemy, they must first be willing to see and acknowledge the hatred they feel toward their enemy, whether that enemy is in the outside world or within the inner experience of their soul. Only then can people move beyond the first step of loving their enemy, that is, seeing their hatred. The Importance of Validating Hatred However, it is important for our clients to not only see their hatred, but to realized that there are many good reasons why we experience the various dynamics of hatred. People need their experiences of hatred validated so they can begin to understand and own their feelings and behaviors of hatred. As we have already seen, hatred is a survival mechanism that naturally arises due to the dynamics of broken love or through the experience of helplessness. However, when hatred arises in our experience, there are certain patterns that typically occur. Attachment theory teaches that there are often two responses we have toward people, especially during times of conflict: either we pursue them or withdraw from them. I have found this theory to be also true regarding intense emotions like hatred. Either we pursue hatred or we withdraw from it. When we pursue hatred, we seek to aggressively destroy or annihilate that which is causing our hatred. We may want to destroy the person who is hurting us or cut out of us (self harm) that part of us that we hate experiencing internally. We want to return to a place of safety and peace where we can settle and rest, whether it be in the external world or within our internal world. This is the positive purpose behind hatred. It is seeking to help us experience peace and rest again. However, as we pursue our hatred in the outside or inside world, our ego will notice a certain power that feels quite good, a power that feels very strong and liberating, a power over that which we hate. This powerful feeling is quite seductive. We can quickly become attached to this power and our hatred toward the enemy associated with it. This is why we see so much hatred expressed in the world, and often why people, including ourselves, feel so justified in destroying our enemy. This hatred makes us feel powerful. But, as we all know, there is a huge downside to expressing hatred. In destroying our external enemies, we now become hated by those who now perceive us as their enemy. Now they seek to destroy us, and so, in acting out our hatred, more hatred becomes directed toward us, which make us more fearful, more powerless, and thus filled with even more hatred. In destroying our internal enemies through self harm, we end up hurting ourselves more causing us to hate ourselves even more. Acts of hatred always begets more hatred. Hatred never produces inner peace. This is why the power associated with hatred is seen as false power within the Diamond Approach. This expression of power never liberates us. For many people, instead of pursing hatred, they withdraw from it. Seeing hatred as wrong, they avoid people they hate or repress all feelings of hatred so they don’t experience this “wrong” feeling. What most people don’t realize is that we, as humans, are quite adept at repressing hatred for hatred was a common experience in our childhood environments. Every time we didn’t feel love from our parents when we needed it or felt helpless as a child to defend ourselves from them, a natural hatred filled us. Now, in most homes, it was never safe to express this hatred for it would have led to severe punishment. Instead, we learned to suppress it. However, as a younger child, due to our cognitive development, we were not able to judge our parents' behavior as bad behanior regardless of how bad it was. Furthermore, since we believed then that our parents must love us, the only conclusion left was that somehow we deserved to be punished, hurt, even abused. So, most of us, as children, and certainly those who experienced trauma in their childhood homes, learned to repress all their hatred quickly that naturally emerged when we were rejected, not loved by our parents, and that hatred turned against us. In rejecting our hatred toward our parents, we often ended up rejecting ourselves, hating ourselves. This is why I often say that we need to get our hatred going in the right direction. When someone threatens our survival, we will naturally feel hatred toward them. This is the natural direction of hatred, the way God created our world. In the Christian tradition, this hatred toward those who do wrong or abuse others is often described as the "wrath" of God, the experience of God's hatred toward that which is bad or evil. (There are almost 200 direct references to wrath in the NRSV Bible, most of them attributed to God). When seen through this lens of attachment theory and the Diamond Approach, we, as counsellors, can validate all the client’s experiences of hatred, and all of their related behaviors. When we validate a client's experience of hatred, we are helping them understand that their behaviors make sense to us, and hopefully to them too. Even if our client’s behavior was hurtful and morally wrong, the experience of hatred behind these bad behaviors is not morally wrong. The feeling of hatred is a fact of life, a dynamic of reality that always arises in us when we feel rejected (not loved) or powerless and our survival is at risk. There is something liberating for the client as they sense their experiences being validated by their counsellor or friend in this way. People often go back and forth between pursuing hatred and withdrawing from hatred. But neither of these options actually transform the hatred people find themselves living with or avoiding. Is there a way to love this hatred more deeply unconditionally? Is there a deeper form of agape love that helps people transform their experience of hatred? The Importance of Holding Hatred (The Twinning Experience) So far, we have seen how people either pursue hatred with the goal of destroying those who they hate or they withdraw from hatred by repressing their feelings of hate. Neither leads people down the path of what their soul is thirsting for, a place of inner and outer peace where it can rest, relax, settle, and just be. However, there is a third option based on attachment theory. Instead of pursuing hatred or withdrawing from hatred, we can help our clients learn how to hold their hatred experience with a deeper level of unconditional love, that is, develop a secure attachment to their experience of hatred. For this type of holding environment to emerge, a client needs a friend or counsellor who can hold their hatred with them from this deeper place of love. When a client feels securely attached to their therapist, they are experiencing a holding environment where they “are able to be fully themselves without apology or shame, where <their> feelings are validated and mirrored back to <them>, and they are able to make sense of their lives in a way that promotes an embodied sense of wholeness. In such an environment, <they> are able to access, articulate, and metabolize inner experience <they> might previously disown or repress or weren’t even aware ,<they> were having” (Licata, p. 39) It is here in this place of holding our client’s hatred that the self psychology’s experience of twinning happens in the counselling room. As the hatred experience begins to arise in our client, we, as therapists, will sense it in the counselling field that exists between the two of us. When this twinning happens, our goal is to welcome this hatred in the field so that our client can welcome their hatred that is arising within them. It is in this place of secure attachment with us and their hatred that our client and us develop an intimate but spacious relationship with their experience of hatred. Developing a secure attachment to our experience of hatred does not happen over night just as a good friendship does not suddenly appear. It is an ongoing process that happens over many months. In many ways, this journey with hatred is a lifelong process. It takes time to soften the conditioned patterns from our past that we have with hatred. However, slowly our relationship with hatred changes from a hatred that I am scared to feel or that I get lost in, to a hatred that I can finally sit with, welcome, and hold without too much rejection. Then, one day you may discover, like that I did, that there are many gifts to spiritually working with hatred. It was during a session I had with my Diamond Approach teacher where I was processing my hatred I carried from my childhood. Many times in doing this work with my Diamond Teacher in the past, I had experienced my wounded little boy, but on this day it was different. Instead of finding myself feeling this hatred as a little boy and his powerlessness, I found myself experiencing this hatred from inside the emotional field of hatred. There was no longer a space between me and my hatred. I had simply become hatred itself, hatred fully embodied. At first, I thought I was in a merged state with my hatred, but this was clearly not the case for I was totally aware and in control. (When we are in a merged state with hatred, we lose all awareness and sense of self and now hatred controls us.) Furthermore, I felt an internal power that I had never experienced in my life. In fact, I felt all powerful, almighty, all the terms we often attribute to God, and yet I knew that I was not God. With this sense of power also came the perception in my mind that I was far bigger size-wise than my normal physical body.
And yet, while I felt all powerful, I also experienced total freedom with this power, that I could chose to act or not act from this place of total power. I realized in that moment that Divine Power is very different than how power is understood in the world which stresses the action-side of power. True power is realized as much through non-action as through action, maybe more so. If we don't have the freedom to not act on our hatred then we have not experienced fully Divine Power yet. Your ego is still attached to the false power found in hatred that only wants to destroy the enemy. (As a Christian, this brings new meaning to how Divine Power manifested in Jesus during his trial and crucifixion experience. Jesus realized that nothing good would be realized by acting out in powerful human ways, just more violence and deaths. Instead, God’s almighty power was manifested in him through his non-action, resisting the powerful impulse to destroy his enemies.) I also learned personally through other powerful sacred experiences like this one that hatred does not mean destroying physically our enemy. Rather, the annihilation happens psychically, within our soul. Holding and experiencing fully our experience of hatred in the present moment gives us the ability to sever the emotional ties between our painful past and our present-day experience. It causes us to emotionally realized due to our increase sense of power found in hatred that we will “never again allow anyone to hurt us” like that again. As these emotional connections are slowly severed from our history stored in our soul, the hatred begins to break for we no longer feel helpless. Instead, we begin to feel powerful, rooted, singular focused, a clarity. Often, with this hatred energy now diminishing, we may notice at times tender loving feelings arising toward those we once hated. In sensing all of this, we notice that our mind, heart, and soul begin to settle into a place of inner quiet, peacefulness, and rest. This is the ultimate gift of fully loving unconditionally our hatred; it will eventually transform into Divine power, inner peace, deep rest, and into forgiveness and the re-emergence of love. So, the next time you experience hate, please don’t dismiss it or reject it. Welcome that hatred and see it as an invitation to learn how to love it unconditionally, for it is the doorway to the path that leads us to discovering true peace, inner rest, and a deeper experience of God's love and Divine power in our lives. Questions to Ponder to help you explore your relationship to hatred:
Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator (CASC) This past fall in my new role as Spiritual Care Provider to palliative care clients in the community, I visited a man who was terminally ill with cancer. He was quite anxious about his pending death because of his view of the afterlife. In this blog, I want to outline how I, as a Christian spiritual director, have come to understand the judgement process and the afterlife. My client’s fears were around him not being good enough to get into Heaven. When I tried to reassure him that God was gracious and would embrace him upon his death, he challenged me by saying, “God does not let everyone into Heaven. There are evil people in this world like the people behind the Rwanda genocide or the people running the Jewish concentration camps in World War 2. He proclaimed that there is no way God would allow them to get into Heaven.” I was quite troubled by his fears of the afterlife for it had been nurtured by teachings in his church. The church has taught that our death is a day of judgement before God, and that this judgment determines our destiny in the afterlife. The way the Church has understood this judgement has not changed much since the days of the early church 2000 years ago, which is surprising considering how much the theology of the Church has evolved over the centuries in so many other areas of thought. God’s Two Sets of Children: The Prodigal and the Religious It is clear to me that our Christian tradition teaches that God loves all people unconditionally. This is often called God’s agape love. The Bible story that captures this unconditional loving nature of God the best is the popular Prodigal Son story (Luke 15: 11-32). In the Bible, we read Jesus telling this parable to an audience made up of two groups of people: outcasts and sinners and religious leaders. This parable provides a helpful framework in understanding God’s agape love and how it plays out on both Earth, our physical world, and Heaven, the spiritual world. One could see the parent and the parent’s home in this parable as God and Heaven. From this heavenly home comes two sets of God’s children who are born into our physical world, Earth. It is very apparent in the parable that both sets of children become lost on Earth. One set of children grow up and find the physical world appealing and full of possibility. They end up seeking happiness in the external world. They become prodigal children. The second set grow up suspicious of the earthly world and instead seek happiness by becoming religious children. They seek to please God through doing their religious practices with the hope that someday they will experience God’s gracious love. After many years seeking earthly treasures, the prodigal children get to a place of bankruptcy, possibly physically, relationally, morally, and spiritually. They realized that they are totally lost. Seeing that they are the cause of their poor choices, they become repentant and humbled. It is during this time of starving that they begin to remember God and the Heaven they came from. A hunger arises within them for the treasures of Heaven that they remember from their heavenly home. And so, they begin their journey home. Upon getting home, they hope that God will be gracious enough to give them a task to do that will allow them to earn a place within Heaven. You can imagine their surprise that upon arriving home God welcomes them with open loving arms and wants to celebrate their homecoming by throwing a big banquet of the best. These open arms symbolized the unconditional gracious love of God. In contrast, the religious children, in the parable, are horrified at God receiving such sinful children into Heaven. This cannot be possible. The religious children are upset because they have tried to please God all their lives by doing faithfully their religious practices, but not once did God throw a party on their behalf. It is interesting how this parable ends. God basically says to his/her religious children, “I have always been with you; you have simply not been able to experience me. All of my treasures are yours to have; you have not allowed yourself to enjoy them.” This parable, as I have interpreted it, provides a helpful framework from which to address many key questions that people have around Heaven when we died. God’s Love is Unconditional and Never Changing It is very clear from this Bible story that God’s agape love is unconditional. To love unconditionally means that God’s love never changes, never becomes less or becomes more. It is a divine love that is the same today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow. Jesus compares God’s unconditional love to the sun, that rises on both the evil and the good, and to the rain, that falls upon both the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45). This is why Jesus teaches that it is possible to love those who hurt you rather than retaliate (Matt. 5: 38-42), to love our enemies as well as our friends ( Matt. 5: 44). It is clear that the unconditional quality of God’s agape love is very different than the love humans normally show each other. One simple teaching that the church often uses to capture this notion of agape love is that we are to “love the sinner but not the sin.” But the reality is that few people can practice well this teaching of love. The Narrow Gate to Heaven Christians often challenge this notion that God loves everyone and will accept everyone at death into Heaven. Like the religious children in the parable or like my client, they argue that this cannot be possible. People who have committed terrible crimes should not get into Heaven. Furthermore, these people often quote that Jesus taught that the door to life or Heaven is narrow (Matt. 7: 13-14). These people argue that the reason this door is narrow is because of God’s holy character. They believe that God is very particular about who gets into Heaven: only the faithful followers of God do. This begs a question. What does it mean to be a faithful follower of God? As the parable of the prodigal illustrates, just because you are religious and believe the “right things” or do the “right religious practices” does not mean you will pass through the narrow gate and experience the fullness of life and God’s unconditional love? The religious people in the parable didn’t. In fact, they were outraged at God’s gracious love to the prodigal people when God celebrated them coming to heaven. So what does it mean to pass through the narrow gate? I want to suggest that this narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s judging people. As the parable teaches, God’s loves prodigal people and religious people equally. However the parable does teach that some people find themselves in Heaven while others don’t. I want to suggest that judgement tied to the narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s heart. God’s heart always loves unconditionally. The narrow gate is connected to our human heart, how our heart can be open or not open to receiving God’s gracious love, just like we see in the parable. Some embrace God’s gracious love while others don't. This is why I said to my client that he has nothing to fear about the afterlife when he dies. His heart clearly longs to experience God’s gracious love upon his death. Our Experience of Judgement is not due to God’s Heart. This emphasis that the human heart is key to experiencing God’s love is found throughout the Bible. The first commandment of the Jewish Ten Commandments states that humans are to worship the true God and no other gods (Ex. 20: 2-3). To worship is an act of the heart where our hearts wants to align with the heart of God. Jesus taught that all the Jewish commandments can be condensed down to two commandments: to love God with our whole mind, heart, will and soul and to love others as ourselves (Luke 10:27). The human heart was created and longs to be aligned with God’s heart of love. The second commandment of the Ten Commandments stresses the importance of not worshipping other gods (Ex. 20: 4-6) that can easily lead our hearts astray. These false gods are like the tempting gods in the world that prodigal children chase after for happiness or the idols that religious people become attached to like right beliefs or right actions or religious identities. It is interesting to note that these verses in Exodus also talk about how God punishes humans for God has a jealous heart and has no tolerance for a wayward human heart. How do we make sense of these teachings about a jealous judging God in the Bible (and there are many such teachings in the Bible) with the unconditional loving God of grace found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son and numerous other places in the Bible? These opposing teachings cannot be both true. Personally, I experience God as unconditionally loving. God’s love is always present as well as all of the other fruits of God’s spirit: compassion, grace, truth, joy, peace, kindness, strength, trust, etc. All of God’s spiritual fruits are always present or accessible in our lives for God’s spirit is unconditionally present in our lives all the time. This is why Jesus said, “God is like sun that shines upon both the faithful and unfaithful people in our world.” But, as we know from our natural world, just because the sun is shining does not mean we feel it all the time. Often clouds are in the sky which keep us from experiencing directly the light and warmth of the sun. The darker the clouds, the less light and heat we feel. Furthermore, we know from our seasons of summer and winter that distance between the sun and earth does affect how much we feel the warmth of the sun. All of these patterns about sun, clouds, and our experience of life are true about our ability to experience God. When God’s love becomes blocked or distorted by the clouds in our heart or feels far away from our heart, that love starts to lose its loving quality and begins to develop a non-loving quality. If God’s love is totally blocked, that love becomes transformed into its opposite, the experience of “no love” or “hate”. Let me provide a chart to illustrate how these clouds in our heart can affect the aspects of God’s unconditional character. Divine quality Divine Quality totally blocked/distorted/far away Light Darkness Warmth Cold Love Hate Compassion/grace Judgemental Strength Weakness Truth Confusion, Lies Clarity, knowingness Doubt Joy Despair Trust Anxiety Grounded Ungrounded Freedom Bonded, enslaved This pattern I am illustrating is built upon the Theory of Holes taught by the Diamond Approach, a psychospiritual work school that I have been part of for 15 years now. When seen in this way, we can begin to understand how God’s love can be experienced in two different ways depending upon the condition of the human heart. If our hearts are like the repentant prodigal children in our parable, then we will experience directly the amazing grace of God’s unconditional love. If our hearts are like the religious children in the parable, filled with many clouds, then we will experience God’s love as being very conditional. Two very different experiences of God's love, but the reason for the difference is not because of God’s divided character. It is because of our human divided heart. However, we often project this difference onto God’s character. We believed that God’s character is divided when it is really our own. This interpretation brings a further new meaning to the narrow door to life and Heaven. The door to Heaven is actually wide open. All people whose hearts long for God will be received with welcomed arms. It is the divided condition of the human heart that has made the door to Heaven narrow. This is why Jesus taught that the “poor in spirit”, a humble repentant heart, will receive the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5: 3). This is also why Jesus taught that those who are treated “last” by the world, like the prodigal, will discover that they will be first to be received in Heaven (Matt. 20: 16). Their heart longs for the gracious love of God. We Experience Heaven on Earth First Many people believe Heaven is very different than life on Earth, that Heaven is only found in the Afterlife. But our Christian tradition is very clear that the experiences of Heaven happen here on Earth too. The Lord’s Prayer recited in many churches stresses this truth. It begins with the words, “Our Father, who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” There are many other teachings of Jesus which highlight the “here, but not fully here” Kingdom of God. It is interesting how Jesus stresses that the Kingdom of God cannot be directly observed in the physical world and objectified (Luke 17:20-21). Rather, he says, the Kingdom of God is found among or within us meaning that we notice the Kingdom of God through our internal experience as humans. In other words, we notice signs of Heaven here on Earth through our internal human experience. This is why in my palliative care ministry I encourage people to reflect on the times in their lives when they have experienced sacred moments. People do have such moments, often many whether it be in nature, or in their relationships, or mysterious coincidences in their life, or through the meaning they find in their work like being creative, helping people, or making this world a better place. It may be a repentant experience similar to what the prodigal encountered when they realized they were spiritually lost. However, in realizing their spiritual disconnection or remembering past sacred times, many people experience a longing to return to their spiritual home. That longing is a sign of God’s spirit transforming their hearts such that their hearts begin to point in the direction of Heaven. They begin, like the prodigal, to travel their sacred journey back home to God. The Journey to Heaven Begins on Earth It is important to realize that this spiritual journey home begins for many people on Earth, long before their death. Many people seek out a religious community or spiritual director for this very purpose, so they can begin to experience Heaven on Earth. This spiritual work involves reducing the distance between a person’s heart and God so that they can feel more intensely God’s light, warmth, love and all the qualities of God’s spirit within their lives on Earth. It also means doing the psychospiritual work necessary to melt the clouds within our hearts so that our hearts align more closely with the gracious loving heart of God. As we work at our spiritual transformation, we experience more often and more deeply the dynamics of Heaven in our earthly lives. As people do their spiritual work, people notice a difference between the dynamics of Heaven and the dynamics of Earth. As the prodigal discovered, the dynamics of Earth are very physical and concrete. There is a strong pull downward to the physical world that operates at a lower vibrational frequency, one that can we experience through our five physical senses and observe through the scientific method. We can become quite attached and addicted to the dynamics of this physical world. However, this downward pull vibrationally also happens everytime we "rigidize" or solidify our beliefs, emotional states, the ways we do things or how we hold experiences in our physical bodies. When we give in this downward pull, we find ourselves attached or addicted to our internal states just as we can be to aspects of the external world. This temptation to control our earthly experiences is quite appealing and as a result, our hearts are pulled downward and often become trapped in these lower frequencies. The dynamics of Heaven on Earth, often called the fruits of God’s spirit, are very different. Rather than being external and physical, the qualities of love, grace, truth, joy, peace, etc. arise from within us, within our mind, heart, will, and body, within our human soul. This is why they are seen as having their source from God or Heaven rather than from our physical world. These heavenly dynamics are also more subtle meaning that these dynamics cannot be noticed by our physical senses or by scientific instruments. Yet, our heart, mind, gut, and body clearly sense them which suggests that these spiritual dynamics operate at a higher vibrational frequency than the dynamics of Earth. But there is a catch with these spiritual dynamics. As soon as we try to control these qualities or seek to become attached to them, they lose their godly quality. It is like these heavenly energies fall in frequency to earthly vibrational levels, and all the divine aspects of love, grace, and compassion disappear. It is only when we stay in a posture of surrender and trust that these aspects of God's spirit remain within our earthly human experience. As we realize this truth, we come to know that these heavenly experiences are truly a gift from God, moments that we can only experience when our hearts are aligned with the heart of God. This is why Jesus stresses the importance of learning to surrender our attachments to the physical treasures of earth (Matt. 6: 19) and seek instead the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 6: 33). The Experience of Heavenly Judgement on Earth It is important to realize that the treasures on Earth have the potential to pull our hearts downward. As we experience something pleasurable like ice cream, we want to experience more of that goodness, because after a while, we don’t get the same kick of pleasure. We need more of that pleasure to get the same positive experience. As result, if we are not careful, our mind, heart, will, and body will become more and more desensitize and find ourselves soon enslaved and lost to the dynamics of our Earthly world. As we all know and as the prodigal found it, there are painful consequences to any earthly addiction: broken relationships, poverty, guilt/shame, self hatred, etc. These are the consequences or judgements of God’s Law, one could say, that arise due to our choices when we follow our flesh or sinful desires (Gal. 5: 17-21). In other words, the experience of judgement or Hell-like experiences happen on Earth long before we get to Heaven. In contrast, for us to experience the higher frequencies of Heaven, we have to practice surrender, letting go, the emptying of ourselves (Phil. 2: 7) of all our passions for this earthly world. You would think that when we let go of control and surrender to God’s spirit and the flow of life we would fall downward. But as Richard Rohr explains in his book, “Falling Upward”, the opposite happens. We find in surrendering to the experience of Being that our souls wake up and become more sensitized to the subtle dynamics of God’s spirit. We begin to experience more fully the fruits of God’s Spirit on Earth. Instead of falling downward into the denser energies of Earth, this relaxing of our soul allows it to rise to experiencing the more subtle, higher frequencies of Heaven on Earth. That is, we experience the judgement of our choices on Earth, but in this case, we experienced being blessed by the fruits of God's spirit and often by others in the world. How is Heaven different at Death? This begs the question. If we can experience aspects of Heaven during our life on Earth, what happens at the moment of death when we leave this earthly plane of existence? One big difference in the Afterlife is that the physicalness of Earth passes way. Everything associated with our physical body and physical life disappears. What remains is our human soul with all of its patterns of thinking, feeling, longing, and being that were developed on Earth. Another key difference in the Afterlife is that upon death we enter a totally different dimension of time and space. Time and space essentially disappear. As two different writers in the Bible suggest, a thousand years is just a day in God’s time (Ps. 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8). This suggests that the notion of past, present, and future vanishes, at least as we understand it on Earth. In the heavenly dimension, God and the spiritual world are described as eternal, everlasting, timeless. We get a taste of this heavenly timelessness sometimes when we have sacred moments in our earthly lives. However, since the realm of Heaven in the Afterlife is no longer restricted by physical reality, we experience immediately the consequences of the thinking and emotional patterns in our soul. While consequences can take days, years, or even a lifetime on earth to happen, and sometimes not even then, we now experience them immediately. It is interesting reading stories from Near Death Experiences and other research on human consciousness that reveal how Heaven is a world shaped instantly by our thoughts, feelings, and longings.
What this means is that the heavenly journey of spiritual growth on Earth continues in the Afterlife. All the consequences related to our soul’s thinking, feeling, longing, and being are now realized quickly leading to the possibility of faster growth. While on physical Earth there is a subtle pull toward the higher frequencies of living nurtured by the dynamics of Heaven, in the Afterlife, this pull upward to experiencing God’s agape love and all the spiritual fruits is far stronger. And yet, it seems, based on the Scriptures of the different religions and consciousness research, that there are levels of goodness and conscious awareness in the Afterlife, just as there are levels on Earth. The hearts of people in the Afterlife still respond to God's unconditonal love in different ways, some embrace it fully whiles others distrust it or even reject it. How people's hearts respond to this divine gracious love at their death determines, it seems, where their spiritual journey begins in the Afterlife. Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator |