On (Not) Finding a Church - Part 4

Memory and meaning

This is Part 4 of my series, On (Not) Finding a Church. If you haven’t read the previous installments, you can catch up at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I had originally intended for this installment to include my childhood story and its implications for how I experience community life, but after spending weeks on/with it, I’ve decided that Part 4 will serve as a moderately long but important preface to the story, which I’ll save for Part 5. There won’t be as long of a wait for Part 5, so stay tuned!

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At the end of Part 3, I explained that in the course of trying to get to the bottom of my acedia around church, I went from asking, “Why is the American church landscape so difficult, and what can be done about it?” to asking, “Why is Christian community so difficult and so fraught with pain and disappointment for me?” Despite my initial animosity toward Bonhoeffer’s words in Life Together, they became the impetus behind that shift. That’s a good thing. The updated question meant I was now open to the possibility of the Holy Spirit helping me see old things in new ways.

Soda geysers and making my first counseling appointment

During my junior year of college, I said to my best friend, “I think I’m pretty well-adjusted despite what I went through growing up.” I said that without any sense of irony—as a person who believes in something as fact would. But then she replied, “Oh Judy, that’s only because you don’t have the capacity to face it all right now. Some day it’ll all hit you like a ton of bricks, and then you’ll start working through it.” I was incredibly offended. What was she talking about?? I was doing well in school. I was leading a Bible study and leading worship (that was worth double points). I didn’t drink alcohol or do drugs. I was sleeping well at night. I had friends, and unlike my sophomore year when I went through a months-long major depressive episode, I was now happy most of the time. If all that wasn’t proof of being well-adjusted, then what was?

“Ugh,” she said a few weeks ago when we recalled that conversation. “I used my spiritual gifts of truth-telling so poorly back then. I’m amazed God didn’t revoke them!” We laughed. In fact, we laugh a lot now about so many memories from the days of our youth when we were both so wet behind the ears.

Six years later, though, I discovered that she had been right. A perfect storm of events caused the coping mechanisms I had long relied on to start failing. I was in the middle of an eight-week family medicine rotation in Del Rio, Texas where I didn’t know a soul. On this particular night, I was sitting alone in my short-term-lease apartment, sobbing uncontrollably. The smell of weed was working its way in from one of the neighboring apartments, but the secondhand THC-laced smoke didn’t seem to impart any numbing effects on the grief that had hit me “like a ton of bricks.” Actually, it felt less like a ton of bricks and more like a soda geyser domino—a continuous gushing of grief from deep within my soul. Have you ever seen Mentos mints dropped sequentially into 251 two-liter bottles of Diet Coke?

It was like that.

I don’t know how long I cried, but it went on long enough for me to get really, really thirsty. Parched. This turned out to be surprisingly beneficial, though. It jolted me out of that passive, despairing state and helped me regain a sense of agency. “Enough!” I said to myself. “Pull yourself together, woman, and drink some water before you die of dehydration.”

A few weeks later, I booked my first counseling appointment.

Memory and meaning

I recently turned fifty. That first appointment was literally half a lifetime ago.

As I survey my twenty-five-ish years of trauma recovery work, something that stands out to me is how dynamic memory and sense-making have turned out to be. Which things I’ve remembered, why I’ve remembered them, and how I’ve remembered them (i.e., the way I’ve framed those memories) have morphed as I’ve cycled and recycled through different stages: resentment, stagnation, regression, learning, forgiveness, acceptance, healing, empathy, and growth.

I think part of the explanation for this dynamism in memory and sense-making is that so much of the process of healing from childhood trauma resembles growing up: passing from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to mature adulthood. Sense-making changes tremendously through these respective stages. An emotionally mature adult understands and frames reality quite differently from the way an adolescent might, and an adolescent understands and frames reality quite differently from the way a child would. I’m reminded of 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like child. But when I became an adult, I set aside childish ways.” At the same time, “growing up” in the wake of childhood trauma is nothing like growing up in the traditional sense. It’s more special-ops-rescue-mission than natural process, more scavenger-hunt-through-rubble than forward-looking journey of wonder and discovery. Plus, you don’t hit benchmarks within predictable time frames or in straightforward ways. You could, for example, progress to mature adulthood in certain areas of life but continue to struggle with childlike emotional dysregulation and self-centeredness in other areas.

Nevertheless, transformation can and does happen. I’m going to use as a reference the following diagram from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Rev. Mpho Tutu’s book, The Book of Forgiving. Much of my trauma recovery work predated my reading of the book, but my own healing journey pretty much involved the steps outlined in what they call the fourfold path.

Source: The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World (2014) by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu, p. 49

In the early years of telling my story (step 1) and naming the hurt (step 2), anger was the most accessible emotion. I was so angry. During this stage, my assessments about my childhood and my parents were rigid—I’d even say dogmatic. The tricky thing was that I was still in relationship with them and interacting with them on a regular basis. What did that look like? Probably not what you might guess. Now that I had become a high-functioning adult doing my own things in the world, old feelings of powerlessness coupled with unresolved pain from feeling unseen as a kid manifested themselves in pretty dramatic displays of verbal aggression toward them. I was mean, harsh, and short-tempered. They never returned the aggression or complained about it; they just took it. Occasionally they would say, “I don’t understand why you’re so harsh,” but that would drive me crazy. Don’t you know??? You should know. That’s part of the problem! A few times I actually tried to explain why I was so resentful, but those attempts never yielded the results I wanted. My parents either didn’t remember things the same way, didn’t remember them at all, or dismissed what I said by telling me I was too sensitive. You can imagine how well that went over.

A line from The Umbrella Academy by the character Allison Hargreeves captures what my mindset was during this time: “People don’t want apologies. They want confessions. They want you to stand there and list all the shitty ways that you’ve hurt them so they know you understand.”¹ If I had been able to verbalize exactly what I wanted from them, it would have sounded something like, "I would like a full confession of your sins against me right now, with full awareness of how much you damaged me. I'll wait.” The reality was, though, that we were from very different worlds, and a scenario like that was never going to happen. The other thing was that my parents weren't in a position to do any real harm anymore. Sure, they could still hurt my feelings, irritate and offend me, but they couldn't actually do harm to me without my own cooperation through what I now recognize as learned helplessness—a thought disorder I developed because of childhood trauma that made me believe that I lacked agency with them, could only be passively acted upon by them, or was forever and always their victim. Ironically, the learned helplessness and the rage it provoked had the effect of turning me into the emotionally and verbally abusive one in the relationship.

By God’s grace, I came to understand that what I most needed to work through wasn’t really anger but grief. Anger was merely a symptom of my grief—the grief I felt over the various deep losses, shocks, and deprivations of my childhood. And I didn’t need a detailed, fully empathetic confession from my parents in order to make progress in my grieving process. I just needed to be willing to be present to my pain. I really appreciate the way Desmond Tutu describes the grieving process:

Grief is how we both cope with and release the pain we feel. Grief has many well-documented stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately acceptance… We may cycle through the stages of grief or jump from one stage to another and back again. There is no fixed time, no fixed order, no one way of experiencing the grief associated with a loss. One may be in denial and then find oneself in depression, or one may be in acceptance and then find oneself in anger again. There is no right way to grieve, but grieving itself is essential. Grief is how we come to terms not only with the hardship we have endured, but also with what could have been if life had taken a different course. We grieve as much for what might have been as for what was. (Tutu, 2014, p.102)²

After years, this grief work paved the way for curiosity to emerge about the details of my parents’ stories. Here’s Tutu again:

The person who injured us also has a story. They have wounded us because they have stood inside their own story and acted out of pain, shame, or ignorance. They have ignored our shared humanity. When we see pain in this way, we are able to see our common bond. We might even be able to empathize with the perpetrator. We can begin to let go of our identity as a victim and their identity as a perpetrator. (Tutu, 2014, p.52)

When we can accept both our humanity and the perpetrator’s, we can write a new story, one in which we are no longer cast as a victim but as a survivor, even perhaps a hero. In this new story, we are able to learn and grow from what has happened to us. We may even be able to use our pain as an impulse to reduce the pain and suffering of others… Healing does not mean reversing. Healing does not mean that what happened will never again cause us to hurt… Healing means that our dignity is restored and we are able to move forward in our lives. (Tutu, 2014, p.53)

As I learned to ask my parents new and different questions about their lives (like an investigative journalist might, I suppose) and they felt increasing freedom to share previously undisclosed details, a very different understanding began to emerge. All that rage and entitlement I felt in the early years of this process melted away and turned into empathy, and then into forgiveness. As real forgiveness took place, it began to reshape my memory and recall. I started being able to see the traumatic parts of my childhood as parts of a much larger story. That alone made room for good memories and even nostalgia to float their way to the surface in places where grief and despair once occupied all the real estate.

I’m sharing all this before I get into the narrative of my childhood—the one that sheds light on how I experience church—because I want to convey that the particular narrative I’m going to share took a very long time to take its present form. It includes parts of my parents’ stories because their stories are inextricable parts of mine, and mine is an extension of theirs. Even as I’ve been writing and re-engaging with my past and mining it for clues about why church has been such a painful yet important part of my life, the narrative has taken on new contours. For example, for much of my adult life, I haven’t been very good at telling the good parts of my childhood story, even to myself. Trauma and grief cast long, domineering shadows. They just do. But in recent months, I’ve realized that those “forgotten” good parts played a significant role in my formation as a person and in helping me develop resilience.

It’s even more complicated than that. The same people I spent a lot of time blaming for the bad stuff were also the main ones behind the good. I guess that’s why this narrative has taken so long to develop. There’s fear at the heart of every person who has survived trauma that making room for the complex humanity of the people who hurt us will somehow invalidate our own pain or excuse the damaging ways they related to us (i.e., lessen their burden of accountability). Determining that it doesn’t do that can be a long, winding, and unpredictable process.

1. Quote is from The Umbrella Academy, Season Three, Episode 7: “Auf Wiedersehen”

2. Tutu D., Tutu M. (2014). The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World. New York: HarperOne.