the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

Things I have been learning about Yahweh:

• I recently joined a six-month fellowship group ! We have yet to start our first official session and have only started an open-house session and an introductory session, but I am excited to be going through it ! All of us are pretty much Christians who have been disillusioned by our more fundamentalist upbringings, and know that there are still spiritual practices that we can still be centering our lives on that does not include any of fundamentalist, overly Christian-ese mentalities that were actually harmful to us. At this point in my faith, I’ve been trying to keep up the practices I’ve done for the past handful of years – frequent scripture reading, journaling, devotional reading, Sabbath, tithing, and church service, but I admit that part of me is jaded so I’m trying to, at my own pace, let myself untangle so much of the harmful theology that I grew up in and was constantly immersed in.

Things I have been learning about others:

• This could also be a reminder in the “things I’ve been learning about myself” section. It’s been a while since I’ve served consistently with the youth. I don’t know if I’ll go back to it, but something I remember and still agree with is to make conversation with anyone as awkward as it is. There’s someone who is my superior at work and although he is a little awkward about it, because of his position, he needs to make many connections. Consequently, he often comes off as a little awkward, but there he still is making conversation and connections – and that is very admirable in and of itself.
• Jacob and I just finished playing the EA co-op game “It Takes Two”. It was fun, as there were many different worlds to explore, skills to possess, tasks to do, and I also especially loved the storyline (warning: spoilers ahead!), as silly as it was at times. Basically, a husband and wife’s consciousnesses are transferred to these hand-made dolls that their 6-7 year-old daughter made because she cried over them after they told her that they were getting a divorce. A love book comes to life and is the one sending them off to all their missions and quests, forcing the couple to spend time with one another, work together, and get to know each other better. By the last 3 levels, although they still bicker “in therapy” with the book, you can slowly see their hearts start to soften and pay more attention to one another. Although it’s just a fictional game and not the best way to go about couple’s therapy, one thing I will give the crazy love book credit for is forcing the couple to spend more time together and find their attraction and love for each other again, as that was missing in their real world.

Things I have been learning about the world:

• I learned recently that in nature, in the sky, during storms above storm clouds, these things called “red sprites” can form. They happen so briefly that it can be difficult to really photograph them, but they basically look like red lightning aliens. It is truly a fascinating thing to research, but I could imagine perhaps people from long ago spotting red sprites and feeling terrified of potential celestial beings that they just spotted. Image found on Google:

• I also learned recently that figs are actually flowers, and for them to mature, they need to specifically digest a fig wasp.
• Another random thing I learned is that people buy a lot of money to buy sperm whale vomit… because apparently it smells really good. One common way that sperm whales ‘use’ their vomit is to help digest giant squid beaks that are sharp in their digestive tracts.

Things I have been learning about myself:

• I just read a good reminder that soothing is a good way to resolve animosity. I seldom get defensive and verbally aggressive, but some of that comes out when I notice that whoever I’m talking already appears to have that stance. It’s difficult for me to remain and speak calm/neutrally, because, naturally, that is not how I feel. Although I want to tend to my feelings, I also want to be communicating with others in calm, respectful manners, even if they are not doing the same for me.

Continuing with the Hidden Wholeness quotes and why they stand out to me:

• “…we are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness – an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others. We may abandon that knowledge as the years go by, but it never abandons us. I find it fascinating that the very old, who often forget a great deal, may recover vivid memories of childhood, of that time in their lives when they were most like themselves. They are brought back to their birthright nature by the abiding core of selfhood they carry within – a core made more visible, perhaps, by the way aging can strip away whatever is not truly us.” –-> I feel like this sticks out to me partly because it reminds me of one of my core beliefs that everyone is born good – not a blank slate – good; but good and vulnerable. And it is this vulnerability that can have the potential to be something relationally beautiful or to spiral into darkness, which is actually in an upcoming quote that I will share. In any case, part of me feels a little sad that it is only really when we’re very young or very old that we are awakened to our true, good selves the way that God intended, as if our youth were wasted. I think I had blindly been walking through my life for a good number of decades, and it hasn’t been until a few years ago that I slowly could notice some parts of my own childhood self emerge. I think one reason I entered the counseling field is because I wanat to help people reclaim this part of themselves. I am also thinking of ways I can reconnect to this part of myself, too, amidst the distractions around me and the distractions I also place in front of myself.

• “Most of us can make a long list of the external enemies of the soul, in the absences of which we are sure we would be better people ! Because we so quickly blame our problems on forces ‘out there,’ we need to see how often we conspire in our own deformation: for every external power bent on twisting us out of shape, there is a potential collaborator within us. When our impulse to tell the truth is thwarted by threats of punishment, it is because we value security over being truthful. When our impulse to side with the weak is thwarted by threats of lost social standing, it is because we value popularity over being a pariah. The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of ‘self-impersonation,’ and betray our identities. And yet the soul persistently calls us back to our birthright form, back to lives that are grounded, connected, and whole.” –> This ties back to what I was sharing about our inherent goodness and vulnerability. Wanting to be secure and wanting to be liked are not bad things, but with shame and fear, we can try to grasp those things in ways that end up being more dysfunctional for our humanity in the long run. It’s never just a matter of ‘just good’ or ‘just bad’. I really appreciate Palmer’s phrase of ‘betraying our identities’, and personally, that’s probably one of the best defintions of ‘sin’ that I have seen.

• “‘This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know,’ says Mary Oliver, ‘that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attentiveness.’ But we live in a culture that discourages us from paying attention to the soul or true self – and when we fail to pay attention, we end up living soulless lives. Two streams in our culture contribute to our inattention. One is secularism, which regards the human self as a social construct with no created core; the other is moralism, which regards all concern for self as ‘selfish.’ Secularism and moralism may sound contradictory, but they take us to the same place: a denial of true self. If we accept their distortions of reality, the journey toward an undivided life becomes a fool’s errand, so it is important to understand why both assessments of our condition are wrong.” –-> Firstly, I agree with Mary Oliver’s poem on the soul. This is why digital detoxes help us feel more ease and help us pay more attention to ourselves – our pains and joys – and lets our souls breathe a bit with regards to trying to get our attention through perhaps otherwise dysfunctional ways. I also thought this commentary on secularism and moralism was a different perspective on the definition of secularism than I’ve seen before. My own conviction about secularism is that it does not really exist and that, in fact, everything is sacred. There is this author Brandy Anderson who describes this quite nicely, that there is no ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, just the sacred twisted in darkness. In any case, though, I also like Palmer’s definition of what secular could mean. Think that we are only material with neurological influences affecting how we view life fails to explain bigger life questions. Moralism is also the ultimate disservice to God, as God created us to love ourselves as well, as a way to love Him.

• “… I have met too many people who suffer from an empty self. They have a bottomless pit where their identity should be – an inner void they try to fill with competitive success, consumerism, sexism, racism, or anything that might give them the illusion of being better than others. We embrace attitudes and practices such as these not because we regard ourselves as superior but because we have no sense of self at all. Putting others down becomes a path to identity, a path we would not need to walk if we knew who we were.” –> I will say briefly that this overall idea that has been so eloquently described simply reminds me of the phrase that we can’t others well if we haven’t been loving our own selves well. If we can love and have compassion for the humanity that is in us, then we can truly see and love the humanity that is in every single human.

• “The moralists seem to believe that we are in a vicious circle where rising individualism and the self-centeredness inherent in it cause the decline of community – and the decline of community, in turn, gives rise to more individualism and self-centeredness. The reality is quite different, I think: as community is torn apart by various political and economic forces, more and more people suffer from the empty self syndrome.” –> I mainly appreciate here how Palmer acknowledges that there are bigger forces at play than just “individual sin”, sin always goes to the cooperate level as well. One does not happen without the other, as we are always formed and shaped by other people.

• “A strong community helps people develop a sense of true self, for only in community can the self exercise and fulfill its nature: giving and taking, listening and speaking, being and doing. But when community unravels and we lose touch with one another, the self atrophies and we lose touch with ourselves as well. Lacking opportunities to be ourselves in a web of relationships, our sense of self disappears, leading to behaviors that further fragment our relationships and spread the epidemic of inner emptiness.” –> Reading this mainly felt like a small light-bulb moment. It reminds me that at the end of many people’s lives, those who have regrets usually have relational ones. Our sense of self and identity need others, not in an enmeshed, attached way, but in ways that we can feel genuinely connected. From a therapy standpoint, oftentimes emptiness involves being disconnected from ourselves because we have not had the best communities that could connect with us and so to survive, we disconnect from ourselves. It is usually only when we can find others who can genuine connect with us that we also learn to connect with ourselves.

• “…the moralists have got it wrong; it is never ‘selfish’ to name, claim, and nurture true self. The are selfish acts, to be sure. But those acts arise from an empty self, as we try to fill our emptiness in ways that harm others – or in ways that harm us and bring grief to those who care about us. When we are rooted in true self, we can act in ways that are life-giving for us and all whose lives we touch. Whatever we do to care for true self is, in the long run, a gift to the world.” –> this comment of Palmer’s reminds me of the ever ongoing debate of Christianity versus self-help. I genuinely think a good portion of self-help books are to really help us discover our true self and furthermore, our true, God-given selves. Some Christians feel threatened that to dive into the world of self-help is to abandon Jesus and worship self, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Especially with regards to our seemingly more difficult emotions to experience, self-help books may lean towards trying to be curious and compassionate towards those emotions, while some versions of Christianity may insist to pray those emotions away and if they don’t go away, then we’re not faithful enough. Anyways, small rant about some Christian mentalities.

Thanks for reading !