Healing the Soul…
The Dark Heaven of Recovery
“ I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. ”
—TS Eliot, from East Coker
How is it that I am reading this?
I thought nobody wrote about this.
I thought nobody knew.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe this has nothing to do with what happened to me.
What if it does?
But I read on
Even if I'm pretty skeptical
Even if I may be confused
Even if I may be quite fearful
Even if I am furious
Even with all the therapy I may have had,
… Even if therapy could not touch this thing inside
What happened to me should not have ever happened…
In my church
In my temple
In my house
In my bedroom
In my body
I am tired of being made wrong
Or worse—patronized –
For my abuse
For being gay
For being a woman
For being anything but white
For being orthodox, or reformed
For being veiled or unveiled
For being celibate
For keeping my own counsel
For speaking up
For telling the truth of what happened
For trying to be invisible
For being an outsider
I read this because there may be few people I trust to listen to me.
Even if I am angry with God or whatever I call God.
Even if I don't believe in Him or Her or It anymore….
Even if maybe I still do
I cannot stop wrestling with whatever I call IT
I am tired of being god
I grapple
I question—I've got to question
I want peace, not faith
I want truth, not excuses
I want to be quiet, but I can't be still.
I want to listen, but I don't hear anything.
I want to make sense of the darkness
I want to celebrate something again
I've want to sing again
I want
to pray again…
Discrimination, persecution, violation, shame, hatred, all in the name of God…
Religious abuse is the physical, mental or spiritual damage suffered by members of a faith community when its leaders or the membership exploit, manipulate or harm them.
A hate crime, an unconscious or condescending racist action is religious abuse
Shunning someone because of their sexuality or gender under the umbrella of religious protocol—is abuse. Violating a woman or a man, or defiling a person who is transgendered because of their sexual orientation in the name of God—is spiritual abuse.
Shaming a child by willful manipulation of his innocence, using a child for violent, sexual, or physically abusive ends in the name of God—is religious abuse.
Rape, seduction or the violation of a sexual boundary not only of a child but with an adult who cannot participate in a relationship of equality—in a family under religious pretext, with a member of the ministry or a spiritual leader—is tantamount to incest: The deepest connection of sacred space is corrupted under the umbrella of spirit—The perpetrator exploits his own and his victim’s sexuality to subjectively empower himself, by utterly dominating the physical, psychological, and spiritual experiences of the victim. This is a most vile form of religious abuse.
If the ones who were supposed to protect and comfort, hide their own worst truths instead, their victims are often shunned or punished even as they try to speak of what has happened to them. And if the community persecutes those who honestly challenge the questionable actions of religious authority, or silence those who speak up for social justice on behalf of those who might not have a voice—the betrayal is double.
In the trauma of religious abuse, memory can splatter across the pavement of the mind like shards of glass. Truth is not always linear. That is why it is important to listen, even to those who often stretch or bend their stories. Sometimes distortions cover truth by retelling an event with indoctrination, fear or silence. Truth becomes more complicated. It was supposed to set one free, but it weighs heavy. For some telling what happened was supposed to give some closure, but sometimes silence is only way to survive.
How does one who has experienced something like this find the safety to trust what is real, or to risk having a space to speak or eventually to be curious, or to voice doubt?
How can one find a way to rage, to reclaim what is valuable, or grieve for what is lost?
What does one do with fear or cynicism, or despair for that matter? When one's sexuality or sexual orientation, shame about their body, or race, or convictions--has created confusion about intimate relationships, how does someone find a way to reconnect with another?
The harm of such abuse and such shame is not simply psychological, which is why talk therapy cannot always touch it. The affect of religious abuse sometimes reaches even to the core of the self where there may no longer be a place for love. When persons have been violated like this, it can devastate their sense of self, their principles or inner compass. It can alter their experience of the world, their body, their sexual orientation, inner values, relationships, their sense of meaning, their ground of being. It can stultify perception and corrupt their sense of meaning or hope.
For those who are survivors, especially those who have suffered sexual or ritual abuse, the physical and psychological cost can be overwhelming. There may be damage to the body, and even to the circuitry in the brain. Sometimes they are developmentally stuck in the place they were when they originally experienced the abuse.
But, there is another level of distress, and…another kind of developmental arrest that is more difficult to speak about. It comes from trauma to the soul.
The impact on one's inner life is so core that it alters the essence of the self. How can one trust gravity when the ground disappears? Where is the point of return, when there ceases to be a point?
The manifestations of religious abuse on a victim are legion: rapidly shifting relationships, persistent abusive loyalties, unreasonable sacrifice to unreasonable causes, isolation and mistrust, either overcompensating deference or vicious rage toward authority. The repercussions of religious abuse create fear in its forms of spitefulness or insularity, and can breed a primitive faith in old childish mindsets.
But the most profound residual of all is a toxic and brutal shame. Like a hungry ghost, shame feeds off the self, diminishing one's sense of self worth, dignity, one's sense of goodness.
Shame takes the blame.
Shame invites more abuse.
Shame breaks down the soul.
One who feels toxic shame will do anything not to feel it, even shameful things. He will hide. He will compromise. He will be very busy trying to outrun it. But shame reverberates into a downward tightening spiral, often reflected repeatedly into compulsive action, addiction, codependence, secrecy, and more shame.
And shame is the sadder underbelly of the perpetrator's pride. Pride and self-interest may drive him, but it is shame that brings him to the deplorable place of abuser.
Shame runs the show all around.
Shame and its sister, fear, beget silence.
Silence is more powerful than words. From silence, there are other ways that disconnect the community from seeing its own prejudice, like self righteousness, or strict observance to protocol even at the cost of compassion, or shunning, isolation or exclusivity, or allowing sexual violation by religious leaders even when the abuse is in plain sight.
Silence blesses our ignorance, but shame forces our eyes wide shut.
Some of us have our own story about shame and pride, about fear, about bigotry, about sexual or physical violation at the hands of a trusted other—
How someone, into whose hand we put that tender and most vulnerable spirit, betrayed us—just when, like a bird with trembling wing, frail and splendid, we were ready to take flight.
How our attempts at disclosure might have created only more isolation. How the church or community did not protect, and then did not believe. How they may have blamed or pathologized or shunned us; how we may have been failed again by being scapegoated, or worse, by silence.
Some of us may know what it is to be left with only the mask of religion, a shell-shocked heart, or with nothing at all.
Perhaps we would never go back to an infantile relationship with God, because that kind of relationship did not protect, and given how it all went down, perhaps that God of your early life no longer makes sense.
We might continue to be enraged, or have simply given up on whatever we thought God was.
But then… even despair can seem like a cheap excuse.
There must be a way to find a voice again, to tell the truth again, to be heard—and to be believed. There must be a way to regain physical, moral, or sexual integrity again, to experiment with spirituality or some kind of inner life. There must be a meaning to all of this
We search. Perhaps we decide to chart some other course through the minefield of conflicting feelings, memories, and rituals. We may have already been through the other avenues of recovery, marriages, divorces, children, losses, loyalties to tragic causes, new organizations, bad organizations, good therapy, very bad therapy, new religion, no religion.
We cannot shake out the longing, the sense of deep and abiding restlessness.
We may be disillusioned, disenfranchised; we may reenact again and again what has happened by self-destructive behavior or addictions, overwork, unfortunate choices or difficult relationships.
But there is something that is quite difficult to describe that keeps pushing us on.
I choose to call it fierce grace. It is a lingering intense desire to be free.
There is a hunger for truth, and a profound resonance with kindness and compassion. It never leaves us. It drives your outrageous and sacrilegious sense of humor; it suffers when you hear platitudes; it rails against injustice and discrimination in the name of God, when God has had nothing to do with it. And despite all the pain, the lack of self-esteem, the attention deficits, the addictions, the endless self-sabotage, the shadows and potholes, it is always there, like a brook under the ground.
Fierce grace or whatever else one would call it, often waits without hope but responds to what is true. It is not pious or passive, and often it is not particularly pretty. It may have nothing at all to do with whatever others call God. But it sustains us as we make our way to recovery.
I would like to tell you a story that I hope might somehow speak to this. It is from the oldest recorded myth, which was written on clay tablets in the third millennium B.C., a Sumerian story about Inanna, the beautiful Queen of Heaven and Earth and Goddess of Light. As the story goes, Inanna feels obliged to visit the underworld to attend the funeral of the husband of her sister Erishkogal, who rules the dark realm. Inanna is not in the habit of going below and has had no contact with her sister or this realm since Ereshkigal was raped as a child and then exiled—an unjust consequence of her trauma. Ereshkigal is not only grieving for her husband. She suffers in labor, unable to give birth. And, she is raging. She lies on her bed, furious because of her circumstances, fearful of more loss, and desperately lonely.
Inanna believes she can easily make the trek to the underworld, pay her respects, and come home. But Enki, the god of Wisdom, knows it might be more difficult than Inanna believes. So he gives her the holy me, the gift of wisdom and knowledge, to help her make the journey. Inanna also brings her crown, her lapis lazuli beads, some sparkly stones and a fashionable robe, which she considers both necessary and alluring. She leaves instructions for her servant: if she does not return in three days, the servant must beat the drum for her, and go find help.
Inanna arrives at the gates of hell after a long journey. Meanwhile, the dark Queen of Death, groaning in misery, is enraged that her sister has blithely entered her realm without an invitation. Her presence is hardly welcome. In fact it seems a bit self-serving. Besides, Innana’s visit is but a reminder of all that Ereshkigal has lost.
“What does the Queen of Light want from me? I am the Goddess of Death. I weep for infants taken before their time. Does she want a piece of that? Or does she just want the Water?” For in the underworld, it is Ereshkigal who also holds the Water of Life.
Ereshkigal declares that even the Queen of Heaven must abide by the same regulations as everybody else. She instructs the gatekeeper to systematically remove Inanna’s garments as she descends. He takes Inanna’s crown, the lapis, the jewelry, and the royal robe at each of the narrow consecutive gates down to the realm of death, until Inanna arrives in the underworld utterly naked. But it makes no difference that she has been stripped and shamed. Inanna is still quite lovely, which only infuriates the miserable Queen of Hell even further. Ereshkigal, embittered as she is, pronounces Inanna guilty—guilty of the ignorance of death. And, with a cry, she fixes her eye of death on Inanna. Erishkigal turns Inanna into a rotting corpse, left to hang on a meat hook.
Now Ereshkigal is truly miserable. Her husband is dead, she has killed her only sister, and she is still in the pangs of labor, unable to give birth. Meanwhile, Inanna’s servant waits outside the gates. After three days, she appeals for help from the two men who should care the most, Inanna’s husband and father. Inanna’s husband has quickly moved on to other distractions, found another love interest, and forgotten about his wife. And Inanna’s father, like a company man fearful of rocking the cosmic boat, says he can do nothing to alter fate.
So the servant again approaches Enki, who originally gave Inanna the blessing of knowledge for her journey. Enki is quite troubled to hear what has become of Inanna and agrees to do what he can to rescue her. He takes some dirt from under his fingernails, and creates two little unobtrusive genderless demons, called Mourners, that can sneak through the cracks of the underworld. When they arrive, they do not even bother with Inanna’s body. Instead they go to Ereshkigal, who is moaning on her labor bed.
“Oh, my inside. . .”
“Oh, oh, your inside!” the creatures moan back.
“Oh, my outside. . .” She weeps.
“Oh, oh, your outside. . .” They weep with her and do not leave her side.
The Queen of Death falls silent. This is a new experience for her. No one has ever seen or acknowledged her pain. Relieved and flooded with gratitude, she finally gives birth. In appreciation, Ereshkigal offers the little Mourners a boon of their choosing. They simply ask for Inanna’s corpse. Ereshkigal agrees—and then mercifully sprinkles some of the Water of Life over the body of her sister.
Inanna, now revived and alive, returns to the earth and its heavens. But she is no longer simply the Queen of Light and Joy. Once freed from the underworld, she insists on keeping the little demons with her. She has been touched by the eye of death and experienced the decay and darkness that are her opposite. She has been stripped down and left for dead, and yet she has learned something down there in the cave. She has also found the Water of Life and so returns to her kingdom a wiser, humbler Queen.
And, after everything that she has been through, Innana takes the little mourners with her back to the world. They stay with her always, reminding her of what she has learned and helping her to be a more complete queen. She can never go back to the way she was, and is grateful for it.
But there are several understories to this myth. And perhaps, at some point in our lives, in greater or lesser ways, we play one or more of these parts
First: there is the perpetrator, hidden from view: he is the one who drinks the elixir of life from another, and gets away with it. He or she can be a trusted member of the spiritual community, or a family member. But the one who harms may be the entire community. They abandon those who have been violated by choosing to do nothing about it. Or perhaps, like Inanna's own father (remember he was Ereshkigal's father as well) they divert their energies and care to uphold the status quo. For a survivor of religious or any other abuse it can be as devastating as the original abuse: to be ignored, blamed, shunned, shamed or abandoned by the community after what they have already suffered.
The back-story of Innana is important as well. The queen of heaven is well meaning, but does not intend to become so involved. The messiness of the situation may be too much, too difficult, too uncomfortable. She might attend to her duties because of protocol more than compassion. And so she is pronounced guilty—guilty of not engaging in all that life brings to bear. She doe not deserve to be strung up on a meat hook for this. In the story Innana is saved from death, and from unconsciousness. The grace of the little mourners –and Ereshkigal's water of life, makes it possible for her to return to life.
Enki, the wise one who stays in the background, imparts the holy Me. In some of the Sumerian stories, Enki is not a perfect character. He is a drunkard, his boundaries are not always so good, and he gets fooled because of his good-heartedness. But it is Enki who provides the wisdom, truth, judgment, and kindness. It is he who creates those egoless, genderless little mourners from the dirt of his own fingernails.
And —the little Mourners: so unobtrusive, they crawl through the cracks of hell to do whatever they can for the one in pain. They have "nothing" to offer but their witness and their presence. They know that they cannot "fix" Ereshkigal, but can only practice kindness, honest caring, responsive listening, supporting, attending and honoring the one in pain. What the little ones have to give is surely not the same thing as pity, or even sympathy, although they often are confused for one another. Sympathy is when a person experiences the feelings of the other as if he or she were the sufferer. Sometimes this shows up in a patronizing sentimentality that can actually deplete real care and authentic response to the one in the pain. The mourners instead show the real meaning of empathy, the consideration of the feelings and experience of the one who is suffering, and readiness to respond to his or her needs—the ability to experience the outlook or emotions of another human being—responding from that person's point of view, and not from their own. The little ones not only attend to Ereshkigal, but also deal with the rotting body of Innana no matter what condition they find her.
This is the very pulse of a true intentional and committed community.
Of course, Ereshkigal’s story is perhaps even most significant of all. Ereshkigal does not leave the dark realm; she continues to be the ruler of the Underworld and the one who must accept and hold death. Yet something has transformed her. The little Mourners do not erase what she has endured, but they witness her pain and resonate with it and because of this, she is finally able to give life.
It changes everything.
Whatever part we might play in Ereshkigal's story, we know that in life or in the quest to recover our "souls," we may find ourselves in the darkness of the cave with no end in view.
But I imagine that even the darkness has a quality of life to it. I believe this is fierce grace. It comes alive in curiosity, in wonder—in gratitude. It definitely resonates with music, or in laughter; it shows up in hope, which often makes no sense whatsoever. Darkness is also blindness, but it can be a way of seeing inside. Thomas Merton says it is impossible to define. You do not fly. There is no space, or there is all space; it makes no difference. The next step…is not a step. All that is left is a kind of freedom. Something disappears and nothing seems to be there—but that pure freedom.
I imagine that when people have lost so much, perhaps there is little to fear—even freedom. And I am not being Pollyanna here. Many of us have looked at evil itself, and yet are still searching, singing, living— opening to love in all its ambiguities, and opening to that lingering intense desire to be free.
We respond to the real not the pious,
We may fight for justice, not just what looks politically or theologically correct.
We show up over and over again, trying to heal our hearts from what has happened to us and perhaps others, and to make something meaningful of it all.
This does not necessarily make the pain go away. There are no magical solutions. But something happens in the exchange…a joining, a listening…a presence.
We may recognize others who share it and perhaps begin to build a new community. It informs our choices for connections that will honor our individual process, and for healthier relationships. We will respond to authenticity even if it takes immense courage to be true to ourselves.
Whatever freedom is, it may be as simple as breath, when breathing is simple and the lungs actually work. But it enables the spiritual lungs to breathe even when there is no wind.
The journey may be a dark road because there are no signposts. "One does not discover new lands," says Andre Gide, "without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." It may seem like traveling with no end in view, until we remember that light is not so different from the dark.
It is not simply the absence of light; it is full of space, of possibility.
Perhaps, even in Ereshkigal's dark cave, we are not alone.