‘Healthy religion offers us a pattern for transforming our pain.’ Photo: Amer Mughawish on Unsplash
Pain barrier: Margaret Cook responds to an anonymous Friend
‘We were all astonished at her sense of not belonging.’
Like the Friend who wrote ‘Fighting talk’ (22 January) I’m sure we all have experiences of our Meetings being divided. We would not be a normal group of people if this didn’t happen. But I think we can approach any difficulty in a way that hinges on what our Friend was intimating in the article, namely our attempts to understand the workings and experience of our inner selves (and, implicitly, to take responsibility for them).
If I fall out with my friend or my colleague or indeed my Meeting, it seems to me the first thing I have to do is ask the question: ‘What is this revealing to me about myself?’ What ‘stuff’ is it touching in me? What unresolved issues is it pinpointing? What hurt, disappointment or anger? What in my past has been too painful for me to acknowledge and which might be being evoked by my current situation? It is only after we have thoroughly examined these questions – in honesty and vulnerability – that I believe we can begin to get a measure of what the problem really is.
I well remember an example in our own Meeting when a Friend said, in a listening group, that she ‘didn’t feel part of Meeting’. It was a deeply sad moment. At the time, this Friend happened to be both clerk to the Meeting as well as an elder, and I think we were all astonished at her sense of not belonging. On reflecting with her later, it emerged that she had had a very bleak childhood in which she was indeed rejected and unwanted. These raw feelings remained in her and it didn’t take much to trigger them or for her to project them onto her current situation. This was an example when her emotional reactions ‘belonged’ more to her than ‘belonging’ to Meeting, and for me it is a tragedy that our Friend was not able to recognise her feelings or – even more – receive them with tenderness.
It is often said that if you don’t transform your own pain you will almost certainly transmit it, to children, family or friends and so on. ‘Healthy’ religion offers us a pattern for transforming our pain. In Christianity, that pattern is, of course, crucifixion leading to resurrection.
I believe this process is all part of our spiritual and emotional evolution because such ‘evolution’ is precisely what spiritual development is. And what helps it is ‘practising the presence of God’, in whatever form we choose to do that.
Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest, claims that contemplation is ‘the most subversive of activities’ because ‘it undercuts the one thing that normally refuses to give way – our natural individualism and narcissism. Once we are freed from our narcissism… we can finally live and act with justice and truth. People don’t really change by themselves. God changes us, if we can expose ourselves to God at a deep level’.
