*This series, Trauma and Transformation Level 2, includes short homilies/talks to a class at the Yonge Street Mission called Trauma and Transformation, Level 2. The messages are aimed at a mixed audience, some with no faith, some with Christian faith, some with other faiths. The mission serves all without prejudice and seeks to draw people closer to God in Christ as a key part of their healing process.*
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I want to commend each of you for being here today. That has already been said, your commitment to your ongoing healing, your willingness to be part of a community that is in the process of healing, is admirable.
And has already been said, you’re here because of the work you’ve done before today in Level one of Trauma & Transformation.
You will likely recall that for each of those classes, I would bring a message that would touch on spirituality as a key to continuing your forward momentum in personal growth.
We believe in a holistic approach to healing, and we believe, at the mission, that our internal world, that which is at the deepest part of us, which we can call our spirit, is truly worth tending to.
If we think of our internal life perhaps as a garden, we can imagine that the experience of a well-tended garden is quite different than the experience of simply walking through the wilds, or two unmaintained fields.
There is still, of course, a very natural beauty to nature, whether it is cultivated or not.
But if any of you are like me, and have spent any time trying to maintain a well-functioning proper garden that produces fruit and vegetables both for you and for the animals, the rabbits and such in your backyard, you know that there is an effect and impact to paying no attention to the garden.
And there is an effect and impact to tending the garden well.
What might be the effect of paying no attention to the garden? It tends to become overgrown, it can invite animal life that you might not want such as snakes and all kinds of bugs.
My wife and I moved into a house recently in Frankford, north of Trenton, and the backyard had not been mowed for 3 or 4 months.
It had become a breeding ground for ticks and of course we had concerns about West Nile virus as well.
An untended garden or backyard becomes super easy to trip over, and then eventually,
and I’m speaking from experience, it becomes a picture of chaos.
You either can’t get to the fruit and vegetables, or to do so becomes just a great deal of work, and the common outcome of that is that the garden is simply left ignored.
So it grows, but it grows without a watchful eye, a careful tending, thoughtful and intentional pruning aimed at increasing the fruitfulness and beauty of the garden.
So all that to say that our internal world, our internal being, our spirit is truly worth paying attention to, and that when we do that, since our spiritual life, it turns out,
is foundational to our existence, when we begin to order our spiritual life, many other things that we might work on have a foundation to rest upon, a truly solid foundation.
Not to overdo the metaphors, but if you know anything about construction, the foundational stone, the cornerstone, that’s laid determines the eventual outcome of the building.
When you get the foundational stone in the right location, and when it’s made of the right material, it makes possible everything else that might be constructed upon it.
So… I wanted to look very briefly at a passage of Scripture, from the Old Testament book of Psalms. The passage was written by King David.
You might remember that we talked about him before, and that he is a very colourful character in the old testament.
Despite his many flaws, and some pretty atrocious things he did in his life, he ended up being referred to by God in the scripture as “a man after God’s own heart“.
At the very least we can understand that this suggests that no matter what had happened to him, no matter what he had done,
all of those things were significantly less important than the fact that he eventually sorted himself out and had his internal world ordered correctly.
He had learned what the ultimate good was, the absolute highest ideal, and he spent his life pursuing that.
I may have mentioned to you that I was raised to be an atheist, and I was very much so until I hit a certain age in my teens.
I very much understand the difficulty some of us here may have with the concept of God.
At one point the very concept of God was offensive to me and, frankly, in my mind it represented the lowest possible way of thinking.
So I really do understand, respect and sympathize with any and all of you who are as I was, an agnostic or atheist. To that end I would suggest that you can perhaps interpret what I’m saying using some of the language I’ve been using.
For King David, as it is for modern-day believers, God is a very personal and loving and powerful and intimate person with whom we live in relationship. But I do understand how that can sound and how offputting that can be for us.
So then we can think in terms, as I mentioned before, of our relationship to our highest ideal of the highest good.
So then for David, as a man after God's own heart, his relationship to his best thinking about his highest ideal and highest good was such that he would consistently pursue that highest good.
He would discipline his internal life to correspond with his best thinking about the highest good.
David was a musician, presumably also a singer, and a songwriter. And in the Bible we have David's songbook, referred to as the psalms. And David wrote this song, Psalm 27.
Psalm 27 Of David.
The LORD is my light and my salvation-- whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life-- of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall. Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then will I be confident
At various points in his life David had things to be afraid of. He had fear responses to objectively real and verifiable threats upon his life.
And David couldn’t make those threats go away. He couldn’t insulate himself to such a degree that those threats would never be an issue to him.
That’s because he chose to live his life in a community, he chose to live his life somewhat connected to other people. That is one reason why David lived such a rich and full life.
David couldn’t make those threats go away. And given that he faced multiple traumatic events in his life, it is no stretch at all to understand that David would have had trauma in his life.
And we, who have backgrounds of traumatic experiences that impact our lives today, we can’t make the world go away; we can’t possibly insulate ourselves from possible triggers or land mines that can happen.
We can’t always, necessarily, be guaranteed that our emotions won’t get hijacked in the moment by some thing, or name, or smell, or site.
But there is something we can do. And this thing that we can do runs very deep. We. Can. Gain. Courage.
Since we can’t remove all threats, or all trauma responses that we would have where we would respond as though there was a threat, with fear, pain or rage… something we can do is grow in our courage.
David did this. One of the ways David did this was to nurture his personal relationship with God, or as I’ve described with his highest ideal.
David said that the Lord was his light and his salvation. He would rely upon God to see and to understand what he was seeing, and he would rely upon God, ultimately, to keep him safe.
We can think of salvation as just that. To be kept safe. To be kept safe from harm.
David said the Lord is the stronghold of his life. A strong hold is a place of security, it is a place where one has confidence in their own survival.
And it is evident that David saw God as his secure place. He experienced God as his home, his fortified tower.
And what was the effect of that on David. It gave him courage.
Having that confidence in God did not take away any of the very real external threats that he faced, or any of the very real internal threats that he felt due to his trauma. But man oh man did it give him courage.
David said: When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.
David’s confidence and courage was such that even as he imagined the scenario of people intending his harm advancing against him, he did not foresee himself falling or stumbling.
Rather he perceived those who are threats to him as indeed stumbling and falling.
With that confidence, with that courage in place, David wraps up the rhetoric significantly in verse three.
He says: Though an army besieges me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then will I be confident.
David’s connection to his highest idea of the good, David’s connection to the God who he experienced as being very real, was such that he was able to imagine a scenario in which his worst fears would come to be, and he would maintain his footing.
He would keep his courage. He would overcome his fear, so his fear would not define him.
Even in the face of war, David felt very deeply and very strongly that he was so grounded, so connected and so enriched in his internal world by his relationship with God, that he knew he would overcome.
His confidence would not fail, in David’s case not because he had talked himself into it, but his confidence would not fail simply because the thing or the One who he placed his confidence in was so utterly reliable and good that he could speak to himself, could sing to himself, could write a song for us like Psalm 27.
So may we all grow in our courage to face life as life presents itself to us. May we grow in the confidence that we truly need not fear. and may the work we do to nurture and to take care of the garden that is our inner world, may the energy we put out in that regard produce wonderful vegetation, wonderful fruit in our lives, even more than we could ask or imagine.
