T&T Level 2 Spiritual Talk 3 - February 2024
Sometimes, not all the time, not every second of every day, but sometimes life is just too much. It is just too hard.
The day-to-day things that we deal with can start to feel like heavy weights, and just doing the bare necessities of life can start to feel almost oppressive.
And we wonder, why is it that I used to be able to cope? Why is it that I used to be able to handle these things, but now, even just for this moment, it all feels like too much.
One of the challenges about trauma is that its impact can hit us intermittently.
If you’ve ever had an issue with your car, with one of the safety lights going off intermittently, and then you take your car to the mechanic, and then the light is no longer going off.
What does the mechanic say? He usually says that he can’t do anything because it’s not going off at the moment. “Come back when is acting up”.
And of course, that is not at all helpful and it does not provide any kind of solution.
But the effects of trauma are not necessarily constant; they can be quite intermittent.
Or some would say that they are always present but kind of at very low to moderate buzz, that you can manage; and then that buzz gets so loud and intrusive you can’t hear anything else.
And one of the areas that can be affected in this way by our past trauma, is related to our faith, if we happen to be people of faith, or related to our spirituality, if we identify as spiritual but not religious.
Our faith or spirituality are part of what psychologists call our schema. A schema is our brain’s cognitive framework that helps us organize and interpret information in the world around us.
And trauma can really impact our schema, or how we think about everything, including ourselves, including God.
It’s true that if we have once held our faith or our spiritual identity very close to our hearts, and have felt that our faith has contributed very positively to our lives, it’s true that, intermittently or constantly, our trauma can shatter or threaten to shatter our trust.
It can shatter our trust in ourselves, it can shatter our trust in the world around us, and it can pose very great challenges to our faith, to our beliefs.
And so our positive assumptions about life, about the good in the world, the meaningfulness of our worlds, those things that keep us grounded in a healthy mental reality, and how we feel about ourselves can truly be impacted.
And that is a heavy weight, because how we see the world around us, and how we see the world within us colours everything in our lives without exception. It’s literally how we experience life.
Sometimes, for those with no faith at all, trauma or traumatic events can actually contribute to the rejection of a worldview that was not working for us and then the establishment of a positive worldview and faith that one did not possess at all before. That’s what happened in my case.
More commonly, trauma may negatively impact our faith and worldview. And when that happens, it is a very disconcerting experience.
Our responses can range from drifting into neutral and ceasing to practice
our faith or spirituality, to outright rejecting everything about what we have believed - the baby goes out with the bathwater, so to speak.
I want to keep it short today, so I wanted to suggest a passage from Scripture that I often receive as God reaching out to me in my pain and confusion - the weight of it all. It is simply Jesus saying this:
Matthew 11:28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Here Jesus is identifying with us, making it clear that He understands how we feel. He understands the weight we carry, how hard it is, how hard life is;
how difficult and disappointing it can be; how expectations seem like they have to constantly be adjusted downward in order to adapt to ever-declining realities in life.
This brief passage indicates that God understands all of this and more. And so He actually starts with an invitation.
It’s not an invitation necessarily to think differently, to adopt a new philosophy, to somehow imagine that life is not as hard as it really is.
It’s actually much more simple than that. The invitation Jesus offers is to COME to Him. It’s most accurately an invitation to come and receive an embrace. Come to a safe place, come to a safe person
And this invitation is to a place of rest, a place of laying down the turmoil in our souls, no matter the cause or source.
So even if we can’t take this at faith value, either because we just don’t believe or because we believe but we also struggle with what we believe, this has something to say to us.
In fact even that last point - believing but also struggling; that shows up in Scripture, in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 9.
A father needs his son to be healed of a very serious condition, something like epilepsy, that the boy has had since childhood.
The father says to Jesus: “It has often thrown him into fire or water to kill him. But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.” Jesus responds: “‘If you can’?” said Jesus.
“Everything is possible for one who believes.” 24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
In essence he says “My faith is far from perfect. I may not have enough faith. If my faith is not enough, please help me to have enough.
Jesus is pleased with this response and heals the boy.
Enough said. There is available to us an invitation to rest, and to rest in the embrace of One who is truly safe.
And that One Who is safe understands our frailties, including the frailties in our faith.
May we who struggle with our thoughts and burdens, we who are reordering our schemas in order to find our way forward, consider carefully this invitation to rest.
