On disorientation, woundedness and finding our footing again.- Notes on the Journey

——-

I have known something of disorientation.

I went through a deeply painful personal and vocational crisis that left me questioning my place in a community to which I had given a great deal of myself. Relationships, belonging, identity and the future I had imagined all became uncertain.

It wasn’t simply a difficult season that I needed to get through. It reached into the way I understood myself, the people around me and the work I believed I was called to do. Things I had given years of my life to had become part of what I was trying to make sense of.

I’m not going to rehearse the details or name names. This isn’t about settling scores or inviting people to take sides. There are other people involved, and there are things I want to keep private. I know, too, that any account of a painful experience is told from one person’s perspective.

But I don’t want to keep the details private at the cost of being honest about what happened to me. I believe that my reflections, my notes on the journey, may provide voice and help to others.

I was left trying to come to terms with an ending I hadn’t wanted, a loss I hadn’t anticipated and questions I couldn’t answer.

I had to reconsider things I had believed about community, Christian leadership and my own future. That isn’t easy when these aren’t simply ideas you hold, but things you have given your life to.

I want to write about what happens when the ground gives way beneath us. When something we have given ourselves to becomes a source of pain, and the future we thought we were building suddenly looks very different.

For a long time, I went back over things. I still do.

Conversations, decisions, things said and things left unsaid. I wondered why certain things couldn’t have been addressed differently. I kept returning to the thought that perhaps there was something I hadn’t understood, some missing piece that would make sense of it all.

You replay things in your head, sometimes long after there is anything useful to be gained from doing so. You look for an explanation that might finally allow you to put it down.

I didn’t find one that made everything make sense.

And the hurt went deeper than the events themselves. There was the loss of belonging, the shaking of trust, the unsettling thought that a place or relationship might not have been what I had believed it to be. You start questioning your own judgement. You wonder what you missed, what you got wrong, whether you can trust yourself to recognise things clearly next time.

It isn’t just the past that gets unsettled. The future does too.

We invest ourselves in communities, vocations and ways of serving God. We give our time, our energy and our hopes. We build a life around things we believe matter. When they fall apart, we grieve not only what has happened but what we thought was going to happen.

And then there is the question of what comes next.

For those of us whose lives are bound up with Christian ministry, there is another layer to this. We believe the Church is called to embody the love and justice of Christ. Yet churches and Christian institutions are made up of human beings, and human beings can do real harm.

That is difficult to face when the community in question is also the place where you have worshipped, served, prayed and tried to follow Jesus. It can unsettle your understanding of leadership and Christian community. You find yourself holding on to faith while questioning things you once took for granted.

I came close to cracking under the weight of my own experience. Sleepless nights, stress headache. I felt tired and withdrawn. I wanted to be alone.

And I wanted to walk.

Walk

and walk

and walk.

I wanted to get out into the woods, to keep moving, sometimes to run for miles. Perhaps the distance would carry me somewhere else, away from the place where I was hurting. Perhaps if I walked far enough, or ran long enough, the pain might feel different.

I wanted somewhere I could breathe. Somewhere I could begin to work through what had happened without turning it over in my head yet again.

Of course, you can be miles into the woods and still carry the whole thing with you. The questions don’t stay behind just because you have left the house. But the walking gave me space. There was something about being outside, moving through the trees, that helped me bear what I couldn’t yet resolve.

Faith does not make us invulnerable. And ministry should not require us to pretend that we are. Sometimes we need distance, time, the care of others and the freedom to admit that we are struggling.

Stepping away can help, but leaving something behind does not mean leaving the grief behind with it. Sometimes the thing we need to walk away from is also the thing we need to mourn.

There is a kind of unravelling that happens when our experience no longer fits the story we have told ourselves. We reconsider what Christian community means. We ask harder questions about leadership and accountability. We begin to distinguish faith in Christ from confidence in the people and institutions through which we have sought to serve him.

I have found that work painful. I suspect it is necessary, too.

I sometimes think the Church is better at talking about resurrection than sitting with people on Good Friday. We want to reassure, to find meaning, to point towards hope. We struggle to stay when there is nothing to fix.

But Good Friday matters. So does Holy Saturday, that uncertain space between death and resurrection, when the promises seem distant and there is no sign that anything is changing.

We need to make room for that part of the story. Not every wound has an explanation. Not every painful ending can be turned into a lesson. Sometimes there is no helpful thing to say. The best we can do is listen and let someone tell the truth about what hurts.

I’ve been struck by Scot McKnight’s reflections on Paul and trauma. We should be careful about diagnosing someone across two thousand years, but we can take seriously the suffering Paul describes. In 2 Corinthians 1:8, he writes of being burdened beyond his strength, despairing even of life itself. Elsewhere, he speaks honestly about his anxieties for the churches and his own weakness.

Paul was an apostle.

He was also human.

I wonder whether we have sometimes made too much of the idea that those who lead, preach and minister should be somehow beyond this sort of struggle. As though faith makes us thick-skinned. As though a calling from God protects us from the wounds inflicted by other people.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes those who spend their lives helping others carry their burdens find themselves struggling beneath the weight of their own. They may be so used to being the person others turn to that admitting their own need becomes another difficulty.

When the ground gives way,

when the familiar

becomes strange,

when yesterday

no longer explains

tomorrow,

perhaps we don’t need

to make sense

of everything

straight away.

Perhaps we need

to stay,

to breathe

and grieve,

to tell the truth

about what hurts,

and to discover,

slowly,

that being lost

is not the same

as being lost

for ever.

Finding our footing again is rarely dramatic. It can be getting out of bed, sharing a meal, walking beneath the trees or talking honestly with someone safe. It can mean having a day when the experience doesn’t occupy every waking thought. Life begins to open up again, sometimes before we have found answers to the questions that remain.

And sometimes reconciliation doesn’t happen.

I believe in truth-telling, repentance, forgiveness and the possibility of restored relationships. But reconciliation cannot be produced by one person’s willingness alone. We can examine ourselves, apologise where we need to and remain open to correction. We cannot do that work for someone else.

There is a difference between leaving the door open and standing on the doorstep for ever.

I’m still learning what it means to live with these things. I don’t have a formula for finding your footing again. I am wary of anyone who makes it sound straightforward. Some losses take a long time to grieve. Some questions remain unanswered. We have to learn to live with what we cannot put right.

I’ve also been thinking about the wounded healer. It is an idea that needs handling carefully. There is nothing good about suffering for its own sake. We should never suggest that someone needed to be hurt in order to become more compassionate, or that God inflicted a wound because he had a ministry in mind.

I don’t believe God needed to wound me in order to work through me.

I believe God can bring good out of what was not good. That is different. It doesn’t make the harm necessary, excuse those involved or mean we should be grateful for what happened. It means the harm does not have to have the final word.

I hope my own wounds will make me more attentive to the wounds of others. More patient with people who struggle to find the words. More alert to the hurt that can sit behind anger, withdrawal or behaviour we find difficult. More careful about the power we hold and the stories people entrust to us.

I can’t say that I’ve learned all of this yet. I know how easily pain can make us defensive, how tempting it is to retreat behind our own account of what happened. I also know how much it matters when someone has the patience to listen without rushing to judgement or trying to make everything better.

Perhaps this is part of what it means

to minister

with a limp.

Not to celebrate

the wound,

or pretend

it has disappeared,

but to acknowledge

that we are wounded,

fragile human beings,

and that our pain

might make us harder

or teach us

to attend more carefully

to the pain

of others.

If you are reading this from somewhere similar, trying to make sense of a loss that has unsettled your identity, your community or your future, I want you to know that you are not alone.

You don’t owe anyone a neat account of what happened. You don’t have to make the experience useful. You don’t have to rush towards forgiveness or pretend reconciliation is possible when it isn’t.

You can grieve what has been lost and still believe that healing is possible.

Sometimes the goodbye remains unfinished. Sometimes the answers never come. Life does not always return to the shape we expected. But that doesn’t mean there is no life beyond what has happened.

Perhaps, in time, we find ourselves back in the woods, walking beneath the trees. Not trying to outrun the pain now, or hoping that a few more miles will somehow make it disappear. Just walking, breathing, paying attention to the world around us.

The wound matters.

What happened matters.

But the wound

is not the whole of us,

and it does not

get to write

the ending.

- Rev’d Jon Swales