Curse You Brene Brown!

Editor's Note: I debated sharing this post, I actually had a semi-sleepless night about it.  Ironically, Brene Brown covers this topic in her book "Daring Greatly" about perfectionism being the enemy of good.  But, my goal when I write a blog is that one person gets something out of it, so I'm hoping it does some good.  And I'm hopeful that Sheila, Ariel, Marlene, Bonnie and Abbe realize I'm joking.  But then again, I put you all in the same company as Brene Brown and Mr. Rogers, so that's not so bad.

And while we’re at it, curse you Sheila Ewers.  And Ariel Jaillett.  And Marlene Topping.  And Bonnie Pugh and Abbe Straw for that matter.  And practically any yoga teacher, inspirational writer, theologian, or therapist I know.  Curse you all….

OK, now that I have that out of my system, let’s get to the heart of the matter.

As I’ve grown older, and much, much wiser, I’ve discovered that certain of the “truths” I’ve been taught all my life, weren’t necessarily the truth. 

“Your greatest investment is your house”

“The highest compliment you can pay me is to say I work hard every day”

“You must find a church home”

Over time, I’ve found that on a certain level, these aren’t necessarily true, maybe at one point in time they were, but at various points, they’ve failed the litmus test of being the basic tenets of life to live by.

As I’ve come to discover the truth or untruth about these premises of life, I got excited to realize that there was another one that I could shoot a hole in, and I had planned to write a blog post about how it may be cited universally, but it’s really not true either.  It is:

“You can’t really love someone else unless you really love yourself first”

There are many variations to this quote, this happens to be one from one of my heroes, Mr. Rogers, so I guess I have to say curse you Mr. Rogers too.  At this point, I may be going to Hell.

“It’s a sad man my friend who’s living in his own skin, and can’t stand the company”

This one became vitally important to me because, like the line above I quote so often from Bruce Springsteen, I really don’t love myself, and I truly believe I love others.  But, so many really smart people seem to be saying that’s not possible, and I became excited when I started realizing so many of the hard and fast rules I lived my life by were not really correct, this could be one too!  I can love others without loving myself, all the smart people I read and know and respect are wrong.

Yeah, you can imagine how this went….

It all started innocently enough, we were on a yoga retreat that Sheila led and organized, and at one point, Sheila talked about this, and that’s when it first hit me, maybe this is all wrong.  Now, if you know Sheila, and if you know how much I respect her, you’d know this was quite the leap for me.  But that’s when it first hit me to challenge this and tell everyone why we don’t have to love ourselves to love others.

Then, I saw a post from Ariel Jaillett, who is so wise beyond her years, and it looked like this:

I commented to Ariel that I planned a blog post disputing this, I didn’t agree with it, I didn’t agree with Brene Brown, Sheila, anyone, I can love others and not love myself. 

“I’m with Sheila and Brene Brown.  You may think you love others but when you discover self love it’s like adding color to black and white pictures”

Ouch.  That one came from Marlene Topping.  I have no idea if this is an original quote from Marlene, or one she repeated, but it really hit home, there was something about the imagery, and it made me take a step back.

And then it continued to get worse.  Bonnie Pugh and Abbe Straw were leading a course at our yoga studio on Brene Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection”.  I love Brene Brown, I had already read “Daring Greatly”, which moved me a great deal, and Laurel had already read “The Gifts of Imperfection” and spoke highly of it.  (Side note: anytime I read a book after Laurel reads it, she highlights, underlines, puts comments in the margin, so I know where all the important parts are).

Early in “The Gifts of Imperfection”, Brene Brown discusses the whole concept of loving oneself to be able to truly love others.  It was a sobering moment for me as she beautifully shot holes into everything I was trying to prove.  There were many great comments, but the one I found most compelling came from a woman she quoted, Renae Cobb, who said:

“Certainly, the people we love inspire us to heights of love and compassion that we might have never achieved otherwise, but to really scale those heights, we often have to go to the depths of who we are, light/shadow, good/evil, loving/destructive, and figure out our own stuff in order to love them better.”

Check and mate. 

I decided to give it one last shot, as Princess Leia once said, “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope!” I spoke to Hailey, and while I anticipated the answer she would give me, I had to at least take one last shot at vindicating myself.  Hailey is my Obi-wan, she can always seem to say the right things to me.  But, yes, she confirmed what all the other smart people were saying.

We talked, and she gave me some of the old tools she had given me to try, with some new variations, and she gave me new tools to work on.  As usual, she was able to help me figure out how to move forward rather than spinning in circles.  She may not have given me the answer I wanted, but she gave me new-found hope to work through this struggle.

As I described to her, the funny thing is I think I’m frustrated the most because I feel like I’m so close to breaking the chains and moving to a whole new level.  I’m pulling on them, I’m stretching them, I can hear them weakening, but I just can’t break them, and that’s what’s so frustrating.  I feel like I’m so close, but I can’t figure out how to get there, and that makes it all the more irritating, it’s almost in my grasp, but it could still be a million miles away, it doesn’t matter, and as noted, makes it all the more demoralizing.

I took some time and went back through my blog posts to gain some perspective, and it’s amazing to me the pattern of what I’ve written, in some senses, what little real change there’s been over the years, and a recurring theme that pervades so much of what I’ve written, and simply doesn't change.

“I’m dying alive”

“I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter…I think it’s about forgiveness”

“I abandoned my family.  I didn’t take care of my family”

I’ve spent my life, judging myself, beating myself up, not loving myself, and I’m really getting tired.  As I’ve said to Laurel, if I’m not going to truly live, I should just drive my car into Alum Creek Lake.  I’ve just been reading “The Little Prince” (thanks to Sheila), and there’s the one person the Little Prince meets on his journey, a drunkard, and he drinks to forget, he wants to forget he’s ashamed, and he’s ashamed because he drinks.  In a sense, that’s the way I feel, it’s an endless recurring nightmare, a hamster wheel that I can’t seem to get off of. 

As noted though, my frustration lies in the fact that I’m so close to breaking these chains.  I have grown to use so many valuable resources to help me navigate this, Hailey, yoga, yoga teachers, great writers, theologians, unbelievable friends and family in my life, and of course Laurel, who has been the one to encourage me and inspire me to get me to do the activities that I’m doing.  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention God, God put these people in my life, He gave me the tools to figure it out. 

I believe though, it’s up to me now.  Just like the story of the drowning man who shoos away people trying to save him, waiting for God to answer his prayers, and ultimately drowns, I can’t wait for God to swoop down and intervene, He’s given me everything I need to overcome this, I’m the one who has

to turn inward, take it inward and find that inner light that is so desperately trying to come out.

So as I vacillate on the continuum between driving my car into Alum Creek Lake and breaking the chains that hold me back, I keep wondering, what will get me off of this endless hamster wheel?  Self love will never come until I find forgiveness.  One has to come before the other, and that has to come from me.

As I’ve shared in the past, Dave Carr has inspired me to choose a word for the new year rather than New Year’s resolutions.  My word for 2021 was faith, and that one really led me to greater heights in my spiritual journey.  My word for 2022 is going to be forgiveness.  I need to make this intentional, to put in the time, and the work, to take the final steps needed.  I need to really invest in some of the tools and ideas Hailey has given me to break through, to reach a new level.  It’s time to break the chains.

Oh, and by the way, no need to worry, I won’t drive my car into Alum Creek Lake.  As Laurel has told me, Little Bit would miss me too much.

Faith

 “Tell me all your thoughts on God
'Cause I'd really like to meet her
And ask her why we're who we are” Dishwalla

I recently went back and re-read one of Dave Carr’s latest blog posts, “To The Next Person Who Sits At This Desk….” As I’ve often said, Dave is who I’d like to be when I grow up, and as I read his blog, I realized that many of the actions I intentionally do are what I’ve consciously or unconsciously learned from him.  Being fully present, face to face meetings rather than e-mails, handwritten notes, I practice these, and I learned them from Dave.  Plagiarism is the greatest form of flattery.

Another that I’ve learned and practice is not doing New Year’s Resolutions, but choosing a word to focus on for the year.  This year I chose “Faith”.  The reason was simple.  With the pandemic, it became harder to practice faith in a community in 2020.  Through 2020, I experienced a great deal of disappointment from a couple of the religious institutions I had grown to love.  I grew disenchanted with what Christianity had become as we continue to move further away from Jesus Christ and what He taught.  And I read the Bible.

OK, you may find the last sentence a little odd, and I did too.  With the pandemic, I expanded my morning readings with the intent of reading the entire Bible in a year’s time.  I’ve read various parts over the years, but I hadn’t read the entire book before.  I started with and finished the New Testament, and then worked my way through the Old Testament.  I popcorned around to various books, starting with ones I was most interested in.  

I eventually had to stop before I got too depressed.  I had always believed that the Bible was “God-breathed”, written by man, but inspired by God.  While I know I’m probably in the minority, I found many sections of the Old Testament to be at best, filled with meaningless minutiae and at worst, very disturbing and hate-filled.  For the life of me, if this is inspired by God, I have no earthly idea why.  While there are many parts of the Bible that are filled with beauty and words to live our lives by, and I do my best to do that, there are some parts that leave me completely dumbfounded.

As we moved from Georgia to Ohio, as I embarked on a new year, with my core foundations rocked, the Church, the Bible, where does that leave my faith?  

Have you found a church home?

Each time we moved throughout our married lives, Laurel and I always set out to find a church home very quickly once we settled in.  Maybe it was because we weren’t moving with children this time, but we saw no such need to rush.  As time wore on, we saw no need at all.  Through my entire adult life, I had lived with the hard and fast rule that you have to have a church home.  I saw something recently where someone said, “You need the church and the church needs you”.  Why?

I had started reading Rolf Gates’ “Meditations on Intention and Being” in 2020.  Rolf is a yoga teacher, but no offense to yoga teachers, that falls far short of describing him.  His writing and wisdom is astounding.  After I finished “Meditations on Intention and Being”, I moved on to “Meditations from the Mat”, and my feelings continued.  I mixed in Nadia Bolz-Weber’s “Accidental Saints”, Rachel Held Evans’ “Inspired”, Glennon Doyle’s “Love Warrior”, Brene Brown’s “Daring Greatly” and I felt myself growing more and more.  Very respectfully speaking, I was gaining as much insight and inspiration as I did reading the New Testament or some of the prophets from the Old Testament.

I had started doing yoga about four years ago with Laurel, but I was spotty, I traveled a lot, so I only went maybe one or two days a week.  Since we’ve moved, and I travel a great deal less, I’m able to go to yoga usually four times a week.  It’s hard to describe, and I think you really have to experience it, but you can get such a sense of community and belonging in a yoga studio.  Just like with anything in life, I’m sure there are some exceptions, but for the most part, you have unconditional acceptance in a yoga studio, no matter who you are or what you look like.  

“Each one of us is merely a small instrument.  When you look at the inner workings of electrical things, often you see small and big wires, new and old, cheap and expensive, lined up.  Until the current passes through them, there will be no light.  That wire is you and me.  The current is God.  We have the power to let the current pass through us, use us, produce the light of the world.  Or we can refuse to be used and allow darkness to spread.”  Mother Teresa

As the year progressed, I was inspired to get two new tattoos of Scripture.  A few years ago, I got Micah 6:8 and Joshua 24:15.  I had thought at the time, this day would come, and it finally did.  In this case, I moved to the New Testament, I think my Bible reading inspired me, but to a greater extent, the world we live in inspired me.  I find that when I tattoo these verses on my arms, I also tattoo them on my heart, and I try to live by them each day.  I chose:

Matthew 22:39 – “And the second greatest commandment is love your neighbor as yourself”

I chose this one for a few reasons.  I remember years ago watching a sermon by Andy Stanley, and he spoke of the greatest commandment, which is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”.  He said, “You know what, don’t worry about this one, God is God, and He’s OK if you don’t follow this one, but you need to love your neighbor.  But that’s not so easy, because your neighbor is everybody, not just the neighbors that you like.”  He then went on to point out all of the people you may really not like, but you need to love them.  It was compelling to me, and really highlights where we are going horribly wrong.  We have lost our ability or desire to love our neighbor, we would prefer to build up our walls, and keep our neighbors out.  I need to change that in myself.

1 John 3:18 – “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth”

I think too many of us are allowing darkness to spread and aren’t willing to take action because of the consequences.  As noted, we like our walls, we want to separate from those who are different from us without realizing we are all so similar.  I need to be more willing to stand up, speak up, take action to produce light rather than darkness.  This became more evident to me these last few years as we faced the rebounding of racism in this country.  It never really went away, but it came back with a vengeance.

"Many religious folks insist on answers that are always true.  We love closure, resolution and clarity while thinking that we are people of “faith”.  How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite." Richard Rohr

More and more, I’ve found that people need certainty, they need proof of God’s existence, proof of Jesus Christ being the Son of God.  They need proof that Noah really built an ark.  That Jonah really was in the belly of a whale.

I’ve grown less inclined to need that proof.  To be honest, I believe that a lot of the stories in the Bible are just that, stories.  I believe there are a lot of strange things in the Bible.  But that’s OK, I don’t necessarily have to have an answer for why the Bible is what it is.  

I believe in many ways the Church has lost its way, I believe we have lost our way, and the teachings of Jesus have been lost to us.  I also believe there are many really good people serving the church and attending churches, and it’s not my place to determine which ones of them are right or wrong, good or bad.  I just know, at least for the moment, the church isn’t the right place for me, and that’s not the church’s fault, it’s not my fault, it just is.

Have I lost my faith?  Oh my God, no.  Actually, I would tend to believe that over the past year, my faith, and particularly my spirituality, have grown immensely.  I fully believe in God, I am a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, and I feel the Holy Spirit in my life all the time.  

I also believe there is more to the story.  I remember one of my favorite quotes from another of my dear friends, Jim Dyer, “If that’s the way you believe God is, then we don’t worship the same God”.  OK, I probably butchered it, but his point is that if we are worshiping a God of exclusion, we aren’t worshiping the same God.  If I really read and believe in what Jesus said and did, I have a hard time believing that those who we choose to be on the other side of the wall, take your pick, homosexuals, Muslims, people who are pro-choice, are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven.

And, to take it a step further, I’m growing more and more to believe what Laurel often says, the Kingdom of Heaven is here right now, it’s up to us to create it here on earth.  That gets back to the light.  We can choose to be an instrument of light, or we can let the darkness overtake everything.  I can find Jesus each day as I go to work, go to yoga, walk the neighborhood.  I can feel the Holy Spirit surround me and talk to me when I go on my morning runs.  I can allow the current to pass through me to spread the light of God.  I have faith.