Rise Again
Spring has finally come. The sun has returned in warmth if not actual light. The overcast days that bring the water to sprout the seeds that have overwintered give us opportunities to germinate as well, to rest and recoup our energy after the bright days of exultation and bursting forth. It’s OK to start slow, to build our energy gradually. It is now, as the first flowers are blooming, and leaves are budding on the trees and bushes, and life has returned to the earth, that our culture asks us to pause and celebrate one of history’s most famous executions. Jesus was a freethinker who so completely derailed the religious bandwagon of his day that his own people killed him for it. And yet, that’s not what we are asked to remember or celebrate. Words like sacrifice and salvation are used so often at this time of year that they tend to lose their meaning; and, for people like me who mistrust a god who would require so bloody a repayment of debt in order to accept humans into his kingdom, the Christian focus of the day can trigger a cascade of shame and self-loathing that makes celebration of any kind impossible on Easter. In recent years I have circumvented the problem by focusing on the kids and family: Easter is for egg hunts and chocolate and turkey dinner. But last week I stumbled onto an episode of my favorite podcast that has changed my focus this year.
I was scrolling through the episodes of We Can Do Hard Things podcast looking for a particular guest, when I ran across another name I recognized: Nadia Bolz-Weber. I was introduced to Pastor Nadia through her most recent memoir, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, which I also stumbled across while looking for something else. I explored some of my thoughts about Shameless in this post:
The podcast episode was called “How To Finally Forgive with Nadia Bolz-Weber,” and since forgiveness is a thing I’ve wrestled with in recent months, and because I just love Pastor Nadia, I played it. You should, too, because I’m not sure how to describe the way I felt while listening. As Brené Brown might say, it brought me into a place of true wholeheartedness. As Father Richard Rohr might say, I was able to sink into my True Self. In my own less educated words, her voice put me a little more at ease with being a fucked-up human, which is what I appreciate so much about Pastor Nadia. Her tendency to be drawn to the misfits in life and her deep need for grace is familiar to me because she’s been in addiction recovery for thirty-three years now, which is nearly as long as my parents have been in recovery. The key to forgiveness for Nadia comes from the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book.” She paraphrases:
So here’s the worst line in the big book. It says, looking at people who have hurt us and our resentments, if we look back far enough, we will find that at some point in the past, we made a decision based on self that put us in a position to be harmed by them1.
“I know,” she said, “I know! It’s so gross.” Nothing grabs the ego by the balls like realizing that I might have aided in my own hurt in certain situations. This is not victim blaming, Nadia is adamant about that. Being complicit in your own harm is not the same as being at fault for it. Doing the work of unraveling your own complicity is necessary to getting unstuck from resentments. One way to know that you’re stuck, she says, is if you tell the story of a particular hurtful incident in the exact same way over and over again. Which is a vulnerable thing for me to repeat to an audience of people who might have already noticed that I do, indeed, tell certain stories the exact same way over and over again. These are the stories I need to revisit and retell to myself from a different perspective, and that is the work for another day (weeks, months, years…we’ll see how long it takes).
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