Stop Hiding, Open Up those Boxes

Image: A pale wood box with a gold clasp sits slightly open, with the opening of the box turned 20-30 degrees to the left.
Text in graphic: This Week in the Rector's Note "We are all wounded. Self-awareness, honesty, and trusting community help us turn our wounds into gifts of wisdom, sensitivity, and compassion. ...Again and again in pastoral caregiving at St. Martin’s I encounter wonderful people who are adding suffering to their suffering because they think they are the only one struggling in the community." - Stop Hiding, Open Up those Boxes. 9.26.2019. Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Episcopal.

A journalist asked Brad Pitt the following question during an interview about his upcoming movie, “Was Ad Astra a way to work through some of the loneliness you may have been experiencing?” His answer was vulnerable and revealing, “The fact is, we all carry pain, grief, and loss,” he said. “We spend most of our time hiding it, but it’s there, it’s in you. So you open up those boxes.”

The article then gives the back story which I quote at length:

It was reported that the final straw in Pitt’s 11-year relationship with (Angelina) Jolie came in September 2016, when they fought about his drinking while aboard a private plane. Now, Pitt is committed to his sobriety. “I had taken things as far as I could take it, so I removed my drinking privileges,” he told me. After she filed for divorce, Pitt spent a year and a half in Alcoholics Anonymous. 

His recovery group was composed entirely of men, and Pitt was moved by their vulnerability. “You had all these men sitting around being open and honest in a way I have never heard,” Pitt said. “It was this safe space where there was little judgment, and therefore little judgment of yourself.” 

Astonishingly, no one from the group sold Pitt’s stories to the tabloids. The men trusted one another, and in that trust, he found catharsis. “It was actually really freeing just to expose the ugly sides of yourself,” he said. “There’s great value in that.”

I am grateful for the brave honesty Brad Pitt displays in this interview. My hope is that his example helped hundreds, maybe thousands of people, come out of hiding and into spaces transparency, trust, healing, and growth.

“We all carry pain, grief, and loss.” We are all wounded. Self-awareness, honesty, and trusting community help us turn our wounds into gifts of wisdom, sensitivity, and compassion. Hiding, avoiding, and denying cause wounds to fester into self-destructive behaviors and acting out which passes the harm to others. God’s grace transforms our despair over our wounds into hope for progress and growth into a “new creation.”

Again and again in pastoral caregiving at St. Martin’s I encounter wonderful people who are adding suffering to their suffering because they think they are the only one struggling in the community. They tell me that they feel that “everyone else” must “have it all together;” “have it all figured out,” or “have it easy.” When we only present ourselves as happy, high achieving, successful, and winning - that is, when we only share one side of our life - without knowing it we may be increasing the isolation of someone who is struggling. One of the most helpful things we can say to someone is, “You are not alone.”

I want St. Martin’s to be a community of love, acceptance, and grace where people feel free to come out of hiding and find the healing we all crave. Our church is called to be this way because Jesus was this way, and he continues to give us what we need to brave the journey into honesty and vulnerability.

In God’s presence there is no hiding, no deception, no masks, and no facade. As the Prayer Book says so beautifully, God is the one, “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” We are transparent before God’s pervasive light and all encompassing love.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector

+++++

If you'd like to know more about addiction and recovery, please join us at Parish Forum on Sunday, October 6 where Steele Stevens will lead a discussion on Understanding Addictions. Learn more on our Parish Forum page.

What do I need to be free?

How do we get free from the pain we carry from injuries inflicted on us by people close to us? This painful and pressing question comes up frequently when I am providing pastoral care. Emotional, spiritual, and moral injuries cry out. They will not remain still. They beg to be addressed.

In the face of the painful insistence of these injuries we often provide false answers to ourselves in an attempt to get free. The instinct is correct. We want to get free of the pain. False answers, however, increase the pain and leave us with a diminished life. Examples include blaming ourselves, taking too much responsibility, pretending it was not so bad, excusing the abuser, and so on.

What we really need - what our emotional pain is calling out for - is a reckoning and an apology from the person who harmed us. Eve Ensler makes this observation in her amazing new book, The Apology. Ensler is a playwright, author, humanitarian, and a survivor of vicious childhood abuse by her father. Using her creative gifts she conjures up her dead father as the narrator of the book and uses her imagination to lead him into the reckoning and apology he owes her.

Ensler starts with the question, “What do I need to be free?” From that starting point she discovered her process. An apology from her abuser would need to have the following characteristics to aide her healing:

First, her father would need to be humble and approach her as an equal and not from above. Second, her father would need to be vulnerable, emotionally available to understanding the harm done, and ready to hear what he has done. Third, her father would need to be empathetic, ready to understand and feel the sadistic harm he inflicted from the perspective of his daughter, and what she experienced at the time. Fourth, the father would need to forsake the self-excusing amnesia of the victimizer and be ready to reconstruct the hidden, shameful history for what it is, listening to the voice of the victim especially. Fifth, her father would need to be accountable, willing to take responsibility for harm done and, most importantly, willing to become reflective enough to begin his own healing journey into his own personal damage.

The good news is that the author was able to walk this path to freedom in a conversation with a father who has been dead for many years. In her imagination she was able to dream a new reality that crossed boundaries and opened up new possibilities for empathy and healing. I would call this a form of therapeutic prayer.

We can be set free from harms that oppress us. I highly recommend this book as an aide and guide to your healing. I will plan to offer a Reading with the Rector during 2019 - 2020 on this book.

Blessings,
The Rev. Jarrett Kerbel
Rector