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

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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.

The Practice of Self-Vulnerability

This month is National Blog Posting Month (colloquially referred to as NaBloPoMo) which is a community sustained challenge for professional and personal bloggers to publish one post every day of the month. I've committed to NaBloPoMo on my personal blog for the second year in a row in hopes of tapping into a new level of writing inspiration and motivation. Less than a week into the challenge, I feel like I have instead tapped into new levels of incredulity because I have subjected myself to this challenge again despite the struggles I had last year.

When I first attempted the challenge last year, I assumed that the hardest part would be carving out time every day to devote to writing a blog that I felt was worthy of publishing. While that has certainly been part of my struggle, this year I'm realizing that the actual hardest part is listening. In order to blog successfully and authentically every day, I have to more deliberately listen to what I'm thinking, feeling, and experiencing throughout the day which requires a level of self-vulnerability I didn't anticipate when I decided to take on this challenge.

This unexpected experience is much like what I went through during the Enneagram sessions that Wellspring offered the past two weeks. While I recognized that a certain level of self-work would be necessary to discuss personality types, I didn't expect to have to look that deeply at what motivates some of my most deeply entrenched ways of being. I had mentally prepared myself to be extra attentive to the presenter and to other people in the session but not to myself.

The strange thing that I am learning from the NaBloPoMo challenge along with the Enneagram sessions is that in order to be attentive and even vulnerable with other people I have to be willing to be vulnerable with and attentive to myself. In order to be honest and present with others, I have to practice being fully present with myself.

For me, that means giving myself time to breathe and center myself. It means quietly acknowledging feelings when they arise, even if I’d rather gloss over them. It means praying daily for the patience to be still and listen.

What about you? What does it look like for you to be present with yourself? How do you practice self-vulnerability?

- Angelique Gravely