Floating in Feeling
A couple of weeks ago my family and I camped in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, just a stones throw from a beautiful lake overshadowed by Mt. Adams. We arrived on Sunday afternoon, and setup camp. After all the work of bending tent poles, and nailing stakes into the ground, we ventured down to the lake and dove into the cold water. It was so refreshing. Swimming underwater is one of my favorite physical sensations, followed closely by laying on my back, my ears submerged in the water and letting the water take my weight.
Photo by Marco De Waal on Unsplash
That night I turned into the tent, feeling relaxed, my lungs full of fresh air. Just a few hours passed, and my tent was illuminated by headlights, and soon the sound of two adults and couple children setting up their camp. It must have been around midnight, an odd time to be setting up camp. I did my best to block out the sounds and to go back to sleep. But, just a few moments into that experiment the all too familiar sound of a crying child grabbed my attention. The wails came from a little one, maybe two or three years old? From what I could gathered by the conversation happening outside the tent, the little one was asleep in the family vehicle, but during the transfer to the tent had begun to cry.
There was no frustration on our part, for this little one…as we can imagine the shock of being removed from the familiarity of the back seat of the car into a dark and cold tent in the middle of the night. I could hear in his cries confusion, exhaustion, and fear. I felt my fatherly instincts firing in my own head and heart…this poor kid needs reassurance, he needs a hug, he needs comfort.
Sadly, he received none of those things. Instead, I laid there and listened, painfully, to explicative laced threats, anger filled demands for this little one to shut up, to stop being a baby. With each venom filled sentence the child only screamed louder, and just as the volume increased externally for the little one, so did my own internal volume. Before long I felt tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. I felt myself to be this poor child in this moment, afraid, and longing for comfort that I know would not come…knowing that the only reprieve from the anger would be to find that comfort within myself.
The next morning my partner and I, along with the two other parents we were camping with exchanged heartbroken and exhausted looks with one another. While all four of us have been frustrated parents, we all knew in our bones that our response to our own children would have been different. It wasn’t a holier than thou moment, just more of an acknowledgement that at the core of our parenting modality is at least an attempt at loving and compassionate presence for our children…even when we are ourselves fail.
That whole next day I couldn’t help but think about that little child, and the patterns that were made or reinforced the night before in his little brain. I thought about all of us, once children, who have ourselves navigated and formed our own ways of coping, of surviving within the imperfection of the adults who were tasked with caring and loving for us. I thought about all the ways we adults have carried those lessons into our adult lives, and how they continue to factor into the way in which we interact with our neighbors.
One of the things my partner and I committed to do with our children was to be as present with them in their emotional experiences as we can. As infants saying out loud the feelings we predicted they were feeling, “oh, little one, are you feeling hungry?” or, “It seems like you are feeling frustrated right now…” As they began to form words, we would create space for them to correct us in our assessments, to listen when we asked them the question, “are you feeling angry?” We have found the naming of these feelings to be a part of the process of processing and moving through them.
As many of you know, I am a deep feeler. When I experience emotions, it is hardly ever a lite experience for me…often it is wildly intense. I’ve been known to make myself sick or dizzy from being in emotionally intense situations. But, in those moments, I have found that it is not the leaning into the feeling that causes distressing physical symptoms, it is the internal dialogue that says, “no no no no no no don’t go down this road! Ummmm, think about something else, oh crap, um that isn’t working, ummm…Mark, hey, oh yea, crap, hey! hey! hey!” This inner dialogue actually just increases my heart rate, and adds to the dizziness…but it appears to be there as a mechanism to protect myself from feeling the feeling as it should be felt…and that seems to be the product of labeling or compartmentalizing certain emotional responses as unsavory, or even bad.
If you have never watched the movie “Inside Out” I highly recommend that you just go ahead and log off of this call and make that happen right now…just kidding…but get to it ASAP. Regardless if you’ve seen it or not, the premise of the movie is BRILLIANT. You are invited into the internal system of a pre-adolescent girl named Rylee during a part of her life that includes some incredible transitions…moving from her home in Canada to San Francisco and starting a whole new life in a foreign place. You are introduced to the characters in her brain…joy, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. Joy is the protagonist in the story, and the one who demands much of the control of Rylee. The problem is, especially during Rylee’s life transition, the character sadness keeps mucking up everything. Joy tries to contain sadness by taping a square on the floor and telling her to stay in there…of course, sadness doesn’t comply.
By the end of the movie, spoiler alert, Joy realizes that sadness is a normal part of Rylee’s system and can and should be a part of the healthy functioning of her life.
The parallels to my experience camping are obvious at this point. But I want to invite us into thinking about this even more deeply, in the context of what we are seeing unfold in our world today. Namely, how we continue to do injustice to marginalized people by attempting to compartmentalize their experiences of pain.
One of the things I have been trying my best to do is to listen to the voices of people of color in this moment in our country. The collective Spirit of that voice, at least from what I am sensing, is a deep and intense feeling of absolute exhaustion and hopelessness. What I am hearing is a profound weariness about the prospect of change, and this weariness, exhaustion, and hopelessness is rolling over into predictable, and warranted responses of anger.
The work I have needed to do is not to dismiss that anger, or to allow myself to discredit those who are feeling hopeless because of the way they are responding to that hopelessness. For me, I do not see compassion in demanding a person experiencing incredible pain and injustice to be quiet. Like that little one in the dark and scary tent that night of camping, I don’t get the sense that ignoring, or attempting to squelch the real and lived experiences of fear and anger is, in the long run, the healthiest thing to do.
Instead, I get the sense that reaching down into our inner selves, to access those places of shared experience, is the best way to come alongside someone. When I have felt hopeless have I not have the impulse to radically start all over, aka burn it all down? When I access that experience within myself I am more capable of compassionate presence with a person who is feeling that way.
I think that is why I adore the story of Jesus with the woman caught in adultery. It reads:
At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them. The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. n the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. 10 Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared.
Jesus invited that crowd into collective compassion by encouraging them to visit their own, and similar places of brokenness. In this way, he disarmed the mechanisms of judgement while acknowledging that each of us have shared experiences of pain, sadness, embarrassment, and guilt. This is a whole hearted dedication to seeing and invited others to see.
Let us prepare our hearts, now, to enter into some deep silence with one another. A reminder of the beautiful things we are about to do together…a collective act of listening to the way in which God might be speaking to us this morning. Let us settle into that silent and pay close attention to what it is that is moving within us.
Some queries to aid in this work of discernment:
So long as it is not too painful, revisit your inner child during open worship, what lessons have you internalized about how to experience and respond to your emotions? How has this shaped the way you expect others to be in their emotions?
As we bear witness to the pained voices of our brothers and sisters of color, crying out for justice over centuries, how are we responding to their anger, frustration and hopelessness? How has your response to their prolonged suffering revealed something about yourself?
In what ways is God moving you to be a compassionate companion for folks experiencing the trials and tribulations of life?