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Healing, Healing meditation, Trauma, Trauma recovery

FEAR, COMPASSION, & COURAGE

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

“For they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Mark 6:50 NRSV (similar to Matthew 14:27)

Reflection

In the aftermath of trauma, the disciples felt fear. The cross’ terror pounded through their bodies. Causing them to hide from the world. Live inside locked doors. Stay on guard. Peek out with wary eyes.

Jesus’ reassurance consoled the disciples. Settled their activated nervous systems. Gave them a sense of relief. The space to see and hear.

These words, “do not be afraid,” may also console us now. Remind us to breathe into our racing thoughts. Breathe into our protruding visions of what happened. The ones breaking into our everyday moments. Victimizing our survivorship. Directing our words and actions. In harm-filled ways.

Yet there may be days in which these words, “do not be afraid,” just hurt. Illicit curses like WTF, Jesus! And questions such as how? How can I not be troubled or worried or afraid? Jesus’ words working not as reassurances. But as platitudes. No better than “God has a plan,” or “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle.” Making our whole bodies, even our toes shout into our socks and shoes, “bullshit!”

Because we are afraid. Fear brought us to this place in trauma’s afterlife. Life threatening fear still lives within us. Refusing to be calmed by four words.

Healing Practice: Take Heart

Breathe into your fear-filled heart. Just breathe into it. Allow your fears their space in your heart. Know that this action takes courage.

Picture your heart. Breathe into your troubled heart. Breathe deeper and wider. Know that this action takes compassion.

Picture those who weigh heavy on your heart. Loved ones’ suffering. Joining you on your heart. Breathe into your troubled heart. Breathe deeper and wider.

Expand your breathe until it dances with your fearing heart. Its wind weaving in, around, and out of heart’s pumping action.

Keep breathing. Allowing your breath’s wind to dance with all who are on your heart this day. Allowing your breath to bring all of you together in one big dance.

Prayer

God of troubled hearts, worried minds, and fearful bodies, show us what Jesus meant when he said, “do not be afraid.” For his disciples then. For us now. Help Jesus’ words break into our fear. Acknowledging it. Grow our compassion for self. Give us courage. Amen.

Image by Annette Meyer from Pixabay

Faith, Trauma, Trauma recovery

FEAR

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

“For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.”

Matthew 28: 4 NRSV

MEDITATION

Mary Magdalene and Mary go to the tomb. They go on Sunday at dawn. Immediately, the earth shakes. An angel appears whose “appearance is like lightning.” (28:3)

Guards there, on the job. Ordered to keep watch. Commanded to commit atrocities. Feeling stuck in a daily nightmare. With no way out, except death. Theirs and their loved ones. Called moral injury now. No way to stop it. Culture and systems stronger than individuals. These men are merely human.

Guards succumb to ancient instinct this famous morning. In fear, they shake like wild animals. Falling dead like possums. While the women run with fear and great joy. Grounded in something greater than themselves.

PRACTICE: GROUNDING

Stand or sit. If possible place your feet on the earth. Or close to earth through the floor. You may also use hands for this action.

Feel your heels on the earth. Feel the pads of your feet on the earth. Feel your big toes on the earth. Feel your pinky toes on the earth. Feel all your toes on the earth. Feel your whole foot, both feet on the earth.

Now breathe up through the earth into your heels. Breathe up through the earth into the pads of your feet. Breathe up through the earth into your toes, one by one. Breathe up through the earth into your whole foot. First left, then right. Now both.

Breathe. Begin your dawn from here. Grounded.

PRAYER

God of all people and all living things, ground us in your creation. Ground us in your love. Regardless of our actions. Regardless of our past. Regardless of what we have done right or wrong. Regardless of when we were stuck. Regardless, love us. Then. Now. Forever. Amen.

Image by İ. A. from Pixabay

Faith, Grief, Healing, Hope, Trauma

Thoughts on Grief, Compassion, & Joy

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

From my journal, January 20, 2021

I think Jesus fished for people in need of compassion. Maybe he saw the disciples lacking in it. Heard this void in their words and actions. Knowing God wanted more for them.

Read an article by Nicholas Wolterstorff in The Christian Century magazine a couple of years ago, the January 16, 2019 edition. Struck once again how Christian doctrine often works against us in relationship to one another. Doctrine becoming a shield. Creating a wall of souls. Not allowing the other, the one holding up the shield, to step beyond entering into our pain. Embodying our experience. Creating compassion for and with us.

Wolterstorff was called heretical after writing honestly about suddenly losing his beloved son, Eric. A reviewer of Wolterstorff’s book, Lament for a Son , guarded something, maybe the vestiges of their own unresolved trauma with their words. Instead becoming a humanly righteous defender of the faith (as the reviewer saw it). But Wolterstorff needed a defender of his heart. From others. Especially Christians. I quote this man who endured profound loss here.

“I am not angry [at God] but baffled and hurt. My wound is an unanswered question. The wounds of all humanity are an unanswered question.” *

As Christians, we do not hold a doctrine of grief. Of how we believe, even trust, and then act upon our belief in times of grief. On how to love others through the most profoundly painful times in life. Perhaps we need such doctrines. Doctrines of grief, sorrow, trauma, anguish. Small frameworks reminding us of our human responsibility to ourselves and to one another. Not just to God in abstraction. In human configuration. But to the holy within us or in front of us who ask merely for a small bit of compassion. Love. Understanding. Claiming there is nothing heretical about any form of human love including grief for the loss of what we love. Loved. Of a beloved.

My mind winds through these thoughts on grief and compassion leading me to joy. Not that joy should be the end result of grief. Perhaps only because I want as a giver of compassion to hold joy for those who hurt until they may reclaim it for themselves. Some claiming it for the first time.

Joy often brings me to the verse from Psalm 30–words I discovered as a teenager full of feelings, hormones, insecurities, and fears.

“…Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5 NRSV

I hope that the psalmist knows something I do not. Not that sorrow is an active ingredient of joy. Necessary to make joy rise. But that all feelings and especially intense feelings have an active lifespan which does not last in intensity and duration. Acute only for a period of time-an expanse we cannot predict yet must travel through. The longing never fully dissipating. Yet with the increase of self-compassion and compassion freely given by others, the longing has a sense of healing and a willingness to embrace other feelings, the ones supporting new life in the after time of sorrow.

Perhaps joy doesn’t come the morning after waking on and off, weeping. Or even the next. Or the next. Perhaps joy comes in small glimmering ways. Like the fall afternoon light dancing on rippling water. The steadiness in night’s sky of a shining planet. A dewy bud opening at dawn. The busy butterfly on summer’s flower. A moment of silence shared with an understanding other. Slight moments reflected off bits and pieces of the world, the natural world and sometimes even its humans. Momentary brightness showing us, reminding us of something other than sorrow. Which feels good enough. Better than what was. A particle of joy amidst what we cannot change.

A prayer.

God of all emotions, We wait for joy found in small gestures of human compassion and glimmers of life within our view or on their way. Weaving in and out of obstacles, sadness, shock. We wait while you hold hope for us in its coming. Slowly, through minutes, hours, days, months, years. Waiting. You in joy. You in sorrow. Amen.

* Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

Christmas, Hope, worship

A Sermon for Christmas Eve

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Luke 2:1-14 [15-20]

On Sunday, Advent III, I asked the congregation what they longed for. And the answers shared were individual yet also universal. The kind we all have. The kind we all carry on our hearts such as peace, healing, and acceptance.

Then in the days leading up to Sunday, Advent IV and on Advent IV (the last Sunday in Advent), something happened around here. On Wednesday during our free community meal, one of our regular friends said to me “Pastor, I brought my friend tonight. I told him that it is peaceful here.”

Someone’s longing for peace was and is answered here in this place. We can treasure these words in our hearts.

On Thursday, one of our Wednesday night volunteers said to “Pastor, thank you for allowing me to volunteer here even though I am not a member and do not attend worship.”

Someone’s longing for acceptance was and is answered here in this place. We can treasure these words in our hearts.

On Sunday night, another person who regularly eats with us here said to me and Pastor Josh of the Northern Illinois Synod office, “I fell on hard times and this place has helped me get back on my feet. Thank you.”

Someone’s longing for healing was and is answered here in this place. We can treasure these words in our hearts.

On that same night, on Sunday, Advent IV, I sat outside in my car looking through the Fellowship Hall windows. Watching people eat together, find warm clothes, connect with others, give and receive support. Within our walls, finding peace, acceptance, and healing. And I just cried at the beauty of it all. Cried like the shepherds must have done when witnessing what the world could be and just because a baby had been born to bring the good news to the poor. Good news of great joy.

I also cried, (sobbed really) because of the fragility of it all. Knowing the scene that I witnessed can fall apart so easily.

Tonight, is the night each year we dare to hope that our universal longings for peace, healing, and acceptance for all people in our world are or at least can be fulfilled. And like other universal longings, I think we want them to be fulfilled simply. Not in easy answers per se. But perhaps as answers staring us right in the face.

We long for simplicity and especially this night when we hear once again the story of the birth of yet another poor child, this one in a makeshift birthing center. So much already not in his favor. Yet somehow in his new life we hear a message that all can be well. That the God we hope for, long for is truly among us. Simply among us, incarnate in a baby.

Simplicity answering our longings. Opening up like the sky seems to do on this night for a group of lowly shepherds keeping watch by night. Watching not for peace on earth, but for predatory animals lurking in the shadows. Waiting to take their prey.

But instead of predators, the heavens erupt in celestial beings, and song, and joy. Because the longings of the poor have been seen by God. And God is sending hope, simple hope in human form. So human, Jesus-Emmanual-God-with-Us does not appear fully grown but as a baby. A newborn baby.

Perhaps all these things—a baby born in the night, shepherds feeling seen and heard by night’s sky—is why the hymn, Silent Night, has become an enduring part of our Christmas season each year. Why we always sing it. Why we know its words. Why it speaks to our hearts in universal longing. That in night’s silence, we see the holy. In night’s calm, we find hope in all being well at least for a time. In night’s star and moonlight, we sense peace, healing, and acceptance in the miracle of a baby whose future will be tenuous. Yet brims with the possibilities of a new beginning, a new earth, and a new time for all people.

Peace, healing, and acceptance fulfilled through the unexpected yet ordinary. The Good News simple. It’s application, it’s living, not. Amen. 

The grace of God has appeared in a baby. In tiny human form. Vulnerable. Needy. Alive. Let us care for this grace with love, tenderness, and compassion. Amen. 

Image by Svetlana from Pixabay