By Rev. Rebecca Bryan
“Heave ho.” I flung another box into the large dumpster and watched it land deep in a pile of trash. I paused to see if the automatic cruncher thing would push it further down out of sight; maybe it would even get buried.

I returned to my car to get another run of memorabilia that I was disposing of at our local dump. This was not a way to avoid taking trips to Goodwill or staging a yard sale. I was not environmentally unaware. 

I was in pain, a lot of pain, and I wanted it to stop. 

Young of age, long in life story, and about to be divorced, I was desperate to put my past behind me and to start a new life. 

I threw away my wedding dress, photos, and anniversary cards. I also threw away all the writing I had done since I was a very young girl, including poems, stories, and memoirs.

Years later, a spiritual director encouraged me to promise myself that I would never throw away another piece of my writing. I have honored that promise. 

I mistakenly thought that by cutting off the top layers, I could heal the roots of all the pain. Think about gardening. Have you ever tried to get rid of a weed by cutting off its branches? It may appear to be gone, and yet it is reseeding itself, its roots are growing deeper, and it comes back larger than ever. 

It took another decade before I realized that running away from my past was not the answer. Instead, I learned that the path to experiencing joy, meaning, and love in life included healing all the pain that I had sought to avoid.  

It was a long process and one that continues to this day, though it looks very different from the way it did at the beginning. It took a lot of patience, dedication, and help. I did not do this alone. This excavation of my soul has been excruciating at times. It has also been exquisitely beautiful. Without it, I would not be here today.

In giving this sermon, I want to take away the shame, the secrecy, of trauma, and I pray to offer hope. This is, by no means, the complete picture of healing. It is arduous work, not for the faint of heart, and it is possible to recover.

Last month we explored openness; this month it’s roots. We will delve into roots and their impact on us personally, communally, and historically. 

The Gospel of Thomas says ,“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” 

In his book In an Unspoken Voice, Peter Levine writes about trauma, its prevalence, and the diversity of its sources. We may think of things like war, rape, and abuse, but trauma is much more. It can result from car accidents, health conditions, and sudden loss. These causes in no way undermine those I listed earlier. The addition of these simply highlights trauma’s ubiquity.  “Trauma is a fact of life,” Levine writes.  “It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” 

These two truths—that trauma is a fact of life and that it doesn’t have to be a life sentence—along with two others—that there are paths to recovery and that these paths are open to us all—are important to keep in view. When trauma is healed, Levine writes, “…the individual opens into a mother lode of existential relief, transformative gratitude and vital aliveness.”

Though therapy is important, this sermon is not a therapy session. What I am focusing on is the spirituality of this work. Recovering from trauma is inherently a spiritual journey, since trauma is being cut off from our true selves including our capacity to reason, cut off from our bodies, and most of all cut off from our hearts. The journey requires us to develop compassion, perseverance, and perspective; and it requires that we learn how to ask for help, how to be honest, and how to form deep, real connections. Ultimately it requires us to forgive and to “Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time” to quote Maya Angelou.

My spirituality informs and supports my journey. Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness help me to develop compassion, perseverance, and perspective. My 12-step work is spirituality at work in day-to-day living. One might call it religious naturalism, humanism, or agnosticism. A critical part of the healing in my journey has required me to return to the Christian religious roots of my immediate family and ancestors and to find new meaning in that tradition. Of course, Unitarian Universalism is the spiritual container that holds it all for me. It gives me the space and encouragement to walk my own personal path and provides the tenets of morality central to who I am. Perhaps most important, it is the community that I call home. 

In his landmark writing about being a prison in Nazi concentration camps and his journey to finding meaning and healing, Victor Frankel writes, “… there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance…”  And he wrote,  “In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.” 

When we attempt this journey, or any spiritual journey, if we are to do it authentically, we will have to make peace with our roots. That does not mean we condone all of what happened or that we necessarily be in physical relationship with the people involved. Sometimes, the healthy thing to do is not to have those physical relationships. And sometimes, by the time we get to this point in our life, people may have died. We are all contending with unresolved trauma from the histories of our ancestors, including slavery, generational trauma, and immigration experiences. The healing happens in the here and now, and we must befriend ourselves, even our roots. 

“We must go down to the very foundations of life. For any merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at order had ever been made,” says the I Ching.  

There are many methods and paths to recovery from trauma. The constant in all of them is connection. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, it is connection that offers healing. The difficulty in this is that we are vulnerable in our traumatized places. The human tendency is to lash out or withdraw. It is so much easier to connect when we are feeling good.

As I have said many times, let us ensure that this is a place of safety, healing, and authentic connection—a place where we do not leave our pain at the door and a place where nothing evil crosses these doors. 

One of the most important things that happened for me over these years was hearing Thich Naht Hanh promise me, in his voice, that I could withstand the emotional pain that came with healing. I was at a conference with thousands of other people. We were discussing what comes up when we sit and meditate. Thich Naht Hanh acknowledged that pain will come up and that we can sit through it. “You can do it,” he said, “I know that you can.” I carried those words and his voice in my heart. They give me courage to this day. 

Thich Naht Hanh is in his final time. At the age of 92, after being exiled from his birth country for decades, he has returned to Vietnam to die. In a final interview conducted in March of this year, his senior disciple Brother Phap Dung, said, “He’s definitely coming back to his roots. The message is to remember we don’t come from nowhere. We have roots. We have ancestors. We are part of a lineage or stream. So he is reconnecting to the stream that came before him. And that suggests the larger community he has built is connected to that stream too. The stream will continue flowing after him.”

We too are part of that river, my friends. 

Rapids, stones, still waters. Fish poop, gravel and dirt. It’s all part of stream. It’s all part of life. 

Root in its waters, root in its flow. 

Amen and Blessed Be