Faith Like a Permeable Child

On the soul’s capacity & homeward struggle.

“We are told that even children with sad or abusive childhoods still long for ‘‘home’’ or ‘‘mother’’ in some idealized form and still yearn to return to it somehow, maybe just to do it right this time. What is going on there? I believe the One Great Mystery is revealed at the beginning and forever beckons us forward toward its full realization. Most of us cannot let go of this implanted promise. Some would call this homing device their soul, some would call it the indwelling Holy Spirit, and some might just call it nostalgia or dreamtime. All I know is that it will not be ignored.”

Richard Rohr

I grew up in a house cornered by two large cotton fields.¹

In the summertime my sister or friends and I would often play hide and seek with the dogs. I would run out into one of the cotton fields a hundred yards or more from our property, find a row to duck low between the crops, and signal for the other person back at the house to release the pups. I remember how much we laughed watching them run and jump, popping their heads over the tall plants while they tracked me. I did my best to stay quiet and not give away my location. Sometimes I stayed put. Other times I would run deeper into the field and try to escape from their scent, which never worked too well. They could usually find me within a couple minutes—but the thrill and fun of the chase was the point!

I had the fortune as a child to fill much of my time with play and exploration in the countryside of rural, small town North Carolina. One of my close friends during those years lived a mile or so across the fields and through the woods. He and I would trek to one or the other’s house, or bike—which required walking the bike around some un-bikeable stretches through forest, over streams, etc.

Source: stock photo

There was the occasional disruption, like when that friend crashed on one of our rides and had to be taken to the hospital with a spleen injury. But mostly those years living in the country were filled with formative simplicity. My young, delighted soul absorbed a lot of good nature—and good-natured people. Like the cotton fields, I was also surrounded by warm and down-to-earth family. The kindness of my parents mimicked the kindness of quiet trees and humble acreage.

We became busier when we eventually moved to a larger town entering my teen years, but the rhythm and rituals of childhood opened my soul wide. In many ways, what I absorbed I also inherited. This is one of the most sacred and scary parts of being human, of course: our vast internalizing faculties.

When it comes to love and beauty, it seems, our capacity to absorb is basically limitless. But when it comes to pain and rupture, there is only so much the soul can take in without seismic reorientation. Fundamentally my soul wants to live. It longs for uninhibited vitality. It knows that connection with transcendence isn’t so ethereal. When hindered, it grieves and protests through my body until I’m “home” again—laughing and lunging across the fields as it were—enveloped, loved, secure.

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This spring feels like I am slowly tip-toeing outside to feel the sun again after a nine-month tempest in some kind of hell. I don’t even know what just happened. Or if it’s even behind us, fully. If you’ve followed along here or on the socials you probably know about my wife K.J.’s medical saga.

After moving into our first house a year ago and savoring the sweetness of life and brimming vocations, we didn’t see it coming. When you look back several years and consider this trauma stacked onto prior years of pain, it’s no wonder there is part of me that feels really scared of feeling the sun again. We were beaten back so bad I don’t trust good to hang around very long.

My own body took some blows as well. After a few of us got Covid last July while K.J. was in the hospital surviving mystery immune reactions, I started having unpleasant symptoms with my autonomic nervous system. I would be diagnosed with dysautonomia/POTS a couple months later by a cardiologist. At times it has been downright miserable but thankfully most of the worst symptoms have slowly improved. The combination of therapy, somatic practices, and exercise have kept me okay enough today. But I’m still rattled. Not just from the last nine months, but from the totality of recent years.

That part of us as internalizing beings? Yeah. Sometimes we take in so much that former sources of comfort lose much of their shape. They become opaque to our interior life.

This is why when I learn of people leaving the Christian tradition, for example, because of what they’ve lived, absorbed, witnessed, or been betrayed by in the name of Christianity, I see the integrity of their decision to shift away. We can only absorb so much.

If decades of devout religious participation leaves the soul and body trampled from ruptures and indignities, persons may flee such a construct of God (or religion altogether) in order to heal.

The soul wants to live…and sometimes a faith system forces it into exile.

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We attended a Catholic church growing up but we didn’t talk about faith a whole lot, weirdly enough, until I got older. I became vocal about my beliefs as a Christian in high school after attending an evangelical school and learning the (largely white) evangelical language. I adopted and embraced this rubric for twenty years. I absorbed it. I became it—until the betrayals spoke louder in my body than the ‘right’ beliefs.

Consider these words by the late author and psychiatrist Gerald May:

“…addiction to a religious system, like addiction to anything else, brings slavery, not freedom. The structures of religion are meant to mediate God’s self-revelation through community; they are not meant to be substitute gods. Doctrines of belief, rules of life, standards of conduct, and reliance on Scripture are all essential aspects of an authentic spiritual life. Sacraments are special means of grace; God acts through them with great power. All these things are vehicles for God’s love, but addiction to them makes them obstacles to the freedom of our own hearts.”²

A faith system, which is always susceptible to fundamentalist embrace, can operate like a noxious addiction. It may be practiced with triumphant language and promises of redemption. It may produce repeated euphoric experience, but the properties of addiction are never nourishing to the body that houses them.

May later explains that the opposite of addiction (to a religious system or otherwise) is spaciousness, where love and mystery become unitive in the spiritual ‘homeward’ journey. The integrous spiritual life does not need every space or question filled by propositions of our intellect.

Children understand this innately. The younger parts of us are imprinted with wisdom, a knowing before we know much at all. When we’re young we can often incarnate our lives in ways that become difficult to access when we’re older. There is a very real aspect to healing and grieving that requires retracing our steps.

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I became a pastor in my mid-twenties. There is still something true about that invitation. There remains a core part of me that senses I am working out that vocation even as the context continues to shift. Eugene Peterson described “Tarshish” as the metaphorical locale for glamorous, consumptive religious careerism. It’s where human dignity can be maimed and mauled in the sport of North American ministry. The further I distance myself from that Competition of the Calloused, the harder it is to sort out the co-opted from the sacred.

The Cumulative of life does not always allow us to square our stories with God—at least, not comfortably.

I am starting a new job as a hospice chaplain. I have some experience in this setting from a few years ago. What I love about the environment of hospice is that it often strips us of our pretense. There’s not much use propping up our false selves or indulging the shadow any longer. In addition, it is not my job to “save” anyone or litigate eternity. Instead, it is to honor the dignity of a patient and loved ones, which may or may not include exploring the spiritual landscape—whatever “home” origins might remind them of love and permanent place-hood. The attuned, unambitious presence (which anyone can offer) of a living room or bedside makes a better starting point, I think, in defining the work of ‘pastor’.

Sometimes I wonder if those fields of my childhood carved out years of space for my adult self to find ballast when the pain of life became untenable. They remind me that true and good origins can still exist at bottom even when our bodies have swallowed oceans of grief. I may become estranged from many former tropes and truisms that bloated my vocabulary for years, but I can still listen for home.

1. I realize and honor that for many, memories of cotton fields in the south do not produce fondness of thought or nostalgia but instead the reality of generational oppression and trauma through slavery.

2. D., May Gerald G M. Addiction & Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addiction. Harper San Francisco, 1988. p. 97.