There are little sprouts coming up in my garden from seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago. It’s kind of a miracle. Since I planted these seeds, my garden has experienced torrential downpours, a tornado and even frost. These sprouts shouldn’t be appearing, and yet new life is bursting into view. The seed has abided in the very substance of it’s being, the ground, and together, they are forming something new – nourishment.
The word abide comes to mind as I watch these tiny miracles spring from creation itself. To abide means to continue without fading or being lost. To take refuge and root in that which is greater than ourselves. In so many spiritual traditions, this is the core concept. abiding in the Creator, in God, in the Great Spirit. Jesus speaks of abiding in God as God abides in us. There is a oneness at the core of this abiding, a merging with that which gives life that allows us to “continue without fading or being lost.” A Power greater than ourselves meets us in the darkness of our world and nourishes us, turning us into something new, giving us the strength to nourish others.
To turn towards the practice of abiding is to turn towards something greater than the winds that toss us about or the events of our lives that threaten to lead us down pathways of despair. We need this nourishment each day of abiding, it is the very thing that keeps us spiritually alive. It is the path of life, our very refuge.
It can be difficult to practice the very thing we need the most when all around us seems chaotic and driven by fear. But remembering to abide can be a practice that not only saves us in these times but changes us on the other side. Taking some moments throughout the day to develop this practice can provide a rootedness that can carry us through our lives and through difficult times. In fact, these thin spaces of our lives, when the veil between heaven and earth is cracked open through suffering, can be the perfect time to begin or perhaps begin again.
Here is one of the practices I use to abide. Feel free to adapt it or develop your own.
Centering Prayer: This is a practice that has been used by monastics for hundreds of years, but Fr. Thomas Keating really brought this practice into the mainstream. There are many videos of him discussing it on Youtube and you can readily find them by doing a search with his name + “centering prayer.” Sometimes, I listen to them while driving. He is the real pro and I recommend learning the art of the practice from his videos. Being a musician, I like to innovate a little. I adapted my version of this practice several years ago. You can use a word or a phrase that helps you feel connected to God. I often use the word, “Creator” but it can be a word such as “love” or “grace” or “peace.” The important thing to remember is that anyone can do centering prayer, it is available to us all. Sit in a comfortable position, breathe deeply for a few minutes, slowly. As you breath in you say the word at the tip of the inhale of your breath, say it in your mind. Then breathe out slowly. Repeat this for 10 to 20 minutes (or however long) as you seek to connect with God. If your mind drifts off, just gently get back into the practice. It may take a few minutes for the mind to settle. When I have trouble settling my mind (often), I add a little soundtrack of Tibetan prayer bells, which again can easily be found on Youtube. The bells help my mind to sink into the breath. Somehow, the vibrations of the bells are very calming.
Maybe you are like so many people and may have problems with the God concept. So many people have been raised to believe that God is wrathful and punishing or indifferent and uncaring. But God is unconditional love itself. Something that is hard for us to fathom. If you have trouble with the concept of God, try this acronym: G.O.D. – Good, Orderly Direction. God desires to move us to a place of sanity in a world that sometimes feels like it is overwhelmed with insanity (Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results).
We need new practices to solve old problems, to confound old narratives of hurt and pain. Or maybe taking old practices and making them new. Centering prayer, as Thomas Keating has said, is a form of “Divine Therapy,” that over time, quiets the mind and helps us connect to the heart. In other words, to abide, to continue without fading or being lost.
As we return to God throughout the day in prayer, we discover a miracle. God abides in us, giving us strength, growing our internal resources, giving us hope even in times of uncertainty.
Here’s a little piece of a song I love, created with Rumi’s poetry and a wonderful composer, Conni Ellisor. It’s called “Kiss the Ground” and the lyrics really remind me of the importance of being grounded in that Power that is greater than myself. Enjoy!
When I was a child, two things kept happening. One, I was always stepping on bees and getting mercilessly stung. Bees were more abundant back then and I was barefoot most of the time, I didn’t like shoes in the summer, still don’t. Second, I seemed to have a knack for finding the one, live electric fence in the whole world left on when kids are playing around it, the one that held within its boundary a few stray cows and a couple of half broke horses.
The other day I was taking a stroll through a lovely botanical garden. Around one of the flower beds was situated that long, painfully familiar, barely visible string of wire with a nice little sign that read, “please pardon the electric fence, it keeps the deer from eating the flowers.”
I was slightly offended by it. Who cares if the deer eat the flowers? High voltage fences are more dangerous than the deer.
Running into an electric fence feels like being hit in the stomach by a projectile basketball, forgetting to catch it first. With enough voltage to scare off a nearly one ton cow running through you all at once. As if that weren’t enough, there are the accompanying feelings of stupidity as it dawns on you that you forgot to remember that one, nearly invisible boundary you were never, ever supposed to forget.
The bee stings weren’t quite that bad, but always delivered a pulsating ache that stopped me in my tracks, eliciting a familiar shriek that beckoned the neighbor or Mom to come running , bee sting remedy in hand, at the call of that special cry. Tobacco was the best medicine, much better than the green stuff in the plastic vile, tobacco really does the trick, with a little spit thrown in to draw out the pain.
Everything in this world has a boundary. A bee, a flower, a field of stray cows and half broke horses, a little girl roaming the world barefoot. Even the wilderness has its own kind of boundary called survival and our lives have a boundary, too, called death.
My best friend told me that I didn’t have a problem with setting boundaries, rather, I had boundary fatigue from other people trying to tear them down.
“There’s a difference?” I asked.
A beautiful, ripening tomato reaches its boundary for potential if it isn’t plucked off the vine within the window of its ripeness. A storm reaches the boundary of its territory before conditions change and it dissipates. A whale will eventually reach the boundary of what seemed an endless sea when its migration is complete.
A person with great potential for love will put a boundary around her heart reasoning that it will keep others from coming near and perhaps wounding her more deeply than before. She thinks that she will not be able to bear the pain again. She feels stupid for forgetting the one thing she was never, ever supposed to forget. Little by little, by the grace of God, others who care for her dearly teach her how to build safe and healthy boundaries.
In my grown up life, I’ve learned that I can still walk barefoot in the grass, I just have to be careful around the clover. I’ve also learned that wherever there are domestic animals, there is likely going to be some kind of barrier, maybe even a high voltage one. I’m much more careful around farms. I’ve learned that it’s okay to set boundaries around my time, work, relationships and love. I have control of the voltage, But I also realize that I can draw these boundaries way too firmly when I am too hurt, too lonely, too tired or too empty. Keeping healthy boundaries is all about keeping myself healthy.
It’s okay to make mistakes when we are trying to figure out where the boundary markers are. In fact, we most surely will draw our boundaries too firmly at first, or not enough. We learn, we try again, we observe ourselves, we reflect, we make adjustments. We learn balance as we go along. We most likely will not be very good at setting boundaries when we begin. But over time, we’ll get better. We’ll know what to do to get back on track.
These days, I keep a pouch of tobacco in my purse, strictly for medicinal purposes.
“Nobody escapes being wounded, we are all wounded people. Whether physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds, or hide from them?’ but ‘how can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.” – Henri Nouwen, “The Wounded Healer”
The Wounded Healer is a human archetype that’s been around for thousands of years. In native culture, the wounded healer is the shaman or holy man/holy woman who heals themselves and others through becoming a channel for the Creator’s power to flow through them. They often use their wounds as a source of information for healing others. Jesus became the great Wounded Healer (the topic of Nouwen’s book) as his wounds became a source of healing for the wounded of the world.
It’s a beautiful idea, that our wounds could become a source of healing. But if you’re like me, you might initially balk at the thought of placing your wounds in the service of others. After all, if you’ve been on the earth very long, you soon learn from the school of hard knocks that you have to heal yourself before you can help anyone else, right? But here is what Nouwen is getting at and it’s also the real genius behind Jesus’ core teaching of “love one another.” The way to unleashing the wounded healer within isn’t in the fixing of our wounds or the wounds of others, it’s in the loving.
We so often confuse fixing and loving, and it’s easy to do.
When Jesus told his followers that the most important thing was that they love one another and love God, he knew they were broken people in a broken world. The thing is, he wasn’t telling them to fix the world or fix each other, he was telling them to love each other. It is somehow very important as we find solutions to the problems of the world like hunger, homelessness, climate change, violence and oppression that love leads the way.
Loving is different than fixing. We can’t fix each other but we can love each other, and this is where the magic happens, this is where the healing begins. In fact, Jesus was clear on this point too, that we need not get involved in trying to fix each other, but loving, loving one another is necessary for our own healing. Because it is love that connects us as human beings. People tend to suffer from loneliness, isolation and abandonment without love. Without love, we are just doomed to live out the nature of our wounds.
Healing our wounds is really important to human thriving. The field of psychology informs us that if we don’t heal our wounds, then they become the pain that we inflict on others. We project the dark attributes of our wounds onto others because we are trying to find some kind of method to cope with them. When we are not able to go through the healing process, we tend to project our pain outwardly, it’s how we manage the emotions we can’t process. Because we’re projecting the material of our wounds such as hurt, fear, mistrust, jealousy, it makes it difficult to connect with people, to love and have intimate relationships. Without healing our wounds, we are controlled by our pain.
But, as it turns out, the opposite is also true. That when we project love onto others, we go in the direction of love, in ourselves as well as outwardly. Love begins to give us messages about who we really are, because love is inside of us, the most powerful force in the universe. Love leads us to healing. We begin to crave more love as we get to know love, as we seek to love without conditions, we want more of that in our own lives. It leads us to seek our own healing. If we get into a program of healing, then our wounds can give us the information we need to move forward into friendships, love relationships, intimacy and a sane, manageable life. We become wounded healers.
Healing happens as we learn to give and receive love, as we share our brokenness with other human beings who are also broken. It took me a long time to really accept this. Because I always felt that I had to fix things, situations, problems; that in my ability to fix impossible situations, I could be spectacular and finally be worthy of love. I found out, in ten years of being the pastor at one of those churches Pope Francis has called “the frontlines of the world’s pain” that I was wrong. I couldn’t fix anyone or anything, all I could do was love broken people and eventually, learn to love myself. I learned that if I let love lead, solutions to problems would arise and I could see the way clearly.
Check out Sherry’s latest book: reflections from a pastor on homelessness and her spiritual journey.
The act of loving one another actually gives us access to our wounds. Because often, they are buried so deeply within us, we can’t reach them by ourselves. We need others to become mirrors for us so that we can locate them, have language for them. Sometimes our wounds are buried beneath layers of a false self that we’ve developed to survive because the pain of these wounds has been too overwhelming for us to process. Our real self or true self goes into hiding to survive. But the genius of Jesus’ teaching, “love one another,” is that as we risk loving instead of fixing, something deep within us begins to vibrate, God’s love, hidden inside of us all. It wakes up like a sleeping giant and begins to shake these layers of the false self as we connect with others through love. We begin to realize there is a truth inside of us that is much more powerful than our pain, that is Divine love. It shines out from inside as we risk loving, as we realize we are broken. Somehow our hearts need to break so we can believe that love is inside of us, love rescues us from within because it is innate in us all. We were all created with the image of God within, we just have a hard time believing it. Love holds us steady, loving others stabilizes us as we take the healing journey.
There is a wounded healer inside of us all. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we find our healing by putting our own wounds in the service of a greater love. God begins to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
As the poet Rumi said, “the wound is the place where the light enters you.”
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The thirty-something Cherokee woman asked me, sitting across the table at the mission.
“It feels like everything on the reservation is falling apart and the world is, too,” she said.
To her, there were two worlds. The one “out there,” which was more desirable than the one “in here.” Until now, that is. The lifelong destination of her dreams, the world I had come from, the one that held the strange mixture of oppression and opportunity, didn’t seem much better than hers. The boundaries had become blurred and she didn’t know what to make of it. She was in need of a Holy Woman or a Beloved Woman, to interpret the signs. Aren’t we all?
We long for this Wise Woman, the one who turns the end of the world into a new beginning. But where has she gone? We read about her in the Bible, we hear about her healing, her songs, prophetic insights and stabilizing force in tribal stories, but can she still be found? This question is what brought me to the Qualla Boundary of the Cherokee Nation and it’s a question that has haunted me most of my life. Where is the woman “out there” who feels like the one I have “in here,” inside of me? I began my journey with the ones with whom I share ancestry, the Cherokee.
Sally (her real name is undisclosed) was one of the few women who agreed to be interviewed. Their resistance was understandable. Exploited by society’s hunger for the exotic and rare, they were clinging to what little threads of identity remained past the thin veil of the Hollywood generated images that brought in tourism dollars. It was all they had left, and it was a thing to be protected.
Apparently, my application for interviews was still on hold at tribal council. But Sally agreed to speak to me because I was a minister, she was hoping to be one herself. She heard I was on the hunt for the memory of the Holy Woman, in Bible and in native cultures. To me, the Holy Woman had become almost extinct, but I had read stories about this type of woman, call her an archetype if you will, in Bible and in native history. I hoped to discover remnants of her to bring her influence to my own faith, to shed light on how these women might have functioned in the tribal cultures whose stories haunt the unexplored territories of the Bible. If we could get a glimpse of her, maybe we could believe that she actually exists, maybe we could say with more confidence, “here we are.”
Holy Women or in Cherokee, “Beloved Women,” were the property owners, not the owned, women warriors, prophets, owners of crops and lands, negotiators, judges, matriarchs. I was given this definition of a Beloved Woman when I asked the tribal historian for his understanding of her role in Cherokee culture:
“The Beloved Woman is an important community figure among the Cherokee people. The wise woman bestowed this role acts as a one-woman legal counsel and judicial authority over all members of her tribe. Her word is law and all people must abide.”
It would be a miracle if this woman survived.
When the early American settlers came, the men were shocked that they were forced to negotiate with Cherokee women for goods and food. It didn’t fit into their scheme of how the world worked. If a society wasn’t patriarchal, to them, it just wasn’t civilized. It hadn’t been that long ago, relatively speaking, a few generations back. I wanted to know if anyone remembered, or if anyone was still carrying on this tradition.
I began with the question, does the “Beloved Woman” still exist or has she become a force of the past? Her feminine powers brought into submission through patriarchy, as in many dominant strains of my own Christian tradition? I knew that at one time, the Cherokee tradition had revered these women as tribal leaders, judges, warriors, property owners, prophets and healers. But did she still live, if only in ancient memory?
We sat across the table in the fellowship hall of a quaint, stone church in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountain range. The mission, constructed in the 1950’s, was what remained of the Methodist efforts to bring Jesus to the Cherokee, an effort begun out of the early 1800’s missionary zeal of the circuit riding preachers. I guess the Methodists were not aware, in the beginning, that Jesus had already appeared to the Cherokee almost two thousand years prior. But even Jesus, the one in the Cherokee legend who was known as “the great healer that walked the earth,” and the Methodists, as powerful as they were at the time, couldn’t stop the Great Removal. All that was left of the mighty nation that once roamed the entire southern region freely was a stamp of land known as the Qualla Boundary and an identity that lived somewhere beyond the pages of history books; somewhere beyond the layers of intergenerational trauma, in the river, in the land, in the wind, in the lost women who were once “beloved.”
Sally told me that she had longed to take a spiritual journey but she felt trapped. I encountered a similar sentiment in each of the woman who agreed to speak to me. A deep, unmet spiritual yearning that seemed to run parallel to the beautiful, winding river flowing through the mountains, constant and determined. It was something that each of them felt intensely and yet also felt sealed off from, as if they were not allowed access to the beauty of their own souls. It was as if this spiritual desire that ran through them belonged to someone else from another time. As if their very identities were the property of an elusive power they couldn’t even name.
Though these women were connected to one of the richest spiritual traditions on the continent, Cherokee spirituality, they somehow struggled to make the connection at the soul level. Sally felt bound by many things, her husband’s illness, her mother’s recent death and her many children who had taken what she called “bad roads,” succumbing to the rampant drug and alcohol epidemic that plagued reservation life. But more than that, there was a kind of binding of her spirit that she struggled to give language to, to her, it was only a distinct feeling she could name as “the end of the world.” The blurring of the boundaries between the “outside world” and the “inside world.” I told her that when it feels that way, when it feels like something important is crumbling, then something more valuable than money, property or power is usually wanting to be born. Something old, a hidden treasure, wanting to be discovered.
Like the woman in Revelation 12, the woman at the end of the world, clothed with the sun, golden, full of light. She had to endure the epitome of suffering in order to give birth to something new. All the while fighting off a dragon. I wanted to tell Sally that she was that woman, that we all are, at one point or another in our lives as we embrace the terrifying freedom of the birth of our very own souls in the world.
But the Holy Woman would have understood these things, she would have interpreted them for the women of the tribe with her songs, stories, healing and her prophetic insights. The Beloved Woman would have made the end of the world feel normal.
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When I asked her about the tradition of Beloved Women in her culture, she said she didn’t really know of any. She grew up in a time in which it was dangerous to be native. She had always felt disconnected from Cherokee culture and though her grandmother spoke the language, she only spoke it among trusted friends. To be Cherokee was to remain hidden, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to keep your true identity a secret.
I wonder if the bones of the Holy Woman are buried in the spiritual longings of these women. Longing to connect with the grandmothers who spoke their language freely.
I wonder if the Beloved Woman is walking alongside the “great healer who walked the land,” two thousand years ago, gathering her medicine in the mountains, fighting off the dragons, clothed with the sun. Singing her songs as the boundary between the end and the beginning fades. Giving birth to something old.
Maybe she is still alive in us all.
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Occasionally I meet a holy family. This is my term for a homeless family with a baby. I call them holy because I always think of the traveling Mary and Joseph, rejected and forced outside, exposed to the elements, with the task of doing something Divine.
Such a family walked into the community meal with a baby boy, not quite a year old, with blue eyes and blonde, curly ringlets. The couple had become newly homeless and were living in their car. I tried many different techniques to help them get into housing, working with other agencies, helping them with paper work, but nothing stuck. Even with all my best efforts, it seemed I was unable to find a solution for this family. The layers of their predicament were thick and seemingly impenetrable. They would appear and disappear with great irregularity.
Randomly, they would come into the meal, covered in grease, dirt, and the fatigue of the streets. I would hold the baby, give them supplies, sometimes put them up in a hotel—and my heart would break again. The church did as much as we could financially to help them but after a year of coming and going, they just couldn’t get on their feet. It was so discouraging.
One Thursday night, one of my new mothers from the church came to the meal and noticed that the baby, now almost two years old, had blackened feet. She took a wash cloth and some soap from the kitchen and washed his feet. I had bought two gallons of milk for the meal that night, and she filled a bottle with fresh milk and fed him. The baby laughed at her, feeling safe in her arms. She noticed the dark circles under his eyes, and how tired the baby seemed. She called me that night after the meal, crying.
“I don’t know what to do, I can’t stop thinking about this baby,” she said through tears. “He just looked at me with his eyes, it was like he was crying for help and I just feel like I have to do something.”
I tried to console her. I knew she had made a connection with the baby boy and that he reminded her so much of her own little boy. Her heart was genuinely breaking over the situation.I assured her I would check further into what some of the options might be, though there didn’t seem to be any great ones presenting themselves immediately.
There was the Department of Children’s Services that we could call to come and investigate options for the baby’s safety. I explained to her that I’d done everything in my power to try and get them to commit themselves to the family shelter, but they would have to split up and they refused to do so.
She wouldn’t let it go, her heart had become involved. “I have some money if you think it would help, I can get together some supplies for them, whatever you think.”
“I’ll look into it this week,” I said, and thanked her for her generous offer.
The next day I made some phone calls, tried to track down the couple, but they were nowhere to be found. They had no address other than their car, no one seemed to know them, they were part of a hidden population and they were hidden well.
After church on Sunday the young mother lingered, sitting in the back of the church crying.
Now there are few women in my church from Africa, they are refugees of war-torn countries like Sierra Leone and Sudan. They knew something about the dangers of being homeless with children in tow. One of the mothers, Sarah, from Sierra Leone was forced from her home during a rebel invasion. Sarah’s baby was ripped from her arms and murdered in front of her. The atrocities they have lived through put our problems in perspective.
These two African now American mothers, Josephine and Sarah, began to comfort her and talk with her about this baby’s condition and what might be done.
“In Africa, we would never let a baby live on the streets,” Sarah said. “He would be taken to an auntie or a cousin. Someone would take him in. I don’t understand how we let this happen here in America. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
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The three of us were standing around the young mother who was sitting in the pew, trying to comfort her and come up with a solution. I shook my head. “I guess in America, we are a different kind of village. We have to have the system step in, if we call DCS, the baby will be taken into state custody and then put into the foster care system, it’s not guaranteed that the baby will have one home, it may have many in that system, it’s not perfect, it’s just the system we have, but it does often work out in favor of the child’s safety.”
“I just want to take him home,” the young mother said. “I want to feed him and bathe him and make sure he feels safe. It’s killing me that he’s not.”
“We have to do something,” Josephine said. “We can’t just let these babies live on the streets, we have to intervene.”
The women reasoned through the situation and decided that we should, as a church, call DCS. The only problem: there was no way to locate the couple, and she was expecting another child, due in two weeks.
The next community meal, the couple did not show up. Perhaps they intuitively knew something was going to happen. I haven’t seen them since, and as I asked around—no one knew where they went. I had no words of comfort for the young mother. Only, that these are just the kinds of situations we encounter when we do this type of work. It’s hard, but sometimes all we can really do is pray and keep searching for some kind of miraculous solution, giving what we can give, doing what we can do while we wait. Sometimes, even I have a hard time heeding this advice because my heart breaks, too.
I grew up in a very small town. In a small town, there is a culture of remembrance. People remember your personality—the things that made you unique—and your family. There is a deep well of recognition. Even in this day and age, there are no homeless people in my hometown.
But in the city, people fall through the cracks. I don’t know where they go. There are places to hide, even in plain sight, where no one will ever find you. It haunts me just like it haunted this young mother that a baby did not have what it needed to survive, that a little one so tender could be at risk in a great big world. This precious, new life, in danger of slipping through the cracks.
As an urban pastor, I’ve tried to create a culture of remembrance, but it’s hard because sometimes I feel as if my one, precious life is slipping through the cracks, too. There is something exciting about being in a city with its opportunities, but if you are from a culture of remembrance, it’s difficult to stay in that forgotten place.
I often admire the African refugees in my church because they stick together. They are surrounded by their culture here in the city. Even though they joke with me that they have “left the village behind” to fit into the urban culture, this is not really true. The village lives inside of them like my hometown lives inside of me. It guides them to take care of their neighbors’ children, to look out for one another, to be kind, and to protect the vulnerable. They have always carried the village in their hearts and as long as they do, they will never feel lonely.
I’ve learned so much from them and they have become the very heart beat of my church and ministry here, they have so much to teach us about how to love. They are so grateful to be living in what they call a “great country,” free from the kind of violence that drove them from their homeland. Here, they can use their gifts, pursue their humble dreams, educate their children, and make a life for themselves. And yet, they do not understand why we have so many holy, homeless families.
I’m not sure what will happen to the holy, homeless family but I pray for their safety and for the well-being of the babies. I pray for a new world in which we cherish all the sacred, holy families in our communities. I have learned that the only home we truly have is the one that is carried in the hearts of others.
About the Author:
Sherry Cothran, M.Div., is a speaker, musician, author and ordained minister. In addition to her ongoing work as senior pastor, Sherry has been featured in USA Today, UMCorg, been the keynote speaker at several conferences and performed her songs and stories on many stages. She has received two grants from the Louisville Institute for her creative projects in Bible, faith and spirituality. She was the Artist in Residence at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. Her sermons and blogs have been featured in Good Preacher, Abingdon Women, Interpreter, Ministry Matters, Alive Now. An award winning recording artist, her most recent collaboration with indie film maker, Tracy Facceli, “Tending Angels” can be viewed on Youtube.
Sherry Cothran, M.Div., is a speaker, musician, author and ordained minister. In addition to her ongoing work as senior pastor, Sherry has been featured in USA Today, UMCorg, been the keynote speaker at several conferences and performed her songs and stories on many stages. She has received two grants from the Louisville Institute for her creative projects in Bible, faith and spirituality. She was the Artist in Residence at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. Her sermons and blogs have been featured in Good Preacher, Abingdon Women, Interpreter, Ministry Matters, Alive Now. An award winning recording artist, her most recent collaboration with indie film maker, Tracy Facceli,