Transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope

Here's the reflection that I shared this evening at St Andrew's Wickford:

My family recently celebrated my mother’s 89th birthday. My niece, her granddaughter, had made a photograph album showing all the different stage of Mum’s life. We all enjoyed looking through the album with Mum as she remembered the people and times shown in the photographs.

Remembering, both in the sense of bringing back to mind and also of re-enacting is central to who we are as people. As Katherine Hedderly has highlighted, “The community of the church has a special place in this work because it is a community of remembrance and resurrection. “‘Do this’ in remembrance of me.” We remember what Jesus did and we act upon it in the present. We are witnesses to the living memory of Jesus in the world, to God’s living presence with us, as we are re-membered, or reformed, as a community together. Holding in our midst with love those who no longer have their memory, must be a special task for the church, because we know in a very special way what it means to know who we are because someone remembered us; Jesus Christ, the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow.”

Jesus remembered his mother while on the cross. On Mothering Sunday, we remember those who, for good or ill, are foundational to our lives, experiences and memories. We were reminded that the simplest things we see and do can often be the most profound and those that touch us in the deepest places.

Jesus' remembering of his mother occurred while he was undergoing the most extreme agony personally. For some of us, to remember our mothers might involve complex and conflicted memories which bring back to mind some of our more painful moments in life. Jesus ministered in and through and out of his pain; remembering particular people (his mother and John, his disciple), forgiving those who tortured and mocked him, and dying for the salvation of all.

In him we see:

 
Love in the midst of torture
Care in the midst of pain
Life in the midst of death
Wounded reconciler
Wounded healer
Wounded carer

It is from reflection on those experiences and actions of Jesus, that the idea of the wounded healer has come. This is the idea that our own pain and difficulties - our wounds - do not necessarily preclude us from ministry but may provide a resource or source from which our ministry can flow.

Henri Nouwen in his book The Wounded Healer reminds us: "We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for." Yet, to remember and reach out to support, sustain and strengthen others whilst remaining wounded ourselves may be, as was the case for Jesus, among the deepest and most profound of our ministries to others. Nouwen also writes that: “a shared pain is no longer paralyzing but mobilizing, when understood as a way to liberation. When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.”

The forgiveness and love that we receive from Jesus comes out of his experience of the agony and torture of death. It comes out of the wound of crucifixion and this is why it is of significance that his resurrected body continues to bear the marks of those wounds. We do not need to become perfect in order to be accepted and loved by God nor do we need to recover from weakness, hurt and difficulty in order to minister to others. Sometimes it is the willingness and openness to share our own experience of pain and suffering, not in order to burden another, but as an act of empathy with another that is just the support and healing that that other person needs.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Alarm - Walk Forever By My Side.

Sermon for the first Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 22 June, titled ‘Release and change’

Here's the sermon for the first Sunday after Trinity, Sunday 22 June, titled ‘Release and change’, that I've recorded for the weekly sermon series of the Diocese of Chelmsford. 

All the sermons in the series can be found on the 'Weekly Sermon Videos' playlist. My earlier sermons in the series can be viewed here and here.

Imagine for a moment what it must be like to hear many voices in your head. Some of us will have had such experiences when events have overwhelmed us and, in our anxiety, we cannot see a way through and so the issues and options we experience run round and round in our minds without finding a resolution. Others of us may have had diagnosed mental health conditions which have included the experience of hearing competing voices. Each of these experiences are distressing and are hard to deal with.

Such experiences give us some insight into the story told in today’s Gospel reading (Luke 8.26-39) and the experiences of the man that Jesus healed, all described in the understandings of Jesus’ time rather than the understandings of today. The man describes his experience in terms of having a legion or mob of voices in his mind and the distress caused leads him to live in a distressed state away from his local community.

Our society, too, sometimes responds to the mental distress that people experience by isolating people from their communities, although, generally, we try to support people as much as possible within their homes, families and communities.

When confronted by this man, Jesus stops, listens and then responds him. Similarly, as Jesus’ followers, we also need to be those prepared to give time and space to any who are anxious or distressed, and especially to listen in ways that enable people to unpack their experiences and those things that are a source of distress for them.

In our Parish, Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Groups are one of the ways in which we offer such space. Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Groups provide a structured yet flexible program designed to help participants accept themselves, understand their value and worth, and grow towards a more resilient and hopeful future. These groups are places where people can experience:

1. Safety and support, where there is no shame in struggling
2. An increase in self-worth, confidence and wellbeing
3. A deeper understanding of the reality of God's love for them
4. Clear pathways to receive additional support if needed

As a result of the groups that have run in our Parish, I am aware of people who have been able to discuss past experiences in their families that hadn’t been talked through previously and others that have been empowered to begin to address issues that have needed addressing for some time.

Many of us respond to uncertainty, anxiety or distress by bottling up our thoughts and feeling; keeping them inside, rather than sharing them with someone else and thereby allowing them to be expressed, explored and understood. Our bottled-up feelings have to go somewhere – they have to expressed – because, if that doesn’t happen, they build up and build up inside us until they finally explode and, by exploding, do more damage that would have been the case if they had been expressed earlier.

It may be that this is what is being depicted for us in the strange part of today’s Gospel reading where the many strong forces in the life of this man are sent, by Jesus, into a herd of pigs which then rush down a steep bank into the lake and are drowned. His pent-up emotions needed to come out – to be expressed – in order to leave him and go elsewhere.

The man needed to see something that symbolised his full and final release in order to believe that he was finally free and that is what the episode with the pigs provided for him. A key part of what happened for them was that their pent-up emotions found a different kind of release which then enabled him to be free of them and to begin to share positively out of the experiences he had had.

I wonder what is bottled-up inside of us that we need to express and release in order to begin to become free from its negative effects on our lives. Again, our Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Groups can potentially offer safe spaces in which that sort of disclosure is possible but talking to counsellors or psychologists might also be helpful.

This man was able to walk away free from all that had been tormenting him through his encounter with Jesus. More than that he began to share positively out of the difficult experiences he had had. That is also the experience of several from our Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Groups.

When we are able to address the difficult experiences in our lives – express, explore and move beyond them, so they no longer constrain and limit or harm us – then these wounds in our lives can become the places from which we are able to support and help others. We become wounded healers in the same sort of way that Jesus through his suffering became the source of salvation for each one of us. It is by his wounds that we are healed and, once we have received healing, as with the man in our Gospel reading, then we are often able to support and help others going through similar experiences because of our personal knowledge of what they are currently going through.

Kintsugi Hope works with the centuries-old Japanese repair technique which uses urushi (Japanese lacquer) dusted with powdered gold to restore broken ceramic and porcelain vessels. Rather than masking fractures, kintsugi highlights them with gold to tell an object’s story. Items which have been restored using the kintsugi technique are often considered even more precious than they were before. It is the same with those who receive healing as did the man in today’s Gospel reading as, by becoming wounded healers, we become even more precious than we were before.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Graham Kenrick feat. Natasha Petrovic w/ mental wellbeing charity Kintsugi Hope - Jesus Of The Scars.