Aaron's Lesson for Christian Middle Management

This morning I read Exodus 32, as found in the Office of Readings. A small detail stood out to me that I don't remember noticing before.

This is the account of the Israelites in the wilderness who start to get anxious when Moses has gone up the mountain to worship and commune with God. He's been gone roughly a month, and they apparently were given no timeline about when to expect him back. As far as they know, he's never coming back. They are feeling insecure and scared for their future. 

They complain to Aaron. If I can imagine what's going on for Aaron, he probably trusted at first that Moses' trek was in God's hands, but he also is being pressed by the insecurity of the crowd. The people need a leader, and their complaints start to hit him like demands for performance. "Make it better, Aaron. Do something, Aaron." 

They don't ask him to pray and ask God for direction, and this doesn't seem to occur to Aaron, either. He looks at their need as a crisis and tries to blend his own wisdom and experience with this demands he is now feeling personally. He is not so much concerned with helping the people connect with God as he is with alleviating his own sense of unease. Moses is gone, after all. Instead of looking at the people's need with the humility that puts him in touch with his own need, he comes up with a plan.

And here's the detail. The people say, "Make us a god" and he's now taking their direction. His means? He tells the people: "Have your wives, your sons, and your daughters take off their golden earrings...." He doesn't ask "the people" to personally sacrifice anything. He asks them to make other people sacrifice. Aaron seems to not understand that true spiritual seeking comes at cost to oneself, and that the vulnerable waiting is part and parcel of God's design. Aaron doesn't dig into his own growing sense of uncertainty with Moses gone, and he doesn't ask the men to dig into their growing sense of uncertainty with trust in the Lord. Instead he comes up with this idea to present God as a thing that can be easily grasped. And like he later tells Moses, "I threw the gold in the fire, and out came this calf!" 

For those of us who find ourselves in positions of spiritual middle management, who provide some support to others spiritually but who aren't the leader, or for any of us who are Christian but who aren't in fact the Holy Spirit, this is a valuable lesson. We need to be able to hear the worries and pains of other people without a) thinking we can step in as savior and fix it or b) without recognizing within ourselves the same capacity towards weakness. What we need to do is bring both ourselves and those we support before the Lord. We are equal pilgrims on the journey, nothing more. As we both bow before the Lord, we can then work together to carry out His directives for us. 

Trauma-Informed Lent

I'm not trying to be trendy with this title; I'm trying to share my heart. 

For roughly the last nine months, I've been seeing a therapist who has a specialty in trauma work. Why, you say? Well, as I progressed through my Spiritual Direction Formation Program, I realized I had both childhood and adult trauma that I needed help addressing. Now I only wish I had started this process decades ago. It  has been incredibly freeing, like it would be freeing for someone to get rid of sciatica pain, but who had somehow spent so long with it they no longer recognized it wasn't the body's intended function. 

Both trauma and its resolution has impacted a lot in me, but for right now I want to look at how trauma had distorted Lent in my mind for a long time.

St. Paul reminds us that our thoughts are vital to our spiritual life. "Take every thought captive" and make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5); "set your mind on things above," (Col. 3:2) and "whatever is true, noble, right, lovely... think upon these things" (Phil. 4:8) are examples written to three different cities' communities of believers. In other words, this was standard in his instruction of how to be a Christian. It does make a presumption, though. It presumes that people had already learned to seperate which thoughts were obedient to Christ, true, good, and from heaven -- from those that came from and led to disobedience, lies, bad, and from hell. 

Experience tells me that we life long Christians can make serious mistakes here. If I think it all the time, it must be true and good. Right? Right? 

Enter trauma to seriously mess with your mind. If the wheat your life long Christianity has mixed with the weeds of childhood trauma, you might just be clinging with all your religious might to things that definitely are not true and good. But they are so familiar, so worn in, so me that, certainly I must be understanding this correctly. After all, I'm a Christian. 

This is why we have the famous saying "anyone who takes himself for his own spiritual director is the disciple of a fool." We need to receive input from others to know ourselves.

I want to share a prayer we hear at daily Mass during Lent to illustrate how we can twist truth around our trauma, and believe we hear God confirming us in our dysfunction. From Preface II for Lent (italics mine):

...For you have given your children a sacred time
for the renewing and purifying of their hearts,
that, freed from disordered affections,
they may so deal with the things of this passing world
as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.

Now, I have nearly a Master's degree in theology, but I'm telling you that my trauma did not care about that. I also have a BA in English, and I understand words well, but my trauma also did not care about that. My trauma latched on to emotional content, especially anything that struck fear of loss or demand for a certain kind of herculean  moral performance.

Disordered affections? This meant affection, attachment, and human feeling were ultimately bad news, and being a good Christian meant being willing to live without these, ready to rip them out, trample them underfoot. Yes, I know the prayer really means that a good, created thing like affection needs grace to raise it from the natural level (by that purification mentioned above it). But in the past as I prayed this, I baptized the voice of trauma and practiced steeling myself against my own humanity.

Dealing with the things of this passing world? Ok, what passes away. Voice of trauma says: the reliability of others. A sense of safety. A sense of others acknowledging I have intrinsic worth. What things eternally endure? I have to be the responsible one. The buck stops here. Maybe if I hold my breath long enough I will finally be able to escape.

Yeah, no. 

If you would have asked me for an analysis of these prayers in any recent year, I would have been able to theologically parse exactly what they really mean. But deep down, I would have found it hard to believe or connect the explanation to my experience. 

But today when I heard this at Mass, I heard it differently. I heard that the Lenten observance purifies my mind from clinging to lies and fears. I heard that the lost little one within who clung in fear to herself can in fact open more deeply to love and to life. God is love, love is eternal, and Jesus is right here with me all the time! His love fills me, and of course I'm going to love all the things He made; they're His! For me! And all the people He made -- they eternally endure, too. Some are harder to love, because they are curled up, clinging in fear to themselves, too. But just like trauma shapes us, love shapes us, too. It renews and purifies. We deal with the world by loving. So we already live in what eternally endures. Disordered affection means we don't love like Jesus. He puts things right so that we can. His love went to the cross, that place of ultimate shame and pain, taking our sin.

Freedom from disordered affection is when we allow Jesus to meet us right there: in our shame and our pain, and our sin. Jesus has been there the whole time. We are the ones who really can't bear to look up at Him, as long as we are curled up on ourselves. Sometimes tying ourselves down tighter with ropes made from religious words. 

God Himself will set me free from the hunter's snare.
   From those who would trap me with lying words  (Lenten responsory, Morning Prayer)