Healing the Wounds that Bind Us

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 12, 2023

Google “religious scandals” and you will be as overwhelmed as I was with the dizzying array of salacious events to choose from. Faced with an astounding list of options, I first clicked Jim Bakker, since that was a familiar name. A televangelist with his own Christian theme park, he and his wife founded the Praise the Lord Club, a televised program netting over $200 million a year. Bakker resigned from his ministry after paying his secretary to be quiet about raping her and then he went to prison for felony related to accounting fraud.

In 1990, Covenant House, an organization designed to help runaway kids, was slammed with accusations that Fr. Bruce Ritter, their larger than life founder, sexually abused some of the kids in his care. That revelation opened the gate for a tidal wave of stories from people across generations all over the country not just accusing priests of molesting them but of a massive system of cover-ups aided and abetted by the most powerful men in the American Catholic Church.

Just a few months ago we learned that a Hasidic school in Brooklyn has been failing to educate their students essentially neglecting to teach them math, English, science or social studies, choosing instead to spend huge sums of money on religious indoctrination and Yiddish. Orthodox schools have also gotten city and state money for children with disabilities, but the schools have provided little or no accommodations for those children. Making these scandals even worse, lawmakers in the area have known for years but haven’t wanted to appear antisemitic or to challenge the voting block which they need to maintain their power in the neighborhood.

People calling themselves Christian have been trying for-ever to convert people who don’t conform to sexual or gender norms. LGBTQ people have been subjected to electroshock treatments, conversion camps, and full communal exclusion when they display behaviors considered outside the acceptable societal expectations. Christian preachers croon about hell and cite narrow interpretations of scripture to marginalize people, leading to unbearable pain.

A woman I know was raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She met her husband in her church, but soon after marrying they decided they wanted to take a break from Sunday mornings and stopped going to church. The minister told the community to shun them, which meant to completely shut them out of their lives. The community included their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters. They were excluded from gatherings of all kinds; not even phone calls were allowed. Under pressure, the couple agreed to return to church where the shunning continued for 6 months until they proved their faithfulness.  

I was raised without religion, a fact many people tell me they wish was true of them. Both of my parents had been treated badly by their religions of origin. They’d both experienced trauma as children and neither of their respective religious traditions or communities were able to speak to their needs in any meaningful way. To make it more complicated, after they fell in love, the fact that he was Catholic and she was Jewish meant that neither family was supportive of their relationship. My mother’s mother forced a break-up. My father’s cousins looked for my mother’s horns. The whole thing was destructive and when I was born, they agreed to keep me away from organized religion. (We can see how well that turned out.)

Religious institutions have been the source of tremendous pain in the lives of millions of people.

Raise your hand if you have been hurt by a religious community or particular theology. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if you rejected religion because it was harmful to you. Keep your hands up. Raise your hand if, before coming here, you were sure you’d never step foot in another church/synagogue or other house of worship again.

You can put your hands down. That’s a lot of us. A lot of people right here in this room have experienced religious trauma or have barely escaped it, and we aren’t alone. Our streets are filled with people who have been hurt, rejected, or otherwise harmed in one of a thousand ways by the very institutions they were taught to trust.

I read a sermon written by a colleague of mine down in Georgia. Her name is Charlotte Arsenault and in her sermon she references a writer named Jim Palmer. He’s done a lot of work on this subject, but what I found most interesting is a list of messages people get from religion that create trauma. Here’s his list:

I am inherently bad.

I can't trust myself.

My heart is wicked.

I deserve punishment.

I don't measure up.

I am powerless.

Self-denial is holiness.

I need forgiveness for who I am.

I need to be saved from myself.

I am worthless on my own.

Being devoted to God means staying in an abusive relationship.

Therapy or medication is a lack of faith.

Self-care is selfish.

The world is evil.

If I mess up I will lose my salvation and go to hell.

People I deeply love are in hell or will go there.

Everything outside my church culture is a threat.

I can never be good enough.

Feelings are dangerous and not trustworthy.

I am not capable of thinking for myself.

Obedience is true discipleship.

Questioning is a spirit of rebellion.

I must be perfect.

My struggles mean I am not trusting God.

I am nothing.

I am weak.

And lastly, God will fix it for me.

To Mr. Palmer’s list I’d like to add:

You don’t need science if you have faith.

You might be in pain, grieving, terrified, but it’s all God’s will.

This is God’s plan.

Your beloved died because God wanted them with Him.

Sex is sinful and separates you from God.

Clergy are closer to God than you are.

Clergy are rarely wrong, sad, angry or in need.

This is because they have real faith.

When you are wrong, sad, angry or in need, it’s your lack of faith.

Women are subservient to men.

Women should not lead.

Women should be quiet.

These might be messages you’ve heard before. If so, I’m sorry. I’m sorry anyone said these things to you or implied them or build a world or system around them. I’m sorry anyone has had to hear them, or that anyone believes them enough they’d repeat them. Those messages saturate our culture, sink into our minds, and effect self-worth in powerful, often lasting ways.

People are running from organized religion, and it’s no wonder. The hurt perpetrated, over and over, generation to generation is finally repelling people, something I hope is a sign of health. I hope there’s a wholesale rejection of messages that don’t align with other shared cultural values.

If I were to make a list of what messages I hope people are hearing or assuming here, here are some things that would be on it:

I am beautiful

I am made in the image of all that’s Holy

I am loved

When I feel broken, there’s somewhere I can go to be reminded that I am whole

Everyone behaves badly sometimes

Everyone gets angry

Everyone feels sad

Everyone knows how it feels to be lonely

None of these feelings are a lack of faith

Everyone is loved

Everyone is saved

My gender, my sexuality, the color of my skin, are reflections of God

I am part of the divine spirit that lives and loves in all of us

My voice matters, even if I don’t have a job or a home or don’t speak English

It’s OK that I don’t have answers

Questions are faithful

One of the ways I see religious trauma play out is in inherent distrust of clergy, and sometimes other church leadership. It’s always interesting to me when I see people start to question the motives of their friends once their friends are sitting on the board. I tell board members when that happens that it’s not about them, the same way I know the similarly suspicious energy I receive isn’t about me. It’s one of the ways we play out years of pain or childhood religious trauma. It’s safer to assume malintent of people with any kind of religious authority. I mean- it’s annoying for us, but in some ways it’s also understandable. I don’t want to downplay the trauma it perpetuates, though. At least two past board chairs here have been honest about how that experience has eaten at their souls. One recently spoke publicly in a congregational meeting that she has some PTSD as a result of how badly she was treated by other members of this congregation when she was in a position of authority. Often in UU churches, once a board chair steps off the board, they leave the church, sometimes just for a while, but often for good. We’re seeing ministers fleeing under similar circumstances. With a national shift toward self-care, clergy across denominations are deciding they can’t be lightning rods any more. We’ve all heard the old adage: Hurt people, hurt people and whether they are aware of it or not, that anger plays out in houses of worship over and over again, continuing the cycle of victimization.

As we make our way toward a congregational covenant, acknowledging the religious trauma we might be carrying will be necessary. We don’t want to keep rehearsing pain, building our defensiveness into new relationships, designing new systems on foundations of unprocessed suffering. We don’t want to perpetuate the same trauma on others because we haven’t come to terms with it within ourselves.

One sermon isn’t going to heal anyone. That’s a magic touch I just don’t have. Today is one step in a process of mending those fragments of our spirits that are still torn, or frayed from having been pulled out from under some heavy guilt and rejection and familial or cultural weights. The steps toward healing aren’t linear. I can’t tell you what’s first, and the fact that you’re here says you’ve already begun. This is more of a spiral where you know the pain and feel it and consider it and deconstruct it and then know it and feel it again. It’s a movement, like all healing is, a dance deeper in and back out again in a process of discernment and letting go and finding replacements for the messages that cause so much hurt.

Those healing messages are spoken here every week, and even as you hear them, they won’t push out the more damaging messages until they are lived and demonstrate themselves to be real. One of the things that helps us to live them is to be honest about them. To talk about where and when and how the damage was done. And let me acknowledge something some of you might need to hear. I know some of the damage was done here at Community Church. I know that this church hasn’t always been the safest place for everyone. We haven’t experienced sexual misconduct from leadership – as far as I know – but there are other ways for clergy to behave badly, ways for leadership to damage a church in a slow-burning, the effects of which are seen over time rather than in the in-your-face-ness of a mega-church guilty of tax evasion or paying off rape victims. We don’t talk about it much here, which I wonder about sometimes. Does it seem disrespectful to name openly what’s been happening here over the last 40 years? Is it that the people still here aren’t the ones most hurt, so there isn’t much to say? Is it that the people causing the hurt or dysfunction might still be in earshot? Or is it that we’ve all been taught not to speak these things out loud, that millennia of listening to religious in power conditioned us to keep quiet?

Just before the Me Too movement hit nationally, the female clergy within the UU Ministers Association started telling some difficult truths. At the beginning of that reckoning, one of our luminaries who has worked with congregations in the aftermath of clergy misconduct gave a critical lecture to our entire membership. She started by invoking the closing scene of Raiders of the Lost Arc where the lead character played by Harrison Ford told his friends not to look as the Arc of the Covenant was opened and the demons were released killing anyone with their eyes open. Instead, she said, Look. We might be afraid, but we have to look and see what’s in the box we’ve been keeping closed or we will never heal. 

A few months ago I apologized from this pulpit for something I’d said the year before. It was a very deliberate act and I did it for several reasons. One was that I regretted what I’d said. It was also because I suspected very few people in this room had ever heard a member of the clergy apologize from the pulpit. It happens very rarely. In fact, I was trying to remember a time I knew of where it had happened without the person resigning and couldn’t come up with one example. This isn’t to say there aren’t plenty, but none come to mind. What does come to mind is people recognizing something they did and then walking away. That might be appropriate sometimes, but I’d like to think there are ways to acknowledge mistakes that allow for a continuation of covenantal relationship. In fact, that’s what I think covenantal relationships are. Some of you have asked me to forgive you for things you’ve done or said and my response is always, “Of course”. That’s covenant lived in real time.

And that’s authentic religious community. No shunning. No converting. No hushing or denying. We speak truth in love. And when we can’t, when we can’t find truth or love is distant, we say that too. We say it in faith, knowing that we will make our way back to ourselves and to each other, that we are together, walking each other home. As Alice Walker tells us, “There is no god but love and so rising is inherent in our heart beat as we move carried or knocked about by life. This we know: We were not meant to suffer so much and to learn nothing.”

So we are here with our broken hearts, our healing spirits, and our wisdom being born.