Can I share something really personal with you?

Ok…deep breath…

I grew up religious. Like, in church six days a week and all day Sunday religious. I went to Bible Camp and then I taught Vacation Bible School. I only wore skirts and graduated, have mercy, to pant suits in 5th grade.  I had my favorite ministers and lived for communion because it was a snack in a long day.

The church tradition I grew up in was fervently Protestant – Southern Missionary Baptist. I was expected to only hang out with other church people, to be demure, to defer to men, and to make my husband look good.

From the outset, I didn’t really see things going that way for me. I wasn’t sold on marriage as an institution for my betterment. I saw lots of men living their best lives while their beleaguered wives were day drinking and living in impotent rage.

I came out of the womb loud, I use my outside voice at all times and my whisper is, more accurately, a stage whisper.

I came out of the womb loud, I use my outside voice at all times and the only whisper I have is better suited to a stage than a {insert}

Church people are a pretty repressed, boring lot. They “sin” then repent, then wash, rinse, repeat ad nauseum. And I don’t come across many men I would defer to on anything more taxing than opening a jar of pickles.

But I heart-eye-emoji Jesus. Not the Jesus they talked about in church, but the radical rabble-rousing mystical healer Aramaic spouting prophet who challenged the Roman Empire and started a movement of compassion.

Because that’s the bit the church seemed to miss: compassion. Self-compassion, especially.

Let me tell you the problem with missing compassion in the work of any mystical rabble-rousing healer prophet: it’s too easy to make perfection the goal instead of deepening to accept that we are made perfect by life’s slings and arrows.

There is a practical element to this: Say you’re a bisexual (possibly pan-sexual) teenage girl/woman with a sharp mind who has traveled her entire life and been exposed to many traditions and who is acutely aware that something is very wrong with her body.

Perfection is already out the door if we’re using a narrow church definition.

If we’re using a narrow church definition, perfection’s already out the door. The church talked in binaries, and I had no hope of perfection. I was defaulted into sin.

Now, mind you, I was aware of my burgeoning sexuality, but I wasn’t doing anything with it. I was caring for my younger sisters and about 20 other infants and toddlers in “Children’s Church” aka Daycare every Saturday and Sunday. I had a healthy fear of babies and didn’t want to do anything that might result in one.

My younger sisters are 11, 12, and 13 years my junior, so I did lots of diaper changes, after-school baby sitting, spring break baby sitting, Saturday night baby sitting, and intensive child care any moment I wasn’t at school or asleep. I knew babies and children required so much attention, love, and devotion that I could not fathom bringing another one into the world without a loooong break.

I prayed every night that if God was looking for a new Virgin to host His next Son on Earth, He would skip over me. (Looking back, that was probably a “sin.”)

What worried me the most was how often I heard that illness was a curse from God. I was at the start of my journey with chronic illness, but every sermon I heard managed to work in that if God felt like it, he could cure me. I prayed for that more than I prayed to be skipped over to host the next Christ.

“Please make me well,” I would sob into my pillow at night. “Please, please, please.” I would wake up the next morning the same. I would pray through the day.

I still pray through the day. But I don’t pray to be well any more.

I left the church when I was 17. I left home for college, and I left the church. My junior year of high school had been filled with church drama of the first water.

The new pastor, who was smart, well-educated, and community-focused rubbed the church elders the wrong way by proposing they build a community center. They fired him so fast his contract to work probably had wet ink.

I was enraged by what I witnessed: the railroading of a solid leader, the upheaval of his young family, by some old guys who liked sitting on a pile of money. It was the last straw in a big pile of straws that included having men in the church proposition under-age me, listening to junior ministers warp and twist the Bible and its messages, and hearing church folks justify all manner of abuses by those in power with religion.

————

I still love choirs and mature ministers who have something important to say. The latter are few and far between. We are all human and formed by our culture. The church’s culture is one I’ll understand for the rest of my life, and it’s a culture that made me who I am. But I have grown beyond that tradition.

The other day, I spoke with a friend who’s also a business coach. We haven’t spoken in years, so we had a lot of catching up to do. After relating my breakdown, organ failure, and mental health walkabout, he asked how I can talk about it so calmly. That question caught me off guard. I recall my pain and confusion. I remember when I couldn’t talk about what was happening to me at all. I was slathered in shame. It went against my deepest beliefs about myself.

How could I say I have serious mental and emotional health issues? How could I tell the world that I’m a whole person who lost an organ and who still feels loved—hell, adored—by God? That’s not what I was taught in my earliest education. I was taught that God punishes sinners and preserves saints.

My earliest education taught me anything short of perfection was cause for shame. In fact, I can’t say I heard much about guilt or contrition, only shame. I didn’t even know there was a salient difference between guilt and shame until I was recovering from my nephrectomy and healing my mind and stumbled upon the work of sociologist Brené Brown.

Dr. Brown explained the difference on a podcast I listened to. I was standing in the shower, conditioning my hair, when everything for me stopped. I can still see the tiles in the shower and feel the water pelting my skin as I heard her explain, “Guilt is saying, ‘I did something wrong.’ Shame is saying, “I am wrong.”

Boom.

I’d spent my life until that moment wrestling with that distinction, and defaulting into what I’d been taught about illness: that illness meant I Was Wrong. I lived without hope, or optimism, or good sense because I believed my illness was a reflection of my inherent worth as a child of God. I believed my outcomes were pre-determined to punish me.

If my surgery failed, it was because I was fundamentally a failure (not so much because my surgeon was a jackass). If my medical malpractice claim failed it was because I was a failure (not so much because the system is rigged against individual patients and in favor of hospitals and insurers). You get the picture here, right? I wasn’t ever going to heal or recover because I had been pre-determined to be unworthy.

On her site, Brené Brown expands this definition, “Based on my research…I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful—it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.

I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.

I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous.” (It’s a quick read, you can find it here: https://brenebrown.com/blog/2013/01/14/shame-v-guilt/

Now, I know, God/the Universe/Reality/Life kisses us all with struggles. That is how perfection is achieved. What’s nuts is that it’s right there in that Bible I had to read cover-to-cover at least three times before I was 17. I read those passages, but I never heard them preached from the pulpit.

Why did I dig Jesus so much? Jesus suffered. Jesus didn’t suffer for my sins.  Jesus suffered because that’s life before Grace. Jesus experienced pain and suffered. Then, Jesus experienced pain and stopped suffering. His followers passed down the stories that were eventually written down about how he navigated being human with grace. How he showered himself with compassion and that compassion flew forth and touched those around him in profound ways. They told stories of Jesus standing in compassion for women— women!—in a time when a woman wasn’t human, she was a vessel to be used by men.

Jesus had compassion for the throwaways of society: Men possessed by demons, women who took lovers, the mad, and the thieves—even those who killed him.

There have been, and still are, ministers whose work I follow—ahem—religiously. Like all my favorite prophets, they take the Bible and delve not just into the stories, but into the context of the stories. They have suffered in their own lives, so their arrogance and ego have been tempered. They talk about the hurt places we visit, they talk about how to grow in those places.

That’s the part that always chapped my ass the most. The church would talk about perfection, and saintliness, and “growing in Christ,” but no one would tell me the ten easy steps to get there. I know now it’s because they had no idea. They were sinning, repenting, and repeating. They were living with the idea that they were inherently bad and deserved all the suffering that fell on their lives. They gorged pain and threw it all up on their families, friends, and communities.

I don’t think about my past or my illness as painful any longer. I think of that time, that struggle, with gratitude and love. I laugh at what I believed about myself. Not mean-girl laughter, but the laugh that burbles up when you see a puppy with a full belly trying to roll over. I feel deep warmth and affection for my tortured puppy-self. Past Cam was soooo adorable!

Let me describe the through line in any great mystical tradition: Eat the pain and transform it into light. Transform it into compassion, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, and higher meaning.

What I eventually told my friend was that in my deep suffering and breakdown, I found a lifeboat. I found a process that allowed me to get it out of me — that toxic belief system that said what I was experiencing was wrong, unjust, and a commentary on my soul. With that process at my disposal, I shoveled my way out of madness. I took the opportunity of being shattered to draw a whole new me in the world.

A better me. A me with integrity and grace.

I continue to do this work. This didn’t happen overnight. In truth, when someone gets tapped by God they crack up in visible ways. I’m nutty, but I can pass most of the time. At least, I think so. I’m probably wrong about that. Oh, well.

What I found most remarkable about this time was how binary my choice was: I could suffer and die OR I could let my beliefs die and learn how to live. I chose the path that went down before it veered back up.

As I’m writing this, I have a song, “The Theology of Brokenness” by The Ambassador on repeat.

He says this:

“Brokenness, based on the scriptures: The spiritual state by which one is disarmed of one’s self-dependence and pride, therefore leaving one disabled and in desperate need of help, thereby making one a viable conduit for the glory of Christ.”

If I had heard less about perfection and more about the flexibility and resilience it takes to live in this world, perhaps I would’ve had a framework for the struggles that came. Thankfully, I had a family that did talk about struggle, and falling short of the glory, and the pragmatic skills needed to navigate an imperfect world.

When I talk to ambitious women who are struggling with their health, 10 times out of 10, this disbelief in their inherent goodness is in the mix. They are vulnerable to narcissists of every stripe (parents, husbands, girlfriends, employers, lovers, co-workers) because they are bartering for acceptance. That’s always a part of our first  conversation: You don’t have to stop, but you do need to be honest about what you’re doing. You need to be able to be bone honest with yourself that you’re doing all this shit for other people because you hope it will earn you some grace and some compassion.

Here’s the killer: It won’t. People who are using you don’t care why you’re doing it, they’re just getting as much as they can. And when you stop because you’re falling apart and in the hospital and crippled by pain, they move on. You, my spectacular darling, are left in the lurch feeling your insufficiency has been confirmed by their decision not to show up for you.

Let’s take a step back, let’s zoom out a little.

Who stopped showing up for you first—you or them?

* Were you showing up for yourself as you hustled for love and attention from them?

* Was it self-compassion when you went out of your way and made it home on the cusp of a month-long flare?

* Was it self-acceptance when you dragged your butt out of bed to show up for their pity party?

* Was it self-gratitude when you gave out the last of your energy instead of resting until your cup was full?

This is the trick I want you to learn: Whatever you accuse someone else of doing to you when you’re down, you have already done to yourself when you were up. If someone robbed you of all your stuff, you robbed you first. You can find it, you can make amends to yourself, and then what they did matters less or stops mattering altogether. You can pursue justice with clear eyes instead of burning through your scant emotional and energetic resources.

You can walk away from what has stopped serving you with grace and compassion for everyone involved, but mostly you. You can love people and keep plenty of space from them.

You can learn the lessons of your illness, you can ask for help from yourself and from others. You can begin to trust yourself.

That’s what we lose in illness and trauma, isn’t it? We watch the world turn and it seems as though other people can trust their bodies. They can trust their hands to have sensation, they can trust their brains not to stroke out, they can trust their skin not to break out and itch like crazy, they can trust their limbs to operate, they can trust their bladders and they can trust their bowels. We don’t have that certainty in this life, so we stop trusting not just our bodies, but our own wisdom.

Do you know what we can gain in illness and trauma? We can trust our brains to tell us when we’ve gone too far, we can rely on our hands to warn us when we’re doing too much, we can depend on our skin to break out and itch like crazy when our diet is nutty, we can know our limbs will fail when we’re stressed, we can bet on our bladder and bowel pulling an epic fail when we’re way out of our integrity.

We get thousands of messages every day to change the way we live, to align with something higher than perfection. We are called to live in a world no one talks about much, but is accessible to us especially because we have received the invitation to transform suffering and trauma into compassion, gratitude, acceptance, forgiveness, wisdom, and higher meaning.

So, tell me how does your body tell you you’re out of your integrity?