Religious Trauma Recovery

Lightening up....

“It took me 29 years to realize there was nothing wrong with me.” My dear friend Garret quoted this to me two years ago, something one of his buddies had said.  I was 28 at the time, and deep in the healing transition that, unbeknownst to me, would land me back in Church and on track to becoming a pastor.  It’s certainly not that this “profession” has caused any problems to go away, in fact this first month has been rockier then the months leading up to it.  I slipped into a deep depression that I coped with by returning to old behavior patterns, trusting the sweet plants to soften the edges of an interior reality that had once again grown bitter and cynical.  In 48 hours I turn 30, and although I feel a twinge of embarrassment for how I spent my first few weeks in ministry, I can see clearly how necessary it was to go around depression mountain again.  I was sitting on a city bus in New York City when for some reason I googled “Religious Trauma Syndrome”.  I’ve known that it exists for several years, and long ago realized it’s something I probably suffer from.  This time, however, the diagnosis sank all the way past the analytical mind and made contact with my hardened heart.  I was that guy, crying openly in a packed public transit.   Maybe to reach that glorious calm of nothing being wrong with us, we first have to fully admit what IS “wrong” with us.  Where in the story was the wound given?  I have a handful, but I know now that the deepest came from the violence of my own religious beliefs.

I like this photo of myself.  William took it, between laughs, as I struggled to get my one-hitter lit in the wind.  We noticed the Jesus poster, and the rebel in me wanted a picture of myself smoking beside it.  It was a light-hearted moment during a break from a recording session that was going really well.  Somehow though, for the brief flicker of this photo, there is a deep sadness captured in my eyes.  When I look into my own eyes through this picture, I can feel the weight of what I carried for so long.  Days later it dawned on me, that this picture was taken in the spot I would have died if I had chosen to jump in the summer of 2016.  I disappeared up to the roof and stared over the ledge, my mind a whirlwind of suffering that I wanted, more than anything, to cease.  It has taken me so many years to understand the connection between the sadness in my soul and the poster hanging there of Christ.  I am a survivor of Religious Trauma Syndrome, and as a now ordained Pastor in the Christian faith it is my life’s work to help others recover and hopefully spare the children from this abuse.  No child, in any context, needs to be taught that their inherent condition is wretched.  Jesus taught several times that we ought to seek the innocence and awe of children.  Jesus did not teach about eternal damnation. I have reconciled with the reality that no matter how much work I do (and I’ve done a lot) to be OK, that what I was taught in my formative years will echo through my whole life.  The Christian environment I was raised in was one of tremendous shame and fear, of each other but ultimately of G*d.

      The deepest, most well-worn groove in my mind is the one that says “I’m not good enough”.  It’s a canyon that carves through a desert of addiction: addiction to attention, to fame, to drugs, to sugar, to sex…..to any and every THING.  It was hollowed out by people who thought they were doing the work of the “Lord”.  How can I reconcile this deep distrust, this deep anger at the very institution I am now a part of.   “Do you know what you are afraid of?” She asked me a few nights ago trying to pry loose the icy grip of the numbness.  I am holding a scalpel with trembling hands….knowing religion is only meant to be turned inward.  If you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all.  So I am silent.  I don’t want to become a salvation salesman.   I want to sit in a peaceful corner and whisper about the secrets that have set me free.  How silence and darkness are enough already.  How all the noise is beautiful in a weird way.   How it’s worth it to live.

I was suicidal for so long. My mind constantly wandered along the ledge of oblivion.   I wanted to be done with it.  I felt that way for most of my life… I hope I live long enough for that to no longer be true.   It’s confusing when the waves of depression return.  I always convince myself that this time I’ve done away with the big emptiness, that I’ll live the rest of my days light and laughing.  This isn’t a fairy tale, there’s no happy ever after.  Happiness is hard work.   Still, I search for a savior.  Still I hope something or someone will make it all vanish…something other than my daily practice.  Still, I get confused about the teachings and think there is some sacrifice I must make to absolve myself of moral sin (SIN is our sense of separateness and has nothing to do with right and wrong). Go and learn what this means, I desire Mercy and not sacrifice. (Matt 9:13)

For centuries the so-called leaders of the Christian church have positioned themselves as the moral authority and the bearers of forgiveness.  How literal that becomes in certain flavors of this tradition is genuine insanity.  It’s really no one’s fault.  It’s baked into the bread of the human condition, this tendency to scapegoat and to struggle towards the light as if any of us could be closer than someone else.  It’s right there in the text too, the disciples jockeying for who will sit closer to G*d in some afterworld heaven.  “And the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Jesus saw through all that and into the truth of our condition.  Jesus taught a lowly and humble way.   My heart has been broken for decades by man’s inability to really reconcile with the absurdity of the gospel.  The gospel being the good news that no sacrifice was ever necessary.  That whatever the force is that governs and animates the universe (G*d) is altruistic, somehow loving, but also deeply mysterious and passive.  In this passivity comes the invitation, to co-create the world.  To, with reverence for how little we can see and do, still do something to make this reality better.  Simply, to love one another.  Even and especially when it seems undeserved.  Mercy, not sacrifice.  Forgiveness, not punishment. There is so, so much missing in our culturally conditioned, empire-building, aggressive form of religion that pollutes seemingly every aspect of life in this time and place.  Off to the side, on the fringes of civilization, there has always been gentle people carrying the soft torch of love that Christ in some way or another brought to this world.  Maybe it was in the stars, maybe it’s just a myth and there was never even a real person named Jesus (unlikely).  Does it even matter?

     I’m a bit too zoomed out I suppose.  I don’t have all the dots connected, but I see a few really clear threads of how I got stuck in a mental rut for so long.  It starts with, for those of us who grow up in some kind of “spiritual” context, this persistent fixation on our unworthiness.  It’s taken me 29 full years to find the firm metaphysical foundation that there’s nothing wrong with me.  I’m relieved to have “survived my twenties” as a mentor put it over dinner one night a few years ago.  For that, it truly is a happy birthday.  I celebrate the journey, I celebrate the chance to be born and to do this deep work of coming to know my ‘Self’.  I sincerely hope that some word I type, some song I sing, or just some deep glance of knowing compassion about how flippin’ hard it is to be human…helps you.  I pray that we are well on our way as a community of this beautiful planet to finding true harmony with one another.  I pray that we might stop waiting for Jesus to return triumphantly, and begin to honor his death by being the resurrection ourselves.  What has given me the strength to overcome my suicidal ideation is the realization that every time that sadness washes again across my consciousness, and I find the courage to keep going regardless, I am reborn.  In that way, I am a man who has been reborn…perhaps millions of times.  Thank you for following along, please know the doors to our Religious Trauma Recovery center (a.k.a. Beaches vineyard) are (almost) always open.  Beyond that, my favorite thing in the world is listening to what’s going on in your journey.  I don’t have many if any answers, but I can help you hold the questions and encourage you that wherever you are now….however broken and lonely….you are right where you are meant to be.

Sincerely, with hope and joy and mystery and a heart cracked open by love,

Pastor Corey

P.S. Cannabis can be a beautiful way to reconnect with the feminine, soft aspects of ourselves and it is also a psychoactive (spiritual) plant medicine that I recommend consuming in a ceremonial way, in a safe and quiet space. It works, until…it doesn’t (me lately). Then the real work of getting to the deeper wound begins. She is gentle, our beloved Mary, so like Christ…let’s be gentle with her. Amen.