7 Pentecost
July 12, 2017
In
the name of God, + Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.
HEARTBREAK.
That burning, twisting, empty feeling in the pit of your stomach,
heart-wrenching, soul-crushing, blow with a two-by-four to the upper chest that
knocks the wind right out of you. That hell through which all must pass before
they finally understand what it means to be truly, head-over-heels in love. Not
the Hollywood version of heartbreak, that oversimplified pining while downing
pint after pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. I am talking the real deal.
The sense of being lost in a wide-open space, of being disconnected from that
which brought infinite joy and peace in a world of sorrow and turmoil that can
only be achieved by the safe, encompassing passion that is true love.
In
Minot last weekend, I encountered something I’ve always dreaded: A fundamental
evangelist in the very place he ought not be. It was Minot Pride, and he was
there to turn the fabulous of Minot to Jesus. He approached me with a friendly
smile, and it wasn’t long into our conversation that I realized what he was and
what he was trying to do. I’ve always wondered what I would do in this
situation. Would I get defensive and scream down curses on his head? Would I
pepper the air with my signature expletive and with a z-formation snap tell him
I was “born this way, baby?” Would I preach a sermon in the style of Jonathan
Edwards? Would he be a sinner in the hands of an angry Darcy? What he got
surprised both him and me. In fact, he got a lot more than he bargained for.
I
tend to have that effect on men.
Growing
up, I was taught that sin was evildoing that people did because they are inherently
fallen beings. Salvation, therefore, is the act of casting off sin and actively
working to be good enough for God. This dichotomy between being naturally bad
and having to atone for one’s own nature resulted, for me and unfortunately for
most of those attempting to live Christian lives in America, in a life of fear
of getting it wrong and being subjected to eternal damnation for missing one
Wednesday night prayer meeting to go to a movie with friends. Sadly, my Minot
friend was operating under this ideological quagmire.
He
explained to me that he deserved death because of the sin in his life, but
Jesus took the death penalty for him. He explained that he served Jesus because
Jesus paid his debt. Then things got weird. He asked me if I knew the love of
God. Normally, this is a triggering question for me conditioned over a lifetime
of people making me feel like I wasn’t a good Christian because I refuse, point
blank, to be legalistic about my faith. This time it was different. When he
asked me if I knew God’s love, I felt it well up in me in an overwhelming and
emotionally charged flood. I responded: “I am overflowing with God’s love.”
I
told you he got more than he bargained for.
He
saw my response as a foot in the door and replied that he, too, was in love
with God, but not in that way. I
asked him what he meant by in that way,
to which he replied, “you know, in the way a man loves his wife.”
“Why not in that way?” I asked.
“Because it would be inappropriate,” he said.
“How so?” I pressed.
“Because God is different than us.”
I replied, glossing over the fact
that since Jesus is God incarnate and the Holy Spirit dwells in us and if we have been baptized Christ lives in us
so God is like us and we are like God: “If you aren’t
loving God like a spouse then you aren’t
doing it right.”
Yeah,
he wasn’t recovering from this one.
As
a psychologist in training I know that when it comes to the bare basics of
love, the psychological process, the very cognitive mechanism that drives love
is the same no matter who it is we love. Ultimately, love is the deep, very
real bond that exists between people who feel able to be emotionally vulnerable
with one another. It is the feeling of safety, of warmth, of actual
togetherness. You know what I mean. We’ve all been in a room full of people,
even people we know, and still feel empty and alone. I wager there are people
in this room today who feel alone even when surrounded by the warm and loving
faces of this congregation. When you are with someone you love, however, you
never feel alone. Because that bond, that connection exists in your mind as if
it were a literal chain connecting their soul with yours.
When
we love God, truly love God, it is as if we are connected to God by a very real
chain connecting the spirit of God to our own soul.
Consequently,
sin is the separation between a person and God. The unfinished links connecting
God’s chain to your chain. And hell is the experience of heartbreak at being
separated from the one we know will make us feel safe in our raw vulnerability.
You might ask, “how can one feel heartbreak over something they’ve never had?”
In the same way we feel longing for things we’ve never owned, places we never
been, or people we’ve never known. We feel the lack of connection just as
surely as every step we make in our journey of self-discovery is one link
closer to God’s chain.
My
evangelist asked me if I believed I was made in the image of God? I replied
that I was. To which he predictably responded: “then how can you claim to be
transgender if God made you and God is perfect and can’t make mistakes?” I was
ready for him, he fell into my trap. I responded, “You are assuming that being
transgender is a mistake. Actually, it is because God is perfect and doesn’t
make mistakes that I accept that I am transgender and am perfectly happy with
it.”
This
is when he walked away.
As
a trained therapist, I feel very safe in saying that nearly everything the
Bible lists as a sin is the result of one thing: trauma. When you strip away
individual experiences and abuses trauma is merely the outcome of a
psychological distancing from reality. We experience abuse, horrible life
situations, repeated invalidation, and our brain distances itself from reality
so that it can survive the horror of what is happening to it. Over time,
systematic exposure to toxic environments and people and experiences can, and
usually does, lead to maladaptive behaviors. The extent to which these
maladaptive behaviors control us and hurt ourselves and others depends upon the
length of time the trauma was experienced and the severity of the triggering
event.
The
experience of trauma causes us, in a very real sense, to lose sight of who we
are and how valuable we are. Our consciousness becomes so distant from reality
that we often cannot see ourselves as other people do. Which is why we all know
people who, no matter how many times we tell them they look good or are smart
or are fun to be with, still feel ugly and dumb and boring. We cannot accept
ourselves as we really are. The way God sees us as we are and accepts us as we
are. The tragedy is that we cannot love God unless we love ourselves. The holy
paradox is we cannot love ourselves unless we love God.
This
is where the chain comes in.
When
I decided to come back to the church I spoke to a priest friend of mine about
getting re-baptized. I told him: “Fr. Richards, I feel as if I was coerced as a
teenager by fear into baptism. I was baptized by another name, I want to be
baptized by my real name.” His response made me see this heartbreak from God’s
eyes. “Darcy,” he said, “so many people are coerced into baptism. The cool
thing about baptism is that we don’t have to do anything for it to change us.
It changes us whether we like it or not. And when you were baptized, God knew
your real name. Even before you knew it.” There it was, plain and simple. God knew
exactly who I was, trauma, self-loathing, fear, cellulite, and all. And God
loved me in spite of it.
I
am no stranger to heartbreak. In fact, my heart has been breaking ever since
December. I am no stranger to trauma, to having my identity invalidated and
spat on. I’m no stranger to bestowing love on people and having it thrown back
in my face. And I am no stranger to the very real place of hell. I’ve spent 84%
of my life there. Yet, during my tenure in hell God was forging our bond, link
by link, even if I didn’t know it. Looking back, I remember hearing the faint
whisper of the words, “you are beautiful and perfect” every time I felt badly
about not being treated as a girl. The more I fought to be Darcy, the louder
the voice became. Little did I know that every day I fought to be Darcy I was
frantically forging link after link of my bond with God, bringing it, and
myself, closer and closer to God.
And
God was doing the very same thing, and it is God who puts the final link in our
chain once we open our heart to God’s love.
Three
days before I left Alabama for Fargo the final link in the chain connecting me
to God was completed. I was sitting in a friend’s living room debating the
existence of God. I was arguing the notion of God was an archaic remnant of a
superstitious past. She finally asked me, “you’ve told me that you’ve thought
about suicide many times. And you’ve told me that you’ve tried a couple times.
What stopped you?” I replied, “a voice inside of me told me to keep hoping and
to keep pushing on.” To which she said squarely, “have you heard of the Holy
Spirit?” In a flash I realized that in spite of the days of empty loneliness
that stretched before me (even to today), that even in the rejection of my
parents, my grandparents, my childhood friends, even the men and women I’ve
loved, I will never be alone again.
St.
Paul in our Epistle today exhorts us to remember that
18 I consider that the sufferings of this
present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.
19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing
of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to
futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in
hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its
bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of
God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in
labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we
ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we
wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in
hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes
for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not
see, we wait for it with patience.
We
are all in bondage to doubt, to invalidation of our identities, to insecurities
and self-loathing forced upon us by years and years of conditioning. The time
is coming, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe after you’ve lived 21
years, when your eyes will be opened to the glory of God, your ears will hear
the validation you’ve longed for your whole life, and your heart will know
fully that you are loved. Until that time, you are surrounded by the creation
waiting with eager longing for the heartbreak to be over, for the radiant love
of God to engulf us with its marvelous healing embrace. Let us love you and
embrace you and help you forge the chain, link by link, that moors you to God’s
eternal love. In so doing, you will never be alone again.
AMEN
