Evolving isn’t talked about much in our world. Pity, that – because I consider it the most important thing about life on this earth. We are born with the seeds required for living a meaningful life: compassion, wisdom, a thirst for knowledge, a desire to live (physical health), a desire for happiness (psychological health), a need to give and receive love, and the awareness of a quest for union with the Divine (spiritual health). At birth, only the desire to live is fully formed. All the rest are inchoate, left for us to develop, to evolve, as circumstances allow (passive development) and, more importantly, as we choose to bring to full flower.
Yet no one is capable of choosing, ex nihilo, to develop their capacity to be compassionate, to be smarter, to be wiser, to be more spiritual, etc. Instead, circumstances come across our path that afford us the possibility to grow and, simultaneously, the possibility to stagnate.
Everyone knows how muscles are formed: You injure them, and they heal bigger and stronger. It is a very simple model of cause and effect and clearly one of the laws of the cosmos. On the physical plane, this is straightforward – exercise hard, and your muscles will increase in size. But on the higher planes, the noetic (intellect), the emotional, and the transcendent (spiritual), that path presents us with forks; and it is up to each of us to choose which direction to move.
Rather than get into an esoteric sermon about ego, fate, and choice, I want to make this more personal, and ultimately more helpful. My fifty year path down the road called “Church Musician” turned out to be a veritable minefield of emotional and psychological calamity. While I certainly had countless moments that were deeply fulfilling, and while I certainly touched tens of thousands of lives for the better, I seemed to have a knack for stepping on every one of those minefields, repeatedly injuring my psyche and condemning myself to a professional life of cynicism and bitterness. But let’s face it, if you’ve ever been in a dysfunctional system, whether that be family, work, or national governance, (and all of us fit in the latter), you know how easy it is to jump on the bandwagon of complaining. The church music profession is rife with complaining colleagues, but definitely not without cause! Nonetheless, that’s a trap!
Each time we step on a minefield that blows up in our face, we are actually given an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to wake up to a greater or lesser degree. So far I’ve said nothing that most people don’t already know. But most of us are clueless how to choose the path of resolution and growth. Hint: The path of resolution does not include complaining, nor does it include silence and acquiescence. I’ll likely get pushback from this, but the path of resolution also does not include talk therapy. Therapy has an extremely important function in society having to do with self-awareness and emotional (and sometimes spiritual) growth; but all too often we go to our therapists hoping they’ll solve our problems, or help us solve them, and leave disappointed.
The path to resolution requires profound introspection, honesty, courage, and guidance to know what questions need to be addressed, and it requires action to do whatever arises from that new awareness. It is these questions that I want to share here because they functioned so profoundly for me, and helped me so rapidly, that I was able to move from the thrall of my fixation on being hurt, to a feeling of liberation and freedom.
My hope is that anyone who is stuck in resentment might use this as a jumping off point, preferably with accountability to a trusted friend, and find an easing of the burden that you carry, knowingly or unknowingly. So, so MANY of my colleagues in the church music profession are truly the Walking Wounded, but I’m quite certain that the throng this may apply to in countless other professions far exceeds my limited world in the Arts and Religion.
All of these questions I asked in reference to my last, and final, church music position, which ended in a ruthless firing one year ago exactly. I don’t think this process should be used to generalize multiple situations of difficulty, as each situation would have different answers to these questions.
What gave me pleasure?
More than likely, our fixation with being injured excludes this question. Starting this exercise with this internal investigation immediately changed my internal narrative. My list was long and surprised me!
What caused the most pain?
I thought this would be easy because I had rehearsed this answer a million times. But what I discovered is that I only had rehearsed (recounted) the actual situations that lead to me feeling the way I did. I didn’t actually name the what. My answer, which took a lot of introspection, was: pretense, broken trust, lying, posturing, class warfare. Yours would likely be different, just as mine is different for different places where I was fired.
Whom do I need to thank?
This was another one that I had completely ignored in my fixation. Yet there were many people who were “there for me,” and who were also deeply hurt by what had happened to me. I took the better part of a day writing individual letters to the dozen or so of them letting them know how grateful I was that they brought so much love and support to me during my time there.
Whom do I need to forgive?
This one is where the rubber hits the road. There were a handful of people that I felt quite justifiably furious with. Are those the ones that I need to forgive? This is where the incredible wisdom of my friend, helping me through this process, came in. One doesn’t forgive because they deserve it, nor because they regret their actions. More than likely they don’t regret their actions in the least; and as far as I was concerned, they would never merit my forgiveness. No. I needed to forgive these people because I deserve it. I needed to be free from their injurious ignorance. They no longer needed to have a lease on any of the real estate in my psyche.
It doesn’t count if you only forgive in your heart! There’s not a person alive that can outwit the subconscious. So I spent another half day writing letters to these people. These weren’t sweet letters that would have been immediately recognized as disingenuous. I told each of them what they did to me and how profoundly it effected me. I was blunt in saying that I endured months of profound trauma. I then told them that I forgave them and wouldn’t continue to carry a grudge against them. It was oddly hard and also fun writing them. I could be completely honest with how I saw the situation, and then, by forgiving them in writing, completely release their hold on me.
One of these people even responded (grateful for my email).
What did I accomplish?
The hardest work behind me, it gave me a tremendous sense of joy and pride to create a rather long list of the many things that happened largely (or solely) because I was there to serve as catalyst for these changes.
What did I learn?
This was THE HARDEST question to answer. “Learning” assumes insights. Insights assume a courageous honesty about who I was both before and after my employment in that job. What did I know about myself, about my capabilities, about my life, my outlook, what brings me fulfillment, etc., that I didn’t know as well before I got fired from that job? This question, ultimately, is one that looks at life purpose. The subtext of this is to build an understanding of why I felt called to be in that place at that time. And it was a fatalist cop out to think that the job was a mistake that I should have avoided from the start. God doesn’t work that way.
What do I need to seek God’s forgiveness for?
Having grown up in a fundamentalist household, most of my early life I had a deeply misguided concept of forgiveness and God. First and foremost, it’s not necessary to plead with God for forgiveness. Instead, we should be asking when we might be hurting ourselves because we don’t see ourselves as God already sees us. For me, I needed to ask God to forgive me for not loving myself when others didn’t love me. In other words, I made self love contingent on what I experienced from other people. That is definitely not what God intends for me.
What must I do to forgive myself?
Another hard one. In order to answer this, I had to develop the ability to go back and forth between how I experienced my accusers, and how they likely experienced me. Doing that objectively and dispassionately helped me recognize my own tenderness and vulnerability that led to my carrying such tenacious pain. Once I could see that, compassion for myself arose automatically and sweetly.
What is the truth that can set me free?
This final question is THE FREEING question and needed an entire week of contemplation for me to come up with. Jesus’ line, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” is not something that I had ever contemplated before, much less understood. But what I believe he is saying is that true freedom, true liberation, true happiness, comes from a piercing insight into the reality, the truth, of a given situation. There is, indeed, a profound truth that, once realized, releases the thrall of pain, releases the need endlessly to recount one’s “story.” As I worked on this question, searching deeply for what that whole thing was about!, I came up with a lot of answers (about a dozen), all of which were true and helpful. But it wasn’t until I came upon my ultimate one that I was completely free. That chapter in my life served as a crucible where I came to know myself as I truly am.
For that, I am profoundly grateful.
To be continued