worm-child, wretched

I have spent at least two decades working through religious trauma. Maybe three decades. Even as I was still immersed in religion, I was already trying to rid myself of baggage. Sometimes that baggage took the simple form of merely unnecessary loads other people placed on my shoulders.

But sometimes, the baggage looked exactly like (and was exactly like) (and was, exactly,) insidious. Fundamentally stunting. Horrifically warping.

Over the years, most of my family and friends in the Church of Christ have remained loyal to and immersed in this religion in which we all either were raised in or which we committed ourselves to as young adults. I suspect that most of them would read the preceding paragraphs and feel terribly confused. Trauma? Being stunted and warped by anything coming from the church? What can she possibly be talking about?

I don’t blame them. I’m not even angry with them over the lack of seeing I am imagining they suffer from. Because theirs is a suffering. I know, because I suffered from the same affliction. We were all of us programmed not to see.

So here’s an example of what I now see:

The hymns I grew up singing in the late 1900s were mostly from centuries past. I have no idea how old the oldest song in our song books (we never called them “hymnals”) was, but one, at least, was composed during the 1500s: “Ein Feste Burg” bei Martin Luther. There was “Out of My Bondage” by Sleeper (words) & Stubbins (music) in the 1880s. “Praise the Lord” by Kempthorne (words, 1796) & Mason (music, 1841).

For some reason, one of our “hymnals” also contained “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “America the Beautiful,” and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” But nationalist Christianity is another story and shall be told another time.

I’m thinking of two songs in particular today: “At the Cross” by Isaac Watts (1707) and “Amazing Grace” by John Newton.

All of the songs I’ve mentioned so far were written and composed before the era of modern psychology, before early childhood was studied as a science with actionable results to improve the lot of children anywhere the benefits of this science were applied. So it’s not surprising that these songs contain language any genuinely compassionate, caring person would never say to a child.

If we transported Mr. Watts to the present and taught him about psychology and the unconscious, he might be surprised to learn what effect the singing of his lyrics can have on a small child. When you take the lyrics “would he devote that Sacred Head for such a worm as I?” into your very core as a 5-year-old, it takes A LOT to get shut of that unsightly baggage as an adult.

The same goes for Mr. Newton, who was doing his damnedest in “Amazing Grace” to capture his conversion experience — from a retired slave ship captain who remained involved in the slave trade…to a Christian abolitionist. His lyrics “…how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…” definitely came from the grateful depths of his formerly rock-solid heart. I’m genuinely glad for his conversion and for his subsequent work as an abolitionist (with William Wilberforce).

But I didn’t know anything about that when I, farther back than I can remember, learned and began singing about what a wretch I was who desperately needed salvation.

I was a child. A *baby*. A wretch? “Reprobate” and “miscreant” are some of the synonyms. I was to learn those as well. 

Wretch: from Old English “wreċċa,” meaning “outcast.”
Wreċċa: from a Proto-Germanic word that meant “fugitive.”

Sure, I didn’t know any of the etymology, and it’s not as though the word “wretch” comes up in everyday conversation. But I was a voracious reader, and I quickly learned the definitions of the words I was proclaiming as truth from a first-person perspective. And even though the ancient roots of our language never enter our actual day-to-day lives, I do believe the sense of them remains somewhere in our collective unconscious.

Some of those roots are rotten. And they fester. When you use music and targeted lessons to teach a little girl that she is continually observed by an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being…

…and that she herself is a wretch, an outcast, a worm that can never even approach being *good* (Mark 10:18, Romans 3:23) much less approach being omnibenevolent…

…then what you have in her adulthood is a woman with a lack of self-worth so profound, it goes deeper than the cellular level. 

She will believe wholly in her unworth. 

And all “but Jesus loves you and died for you!” protests to the contrary simply are not sufficient for countering the insidious, pernicious programming installed in her Core Self during her most malleable, most vulnerable season of life. What’s really scary is that I didn’t see most of this until I was well into my 40s…and my experience is certainly not unique.
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Fundamentalism (read: DISAVOWED UNCERTAINTY)
isn’t limited to conservative religion. Fundamentalism can rear its ugly head in any arena, any set of beliefs, any type of nonbelief-in-deity, any political identity, any life season.

I still struggle against a fundamentalist mindset gifted to me in the cradle. I still struggle against the fundamental lack of self-valuing that underlies so much of who I am.

I am healthier than I was. Meds…therapy…loving support from people who give me grace (grace = full acceptance; grace = accepting that you are accepted)…all have contributed to a measure of healing. 

But I will likely struggle with these things in some form for the rest of my life. 

And I think about the wider implications of my experience and of the fact that it is not unique to me. 

There are so, so many of us. 

And when those of us who critique Christianity and religion and church engage in our critiques, I think we underestimate the depth of the trauma that has damaged and is continuing to damage the people who remain caught up in Christianity, religion, church.

They are all walking around with raw, open, festering wounds that they deny deny deny so as to neither see nor feel them.

None of this is to excuse how these individuals/groups go about *being* in this world. None of this is to excuse how *I* sometimes still go about being in this world. None of this is to excuse my regressions, my poor word choices, my questionable thought patterns. 

But it does explain. 

None of us can do more than what we have the tools to do at any given time. When we acquire more and better tools, hopefully we will take more beneficial actions.

Keeping ourselves open to the awful, aweful face of the Other is key. 

It’s the only way we will ever open to the Awful and Aweful within our own selves.
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There’s more to this. 

There always is.
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XOXO