Offering 5 | End of Winter
Spiritual reflections on the journey of finding (and reckoning with) the new self.
“These are the worst parts of myself, the parts that I hate…”, I said to her through a steady stream of tears, “…the parts of myself that I so desperately want to escape, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t.”
She paused for a moment, releasing the grip of her pen and notepad, pressing them gently onto her lap. I could feel her gentle gaze from across the room as I kept my own eyes fixed on her hands,
“Are those really the worst parts of yourself? What if they are the bravest parts of yourself, the most truth-telling parts of yourself, relentless in their cry for safety? You don’t really want to escape those parts of yourself, Lahni, you want those parts of yourself to be seen, heard, held, and loved.”
What if?
The Questions We Dare Not Ask Aloud
A year and a half ago began what has proven to be an arduous, excruciating, and miraculously liberating journey of untangling lies about myself and my God. I spent so many years living with the shame, pain, and secrets of trauma and deep woundings that severely malformed my understanding of and relation to God, self, and others.
I am alone and unsafe in my body.
I am alone and unsafe in my home.
I am alone and unsafe with my God.
Each of these statements were deeply embedded into my neurobiology in my most formative years.
According to Dr. Paul Mikevych, neurobiology is “the biology of nerve cells and glial cells that make up the brain — how they fit together and make circuits, and how those circuits process information and regulate behavior, endocrine function, emotions, breathing, etc."1
There is much to be said about the complex consequences that often arise at the intersection of neurobiology and spirituality, specifically within the context of evangelicalism in its many forms, including churches like the one I grew up in that were more on the frays of evangelical culture and yet paradoxically caught in the eye of the storm nonetheless.
There are many who have devoted their life to the careful work of understanding these consequences, who know more about the brain than I ever will, but what I know from personal experience is that painting pretty words about God’s love for you onto the canvas of your story without engaging the truth of your story is not a picture of redemption,
it is a facade—
and eventually it will catch up.
I spent my adolescence trying really hard to create a version of myself that could be loved by God and loved by others. I tried to create a version of myself that others wouldn’t want to escape—and it was exhausting. I realize now that part of the facade was birthed out of a necessity for survival and I both marvel at the accomplishments that girl was able to move toward despite living with such disorienting internal pain, while also deeply grieving the dreams and hopes of the girl lost and buried beneath the wreckage of pain and sorrow.
I realize, too, that this shiny facade was shaped by misinformed theological assumptions that were offered to me in various church settings in my childhood and youth without the painstaking work of an embodied discipleship that is not merely learned, but deeply felt and internalized within the context of an emotionally and spiritually healthy community.
“You are a new creation”, they said.
“Put off the old self and clothe yourself with the new self”.
But what happens when you don’t feel like a new creation?
What if the new self feels just as broken as the old?
What if so much in your life is breaking and nobody chooses to step in—and God feels far off?
What if you feel more broken by facing the truth than clinging to a lie?
When the damaging mantra “truth doesn’t care about your feelings”, and others like it, are touted in churches and used as a weapon in order to disconnect you from sacred questions that arise from deeply embodied feelings, it begins to take root.
And when it begins to take root, you learn to live a lie.
If truth doesn’t care about your feelings, then a lie doesn’t care about the truth.
The Self at the Top of the Wreckage
In the summer of 2022, after years of building a life on top of the wreckage that I was actually still buried beneath, I finally sought out help via the route of psychotherapy under the care of a licensed Christian therapist. The weight of the wreckage became unbearable and I was so angry and bitter and tired of being crushed over and over again by people and memories that would disturb a piece of the wreckage that I had managed to settle for a time, resurrecting a version of myself that I did not like—the version I learned to want to escape because it was the version they chose to escape time and time again.
At the start of that journey, I mentally consented, giving God permission to remove pieces of the wreckage. I was still stuck but I slowly started to feel some relief from the weight of what had been on top of me for so long. But at the beginning of January 2023, about seven months into the journey at that point, I began to realize that I’d given God permission to begin lifting the weight that had been crushing me, but I’d not given him permission to be in the wreckage with me.
The journey between those two points of reference has been long and narrow and undoubtedly one of the scariest journeys I’ve ever taken. No longer was it simply a mental consent forward, it became an embodied quest toward a God I’d only ever given permission to know the girl who built a life on top of the wreckage, but never permission to know the girl who had been lost and crushed beneath.
The Quest For Safety
As my journey shifted at the start of last year, I chose two watchwords2 for 2023, true-self and safety.
Who am I? Am I safe? Are you a safe God?
These questions propelled me into a season of deep vulnerability with God and others that was and still is excruciatingly tender as I learn to hear the voice of a Shepard that sounds much different (and kinder and safer) than the voice I thought was His for so long.
In May of last year, my sister and I took a trip to Israel together. I knew that our pilgrimage would be faith altering, but I pleaded with God to show me a measure of His safety and love on our trip that I had never experienced before. My faith was bigger than a mustard seed.
And yet, as truly incredible as our trip was, and one that I will hold closely as I journey on through this life, I returned home feeling a bit disillusioned. The self that came up out of the Jordan river didn’t feel any more safe or loved than the self that went under the waters declaring death, burial, and resurrection. While being re-baptized in the Jordan was a pivotal moment for my pilgrim-soul, I was still under the dangerous illusion that the new self should miraculously come up detached from the context of myself, the deeply embedded threads of all that have made me “me”.
What if I never feel safe or fully loved? Truth doesn’t care about your feelings, Lahni. Your intellectual trust is enough. You don’t need to feel safe or loved to know it’s true.
But at that point in the journey, I recognized those thoughts for the insidious self talk they were. They had played their game long enough and the self I had buried deep within was not content to remain silent—she persisted in her request.
The last journal entry I wrote on our trip to Israel is titled, June 3rd—Garden of Gethsemane, with a little note jotted beside the date—a place of pressing, suffering, and a place of ascension—and a prayer that I wrote down underneath:
Fill me with your Spirit—may the new wine flow from the places I need to be pressed…pain, shame, anger, bitterness. Cleanse me, Lord—teach me to lift my soul to you, experiencing your safety and grace in the places in myself that remain dark and afraid. Thank you for being pressed for me. May I learn to be pressed that I may live a resurrected life in You.
He could have answered my original prayer in the way that I wanted him to, offering me an undeniable and overwhelming sense of safety and love in an instant. Instead, He’s answered it quite differently and revealed a secret that I’m only just beginning to see and touch and trust in the deepest part of my being:
There is a sense of security bound up in our desire not to be touched by harm or to experience the effects of harm, but true security rests in the truth that it is safe to cry out when harm does comes our way and its effects, to some extent, remain with us the whole long way Home.
I couldn’t even begin to understand the weight of what that prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane would mean in the months that would follow.
Attachment vs. Closure
In the months that have since passed, I’ve remained in the care of a therapist and spiritual director who have accompanied me on this journey of re-learning what it means to healthfully attach, in this specific order to: God, self, and others.
Note: If you’re not familiar with the terminology attachment styles, I’d encourage you to follow the link attached to this footnote3 (no pun intended) for further exploration and understanding of this theory. Essentially though, attachment styles are the unique ways in which we emotionally attach to our caregivers in infancy and our formative years, directly impacting our neurobiology and the ways we relate to our selves and others socially and emotionally in the context of our life.
Within the secular world of psychotherapy, the effects of our unique attachment styles have typically been reserved for study within the context of self, others, and at times a broad sense of spirituality that encompasses the reality of a specific deity or higher power. However, within the realm of Christian psychotherapy in particular, the interest in the intersection between attachment style and attachment to God has become a growing area of research in the last decade.
The scope of study has shifted in fascinating ways from “How do we relate to self and others as a result of our uniquely shaped neurobiology?” to “How do we relate to God as a result of our uniquely shaped neurobiology?”.
As I’ve been reflecting on my own attachment style and patterns within the context of deep inner healing and the ways in which I’m learning to re-attach in a very specific order—to God, self, and others—I’ve found it interesting to consider that we come into this world learning to attach in a seemingly reverse order—attaching to others (caregivers), self, and then God (or our conception of a higher power or cosmic reality).
Perhaps this reversal, in God’s infinite knowledge of human neurobiology, has something do with Jesus telling Nicodemus that we must be born again in order to see the Kingdom of Heaven (John 3:3). I am not a scholar, nor am I a neurobiologist, but I can’t help but notice the direct connection between our being born and the impact that our birth has on our ability to see a certain way.
We are first born into the world learning to attach to people and places that are broken—that inevitably, in varying degrees, break us. We learn to see through a fractured lens.
We are born again in order to attach to the only Person who was broken and yet chose not to break us. We learn to see the Kingdom of Heaven, not through a lens that is now magically without cracks, but in a way in which our sight becomes clearer through the cracks already in the lens. And this, of course, only if we’re learning to attach to God in a healthy way.
Birth is messy.
As someone who loves creative language and its effect on our ability to grasp spiritual realities, I find it interesting that it is often the case that the metaphor of birth suddenly comes to a screeching halt when we come up from the waters of rebirth. All signs of the chaos and fluids of the womb and birth canal are somehow miraculously washed clean, right along with our sins.
But the truth is, that’s not how it works.
Our rebirth is far messier than many of us are willing to admit and messier than many were willing to admit to us.
At the recommendation of my therapist, I’ve been reading through The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson, MD, a leading voice in the growing interest of interpersonal neurobiology at the intersection of Christian spiritual formation. In it he says,
“Not surprisingly, therefore, our patterns of attachment deeply influence the way we experience our relationship with God. For he has to deal with the same brain that we do; he engages the same proclivities we have for the avoiding or being anxious about the intimacy of relationships. It is not as if we get to put our brains, which are wired in a particular way through our attachment patterns, on the shelf and somehow draw on a separate one when it comes to dealing with God. He comes to the same set of neural networks that our friends, parents, spouse, children or enemies do”.
And yet, dear readers, this is exactly what I tried to do—the thing that many of us try to do—thinking that being born again requires that we put our confused and weary brain on a shelf with the old self and offer God a blank canvas, a new self suddenly detached from the complexities of its story.
Many of us learned that our testimony of healing and closure and redemption was the thing, leaving little room for a self in process, a self that could know she was safe and held despite being so tangled up.
God is our redeemer, but so often his redemption and faithfulness got tangled up in our ability to come out on the other side with a testimony. It’s not that God’s redemption can’t be seen at times within the unique contexts of our circumstances, but rather that pressing toward a self-imagined testimony cannot become more important than pressing into Him when a testimony is not yet ours—and may never be ours. A picture of healing looks far different than a picture of being held in the hands of a Healer, held even if healing never comes and closure remains locked behind a door that you’ll never be able to go back and open.
Redemption, after all, is not about our arriving, but about His arriving to us—His attaching to us. We suffer a lot of pain and confusion by trying to fit ourselves into self-imagined testimonies that don’t belong to us instead of fitting ourselves into the hollow of His hands where our true testimony is fully realized: We are fully known and fully loved, held securely in sacred hands that we were once far off from.
I didn’t realize this for a very long time, and even now am just beginning to understand in an embodied way, what it means to reclaim this true testimony that was buried for so long. I didn’t know that the new life that awaits us, that we’re told to put on, doesn’t demand that we pass through the birthing waters arriving unmarked by the very things that indicate our creature-hood.
We become new creations and though our sins are washed clean, the complexities of our creatureliness remain with us on our pilgrimage Home.
In his book, The Context of Holiness: Psychological and Spiritual Reflections on the Life of St. Therese of Lisieux, Marc Foley says,
“I say to myself, “When will I ever be rid of this fear?” Once I could accept that the answer was “Never” I felt a great weight taken off my shoulders. For I was released from the impossible goal of trying to become someone other than myself. “Working on yourself” can become and insidious mask of self-hate, for it makes you think there is something wrong with you until you are “healed””.
Jesus does not magically rid us of the particularities of our unique fragments and frailties. Instead, He gives us the courage to reimagine them alongside Him because attachment is far more important than closure and healing looks more like being held than being whole.
Victory vs. Victor
This theme of healing and closure as a measure of God’s activity in one’s life carried with it implications for the expectations I had in what this new self should look like. I recovered from an eating disorder in high school and wore the testimony of freedom as a badge while my spirit wasted and wrestled within. I was anything but free. As long as I could just maintain the testimony and hold the trophies of God’s faithfulness up loud and proud I wouldn’t have to confront the war within or go back for the girl beneath the wreckage who I thought Jesus had already left behind. If I could just keep up with the girl who Jesus had healed externally, maybe then I’d feel secure. I was wrong.
In shared company with others who carry similar experiences of growing up in the church, the waves of evangelical culture in my childhood and youth washed over me, carrying with each crash a sense that being born again was the victory. I was baptized at a young age and didn’t fully understand the weight of what that decision meant for the “new self” I was supposed to grow into. I put my faith in Jesus and verbally adhered to a basic understanding of death, burial, and resurrection, but somewhere along the way I internalized the lie that coming up from the waters of my baptism was the equivalent of crossing a finish line, my holiness finally within arms reach. As if somehow redemption and holiness and newness of life were now my trophies to hold instead of understanding that the only Victorious One was now holding me.
Our births, as wonderfully miraculous as they are, don’t teach us about our victory, they teach us about our vulnerability. We don’t cross a finish line upon arrival into the world and neither do we cross a finish line when the Spirit blows the winds of regeneration and we are washed by water and truth.
Instead, we each cross a very vulnerable threshold into hands altogether different than the ones that heard our first cry. A threshold where, yes, we are found naked, exposed, and covered with the proof of our birth—and yet— our vulnerability is finally found perfectly safe in the hands of the Victor.
I learned to live a lie because I thought that the trophies should already be in my infant hands instead of realizing that the trophies only ever belonged in the sacred hands that were holding me. When I found myself empty handed over and over again, I thought it better to create a version of myself that looked like she was holding the trophies, someone who could dance atop the wreckage with a testimony that sparkled and shined.
I thought that that version of myself would be a delight for God to love.
The Miracle of The New Self
As I’ve been untangling the knots of religion in my story and the role that it played as my story unfolded during my most formative years, I’ve realized that not all of the knots were bad, that some of them did provide a temporary, albeit wobbly, stability that impacted me positively.
And yet, even the good knots did not keep me from tripping on the bad ones. I never fully felt safe climbing up the rope. I watched as the extreme view of holiness in the tradition I was brought up in shaped fear in the lives of those around me, in the conversations we’d have together, and that was already at work shaping me. In the throes of my eating disorder, I remember asking an adult in my life—Is God mad at me? Nevermind the hidden trauma and secrets that perpetuated the eating disorder, if I could just figure out whether or not God was shaking his finger at me, maybe then I’d feel secure. Fear. Fear left me with a sense of unrest and shame deep within.
I was shaped by doctrine that emphasized a fear based quest for holiness without much emphasis on learning to rest my infant heart in the Hands of Holiness, rocked and swayed by the rivers of grace that were my inheritance.
Grace inevitably ended up tangled with holiness in all the wrong ways and the basis of my Belovedness became dependent on my holiness instead of realizing that my holiness depended on the reality, the internalization, that I was already Beloved. We don’t arrive on the shores of holiness. We arrive in the hands of the Holy One and it is only by learning to rest securely in those hands that our own holiness begins to flow in its proper place.
The quest never belonged to us. The quest was always back to us.
Unraveling all of this in the presence of people who have embodied the gaze of Christ has given me courage to let Christ himself behold the parts and pieces of my self and my story that look more like fallen fruit than shiny gold trophies. I’m learning that my true self, the self hidden in Christ, is not—and was never—separate from the context of my brokenness, but that she is found and loved smack dab in the middle of her brokenness and that her cries have always been heard even—and especially—when others chose to look away.
There isn’t a self that I can create, that any of us can create, that would somehow be more delightful for Christ to love than the broken one who was created to be rocked in the arms of the only One who is perfectly whole. The wounded and desperately scared self that I spent years running away from has turned out to be the very self that has taught my false self (that I tried to make look new), how to climb up into the hands of Love where my true self, frailties and all, has been hidden and safe all along.
The miracle, then, in putting off the old self is not that suddenly the new self is instantaneously free from the context of its particular woundings, traumas, consequences of sin, or the frailties of mind and body. Even Jesus himself resurrected with scars that told a story, giving language to the eternality of the very things that make us human.
Rather, the miracle of the new self, our true self in Christ, is that through the incarnation of Christ in its fullest expression, God’s holiness no longer becomes uninhabitable, it becomes our home—the very place where God’s commitment to attachment is fully realized; where our brokenness is not just invited, but beheld; where it is touched, transformed, mothered, and fathered by the One whose vulnerability and surrender teaches us that we don’t have to dance upon the wreckage anymore—we can descend to the very depths where He’s already gone.
Dear readers, many times we have put off the old self. It’s our conception of what the new self should look like that we so often struggle to lay aside, hindering us from becoming our truest self, the new self hidden in Christ, and fully realized in the gaze of a God who looks and does not turn away.
Water Into Wine
We are born. And we are born again. And the promise we are given is not that we will eventually be found safe at the bottom of the wreckage, but that we will find Him in the wreckage with us. He may not remove every piece of debri that hinders us from climbing to the top, but He will always remove the pieces that hinder us from turning our head and meeting His gaze…because attachment is more important than closure and learning to let him look us in the eyes changes everything.
It is changing everything for me.
The new wine has started to flow. And while I’ve been tempted to despise the old wineskins for convincing me I could simply make them look new, I’ve learned that they, too, made room for the fermentation of my life, a stretching and growing that produced a wine that has not been wasted, a wine that eventually met the bounds of its form, demanding that I face the limitations and dangers of a life on top of the wreckage.
The message of the parable of the wineskins (found in Luke 5) is not that the old is inherently bad, but that the old has a limit and it will never again be able to bear the weight and expansion of the new grace pouring into our life. The old form served a purpose, but the new form shapes our purpose, allowing us to expand and grow within the bounds of a grace that is malleable enough to hold all of our tangled up feelings and transform the very context of our lives.
The new wine, the living wine, is my testimony and the new wineskins are my inheritance. I am not too late. I am right on time. In some ways I have missed out and I am taking the time to grieve the reality of what was lost, but I am learning to realize, through bitter tears, that even in what I missed, in what could have been, somehow I still lack nothing.
If my tears are the water then His grace is the miracle of wine and I’ve always been invited to a banquet where there is One who has never stopped searching for the girl lost beneath the wreckage. She was never left behind and there was never a day where she was not missed and her cries were not heard.
An Answer in the Garden
My therapist was right. I never really wanted to escape those parts of myself that are so hard to face. It has been through learning to attune to those very parts, offering them compassion, and letting them cry out, that I’ve begun slowly and imperfectly reattaching to a God whose gaze has always been on my life, a God who has eagerly awaited this season when I would allow him to not just look at me, but when I would choose not to look away from Him.
And so, may it be with you, too, dear reader, that you would awake each day on this long journey Home with the knowledge that living on top of the wreckage is far more dangerous and destructive than truly feeling the safety of his touch and the depth of His love at the bottom of the mess.
The truth that so many of us were never told is that Truth has always cared about our feelings.
In the echoes of Paul (Ephesians 3:14-21), I pray that you, dear reader, strengthened by the power of the Spirit in your inmost being, would begin to internalize the love of God in an embodied way, being filled up with the fullness of that which is the felt experience of the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ. That you would begin a journey of opening yourself, one step at a time, to the safety of His presence. A presence that does not overwhelm us in a single moment, but that comes to us again and again on our pilgrimage Home, breaking the barriers of our intellect and reaching for the very flesh we are clothed in—the very same likeness of flesh that once cried out in agonizing pain in a garden called Gethsemane:
“Abba Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.” Mark 14:36
Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane was my answer all along:
We are not guaranteed a context of safety or a cup filled to our preferential measure, but because God has sent the very spirit of Jesus into our hearts (Galatians 4:6), we are always safe to attach—to cry out “Abba Father”, knowing that the cup of our sorrows is also the cup of His new wine.
Thank you for reading Cadence & Canticle—I’m so glad you stopped by! May you leave this space blessed and heartened as you return to the soil and stewardship of your life. I’d love for you to join this community of fellow pilgrim-souls!
For further engagement with this season’s offering, head to the Trysting Place right below!
https://medschool.ucla.edu/blog-post/what-is-neurobiology#:~:text=be%20re%2Dembedded.-,Dr.,emotions%2C%20breathing%2C%20etc.%22
Different than a “word(s) of the year”, watchwords are words you watch for throughout the year, not with a sense of striving toward or forcing (like can happen with a “word of the year”), but as an opportunity to look for the work of the Holy Spirit in shaping you—coming to you.
https://familyccc.com/attachment-modality/
WELCOME TO THE TRYSTING PLACE—
a contemplative space at the end of each offering for you to quiet your soul and slow down in the presence of your Creator. Settle in with all three sections or choose just one, moving through them at a pace that is right for you. This is designed to be a spacious place for your soul—a sacred rhythm for your life.
CADENCE & CURIOSITY—
an invitation to quietly contemplate and become curious about what is stirring in the depths of your heart.
Follow the link on attachment styles in the second footnote above. Spend some time reflecting on what your own unique attachment style was in your most formative years. Take time to journal through this and become curious about this attachment style as it relates to how you approach God now. Talk to God about this. Where do you need to relearn attachment with God?
Remember, learning to be parented by God, our perfect Shepard, is not reserved for those whose attachment styles and patterns were not secure. The truth is, all parents had and will have blindspots, including me and you (if you’re a parent). Learning to attach to God in a healthy way changes everything, including how we attach to our own children (something I’m learning and stumbling through in real time).
As a bonus—tune into this conversation over on the Intentional Parents podcasts—
CADENCE & CONVERSATION—
an invitation to reflect on and share what the Lord is revealing to you in this season. Use this as a personal and private extension of reflection or use it to share your heart with other readers in this community of fellow pilgrim-souls. I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Let’s add another layer: Take time to become curious about how your own church experience shaped how you relate to God, for better or worse. Invite the Holy Spirit into this process, asking Him to illuminate realities that perhaps you’ve never realized and confronted.
Are you living on top of the wreckage, presenting a false version of yourself to God and others as a way to satisfy your (and others) expectations of what the new self should look like? Perhaps it is time to go back to the self you’ve left at the bottom of the wreckage and invite God to come with you as you relearn what safety and love look like in the context of your unique story. It is okay to be in process.
Maybe it is time to reach out for help. Consider how you might take a step(s) toward stewarding your story instead of running away from it. You may just find that the self you’re running from will lead you straight into the hands of the One who never left that self alone.
CADENCE & CUE—
The final stop in each offering—a cue to still your soul before the things that are good, true, and beautiful as you ponder how you might carry them with you into your season!
Be on the lookout for a poem that I will publish in a separate post later this month. I crafted this poem last autumn during a season when I realized that the self that was crying “Abba Father” was the self buried beneath the wreckage.