Part 2: Embracing "the Wall"
Part Two: A Dialogue with “The Wall” Embracing the Wall
As described in The Critical Journey
Janet Hagberg and Danielle Jones
Welcome to the Wall! The Wall is a deeply holy place on the faith journey. It is always individual, mysterious, God-shaped, and infused with Spirit-- inviting us to transformation. The Wall is one of the most difficult parts of the faith journey and it asks more surrender of us than we may think we are capable of. It is equally alluring and treacherous. Yet the Wall is ultimately a place of healing, of ourselves and our image of God. We need to have a lot of compassion for ourselves and for anyone else who is experiencing the Wall.
I, Janet, author of The Critical Journey, have been asked by my readers to delve a bit more deeply into the phases of the Wall. As a way to bring greater understanding to these phases, I have invited Danielle Jones, a clergy friend of mine, to enter into a dialogue with me about real life experiences of the three phases of the Wall; approaching the Wall, embracing the Wall and releasing the Wall. We will only describe a few characteristics of each phase in hopes that the reader will be interested in reading more about the Wall or meeting with a spiritual director who is trained to listen to people’s spiritual journeys and guide them through the holy Wall. We will also include the Wall stories of Bobbie, Derek, Michael, and David in hopes that their stories will help explain this spiritual process. Links to summaries of The Critical Journey are listed at the end of this dialogue.
You have chosen to enter the Wall dialogue in part two, Embracing the Wall. If you would like to learn about phases one and three, please click on the links to those phases.
One of the teachers who works with the Wall, Ellen Duffield, thinks of the Wall as a crucible. A masterful image. She writes: “As I often use the language of a journey towards wisdom I describe the Wall as a powerful crucible experience that enables us to let go of those things that would cause us to be less true to ourselves; less intimately connected to both the Divine and humanity at large; and more open to the calling of humility, creativity, wisdom, inspiration and true leadership.” Look for more of her reflections on the wall at the end of this dialogue, along with those of another colleague, Deb Turnow, who is a spiritual director and also teaches the Wall material, and writes about how the Wall is easily misunderstood.
Part Two: Embracing the Wall
The CORE truth of the Wall is what will transform our lives: the struggle that gets you to the Wall is not the essence of the Wall. How you respond to the struggle and what you allow God and other wise guides to heal in you at deep levels is the essence of the Wall.
The Wall is a place of surrender to the healing work of God.
Sometimes the Wall just seems too hard. And for some it is. We make no judgment on that. As we said in the first section, people may hit the Wall and then choose to go back to a more familiar place, or they stay in a pre-wall place and cope there. But for others, moving through the Wall requires a deeper personal understanding of Wall—and what it will take to address it.
For instance, we might be aware of how a child of ours is manipulating us in devious ways, yet don’t know how to face the fear of parenting in any other way. We become afraid of what it will mean for our relationship with our child if we embrace the Wall. Another example is that we’ve seen the pattern of alcohol abuse in our lives, yet we think of it as a way to soothe our loneliness instead of looking at the underlying cause of our loneliness. Maybe we notice the pattern of being intimidated by three abusive bosses, yet we can’t imagine how we could stand up to them, so we muddle through and wonder why we get one illness after another. In our faith life we are critical of one minister after another without noticing that they are decidedly similar to one of our dysfunctional parents. When we face these deeper truths, we embrace the Wall.
When we gather the courage to face these deeper truths of what lies beneath the surface of our repeated patterns, we begin to embrace the Wall.
The Four-Part Process
The four-part process of the Wall is awareness, forgiveness, acceptance, and love.
AWARENESS is the task that emerges first when facing the Wall. As we look at our lives, we become aware of the repeated pattern that is keeping us stuck and uncover the essence or core issue that we are grappling with. This is more than a job hurdle or a break up with a friend. It is a deeper pattern of wounding that cannot be covered up and has to heal (or else it will go underground and be a cause for illness, pain, or bitterness).
Essentially, we need to grapple with our shadow behavior and embrace it to learn our core issues. I (Danielle) had to realize that I had a deep pattern of trying to fix things that I thought were broken. In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with the angel and his own past transgressions to receive a blessing from God. As we become aware of the core issues that have repeatedly ensnared us, we begin to acknowledge that we are in need of healing both spiritually and psychologically. God is inviting us to heal and experience more divine intimacy, yet it will take real wrestling and letting go of our old ways of survival.
Janet: “My friend Bobbie has a daughter who estranged herself and her family from Bobbie for more than ten years. It took Bobbie several years to decipher the issues beneath the estrangement. Her daughter blamed her for all of her issues and told her that she never really had a family to speak of. They went to counseling and it got even worse. No one would hear Bobbie’s story. Nothing Bobbie did (and she tried several things) made any difference. Part of her issue was that she was trying too hard☺. She finally had to come to terms with losing her daughter and had to heal herself of the real issue—feeling that she was a bad mother and she had done something wrong. In addition, a core of this self-incrimination was being born in a culture (China-WWII) that she absorbed in which women were viewed as inferior to men, an attitude that hurt her relationship with God. To heal with her daughter took years of counseling in the Wall, including writing letters to her daughter that she didn’t send, burying a photo of her daughter at the cemetery near her husband’s grave, and working with spiritual directors to find the core issues and heal them. She also healed her self image as a woman by hearing from God that God had intentionally created her female and loved her for being a woman all her life. What a relief.”
FORGIVENESS is the next invitation at the Wall. There are often two parts to forgiveness: forgiving others and forgiving ourselves. For a deep dive on Forgiveness we would recommend Desmond Tutu’s book: The Book of Forgiving.
There is no formula for forgiving others. Forgiveness comes through time, prayer, and processing our pain with trusted listeners. Forgiveness is not often a face-to-face experience of telling someone they have hurt us, and many times we do not receive any vindication for the pain we have felt. Yet we are still called to forgive. Sometimes for forgiveness to take place we need to release people to their own lives and let them go. Other times we have to release our broken images of God, in order to gain intimacy with a healing and healthy image of God.
Many times we also need to forgive ourselves. Usually this involves forgiving ourselves for whatever role we had in the issue, even if that means we did nothing wrong except neglect our own stories. Sometimes we are complicit with the other person’s behavior without really knowing it fully. Forgiving ourselves means we admit that we played a role in where we are today and wrestled with the deeply ingrained patterns that are keeping us from new life with God and others.
Danielle: “Another key moment for me in facing the Wall was realizing that I was in a conflict with my boss that was immovable. I was serving the church I grew up in as a pastor and I had all sorts of ideas about how things should go. My boss and I grew to have an adversarial relationship when we did not see eye to eye on the direction of the church. He did and said some things that felt dishonoring and disrespectful of me and my leadership, and I snapped. What began as a justified frustration turned into deep anger within me. My anger began with good reason. I was wronged, I was disrespected, and I was hurt. But I could not move past the anger. For three months, I repeated my story of injustice to myself and close friends again and again. I was not interested in owning any part of the story for myself. I was interested in vindication. One night, I had a dream that I was in a wheel chair. It was clear in the dream that my job was to ring a bell, but as long as I was in the wheel chair, I could not ring the bell. With prayerful considering and bringing the dream before God, I realized that my anger toward my boss was what was keeping me in the wheelchair.”
“The dream made me aware that I had to begin working through my anger. It took months to unpack my anger, own my piece of the story, and move toward forgiveness. In many ways it was like peeling an onion. I worked through one layer of anger, only to realize there was another layer of anger waiting for me. Releasing the need for vindication was key to finding forgiveness. Realizing that no matter how “right” I thought I was, it didn’t matter and holding on to needing to be “right” was keeping me attached and stuck. I spent significant time in prayer asking God to release me from my desire to hold on to old patterns and stories and to see my old boss with compassion.”
Janet: “In my Wall journey, I had to consciously forgive myself, my abuser, and my childhood image of God. I did the latter by way of creating a ritual with a clergy friend, to release my old image of God and find a new, kinder, and more intimate image of God. Part of my core issue at the Wall had to do with being addicted to charismatic, yet abusive people and then allowing them to abuse me. This happened in my marriage, at work, and also in my spiritual life. I had to find out where that tendency originated. On the one hand it came from my home, where my father and brother were both alcoholics.“
“But this tendency toward addiction to abusive behavior also came from my religious training in which God was holy, transcendent, faithful but also rigid, judgmental, and mean spirited. Santa Claus with a big stick! This image was also fairly close to my experience of my father. Alas, this image of God would not allow me to seek more intimacy with God since it did not feel safe. So, one morning I spent several hours with my clergy friend, listing all the people and events that had led me to this fearful image of God. I told her the stories and we cried (and also swore a few times). Then I accepted that this was just the way it was when I was young, and I found compassion for myself for believing what was told to me. I had done nothing to cause it, I was loved by God and I needed to release that pain. I prayed that I would be able to forgive and release this God image. God helped me to see my teachers’ well-meaning intentions and I forgave them. I needed more to heal though! I wanted to do something physical to signify my journey of letting go. After our story telling I put a list of those people’s names in a pill bottle and my friend and I drove to the Monongahela River bridge where I threw the bottle into the river. A few years later I created another ritual of forgiveness for my church by putting a bouquet of flowers and an anonymous thank you note in the hallway of the church.”
ACCEPTANCE is the next step in the healing process. It consists of accepting the truth that we need healing dealing with it (without judgment or shame) and even embracing it to see what else might come up that needs to be healed. We accept ourselves and we accept others without condoning what they have done to us or to others. It might be the hardest work of the Wall to just let things be what they are and surrender whatever needs to happen to God. We also surrender our identities that we thought we had to retain for our survival or respect or success, relinquishing them for something different and closer to who we’ve become.
Acceptance means we are surrendering to the work that God is doing in our struggle, while also releasing our own desires, wants, wills, and egos to God. We admit we can’t go on as before if we want to heal. We need to surrender. I used to sing a chorus as a teenager called, I Surrender All, yet I had no idea until the Wall what acceptance and surrender would entail.
Derek shares this story of his Wall acceptance: “Standing in my light-brown tiled kitchen, in the rear room of my condo in Denver, near the street; just a few miles from where I had just made a drug score. The crushed Budweiser can in my right hand with small poked holes pushed into it, to manufacture an unconventional pipe. Up for three days straight and all set to keep the sad party going, I pressed the opening of the can to my parched lips. But something happened. I saw it—a moment of light. You can call it a Wall, but really it was an opening, a gate, and I saw it peek through. It was my addiction, in a very authentic, genuine light. Surprising myself, in a haze, I picked up the phone and started calling friends, family whoever and said, “I have a problem”. The words actually popped right out of my mouth. Why had that been so hard to say? Accepting that I couldn’t do this on my own, acceptance of my addiction. The humiliation and the utter strangeness of the whole damn glassy eyed situation. Now I use acceptance to let go. When uncomfortable feelings rise within me, I meditate on the word acceptance. Not reacting, but letting go, allowing myself to feel uncomfortable feelings. Accepting what’s happening inside of me.”
Speaking of a moment of light appearing, Peter, a pastor friend of ours said this about the Wall: “One thing I have pondered and heard as I have sat with folks at their “Walls” over the years is how God provides the door, or at least a window, the way through--or at least the place where light shines in.”
The light shining in, even in a small sliver of light, gives us a path to freedom…
And the path to freedom is like building a whole new life. It takes changing friendships at times, getting into communities that are stable, choosing to live differently and having boundaries that may cause distress. It means loving but not condoning, compassion but not complicity. It reeks of God’s goodness and presence, and the capacity eventually to leave the outcomes to God. A difficult prayer during times like these is “God bring me closer to you, no matter what the consequences.”
LOVE is that last step within the Wall. There are multiple facets to love. First, we become aware of the love God has offered us all throughout the Wall process. Before we were ever aware of God’s love, it was there. At Danielle’s church when they baptize babies, they hold them up and say, “God has always loved you and God will always love you and there is nothing you can do to mess up that love.” Believing that this is the kind of love God offers us is part of moving through the Wall. Second, as we realize God’s relentless love for us, we grow in love for ourselves--where we have been and how far we have come--and we desire to offer this sort of love to the world. One of the gifts at the wall is that we receive a deeper capacity to love: God, ourselves, others.
An unusual way in which love emerges is that we begin to find new passion or unusual meaning right in the area of our wounded story. This redemptive threshing about with our healing stories helps us move forward to become whole. We relinquish our martyr or victim stances.
There are dramatic stories of people finding meaningful work in the area of their former pain. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, led by Rev. Desmond Tutu offered healing and reconciliation after apartheid ended. There is another story about the family of the young woman who was murdered by a group of desperate boys she had taught baking skills for a workable wage. Her parents had to do a lot of healing and eventually they took up her cause and made it possible for the bakery to go forward and prosper. Or, the story of a homeless man who started mentoring younger homeless men after he found stable housing and was staying sober. Many people who have survived and healed from Wall experiences like natural disasters, death of children, or mental illness work in the area of their pain to serve others who are still suffering.
Janet: “My friend Michael is a young man who has an aggressive form of brain cancer. He has had surgery after surgery and his cancer journey has led him to do an immense amount of inner healing work on long hidden and tragic stories of his ancestral lineage and his current family members. He has worked alongside doctors and other healers to find his core of unconditional love and purpose. He has found out that telling his story of how the medical world can be loving partners with patients actually helps heal both partners. He also works with other survivors to invite their stories and thus find some inner graces. Michael has used his own cancer experience to confront his own wounding physically, spiritually, and emotionally to bring healing powers to many situations in his life. Whether he lives or dies, and he does have a strong desire to live, he is doing the healing work he was called to do. Michael has found that his cancer has given him an avenue for doing work he never knew was possible.
A Biblical Example of healing at the Wall
Tamar’s story (Genesis 38:6-30) is one of the most difficult stories of women in the Bible. She was a widow in the house of the patriarch Judah, whose son she married. Once her husband died, his father legally owed her his other sons as her partner in order to produce heirs. Women in that culture had very few legal rights. Yet Judah deceived her and she literally put her life on the line to secure her legal rights from him. She found the courage to stand up to him by concealing her identity and tricking him, her father-in-law, into conceiving a child with her. When he found out she was pregnant, he, as judge of this case, could have had her killed. Then she produced evidence that it was his deed that resulted in her pregnancy and not someone else’s. As the truth unfolded of what he has done to her, he stated publicly that she was more righteous than he. Tamar was one of only five women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, a woman who helped keep the genealogy going despite the overwhelming odds against her.
A Poem for this phase of the Wall
These are all just signs
I sat down to talk with God one day
and asked where do I look for you?
How do I find you?
You already do look for me God said
How is that I asked
You look for me by shopping when you are low
and by taking that extra drink when you are stressed
You work long hours hoping to find your worth
and you eat to fill that empty place within
Your most creative way of looking for me is
expecting someone else to make you happy
These are all just signs you are looking for me
When you know this is true
You will find me
©Janet O. Hagberg, 2006
Song links:
Break Every Chain, Kymberli Joye on The Voice https://youtu.be/hfIog7RIgFE
Precious Lord; Take my Hand, Arethea Franklin https://youtu.be/HVMeRULuUB4
I Want Jesus to Walk with Me, Alex Boye and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir https://youtu.be/jrVTuskdCgo
copy and paste this link into search at youtube.com
Icon image: “Tears in a bottle.” In Psalm 56:8 it says that God stores all of our tears in a bottle and writes them in a ledger.
“You restore my soul” from Psalm 23. The image shows the soul in four stages of restoration, from unhealed, through numb and in the dark, to broken open, to feeling whole.
A pocket prayer for embracing the Wall (small prayers that you can memorize or tuck in your pocket!)
O Holy darkness, illumine my darkness and bring me anew, to you. Amen and amen.
Reflection Questions for Embracing the Wall
Tell the story of how you came to the core, the essence, of what the Wall is for you?
Who helped you to move courageously and healthily into and through the Wall?
How did your experience of God and image of God change in your journey with the Wall?
Which of the four areas; awareness, forgiveness, acceptance or love is the one that is the hardest for you to embrace? Most life-giving for you to embrace?
Part one of this book Approaching the Wall
Part three of this book Releasing the Wall
As described in The Critical Journey
Janet Hagberg and Danielle Jones
Welcome to the Wall! The Wall is a deeply holy place on the faith journey. It is always individual, mysterious, God-shaped, and infused with Spirit-- inviting us to transformation. The Wall is one of the most difficult parts of the faith journey and it asks more surrender of us than we may think we are capable of. It is equally alluring and treacherous. Yet the Wall is ultimately a place of healing, of ourselves and our image of God. We need to have a lot of compassion for ourselves and for anyone else who is experiencing the Wall.
I, Janet, author of The Critical Journey, have been asked by my readers to delve a bit more deeply into the phases of the Wall. As a way to bring greater understanding to these phases, I have invited Danielle Jones, a clergy friend of mine, to enter into a dialogue with me about real life experiences of the three phases of the Wall; approaching the Wall, embracing the Wall and releasing the Wall. We will only describe a few characteristics of each phase in hopes that the reader will be interested in reading more about the Wall or meeting with a spiritual director who is trained to listen to people’s spiritual journeys and guide them through the holy Wall. We will also include the Wall stories of Bobbie, Derek, Michael, and David in hopes that their stories will help explain this spiritual process. Links to summaries of The Critical Journey are listed at the end of this dialogue.
You have chosen to enter the Wall dialogue in part two, Embracing the Wall. If you would like to learn about phases one and three, please click on the links to those phases.
One of the teachers who works with the Wall, Ellen Duffield, thinks of the Wall as a crucible. A masterful image. She writes: “As I often use the language of a journey towards wisdom I describe the Wall as a powerful crucible experience that enables us to let go of those things that would cause us to be less true to ourselves; less intimately connected to both the Divine and humanity at large; and more open to the calling of humility, creativity, wisdom, inspiration and true leadership.” Look for more of her reflections on the wall at the end of this dialogue, along with those of another colleague, Deb Turnow, who is a spiritual director and also teaches the Wall material, and writes about how the Wall is easily misunderstood.
Part Two: Embracing the Wall
The CORE truth of the Wall is what will transform our lives: the struggle that gets you to the Wall is not the essence of the Wall. How you respond to the struggle and what you allow God and other wise guides to heal in you at deep levels is the essence of the Wall.
The Wall is a place of surrender to the healing work of God.
Sometimes the Wall just seems too hard. And for some it is. We make no judgment on that. As we said in the first section, people may hit the Wall and then choose to go back to a more familiar place, or they stay in a pre-wall place and cope there. But for others, moving through the Wall requires a deeper personal understanding of Wall—and what it will take to address it.
For instance, we might be aware of how a child of ours is manipulating us in devious ways, yet don’t know how to face the fear of parenting in any other way. We become afraid of what it will mean for our relationship with our child if we embrace the Wall. Another example is that we’ve seen the pattern of alcohol abuse in our lives, yet we think of it as a way to soothe our loneliness instead of looking at the underlying cause of our loneliness. Maybe we notice the pattern of being intimidated by three abusive bosses, yet we can’t imagine how we could stand up to them, so we muddle through and wonder why we get one illness after another. In our faith life we are critical of one minister after another without noticing that they are decidedly similar to one of our dysfunctional parents. When we face these deeper truths, we embrace the Wall.
When we gather the courage to face these deeper truths of what lies beneath the surface of our repeated patterns, we begin to embrace the Wall.
The Four-Part Process
The four-part process of the Wall is awareness, forgiveness, acceptance, and love.
AWARENESS is the task that emerges first when facing the Wall. As we look at our lives, we become aware of the repeated pattern that is keeping us stuck and uncover the essence or core issue that we are grappling with. This is more than a job hurdle or a break up with a friend. It is a deeper pattern of wounding that cannot be covered up and has to heal (or else it will go underground and be a cause for illness, pain, or bitterness).
Essentially, we need to grapple with our shadow behavior and embrace it to learn our core issues. I (Danielle) had to realize that I had a deep pattern of trying to fix things that I thought were broken. In Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles with the angel and his own past transgressions to receive a blessing from God. As we become aware of the core issues that have repeatedly ensnared us, we begin to acknowledge that we are in need of healing both spiritually and psychologically. God is inviting us to heal and experience more divine intimacy, yet it will take real wrestling and letting go of our old ways of survival.
Janet: “My friend Bobbie has a daughter who estranged herself and her family from Bobbie for more than ten years. It took Bobbie several years to decipher the issues beneath the estrangement. Her daughter blamed her for all of her issues and told her that she never really had a family to speak of. They went to counseling and it got even worse. No one would hear Bobbie’s story. Nothing Bobbie did (and she tried several things) made any difference. Part of her issue was that she was trying too hard☺. She finally had to come to terms with losing her daughter and had to heal herself of the real issue—feeling that she was a bad mother and she had done something wrong. In addition, a core of this self-incrimination was being born in a culture (China-WWII) that she absorbed in which women were viewed as inferior to men, an attitude that hurt her relationship with God. To heal with her daughter took years of counseling in the Wall, including writing letters to her daughter that she didn’t send, burying a photo of her daughter at the cemetery near her husband’s grave, and working with spiritual directors to find the core issues and heal them. She also healed her self image as a woman by hearing from God that God had intentionally created her female and loved her for being a woman all her life. What a relief.”
FORGIVENESS is the next invitation at the Wall. There are often two parts to forgiveness: forgiving others and forgiving ourselves. For a deep dive on Forgiveness we would recommend Desmond Tutu’s book: The Book of Forgiving.
There is no formula for forgiving others. Forgiveness comes through time, prayer, and processing our pain with trusted listeners. Forgiveness is not often a face-to-face experience of telling someone they have hurt us, and many times we do not receive any vindication for the pain we have felt. Yet we are still called to forgive. Sometimes for forgiveness to take place we need to release people to their own lives and let them go. Other times we have to release our broken images of God, in order to gain intimacy with a healing and healthy image of God.
Many times we also need to forgive ourselves. Usually this involves forgiving ourselves for whatever role we had in the issue, even if that means we did nothing wrong except neglect our own stories. Sometimes we are complicit with the other person’s behavior without really knowing it fully. Forgiving ourselves means we admit that we played a role in where we are today and wrestled with the deeply ingrained patterns that are keeping us from new life with God and others.
Danielle: “Another key moment for me in facing the Wall was realizing that I was in a conflict with my boss that was immovable. I was serving the church I grew up in as a pastor and I had all sorts of ideas about how things should go. My boss and I grew to have an adversarial relationship when we did not see eye to eye on the direction of the church. He did and said some things that felt dishonoring and disrespectful of me and my leadership, and I snapped. What began as a justified frustration turned into deep anger within me. My anger began with good reason. I was wronged, I was disrespected, and I was hurt. But I could not move past the anger. For three months, I repeated my story of injustice to myself and close friends again and again. I was not interested in owning any part of the story for myself. I was interested in vindication. One night, I had a dream that I was in a wheel chair. It was clear in the dream that my job was to ring a bell, but as long as I was in the wheel chair, I could not ring the bell. With prayerful considering and bringing the dream before God, I realized that my anger toward my boss was what was keeping me in the wheelchair.”
“The dream made me aware that I had to begin working through my anger. It took months to unpack my anger, own my piece of the story, and move toward forgiveness. In many ways it was like peeling an onion. I worked through one layer of anger, only to realize there was another layer of anger waiting for me. Releasing the need for vindication was key to finding forgiveness. Realizing that no matter how “right” I thought I was, it didn’t matter and holding on to needing to be “right” was keeping me attached and stuck. I spent significant time in prayer asking God to release me from my desire to hold on to old patterns and stories and to see my old boss with compassion.”
Janet: “In my Wall journey, I had to consciously forgive myself, my abuser, and my childhood image of God. I did the latter by way of creating a ritual with a clergy friend, to release my old image of God and find a new, kinder, and more intimate image of God. Part of my core issue at the Wall had to do with being addicted to charismatic, yet abusive people and then allowing them to abuse me. This happened in my marriage, at work, and also in my spiritual life. I had to find out where that tendency originated. On the one hand it came from my home, where my father and brother were both alcoholics.“
“But this tendency toward addiction to abusive behavior also came from my religious training in which God was holy, transcendent, faithful but also rigid, judgmental, and mean spirited. Santa Claus with a big stick! This image was also fairly close to my experience of my father. Alas, this image of God would not allow me to seek more intimacy with God since it did not feel safe. So, one morning I spent several hours with my clergy friend, listing all the people and events that had led me to this fearful image of God. I told her the stories and we cried (and also swore a few times). Then I accepted that this was just the way it was when I was young, and I found compassion for myself for believing what was told to me. I had done nothing to cause it, I was loved by God and I needed to release that pain. I prayed that I would be able to forgive and release this God image. God helped me to see my teachers’ well-meaning intentions and I forgave them. I needed more to heal though! I wanted to do something physical to signify my journey of letting go. After our story telling I put a list of those people’s names in a pill bottle and my friend and I drove to the Monongahela River bridge where I threw the bottle into the river. A few years later I created another ritual of forgiveness for my church by putting a bouquet of flowers and an anonymous thank you note in the hallway of the church.”
ACCEPTANCE is the next step in the healing process. It consists of accepting the truth that we need healing dealing with it (without judgment or shame) and even embracing it to see what else might come up that needs to be healed. We accept ourselves and we accept others without condoning what they have done to us or to others. It might be the hardest work of the Wall to just let things be what they are and surrender whatever needs to happen to God. We also surrender our identities that we thought we had to retain for our survival or respect or success, relinquishing them for something different and closer to who we’ve become.
Acceptance means we are surrendering to the work that God is doing in our struggle, while also releasing our own desires, wants, wills, and egos to God. We admit we can’t go on as before if we want to heal. We need to surrender. I used to sing a chorus as a teenager called, I Surrender All, yet I had no idea until the Wall what acceptance and surrender would entail.
Derek shares this story of his Wall acceptance: “Standing in my light-brown tiled kitchen, in the rear room of my condo in Denver, near the street; just a few miles from where I had just made a drug score. The crushed Budweiser can in my right hand with small poked holes pushed into it, to manufacture an unconventional pipe. Up for three days straight and all set to keep the sad party going, I pressed the opening of the can to my parched lips. But something happened. I saw it—a moment of light. You can call it a Wall, but really it was an opening, a gate, and I saw it peek through. It was my addiction, in a very authentic, genuine light. Surprising myself, in a haze, I picked up the phone and started calling friends, family whoever and said, “I have a problem”. The words actually popped right out of my mouth. Why had that been so hard to say? Accepting that I couldn’t do this on my own, acceptance of my addiction. The humiliation and the utter strangeness of the whole damn glassy eyed situation. Now I use acceptance to let go. When uncomfortable feelings rise within me, I meditate on the word acceptance. Not reacting, but letting go, allowing myself to feel uncomfortable feelings. Accepting what’s happening inside of me.”
Speaking of a moment of light appearing, Peter, a pastor friend of ours said this about the Wall: “One thing I have pondered and heard as I have sat with folks at their “Walls” over the years is how God provides the door, or at least a window, the way through--or at least the place where light shines in.”
The light shining in, even in a small sliver of light, gives us a path to freedom…
And the path to freedom is like building a whole new life. It takes changing friendships at times, getting into communities that are stable, choosing to live differently and having boundaries that may cause distress. It means loving but not condoning, compassion but not complicity. It reeks of God’s goodness and presence, and the capacity eventually to leave the outcomes to God. A difficult prayer during times like these is “God bring me closer to you, no matter what the consequences.”
LOVE is that last step within the Wall. There are multiple facets to love. First, we become aware of the love God has offered us all throughout the Wall process. Before we were ever aware of God’s love, it was there. At Danielle’s church when they baptize babies, they hold them up and say, “God has always loved you and God will always love you and there is nothing you can do to mess up that love.” Believing that this is the kind of love God offers us is part of moving through the Wall. Second, as we realize God’s relentless love for us, we grow in love for ourselves--where we have been and how far we have come--and we desire to offer this sort of love to the world. One of the gifts at the wall is that we receive a deeper capacity to love: God, ourselves, others.
An unusual way in which love emerges is that we begin to find new passion or unusual meaning right in the area of our wounded story. This redemptive threshing about with our healing stories helps us move forward to become whole. We relinquish our martyr or victim stances.
There are dramatic stories of people finding meaningful work in the area of their former pain. The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, led by Rev. Desmond Tutu offered healing and reconciliation after apartheid ended. There is another story about the family of the young woman who was murdered by a group of desperate boys she had taught baking skills for a workable wage. Her parents had to do a lot of healing and eventually they took up her cause and made it possible for the bakery to go forward and prosper. Or, the story of a homeless man who started mentoring younger homeless men after he found stable housing and was staying sober. Many people who have survived and healed from Wall experiences like natural disasters, death of children, or mental illness work in the area of their pain to serve others who are still suffering.
Janet: “My friend Michael is a young man who has an aggressive form of brain cancer. He has had surgery after surgery and his cancer journey has led him to do an immense amount of inner healing work on long hidden and tragic stories of his ancestral lineage and his current family members. He has worked alongside doctors and other healers to find his core of unconditional love and purpose. He has found out that telling his story of how the medical world can be loving partners with patients actually helps heal both partners. He also works with other survivors to invite their stories and thus find some inner graces. Michael has used his own cancer experience to confront his own wounding physically, spiritually, and emotionally to bring healing powers to many situations in his life. Whether he lives or dies, and he does have a strong desire to live, he is doing the healing work he was called to do. Michael has found that his cancer has given him an avenue for doing work he never knew was possible.
A Biblical Example of healing at the Wall
Tamar’s story (Genesis 38:6-30) is one of the most difficult stories of women in the Bible. She was a widow in the house of the patriarch Judah, whose son she married. Once her husband died, his father legally owed her his other sons as her partner in order to produce heirs. Women in that culture had very few legal rights. Yet Judah deceived her and she literally put her life on the line to secure her legal rights from him. She found the courage to stand up to him by concealing her identity and tricking him, her father-in-law, into conceiving a child with her. When he found out she was pregnant, he, as judge of this case, could have had her killed. Then she produced evidence that it was his deed that resulted in her pregnancy and not someone else’s. As the truth unfolded of what he has done to her, he stated publicly that she was more righteous than he. Tamar was one of only five women mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, a woman who helped keep the genealogy going despite the overwhelming odds against her.
A Poem for this phase of the Wall
These are all just signs
I sat down to talk with God one day
and asked where do I look for you?
How do I find you?
You already do look for me God said
How is that I asked
You look for me by shopping when you are low
and by taking that extra drink when you are stressed
You work long hours hoping to find your worth
and you eat to fill that empty place within
Your most creative way of looking for me is
expecting someone else to make you happy
These are all just signs you are looking for me
When you know this is true
You will find me
©Janet O. Hagberg, 2006
Song links:
Break Every Chain, Kymberli Joye on The Voice https://youtu.be/hfIog7RIgFE
Precious Lord; Take my Hand, Arethea Franklin https://youtu.be/HVMeRULuUB4
I Want Jesus to Walk with Me, Alex Boye and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir https://youtu.be/jrVTuskdCgo
copy and paste this link into search at youtube.com
Icon image: “Tears in a bottle.” In Psalm 56:8 it says that God stores all of our tears in a bottle and writes them in a ledger.
“You restore my soul” from Psalm 23. The image shows the soul in four stages of restoration, from unhealed, through numb and in the dark, to broken open, to feeling whole.
A pocket prayer for embracing the Wall (small prayers that you can memorize or tuck in your pocket!)
O Holy darkness, illumine my darkness and bring me anew, to you. Amen and amen.
Reflection Questions for Embracing the Wall
Tell the story of how you came to the core, the essence, of what the Wall is for you?
Who helped you to move courageously and healthily into and through the Wall?
How did your experience of God and image of God change in your journey with the Wall?
Which of the four areas; awareness, forgiveness, acceptance or love is the one that is the hardest for you to embrace? Most life-giving for you to embrace?
Part one of this book Approaching the Wall
Part three of this book Releasing the Wall