Tag: Brene Brown

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Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a fascinating human experience. It can be playful or delightful, as when old friends reunite. Suddenly they are in tears or side-splitting laughter as they recall long-forgotten songs or jokes or shared antics. Their recalling of story after story rekindles old connections, and everyone feels gratitude and joy. Alternatively, nostalgia can evoke a deep and wistful longing for what once was or what might have been. I have written before about the Welsh word Hiraeth. In its darker forms, nostalgia can also evoke rage or blame or contempt toward those who allegedly ruined the good things that used to be – even to the point of scapegoating and violence. If you study the history of any genocide, you will find nostalgia in the mix.

Not all nostalgia is helpful, and not all nostalgia is truthful. As Brené Brown suggests, “Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.”

It’s not uncommon for me as a priest to hear a resentful rant about how America used to be the greatest nation on earth, but now…those people…

Sometimes, I will kindly and playfully ask, “Do you think that’s the story Jesus will tell us when he comes again? Is he going to assemble all the nations and every human who has ever lived to sit and listen to how much greater America was than all the other nations?” That usually gives some pause to the person. It reminds me of the school kids modifying their story when they realized that my friend (their principal) had been viewing the entire incident on the security camera.

The truth is that our American story is quite a mix of greatness and darkness. It includes some of us living privileged lives at the expense of others. Nostalgia becomes a drug to distract our notice from what it is really like to be downtrodden and oppressed. God never forgets his little ones. Judgment Day will uncover the full truth of how we choose to love and serve the poor (Matthew 25:31-46). G.K. Chesterton wrote a century ago, during an age in which nationalism was also running high. As he explained then, genuine patriotism is not loving your nation as better than all the others. It’s loving your nation because it’s your home.

Whether we realize it or not, we tend to edit our stories. Day and night (including in our dreams), our brains are at work, trying to make sense and meaning of our human experience. If it’s not safe to feel grief or hurt or anger or intense unmet desire, we are prone to tell a more pristine story about how things used to be. We will play up the beautiful and happy memories and hide away the dark or disturbing ones. We will bury our deeper longings and settle for a superficial nostalgia.

I’m nearly finished reading Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance. All his writings invite a healthy asceticism that helps reclaim and re-order the intense longing of the human heart. These longings are “very good,” and can only truly be satisfied through God’s plan to have us share in his divine life and become truly like Him. Our deepest nostalgia is for our heavenly homeland, which leaves its traces everywhere in this creation. We are homesick for the Kingdom of God, which is not of this world.

Nostalgia that only looks backwards will ultimately leave us disappointed, disillusioned, empty, and embittered. It will sap our Hope. This world and all the things in it are passing away. Nothing here can ultimately satisfy our intense and unquenchable longing.

Varden reflects on Jesus’ seemingly random reference: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). Lot’s wife looked back, and turned into a pillar of salt. As Varden explains it, we are prone to sacrifice a good future by turning back to what is left behind. Therefore, Jesus goes on to explain that we will lose our life if we try to save it, and find our life if we are willing to give all.

This fall, I’ve been reminding people of those words of Jesus, as I travel the nineteen counties of my diocese. I’ve been facilitating a few dozen listening sessions as we launch our renewal efforts, inviting a pivot from maintenance to mission. I’ve tried to avoid the equivalent of a Pawnee Town Hall Meeting, successfully in every case but one. In order to allow everyone a voice (especially Jesus!) we’ve included silent time to reflect and write. Of course, that leaves me reading through the written reflections of over 3,000 participants.

In my reading, I am finding no small amount of nostalgia for an “amazing” past that was probably not as flourishing and carefree as the person remembers. Nor is the nostalgia limited to one political or theological ideology. Many people, understandably (but unrealistically) just want things to go back to the way they used to be. Or they just want to hold on to some small scrap. Or they blame “those people” for wrecking everything. Or they are simply resigned to ongoing decline. Can you hear the grieving process here (denial, bargaining, blame, depression)? Neither our culture nor most of our church communities know how to grieve well these days. I am noticing a palpable proportionality: the more intense the nostalgia for a supposedly glamorous past, the less imagination there is for a hopeful future.

Nostalgia that gets stuck in the past enables us to bypass our grief. It becomes toxic and ultimately lethal. It will kill our Hope. It is only when we are willing to enter together the pain of the Cross and the Tomb that we can be surprised with the Hope of the resurrection.

The Mass allows us to experience genuine nostalgia. We remember the saving events of Jesus’ death and resurrection in a way that makes them truly present. But the Mass is also a memory of the future. We gain a foretaste and anticipation of the wedding feast of the Lamb. We become again and again what we one day will be – each of us individually and all of us collectively in a one-flesh union with the Bridegroom.

There is a reason why words like hiraeth or saudade or Sehnsucht have provoked endless reflection from poets and mystics. We were created for eternal communion with the living God. We ache for a homeland that we cannot yet fully receive.  For most humans most of the time, it is easier to bury or avoid or escape that longing.  To desire and not yet possess is perhaps the greatest suffering – known and embraced by all the Saints. The more they desired, the more they joyfully received, and the more they joyfully received, the more they suffered in their desiring.

This, perhaps, is why the Saints were so often unwelcomed and persecuted, not only or even chiefly by this world, but by the very Church they loved and served. The witness of the Saints awakens longing and invites conversion from a merely human nostalgia. In the presence of the Kingdom of God, there is no standing still, no comfortable plateaus to settle on. Any earthly power or privilege will be turned on its head, and exposed – not as evil – but as inadequate for answering our deepest questions or filling our deepest longings. Idols are often the beautiful work of human hands. We don’t like to remove them from the holy place of longing in our heart that belongs to God alone. Waiting with empty hands is scary.

What are your idols? What are the idols of your civic community or of your church community? Where does most of your nostalgic energy go?

As we celebrate another All Saints’ Day, may we feel their invitation to embrace our deepest longings and renew our trust that God is faithful and true to His promises. Come, Lord Jesus!

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Confabulation

My grandmother is 96. She is beginning to tell some rather interesting stories!

For several years already her sight and hearing have been failing, but that never stopped her from keeping informed of what was happening in the lives of family members. Once in a while, she would fill in the gaps with her own interpretation. It could be amusing or annoying, depending on her take. More recently, after years of being mentally sharp, she is showing signs of dementia – forgetting certain words, mixing up names, and – yes – telling some interesting stories. When she lacks certain pieces of the puzzle, she’s quite creative at filling in the gaps with her own narrative. And she sincerely believes her version of the story.

Her parish priest is from Poland, and four decades younger than she is. That doesn’t stop her from regaling me with stories of her long-deceased parents teaching him to speak Polish so well. This is an example of what neuroscientists call “confabulation.” It involves telling a false story while sincerely believing it to be true.

The human capacity to confabulate is by no means limited to those experiencing memory loss!

For example, I think of addicts chasing after a fix. Some of them go from church to church with a well-polished story, looking for a handout. The details of the story vary, but they invariably convey some heart-wrenching tragedy – “and all I need is __________ and my troubles will go away!” They get genuinely offended if you don’t believe their story. They have told it so often that, in the telling, they believe it themselves! You can, with skill and effort, expose them in an inconsistency or a lie. But it may not be kind or constructive to do so. They are likely to erupt with rage or blame, not at all liking the intense embarrassment and shame they are suddenly feeling amidst the exposure of untruth.

Another example is narcissism. There is increasing research linking narcissists with confabulation. In their deeply felt insecurity and shame, they exaggerate their achievements, or skillfully shift your attention away from their faults and failures. In the moment, they truly believe the falsehoods and distortions. If you have the wherewithal to cast light on the fuller truth, you are likely to pay for it!

I am also aware, in this age of social media and pop psychology, that “narcissism” is an overused term that is easily weaponized, without curiosity about the person or a desire to understand each human heart. What is labeled “narcissism” is actually a cluster of unpleasant or toxic behavioral symptoms, beneath which is cowering a terrified and ashamed little child who desperately wants to be loved.

 In my experience, we all have at least a little narcissism in us, because we all have shame lurking in the shadows, shame which we would rather avoid than face. We all have at least some moments in which we prefer to bypass uncomfortable memories or emotions, to live in denial, to minimize or downplay, to shade the truth, to omit relevant details, or to shift the focus onto someone else.

Confabulation is a common human experience because it emerges from a core human desire: to make sense out of what we are experiencing. Telling stories (some more true and some less true) is our go-to way of doing that.

Human beings are storytellers by nature. Whether we realize it or not, we are constantly attempting to make sense out of what we are experiencing. Even when our bodies rest in sleep, our brain toils on in our dreams, attempting to put the pieces together.

I was fascinated reading Brené Brown’s Rising Strong, in which she described our almost irresistible urge to tell stories to ourselves– even false ones– in order to make sense of things. Drawing from her research, she shared that there is actually a dopamine release that motivates us:

“Our brains reward us with dopamine when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories are patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity. Unfortunately, we don’t need to be accurate, just certain.”

The story we tell ourselves with great certainty becomes an interpretive lens for our day-to-day experience of life. It colors our perceptions, our judgments, and eventually our decisions.

If Sally is convinced that nobody loves her, she will begin noticing every slight and seeing it as a confirmation of that “truth.” If Fred is intensely ashamed of how he has harmed a loved one, he will avoid lingering in that shame for very long. Perhaps he shifts the blame onto the one who questions him; perhaps he goes into self-punishment or profusely apologies – all ways of getting people to look away from his shame. But is he willing to talk about what it was really like? Is he willing to exchange the story he is telling himself for the fuller truth? That is where genuine humility and courage enter in.

For many years, the story I told myself was that I wasn’t trying hard enough or being good enough. I was the problem. I wasn’t willing or ready to face the truer story of my loneliness and sadness and shame – and how they got there in the first place. Or I told myself that other people would change, too afraid to confront their behaviors and tell them what it is like for me. I tolerated toxic behaviors and allowed my dignity to be stomped on. I just had to be kinder, and they would change. All the while the sensations in my body and my intuitive sense warned me: if I actually spoke the truth about how they were really behaving, they would definitely not be willing to talk about it, and would find ways to make me pay. As it turns out, my intuition was spot on. When I did speak truth, they were not willing to talk about their behaviors, and they did make me pay.

As I’ve pointed out before, on the Day of Judgment, my story and yours will be fully told – in all truth. Facing the fuller truth can be scary, but it is also liberating – allowing us to come out of the shadows and become a whole person.

Knowing our human tendency to confabulate, what can we do? Two great women come to mind for me.

One is Virginia, a parishioner in my former parish, who is my grandma’s age. Like grandma, Virginia always wanted to know what all is going on. But she also had a marvelous habit of going straight to the source before repeating a rumor. “What’s going on with ___________?” she would often ask me, having heard the church ladies confabulating. I would clear up the confusion, and she would nod with understanding and satisfaction. What a gift her wisdom and discipline were! But doing so required her to abide in that uncomfortable place of not knowing all the pieces, and resisting the dopamine fix that comes with imposing an interpretation on the facts.

The other woman that comes to mind is the Virgin Mary. The Gospels offer us glimpses into many moments of her life. In each of them, she was in the middle of an overwhelming and disorienting situation. God impregnated her, and she didn’t fully understand how. She prepared for birth having no idea where it would happen (and when it did happen, it was amidst farm animals, and her baby’s bed was the feeding trough). They were to flee into Egypt, without knowing how long. Her lost-and-found Son was in his Father’s house, but what does that really mean? The same Son, now 33, is being tortured and killed and buried – and all will be well – but how?

Again and again, Mary exemplifies a willingness to be in the middle of a great story, without yet having all the answers. She shows us that it is possible to abide and wait for the conflict to be resolved, resisting the false satisfaction of confabulation. She was willing – repeatedly – to have her narrative disrupted and to be reoriented toward a bigger and better horizon. She is the preeminent model of humility and courage. She was eager to embrace a fuller and fuller truth because she was always allowing herself to be embraced by that Truth.

What are the ways that you and I tend to confabulate? What are the painful truths that we would rather not admit? In what ways are we still in the middle of a story, with no idea how the tension will be resolved? Can we watch and wait in Hope?

The invitation is there for all of us!

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Communion Heals Shame

Shame secretly torments every one of us as fallen human beings. It affects every single relationship we have – with God, with each other, and with ourselves.

Recall the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. The devil seduces by inviting a mistrust of God’s goodness and generosity. Once Adam and Eve choose to be their own gods, they experience the reality of that rupture. They run and hide from God (as though he were a petty tyrant eager to punish them). They sew fig leaves and begin protecting themselves against each other. Their good human passions become unruly – in themselves and their descendants. One need not read far into Genesis to experience the downward spiral of depravity. We begin to use, manipulate, envy, hate, and kill.  Shame is at the root of it all.

Brené Brown is a fellow Catholic who often speaks or writes about shame. She describes it as “an intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

I see shame as the shadow side of communion. It warns us when connectedness is under threat. It shows up in our bodies as a neurological warning signal, swiftly and intensely seizing our attention and launching us into a survival response. We all know the experience of “overreacting” in the present moment. What is really going on? Our body is feeling the familiarity of rejection, abandonment, failure, or humiliation. And our limbic brain is catapulting us into a survival response. Without even thinking, our defenses spring into action: fawn, fight, flight, freeze, or (as a last resort) shutting down. Depending on the situation (and on the skills we’ve learned over the years), we placate or smooth things over; we power up and begin shaming the other person; we change the subject or leave the room (or grab our phone and plunge into our screen); we freeze up and just take it; or we go numb and stop feeling anything. In intense situations of threat, these are actually brilliant responses that give us a better chance of surviving! But in everyday life they really rupture our relationships.

Unhealed shame fuels contempt. I have always found it to be the case that those of us who are hard on others are experiencing (or intensely avoiding) our own shame. Our self-contempt shifts into a contempt of others and an urge to make them pay. Just spend a minute or two on social media and I think you’ll see what I’m talking about!!

In my own life, God has provided many moments of melting my shame. One was totally life-changing.  I was a 23-year-old in the seminary in Washington, D.C. Some very challenging circumstances – including a severe lapse of judgment on my part – left me feeling intense shame for months. I remember one Sunday simply not wanting to go to Mass anywhere. I couldn’t bear being seen. That put me in an intense bind. Not going to Sunday Mass was simply unthinkable for me, but that inner conviction was in a mighty tug-of-war with my desperate urge to hide and isolate. Even attending anonymously across the street to the National Shrine felt unbearable. I slinked upstairs to a little chapel to pray, and there found two resident scholars, Romanian priests. They were offering Mass in their own language, and I had a way out of my dilemma – for now.

It was in this season that my friend Peter “saw” me and drew near to me. Peter was a 37-year-old who was about to be ordained a priest. I desperately miss him – he died in his sleep only four months into priesthood! He and I had many talks, in which – without naming it at the time – he helped me feel seen, soothed, safe, and secure (to borrow language from Curt Thompson). I didn’t want to be seen. I told him as much. I’ll never forget his words: A good friend is someone who sees right through you – and loves you anyway. And that was the thing – Peter wasn’t seeing the perfectionist version of me, nor the always-succeeding version of me. He was seeing all of me, telling the full truth, and (for some reason I simply couldn’t fathom) he was still eager to have a relationship with me. It was so dumbfounding and so healing.

He provided for me what Jesus so often provided in the Gospel – with the apostle Peter, with the woman caught in adultery, with Zaccheus, with Matthew, or with the woman at the well. He saw right through them, but he saw them in their wholeness. He invited them into communion: follow me.

The Greek word is koinonia – which means not only “fellowship” (as many Protestant Bibles translate it) but a true sharing or participation in the communion of the Trinity and of the whole Body of Christ. Because Jesus has reconciled us to the Father and to each other through his blood shed on the Cross, we now have a place to belong. In a sense, our shame is speaking truth – we can never become “worthy” by our own best efforts – and we don’t have to! Jesus declares us worthy and invites us to be secure in his Father’s love. THEN we can begin growing and bearing fruit.  Apart from him we can do nothing.

But it’s never just “me and Jesus.”  He always places us in koinonia with each other. He desires his Church to be a community in which we all have ways of experiencing what I did way back when with my friend Peter. We all need fellow Christians who see right through us and love us anyway!

I invite each of us to recognize the ways that we sabotage or block real community from happening in our families and in our churches: Do we let our whole self be seen? When and how and by whom? Do others feel totally safe and secure in our presence, knowing they don’t have to hustle or hide? Why or why not?

Authentic communion heals shame. We all ache for that – and are perhaps terrified of it at the same time. Will we allow the Holy Spirit to create it in our midst?

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