Carol Howard Merritt’s book, Healing Spiritual Wounds: Reconnecting With a Loving God After Experiencing a Hurtful Church, begins with an explosive situation.
The book opens with a panic-stricken teenager, (the author), retreating
into her room to escape an abusive father. As her father and mother are caught
in their own brokenness, the teen begins to ask a series of questions, each
ending with a haunting refrain.
“Fear choked me as I heard the voices of my mother and father,
rising and cresting, with angry rhythms. I tried to figure out a strategy if it
became dangerous… What should I do?”
Fortunately, God seems to meet her, at least temporarily, to
calm her down. She simply breathed deeply, sat down on her bed and “an
overwhelming sense that it would be okay – that I would be okay – flooded me.
God surrounded me and embraced me.”
Merritt grew up in a Christian household, but the religion
didn’t lend itself to answers, and, to a large extent, was a source of the problem.
To begin to unravel unholy church experiences is complex, says Merritt.
Especially for individuals who choose to hold onto their spirituality, no
matter how wounded they have become.
“I wasn’t afraid to ask the questions or deal with the
consequences if I eventually found religion unbearable,” she writes. “It’s just
that when someone complains of religious wounds, we’re often told to quit going
to church and disconnect from spiritual practices. No doubt this works for some
people, but others see the world through an irremovable religious lens. Asking
us to stop believing and practicing would be so unnatural that it would cause
certain blindness.”
From this point, Merritt begins to deconstruct the
fundamentalist, paternalistic brand of Christianity she grew up with, and, at
the same time, offers meditative practices to foster healing.
“When students of humankind want to understand a culture, they
take a careful look at its religions, myths, and artifacts. A society that
worships a wrathful God will reflect violent characteristics and honor those
traits in its people. They will begin to believe that God calls them to war
rather than forgiveness.
“It’s not just an anthropological understanding, but it is
also a neurological reality. Worshipping an angry God changes our cerebral
chemistry. The amygdala, that primeval bit in the brain that triggers fear and
anger gets a workout when we worship a God of fury, it becomes stronger, and we
can begin to reflect that rage.”
By extension, Merritt argues that individual views of God can
be reflected in society. A God of wrath creates guilt and shame. A God of love
creates a society in which peace and love are valued.
To counteract these outcomes, Merritt introduces several
examples of meditative exercises meant to help readers re-engage the church. One
of the first meditative exercises that Merritt suggests is to realize that
“Often God’s presence is understood through creation or actions, and the way to
God is diverse… Can you recover your union with God through creation? Go on a
walk, if you’re able. Look around, particularly at the elements that surround
you, and finish these sentences:
God is like air, because…
God is like fire, because…
God is like the ground, because…
God is like water, because…”
The whole point is to latch on to what elements of creation
“makes you most alive to God’s presence… then intentionally practice these
things… [K]now that an important healing process is taking place as you learn
to love God and be loved by God.”
A big part of emotional healing for Merritt is the realization
that “there are core emotions such as anger, sadness and joy. And there are
inhibitory emotions such as guilt, anxiety, and shame. When we experience core
emotions, we also experience the release that follows. But the inhibitory
emotions block a person from feeling core emotions and thus from feeling the
release.
“Religion can be an especially powerful inhibiting force,
because religious messages so effectively produce guilt and shame…
“[I]n order for us to have wholeness, we need to reclaim our
emotional shards. You can start to do this by acknowledging your emotions.”
Merritt suggests that readers “take your emotional
temperature, and check in with yourself throughout the day.” And then noticing
patterns of behavior – “do you feel guilt surrounding certain emotions? Do you
try to pretend some feelings don’t exist? Do you have a go-to emotion? Does
gender factor into your emotional life?”
She offers an exercise to help accomplish this.
Later on in Healing Spiritual Wounds, she argues that how we
view ourselves has ramifications on our world view. As Jesus taught, the
ability to love ourselves is wrapped up in our ability to love others.
“How one views oneself is a common concern when people are
longing for spiritual wholeness. It makes sense. Advertisements swarm us each
day, reminding us of what we do not have… The average American is exposed to
three hundred sixty ads every day… Every hour we are awake, we are told
twenty-two times that we not rich, thin, young, beautiful, ripped, or stylish
enough…
“Even though our culture has been criticized for being too
narcissistic, being overly self-conscious can be a mask one learns to put on to
hide damage and abuse. In the midst of all this, our religious understandings
don’t always help…”
Merritt relates her own experience of attending a seminary
that taught a fundamentalist doctrine. “Through the practice of
evangelism, I realized I was hurting people with the premise of my
evangelism. I thought we all deserved to go to hell.”
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| Carol Howard Merritt |
As part of her seminary training, Merritt had to hit the
streets of Chicago, witnessing to people. “I believed that God would send these
beautiful people to eternal suffering unless they repeated the magic words [of
the Salvation Prayer] after me. If I loved them, after fifteen minutes of
noticing the curve of their cheeks and the angle of their nose, wouldn’t God
love them more? Or was God’s wrath so violent that it caused some sort of
divine blindness? If God created them, and blew breath into them, why would God
care about that prayer, that random recipe for salvation? And what did I really
believe about people if I thought that we all deserved eternal burning?”
Merritt makes an excellent point when she writes, “The denigrating
images our religious traditions can inflict on people can move us to imagine
ourselves as lowly creatures, undeserving of God’s love… Much of this belief
system was designed to highlight the grace of God, but it is unnecessary to
make a creature look bad in order for a Creator to look even better.”
Once again, Merritt offers a meditative practice to help clear
the theological air.
She takes on Augustine, noting that he “moves the realm of sin
from what we do to who we are. The sin is no longer an action,
but a being, a woman. So he makes a distinct, damning move from guilt to shame
when he judges not the action but the person.”
Merritt takes on proponents of the ‘prosperity gospel’ who
preach a “faith as palpably demonstrated by wealth and places the individual
over community. It’s message that ‘God wants to bless you with wealth….’ Disseminating
the idea that money equals the good life, and that if you do what the Lord
wants, then you will reap those blessings…
“The shadow side of these beliefs can heap shame on the poor
and lead to the understanding that those who struggle deserve their lot in life…”
So economic inequality fueled by social injustice gets ignored. On this point
Merritt concludes: “As we keep hiding our hardships, individual responsibility
turns into isolated suffering.”
About the subject of patriarchy in the church, Merritt defines
it as “a system that promotes male privilege, or an unearned advantage that’s
available to men while it’s denied to women…
“A patriarchal society has an obsession with control because
patriarchy maintains its privilege through restraining women or men who might
threaten it… In the religious arena, Christianity remains male-dominated,
identified, and centered through our masculine ideas of God, by not allowing
women to be in authority, and by building its theological systems based solely
on the actions of men.”
Towards the end of Healing Spiritual Wounds, Merritt discusses
the central idea of fundamentalism – individual salvation – versus corporate
salvation.
“When a loving mother suffers a miscarriage, it would be cruel
to fault a mother for the loss. Instead, we honor her grief and suffer with
her. In the same way, when we suffer wounds, we can understand the nurture and
comfort of God, who is the source of all life. Through this shift, we move from
understanding salvation as an individual act of submitting to the Father to
realizing that we work alongside God for the salvation of all creation… God saves
us not in a solitary act of murmured a prayer but through pulsing, vibrant
community. It is not because of our individual striving or saying some magic
words. The act of salvation begins and ends with God, and we can participate in
it if we wish, for God is pregnant with us and all of creation.”
Merritt continues: “If I were to be born of God, then God had
to be mother… A good mom. She was a mother who would love her children, no
matter what that child might do and no matter what her child might believe. God
would mourn with loss and rejoice with pleasure.”
With these ideas of religion and God, Merritt explains “God
didn’t withhold favor based on a particular belief system… God was not over me,
judging me, waiting for my missteps. God was under me, grounding me. My faith
didn’t have to be a constant struggle to win God’s approval because God was for
me.”
For those struggling with past hurts due to religion, or faith
stream; for those hungry for a deeper spiritual understanding and connection with
God, I highly recommend Carol Howard Merritt’s Healing Spiritual Wounds.
