Sue Monk Kidd: False Selves

Sue Monk Kidd: False Selves

“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.” Kahlil Gibran

I especially relate to Sue Monk Kidd’s naming of our false selves or masks we wear that we initially put on to protect ourselves from the difficulties we encounter from our very beginnings, but these identities are not our true self. These are similar but an expanded, feminine form of Fritz Kunkel’s four: Turtle, Star, Eternal Boy, and Tyrant. Kidd describes the Little Girl with a Curl (pleaser, very good), Tinsel Star (overachiever, perfectionist, performer), Rapunzel (waiting to be rescued), Little Red Hen (duty), Chicken Little (fear based like Turtle), Tin Woodman (no heart or connection to body). She offers some advice as how to recognize these false selves and how to take off the mask with each of them.

In When the Heart Waits, Kidd challenges us to think about who we would be if all of the roles we play were suddenly stripped away. I connect to her writing about the difficulty of letting go or diapause. I remember my difficulty completely retiring from medicine. I worked four days a week, then twice a week, then twice a month, and finally one day a month. It is so hard to let go of a persona that has been ours for forty years.

Kidd describes the tension that arises when we recognize these false selves that have dominated our lives. She describes an orphanage of banished selves still crying out inside of us. What happens when we still hear the “ego logic” of the Star and the Red Hen driving us to promote ourselves or responding to the Little Girl with the Curl who feels abandoned and unloved and wants to please? What happens when the Star decides not to perform because she learns more about God’s love and no longer needs to be approved by others? I remember this was my persona from an early age when my grandfather first put me up on a picnic table when I as maybe 9 or 10 years old to play my accordion at our family 4th of July picnic. She has been so much a part of my life for so long.

On the other hand, we know we are connected to our real or true self when we respond out of love rather than fear, and honesty rather than approval seeking. The Tin Man is healed by reconnecting our body to our mind, heart and soul by creative dialoguing with our body. I am reminded of the body exercises of Anthony DeMello.

Kidd believes that when we do find our true self and Rapunzel no longer gets someone to rescue her, and the Woodman recovers his heart and embraces his feelings and body, and the Little Girl with the Curl finds her own voice, and the Red Hen stops taking care of everyone else, and the Pleaser stops pleasing, that other people we live with may have difficulty. They no longer know how to react to us as our true self.

Kidd calls us to hold our false selves in our hands and trace our fingers over the masks we wear and begin to find the real person God created us to be.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Kidd, Brueggmann: Forgiveness

Kidd, Brueggmann: Forgiveness

“People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.”
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, Penguin 2003.

Prison Robben Island South Africa where Mandela lived for 17 of 28 years in prison

For myself, if someone has harmed me, I begin to think about them all the time and what I would like to do to them, expose them. They live rent free in my head and in essence become my higher power, my God. I do not want this person to be my God, my higher power. That is what brings me back to start the work of forgiveness. Yes, for me it is extremely hard work. Forgiveness is not forgetting. There are things we should never forget, the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, slavery, abuse, 9/ 11, Hurricanes Camille, Frederic, Ivan, Katrina, and now Harvey and Irma and Michael.

Walter Brueggmann1 writes about forgiveness especially from what we learn in the Old Testament. He writes that forgiveness is made impossible in a system of deeds-consequence when deeds have an unbreakable tight predictable connection to consequences with no way out. This is the law, and if you break it, this is what will happen to you. Amen. This is the basis of much religious preaching of “hell, fire, and damnation,” trying to frighten people into a moral life. Brueggmann believes that forgiveness is only possible when we realize the astonishing readiness of God to reach beyond deeds-consequences, to offer continually to us unlimited restoration and extravagant forgiveness.

There is nothing, nothing that we can do for which God does not forgive us, and we are called to do the same. When we begin to lead a life of pardoning and newness, we start to see the world not through our grievances but through gratitude. It is a new life, a different life. We saw it in Nelson Mandela who forgives his guards of his 27 years of imprisonment as he walks out of prison. He tells others who are harboring resentments and grievances, “if I do not forgive them, I am still in prison.” Buddhists call it the Great Compassion.

1Walter Brueggemann, “The Impossible Possibility of Forgiveness,” Journal of Preachers, Pentecost 2015, pp. 8-17.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Mary Dwyer: Forgiveness

Mary Dwyer: Forgiveness

“Forgiveness is not forgetting, not condoning not a form of absolution, not a pretense, not a once and for all decision, and not a sign of weakness but of strength.” Mary Dwyer, One Day Retreat of Contemplative Outreach, Learning to Forgive, February 10, 2018, St. Mark’s.

Last year at a Forgiveness Workshop with Mary Dwyer from Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., at St. Mark’s we learn some basics to start the journey of forgiveness. She reminds us that forgiveness is the only conditional part of the Lord’s Prayer, “forgive our sins, as we forgive others.”

Reconciliation involves both parties. Forgiveness involves only one party.

Mary cautioned us about forgiving too soon.

She used the process from Fr. William A. Meninger’s book, The Process of Forgiveness. The first stage of beginning to forgive involves claiming the hurt, often by writing about it. Telling our story also is a big part in Bishop Tutu’s book, The Book of Forgiving. In the second stage toward healing we feel guilt that maybe we did something wrong for this to happen. Here we are healed by comforting our inner child. In the third stage we see ourselves as the victim. Mary gave examples of how so many people get stuck in this stage. Their whole life is centered around some hurt many years ago. Support groups help in this stage as we see we are not the only ones who have been harmed. In the fourth stage we become very anger about the hurt. Anger brings with it a huge amount of energy and clarity. If we can transform that energy, we can then start healing as we release this energy and become whole again. What helps me the most is the knowledge that the person who has harmed me is still hurting me as long I cannot forgive them.

Mary then described a process of active imagination with God and the person who has harmed us called the Forgiveness Prayer. After a period of Centering Prayer, we imagine our own sacred space with God very close to us. She imagines she is sitting in God’s lap.My sacred space would be sitting on the white sandy beach by the ocean watching the waves come gently in as the sea gulls fly in and out at the water’s edge. We then invite someone who has harmed us to come into our space. We tell them all that they have done to harm us. Then we ask them if we have harmed them and then ask them for forgiveness. Sometimes having a picture of the person who harmed us may be helpful as we speak to him or her. This is not a one-time event but may require many encounters. For me, the Forgiveness Prayer is so helpful when the person who harmed me refuses to talk about it. The Prayer allows us to talk to that person in a safe place where we cannot be harmed again, but also to acknowledge mistakes we made as well.

Mary also recommends praying daily for the person who has harmed us until we are ready to forgive.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.