Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

January 26, 1997

Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.
The Wounded Healer
-- Henri Nouwen

Stephen Levine, who is known for his work with dying people, tells of his experience with a woman who was hospitalized with bone metastasis, cancer that had spread to the bone, and was causing her agonizing pain. Levine says, "Her way of relating to the world was to mercilessly judge all those with whom she came in contact. She had been a tough businesswoman and a difficult parent--to such a degree that, although she was apparently dying of cancer, her children would not visit her, having been pushed out of her heart and her life so often. She had never even met her grandchildren. Nurses, doctors, visitors were all greeted with anger and profanity. So she was usually alone in her misery, wrapped in self-pity."

Then one night something strange happened. It can be seen as a kind of initiation into what Schweitzer called the "Fellowship of Those Who Bear the Mark of Pain." One night when she was in excruciating pain, instead of resisting the pain, she drew a breath into it, and something in her shifted: "She surrendered for a moment and sllowed the suffering to move through her, giving herself to it as her own. The turbulent waters of her lifelong resistance and suffering broke through and swept over her--she experienced herself not as that woman in the hospital, but as an Eskimo woman dying in childbirth. A moment later, she said, she was a black-skinned Biafran woman nursing a starving child from a slack breast, dying of hunger and disease. The next moment she was another woman, lying beside a river in her same fetal position, her back crushed by a rockfall, dying alone. Image after image arose, which she described afterward as feeling the suffering of "ten thousand people in pain."

The transformation that grew out of this moment was remarkable, for it opened her heart to the suffering of others for the first time. Levine describes her as having become a totally different woman: "In the next six weeks, until she died, her room became the center of healing within the hospital, the place where love was most radiant and evident. She asked her children for forgiveness and pleaded for their return to her life, and within a week the grandchildren she had never met before were sitting next to her on the bed, playing 'with Grandma . . . with Grandma's sweet, soft hands.'

"During those six weeks, the pain in her body diminished and the pain in her mind began to dissolve as her heart opened to encompass more and more life. Although her body continued to deteriorate and she continued to be drawn gradually toward death, she died as healed as anyone we have ever seen."¹

When there is a shell around a person's heart, and that shell needs to be broken open, the breaking often begins with grief--grief stored up from loss, from disappointment, from betrayal. This grief needs to move like an animal force up through the whole body--for it is stored in our very flesh--that we might be washed clean by our tears, and feel newborn, open see others, perhaps for the first time, in all of their humanness, and to care as we have never been able to care. But how to we get through to that buried grief? So long as we are fighting, so long as we are (or think we are) in control, so long as we have a plan, we may not reach that tenderness within. And so pain and trauma and illness sometimes give us a gift by making us vulnerable. Vulnerable: open to hurt, capable of being wounded. It is only in that condition, only in that most tender place, that we can begin to practice true compassion, both for ourselves and for others, can stop comparing and judging and can begin reaching out, to say, "Sister, Brother, I know you as my own, I know you as my self."

There is another way to go, of course. And you all have known people who have taken this route, when trouble comes. The route of indignation, of bitterness. The woman whose husband left her 30 years ago, and her emotional self still sucks its only life from her hate for him. Her children can hardly bear to be around her, and she has allowed no new life, only the putrid decay of the old. Or the 89-year-old woman a minister friend of mine told me about--when she was told by her doctor that she had a terminal illness, she came to her minister and asked, "Why me?" Or the perpetual victim, who can't seem to move beyond, "See what they did to me."

"Indignation is a bondage," says Bertrand Russell, "for it compells our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world." Yes, indignation is a bondage, for it binds the limbs in the ropes of resentment, it turns the open hand into a fist, it changes the heart into stone. In American literature, the greatest literary symbol we have of a man feeding off hatred and resentment is Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. The great white whale has taken Ahab's leg, and he has vowed at any cost to kill the whale. The whale is a creature of the natural world, and Ahab is subject to natural law, but in his narcissism, he feels he should not be as other men. So he sacrifices everything--his men, his ship--on the altar of his hate.

There is another way, a better way. It is the way of acceptance, of relinquishment. It is a spiritual path, and not an easy one to travel, for we as human beings so deeply fear not being in control, not being able to call the shots. The way of relinquishment seems almost counter to our nature, counter to pride, counter to strength. But as a matter of fact, it is the only way to redeem our suffering, for when we take this step, we come to offer our pain as a gift. Have you ever thought of gifting your pain? Of learning from it? Of asking how you might make of your suffering a present to the world? Of becoming a wounded healer?

That is an oxymoron, a wounded healer, is it not? How can the wounded make another whole? But in fact in the healing tradition, one finds that the ability to heal comes directly out of one's being wounded and moving through that woundedness, to a place a deep wisdom and compassion. In the shaman tradition, the initiation stories of the healer invariably include pain, suffering, risk. The Yakut old people say of the shaman's power to heal: "He is able only to help with those ailments who source or evil spirit has been given its share of shaman-flesh." For example, if the spirits eat leg flesh, the shaman will be able to cure the silments of the legs. Great shamans suffer dismemberment three times; little shamans only once. The shaman gives himself up to be slain, and becomes then "like a great field that is plowed, ripped open for seed to be planted." It is important to note, though, that the shaman is not only wounded but also has effected a process of self-healing, and only then can begin to help with the transformation of others. By dying in life, he has tasted immortality and therefore is not threatened or put off by the pain of others. He laughs easily. "The faces of many shamans are riven with suffering and lined with laughter."²

Many of you in this congregation have given yourselves to healing roles--we have many counselors, psychotherapists, physicians, nurses, social workers, and I think I should include teachers, for the wise teacher knows that teaching is not just about skills but about personhood. And my guess is that insofar as you have suffered and have come through that suffering on the other side, you are all the more able to help others heal.

I think about my own life, my own choices, sometimes--and I wonder at my journey. Sometimes I find myself wishing this life away and wishing I had had another kind of life. Yearning still for what was missing years ago. I see an older woman I admire for her intelligence and grace and beauty, and I say to myself, "What if I had had a mother like that?" Or a father who wasn't struggling with alcohol. I think about the virulent racism. I think about the home I grew up in, barren of music, barren of reading matter except for The Reader's Digest and The Louisiana Conservationist, which featured articles about spawning fish. What if I had been guided to a better college, as my own children have been? I remember all through high school planning and scheming that one day, one day, I would go 50 miles away to Shreveport and go shopping. That was my dream. Yes, sometimes I wish I had grown up differently.

But no, that's just idle dreaming. No, not really. I know that everything I am comes from the path I have walked. What I can give you is rooted in my past, and so I will not disown it. It is a gift. My ability to hear you and care about your pain; my passion for learning; my insistence upon excellence; my outrage at injustice; my writing, rooted in my immersion in the King James Bible from the time I was small. "The great illusion of leadership," says Henri Nouwen, "is to think that <one> can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there."³

A question that each of us might ask is, "How have we been gifted by our woundedness? And what do our wounds call us to do?" Not that I really adhere to the idea that God sends us suffering to teach us something--I don't buy that--but still it is true that we can make our suffering be the occasion of growth and deepening. And it can jump-start us in a new direction in our lives. My spiritual director is a Catholic nun, who recently had a serious threat to her vision. She was told she could possibly go blind. Since she is a scholar and a teacher, you can imagine how devastating this news might be. But when I asked her how she responded, she just said, "I thought to myself, I wonder what new path God might have in store for me now."

You see, we are not saved through trying to heal ourselves alone, but by entering into the healing of our community. We might ask, "With this new understanding, carved out of my very flesh perhaps, with this new wisdom, how can I move in a redemptive way in the larger world?" We are not just patients, we are also citizens. In an amusing and challenging article, Jungian James Hillman suggests that therapy should investigate your political life as well as your sexual, instinctual life. Could you be disfunctional politically and suffer from that as much as from something else, he asks. Who did your mother and father vote for? Who did they contribute to? Did you vote in the last election? Spending a whole hour talking about <Newt Gingrich> might as important as talking about your high school dates. He's being his usual playful, outrageous self here--but he has a serious point. How do we use our own pain to redeem not just ourselves, but others, even those strangers whose names we do not know, yet we know we are one.

This past Wednesday Representative Elizabeth Furse told in the Oregonian the painful story of ending her pregnancy years ago before abortion was legal. She told how she was given the choice of having a hysterectomy and never being able to have another child or possibly having a baby with serious deformities, and sadly electing the hysterectomy. She has been a strong advocate for women's right to choose through the years and through the courageous act of telling her personal story, is trying to warn us all that we must be ever vigilant, or we will lose that right once more. Out of her pain comes her witness.

There is another story in the Oregonian that caught my eye this week--you may have seen it on the front page this past Friday. It is the story of a wounded healer. In fact, two of them, one an elderly white woman dying of cancer, and the other a young black certified nurse's assistant, who dreams of one day becoming a registered nurse. The two have come particularly close, and the nurse holding her patient tenderly and singing to her, singing that child's song that some of us may have sung in Bible School, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." This is something rare in a hospital setting. This is presence. This is compassion.

The patient, Emily Jean Anderson, has with her husband raised 6 children and a foster daughter. When her oldest headed off to high school, she took courses leading to her certification as a licensed practical nurse--not the registered nurse that she hoped to become--but it was as much as the family could afford. She nursed in several hospitals and a school. Now it is her time to be nursed. She is frail and dependent, and in the last few weeks members of her large family have gathered to tell her goodby. Inspired by the care of Angela Missouri, the nurse's assistant, the family has decided to set up a scholarship fund administered through the Oregon Health Sciences Foundation, a living memorial to help Angela Missouri and people like her get their education.

The two have become fast friends, Emily Jean and Angela--one an elderly white woman with grown children, and the other a young black woman raising three children on her own. In a voice trained in church choirs Angela sings as she makes up beds, hums gospel tunes as she bathes patients. "I know singing calms people sometimes," she says. "They appreciate it." Emily Jean does. She points to an ugly scar on Angela's chest, the result of a domestic dispute years ago. Emily Jean calls the scar Angela's angel wings. "I want to help her go to school," she says.

And so as Emily Jean's life comes to an end, she will know that though she did not become a registered nurse as she had dreamed of being, Angela and others will take her place, will carry that dream forward. And Angela--one can only guess at the trauma that ended with a knife to the heart, scarring her forever. Where did she find the kindness, the gentleness, for this stranger? Out of her woundedness comes great healing power.

People are searching so hard these days, searching for THE ANSWER. They are looking for the right encounter that can show them the way, a voice that seems clear, a compelling path. Maybe some of you are here today because of a search for some kind of inner peace or fulfillment. A way around pain and doubt and loneliness. Let's start, then, with what we might call the healing power of disillusionment. You will experience pain and doubt and loneliness. If you have a heart, you will suffer, both for yourself and for the hurting in our world.

But the good news is that that is not the last word. Because when we in community share our weakness, confess our fear, hope begins to take form, and despair begins to fade. Our wounding becomes the occasion for deepening, for ripening, for a new vision of creativity. I say, along with the Apostle Paul, "we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28) This doesn't mean that everything that happens is good; it does mean that we can make good out of everything that happens. Are you in pain? Give your pain as a good gift, and ask what on earth can be done with it. You will find a way springing up like a fountain before you.
So be it. Amen.



¹Stephen Levine, "The Healing for Which We Took Birth," in Healers on Healing, ed. Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield. Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1989, pp. 198-99 (adapted).

²Joan Halifax, Shaman: the Wounded Healer. New York: Crossroad, 1982. pp. 20, 25, 92.

³Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. Image Books, Doubleday: New York, 1972. p. 72.

Copyright © 2000, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.