This is a transcribed talk, that deals with how our wounds can sometimes be the opening through which light and new learning comes to us.
THE GOLD IN THE WOUND
(a talk given by John Connor)
My topic today is what I call "The Gold In the Wound"--how our wounds and
tragedies can be portals to a new consciousness. And in that little title
there is "gold" and there is "the wound." I thought I'd begin by talking a
bit about the wounds and then move into the gold. I made a short list of
some of the ways we get wounded and thought you might add some ideas of
your own.
Many of us have childhood hurts and "romantic" wounds. Betrayal. People
who we thought were our friends turn out to be untrustworthy. So I'd like
to put it out to you. Think of ways that we get wounded in our lives.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Death of a loved one.
JOHN: That's a big one. Somebody earlier mentioned divorce which, of
course, is a loss in its own way.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Betrayal.
JOHN: Exactly. And feeling dismissed by others. Have you ever experienced
that? Maybe somebody didn't insult you outright, but they were dismissive
of something you said or an idea that you had.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Loss of a job.
JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Feeling humiliated, which can be part of losing a
job and feeling humiliated in front of others particularly. The gap
between the first time I tried comedy and the second time I tried it was
thirteen years. That's how bad the first time went! I went down in flames
my first time up. I didn't feel too bad about having laid an egg in front
of strangers as much as the fact that I had six friends there who had to
see me twisting in the wind. And then there was also something that was
mentioned, loss of a loved one. So I'm going to tell you about some of my
own wounds, little pieces of my life story, and how they tie into the
topic.
It's about the time of the eighth grade when teachers start asking you,
"What do you want to be when you grow up?" So we tend to thinkabout
careers and that type of thing. I first thought of a couple of men thatI
really admired, and they were both ministers, so I thought, Maybe I'llbe
a minister when I grow up. I didn't know if I was good enough, butthat's
what I thought I would do. And so after high school I took my first
seminary courses. The church I was raised in is very small, and whatsome
would classify as new-age Christian mysticism, called the Emissaries of
Divine Light. And the approach of the seminary training, called Servers
Training School, was that if you're a minister you are there to serve--so
ministers were called "servers." And the training involved several months of
classes, then some independent study living and working in one of the
retreat centers, plus working on one of the church's organic
farms. The retreat center I went to was one several, this one with a
hundred and fifty people living in a communal setting with a beautiful
feeling of a shared sense of purpose.
So it was pretty great stuff, and I completed that when I was about
twenty-two. But I didn't go out and seek a church or a place to serve as a
minister. Because the Emissaries is such a small church, very few people
are full time ministers who get paid for it. Most people are, you might
say, lay ministers in the sense that they have to have a regular day-job. My
parents did this as well. So I started focusing on my career and, being a
young man, dating and such. But as time went on I started to feel less and
less worthy to be a minister. I had these perfectionist ideals which I
talked a little bit about when I spoke here in January. I had
perfectionist ideals about what a minister should be.
In the meantime I got married in '88, and within a year or two we decided
to have a family. But after another year or two nothing was happening in
the normal or natural way of fertility, so we decided to look into
infertility treatments. And so we spent about five years with that,
starting off with hormone therapy and then moving on to in vitro
fertilizations and then zygote inter-fallopian transfers. It was a
continual thing with mounting expense. But finally we got pregnant in'94,
and it was great; we were delighted and life was moving along. Aboutfive
and a half months into the pregnancy we started to have a bit of a
problem, and so we went to the hospital and the doctor seemed a bit grim
but there was hope, too, that there could be some surgical interventionto
keep everything together. Maybe if my wife Bonnie, who is right here,
stayed in bed for three months we could hope to get the pregnancy to
thirty-six or thirty-eight weeks and everything would be fine.
But it didn't work out that way. The next day there was what is called an
abruption of the placenta, and so the baby was going to be born. There was
no stopping it. But a baby that little is too small to live outside her
mom. So our daughter Sarah was born, and she died about two and a half
hours after she was born. This was a totally unexpected event in our
lives. We had spent so long trying to get pregnant and trying to have
children. I was even starting to worry about what I would do aboutthings
like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome after the baby was born, but it didn't
occur to me that this really could happen. It brought me to my knees. It
was the worst thing that had ever happened in our lives and, of course,
Sarah lost her life.
One of things that happened is that it threw our whole lives up for
review: what does this mean? And what is the meaning and purpose of mylife
now? Even though I had a sense of purpose before we got pregnant,
afterwards it seemed like all purpose was gone. And in terms of thetitle
of the sermon this morning, it's certainly the deepest wound I've ever
had.
And so one of the things we decided to do a couple of months after
Sarah died was to go on a trip. I wanted to get away from my regularlife.
I wanted to get away from my business and from my home. And yet I wanted
to go TO something, and I wanted to ask people, "What is yourpurpose?" I
had the idea first to go to some of my old spiritual mentors who were
meaningful to me and seemed wise. But then I broadened the tent--Ididn't
know who would have an answer for me, so I decided not only to ask my
ministers, but also I wanted to ask the clerk at the Subway store andthe
person behind the counter at the motel where we stayed. And so we did.
We spent a few weeks driving around the West, from Texas up intoColorado,
over into Arizona and New Mexico. Anybody who we seemed to have enoughof
a connection to listen to us, we asked the question, "What is thepurpose
of your life?" I remember one girl in particular at a Subway inLoveland,
Colorado, probably about nineteen, said, "Well I don't know."We said,
"Okay, that's honest." But after we walked out and were in ourcar, we
noticed she was cleaning off the counter, deep in thought. So it was
actually a blessing to ask her the question so that she could start
entertaining it. While we found that most of the people didn't have an
extraordinarily new or profound answer, I was pleasantly surprised that
most people had something to say about the fact that their purpose wasto
be helpful, to be a blessing to another. That related to a sense of
purpose I had had, too.
Finally we got to the headquarters of my church, where there were several
people I wanted to ask the question of--and did. Then one fellow, CliffPenwell, said, "Well, I'd like to tell you what I think your purpose is." Iwas open to
that, and we arranged to get together for lunch.
During the meal he started to say some nice things to me about me.
Like many of us, I'm quite adept at deflecting those things because of the
internal monologue that tells us negative things about ourselves. We tend to
have full faith in those! And so as he was telling me these positive things
my mind was thinking, "I've got to bounce that one off me, because that doesn't
really fit with the negative things that I know about myself."
I was sitting there deflecting the things he was saying, when he said,
"No, John. Listen, you are a priest."
It brought everything together that I had felt as a young boy, and in that moment his words leapt over all those doubts I had. After Sarah died a lot of things got laid to waste and a lot of things got let go of. When he said that to me so directly and so "on the nose" for me, I couldn't speakfor awhile; I ended up in tears. I was so thankful that somebody who I didn't even know very well was able to see this about me and tell it to me.
So I couldn't deny it anymore or pretend that I wasn't good enough. All
these feelings about not being good enough, not feeling pure enough, not
feeling like I've grown enough, were still present but they began to not
matter as much. Here I am, imperfect, but there's something I can dowith
my imperfect self. That's what I started to see.
When I got back home I gave a sermon of my own thoughts - something I hadn't done since I had been about twenty. With the exception of reading some spiritual material that somebody else had written as part of the service, I hadn't offered words of my own between the time I was 20 to the time I was 35 years old. And so this offering of my own service was a symbol to me, because my fear had diminished - it was not totally gone from me but it was diminished. I was
ready to stand up in front of a group of people and say, "Here is my
perspective...." It was a golden part of my experience
subsequent to what had happened in me.
I don't believe that God sends calamities to us to give us life lessons; I
don't think God thought, "Well, this guy needs to learn some life lessons so
I'll kill his daughter. Let's see what he makes out of that."
Life on earth contains some slings and arrows along with it, and sometimes we see something new subsequent to painful events, if we look at them a little bit
differently. There can be gold in the wound. Some of that gold for me has
to do with increased compassion. Although I think I was a fairly
compassionate person before the death of my daughter, I remember that I
wanted to avoid things like being around somebody who was very
ill - perhaps even dying - because it made me uncomfortable. I wasn't trying
to be mean, but it made me queasy and I didn't want to be around suffering.
But a few months after I returned from our trip I wanted to visit a friend
who was in the hospital. She had had a mastectomy and was really having a
tough time. But she was a trooper - even though she was being sick
into her little pan when I arrived at her room, she looked up and said,
"Oh, there's no chair for you, John. Somebody get a chair forJohn."
Gracious to the last.
Now it used to be that I would have wanted to be in a
hospital room the shortest period of time possible. But this changed with
increased compassion. All I wanted to do was be there and hold her hand
and see what I could do that might be of help to her.
One of the things she asked for was more morphine. She had another friend
there and we were both with her. I went to get the nurse for the morphine,
and after she fell asleep I left. She was having such a tough time, and in
six months they were going to remove her other breast. She was elderly,
and it seemed like so much. I wondered to myself how I would handle going
through that whole process before "the end", you might say. I found out a
day or two later that she had passed away that night. Though I was sad to
lose my friend, I was glad the suffering was over.
Something else that was golden for me - and it was around early '95 by this
point -- was a quote that went all around the Internet. Originally it was
attributed to Nelson Mandela, but it's actually a quote by Marianne
Williamson, from her book called "A Return To Love". It was a real blessing
to me at the time, and still is. I have it framed on my wall at home. I
want to read it to you.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fearis that
we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that
frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child
of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing
enlightened about shrinking so that others won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to manifest the
glory of God that is within us. It's not in some of us, it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our
presence automatically liberates others."
I was thinking about going "THROUGH the wounds": we move through our
wounds and see what's on the other side. We have all been wounded, and I
think that there is a blessing we can give each other if we can start to
see each other as we truly are, in the context Marianne spoke about - even
though that can be difficult to see about ourselves. Many of us can easily
see the beauty and the brilliance of our friends, but it is often not so
easy to see about ourselves. I have a theory that it takes at least four
positive statements to permeate that Kevlar body armor that many of us
carry around our hearts. Earlier this morning I surprised Bonnie as an
example of that. Bonnie has this mistaken idea that she doesn't sing well,
but she does. And so I told her four times, "No, you really do sing well."
Of course there's no mathematical certainty that four times is enough to
work but, again, it's these things we can say to each other that can be a
blessing. And it's more than a one-time job. I know after I do comedy, the
first two or three times someone comes and says, "Oh that was really
funny," I think, Okay. Maybe. But then the fourth or fifth time someone
tells me, I might start to believe it.
And the same is true of friendship. Many times we speak of a good friend
as someone who is willing to love us despite our faults; they'll look at
us and see our pettiness maybe, or examples of our immaturity, and they'll
still love us. That is a good definition. I'd like to add something to the
definition, though. A good friend - and perhaps this kind of friend is even
more rare - is someone who will let us shine, who will let us be great, who
will let us step out and be our true selves. They will let something
wonderful come out of us without feeling threatened by it, and won't try
to take us down a notch or two. Rather, they will delight in our blooming.
It's good to note that something that is not included in that quote from Marianne Williamson is the word "humility." Occasionally someone says that somebody needs a good dose of humility, and it can be a popular religious notion that we need to be humble before God, or before leaders. Well, for many of us, we've got the "humility" thing pretty much down. We've been humbled plenty in our life, maybe particularly in our childhood.
What would be helpful is to have a good dose of confidence, a good dose of blessing.
When I speak of "confidence", many people think that they have to somehow reach down inside of themselves and pull out this assurance and fabulousness. For many of us that is Step Two. Step One is to hear from a reasonable voice
outside ourselves some of these true things that Marianne wrote about.
And, of course, a little example of that would be in my comments to Bonnie
about her singing. So much negative self-talk goes on in our own brains
that a reasonable outside voice can be a real blessing.
