The Home Altar

Today’s post owes a great deal of gratitude to the teachings of Jessica Fern and Deb Dana, both clinical social workers.

One of the great challenges we face as human beings is limitations to our field of vision based on where we stand. In the picture I took from inside a stone tower, the narrow window provides a gorgeous, yet limited, glimpse at the lush summer landscape both below and beyond. Our minds can live in the tension between wanting to accept only what’s clearly in the frame as real, while also filling in the gaps from our imagination, completing a much larger vista. When I engage with clients about the emergence of wisdom, the stirrings of the Spirit, or the presence of the Divine, sometimes the unfolding action is front and center, clearly in the perceived world right in front of them. Other times, the sacred flow of God’s dance is happening just outside the field of view, in the imagined world that is obscured by the stone archway.

Our internal sense or interoception of personal safety is built around three key factors; agency, authenticity, and attachment. This week I want to focus on the importance of attachment. It will be the key to understanding how we can use our imaginal mind to reframe what is happening within and what God is up to. We can be profoundly activated by uncertainty and a sense of Divine absence, but this doesn’t have to be the case. This is not to discount a period of spiritual dryness, the alarm of spiritual warfare, or even the transformative womb of the dark night of the soul, but rather to affirm the ongoing attachment that is possible even in times of great stress and change.

What that action or presence looks like in our mind’s eye is often shaped by our experiences of attachment in our human relationships. Attachment is a profound and trusting bond, built ideally around safe and attuned responses that help us to co-regulate in times of distress. The model for this bond is an infant’s primary caregiver in early life, and indeed a lot of information about how attachment works is woven into us in our first three years of life.

Where the caregiver was attuned to themselves and regulating their own well-being, and similarly responsive and attuned to our needs most of the time, we probably developed a secure attachment to that individual, knowing that they were a source of safety and comfort whether they were present or not, and that they would respond appropriately when we cried out.

When the caregiver was struggling to attune and attend to themselves, distracted, stressed, sick, or otherwise unavailable in a consistent way, we likely developed an insecure attachment. We could not reasonably depend on them to show up appropriately when we cried out, which might result in a few different life-saving coping strategies. We might go quiet and begin to internalize a deep sense that “no one is coming, I must fend for myself”, often called avoidant attachment. We might become more raucous and disruptive, doing whatever we can to attract the attention we need, constantly seeking our caregiver in cycles of anxious attachment.

Sometimes, a caregiver simply isn’t capable of being the source of safety we need. They are dangerous as a result of untreated mental illness, substance use disorder, unhealed trauma, or other profound stresses. In an abuse situation one person embodies the most significant danger to our well-being, and our link to survival. Our nervous system’s emotional development and spiritual need for **both **connection and safety, cannot be met in this environment. We may develop a disorganized form of attachment, vaulting from traumatic shutdown, to avoidant, to anxious, with very little solid ground to understand how to properly attach to another person.

I have observed these styles at work both in relationships with a Theistic Personal sense of the Divine like Jesus, My Ancestors, or Gaia, and with more Apersonal senses like “The Universe”, “The Force”, “The Spirits”. This is not surprising to me. If we have a basic orientation of “If I don’t do it, no one will”, it’s not a far step to include the addendum “even God”. If we have been seeing glimmers of love and connection some of the time, it can be so easy to want to pile on practices and tools, and techniques so that “the Universe will have no choice but to stop ignoring me.” To say nothing of metabolizing the traumatic theology of “I will be so perfect (faith-filled, pious, pure, normal, etc.) that the God who tortures the imperfect (faithless, scandalous, indecent, marginalized, etc.) will have to love me.”

These various mechanisms can really show up when the Holy One is present or at work just out of view. Not so far away that there’s nothing to pick up on, but just obscured enough that we are prompted to cry out, “WTF are you doing?!?!” in our desperation to attach. We can feel abandoned, anxious, afraid, or we may be resentful, angry, and demanding. Our practice can become less one of presence and more one of overthinking, and frantically trying to appeal to One who might not be listening, might not care, or might even lash out in response.

Here we do well to remember that the image or construct we have created in the imagination space just beyond the boundaries of our present perception is just that, an image. Best case scenario, it’s a most loving work of mixed media, macaroni and crayon, show “me”, “my family”, and “my divine love/caregiver”. Worst case scenario, it’s the story-less nightmare fuel of fragmented sensory, emotional, and coping overwhelm that are the hallmark of a traumatic experience. Just as our earliest and most adoring rendering of “my mom” that hung on a refrigerator door is hardly the fullness of the one we know/knew as “mother”, so our image of the divine at work in the world is a fragment of who the Holy One and Being Itself truly is.

While improving artistic skill, or perhaps our first camera, might bring a much more realistic likeness of our beloved grandfather to the page, even that image is a moment in time and not the entire ancestor who shaped us. What’s more, is that our improved ability to capture the moment, in no way replaces that depth of relationship that took us through time together, from flat figures in crayon to artfully shaded pastels. Using our imaginations to connect to our loved ones in more subtle, mindful, and intentional ways is not an abandonment, but rather a healthy and holy reimagining.

Just because we have applied a particular attachment style to our relationship with the Divine in the past, doesn’t mean that we always have to employ that frame when God is just out of view and we can sense presence but not purpose, or change that leaves us feeling unsettled and lacking clarity. We can borrow the safety from any secure attachment that we have and use it as spiritual medicine with the challenging attachments in our lives. Secure self-attachment can be a source of healing in relationships with partners and parents. Secure friendship attachment can help us learn to love ourselves. Any of these can be a source of reimagining our connection to the Divine and give us room to approach the uncertain work of God just outside the frame of view with curiosity, hopefulness, and patience. It’s not about walking away from God or abandoning our spiritual life, it’s about letting the Mystery who pursues our hearts be bigger than our earliest sketch of who they are.

Practice:

Praying with Color

Find yourself some colored pencils or crayons and grab a page from a coloring book or find a coloring page that intrigues you on-line.

Before beginning to color, set aside some time to ground yourself in a mindful intention. This might be a one sentence prayer, a breath practice, a quality of the Holy that you want to meditate on, a question that you’re pondering, etc.

With that question in mind, you can begin, using either silence, or perhaps soft wordless music to create an environment of calm and presence.

Color in the picture in whatever way you feel moved to.

When images or words arise, add them as a note or doodle in the boundary space and then let them go for now. You can always go back to them later, or process them with a trusted listener.

Sit with your finished work at the end of your time, let it soak into you and savor this little act of creativity.

Notice in yourself, has anything moved in your bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts, understanding? What is new or different? What has subsided?

Put your coloring somewhere where it will remind you of the shift in you, while holding that change loosely.

Be gentle with yourself, you are worth it.

Peace and Everything Good,

The Rev. JM Longworth, OEF
Spiritual Direction and Trauma Care

https://www.sdicompanions.org/sdi-profile/GreenMtFriarOEF/
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