Our Healer Capacity

Sermon | September 6, 2020 | Rev. Julie Lombard

Let’s begin by exploring Human Nature. In doing so, we’ll first consider six characteristics that define it:

• Being playful – how do you play the game of life?
• Being scientific –identifying patterns, making hypotheses & testing them out, measuring results as we pursue cosmic knowledge.
• Being legislative –it’s how we rule ourselves. Governing behaviors ask us about the ways we live in right relationship.  
• Being epicurean – this is about how do we feed, how we sustain our bodies and spirits.
• Being clandestine – what do we keep private
• Being gossipy – “humans use gossip to cement relationships,” says Robin Dunbar, author of Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. Dunbar thinks gossip is the human equivalent of primate grooming. You know how monkeys pick over one another. Dunbar says, “Gossip evolved for oiling the wheels of social interaction.”¹www.atlasandboots.com/defining-human-nature/ 08/02/2020 We know some gossip is healthy, but not all.

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There’s one characteristic not spoken of in the list and that is how we address our emotions -such as fear. For that we look to Khalil Gibran. He wrote: It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road, crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river cannot go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence.

The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean, because only then will fear disappear, because that’s where the river will know it’s not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.

Humans are all of these characteristics and more. Sometimes we prefer to go with the flow like a river or spin like a cosmic spiral reaching far out into the wide universe. I share the visual of a spiral because it leads me to telling you about Adrienne Maree Brown who is the author of the book Emergent Strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. Spirals are one of her favorite motions and she is a woman I am lifting up today.

Brown believes that each of us have daily examples of trauma and crisis in our lives like gun violence, migration concerns, and climate crisis. She said, “We are living in impossible times. If it were fiction it would be critiqued as hyperbolic. If it were nightmares we would never sleep. We are living in times created by our own species…our visions are ropes through the devastation. Look further ahead, like our ancestors did, look further. Extend, hold on, pull, evolve.”

“Emergent Strategy” is a concept she defines as “how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” It’s a source for people expansively thinking about what the future might look like.

Here, are a few distillations from her book:

Collaboration is the Cornerstone- Brown asks. “One of my favorite questions today is: How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?” Nothing that she does happens without deep and radical collaboration- she doesn’t go it alone. She cites natural examples of collaboration, including the way birds fly in flocks and how ants build together.

“There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other,” she says.

Embracing Change is a Non-Negotiable- “A first question to ask ourselves is, how do we practice increasing our ease with what is? Change happens. Change is definitely going to happen, no matter what we plan or expect or hope for or set in place. We will adapt to that change, or we will become irrelevant,” says Brown.

This is not a new idea, however she brings new insight to this age-old challenge, particularly through the insights she gathers from the natural world. She states, “Emergent strategy is something I am still discovering, but a lot of it, for me, feels like tuning into the natural operating systems of the universe and being humbled, as opposed to trying to barrel through and against all the change, trying to best nature.”

We Must Let Go of the Status Quo- Brown believes in the power of science fiction to imagine our future planet’s needs, a future that may well be divorced from current reality. “I would call our work to change the world ‘science fictional behavior’—being concerned with the way our actions and beliefs now, today, will shape the future, tomorrow, the next generations,” she says. Her emphasis is on allowing science fiction to shape the way we do and imagine change. “It is so important that we fight for the future, get into the game, get dirty, get experimental.”²https://www.colorlines.com/articles/three-lessons-adrienne-maree-browns-emergent-strategy, 09/26/2020

Brown’s hopelessly optimistic and refuses to give in to cynicism or despair. This ability to dream wildly is part of how she maintains an openness toward the idea of a better future. From her conclusion: “It is possible that this whole book is about love. My love of this planet, my love of human beings and creatures and the idea of there being a future in which this planet is still a home to living things. My love of the humans who have taught me to be awake and to feel the world around me, and clued me in to both caring more about life and being less attached to the outcomes of life.”

She believes that the natural world gives us ample opportunities to study. She’s assembled principles and elements to pay attention to: her principles are- that small is good, change is constant, there’s always enough time do the right work, there’s a conversation in the room that only we in this moment can have – find that conversation, put yourself in that room. And lastly, never a failure, always a lesson… what can we learn from our life? What happens if we don’t learn the lesson? Do we skip it or does karma force us back to face our unexamined parts?

She also wants us to look to nature to give us examples of the elements of emergent strategy- these elements are: fractal, adaptive, interconnection and decentralization, non-linear and iterative, resilience and transformative justice, and creating more possibilities.

In ferns we find small scale solutions, and ants teach us about societies cooperatively working towards collective sustainability, we can learn about resilience, resistance, regeneration, and decentralization from dandelions, starlings teach us about adaptability, partnership, and collective leadership with their flock patterns, wave-particle duality or what she calls wavicles can help us understand the value of process and outcome to overcome uncertainty and doubt. Finally, we can learn about interconnected and detoxification from fungus that grows underground in thread-like formations.

Brown also believes nature offers us ways to heal ourselves organically. We’ve unlearned how to do healing as we are taught to pay for and rely on data and medicine outside of our awareness. She says, “We all have the capacity to heal each other –healer is a possibility in each of us.” She believes healing happens when a place of trauma or pain is given full attention, really listened to; and that healing is actually the resilience instinct of our bodies.

What trauma or pain are we tending to? What needs more of our attention? Have we given enough time to what wounds us? Is there anything that pains us so much that it stops us in our tracks, where do we get stuck? What holds us back?

Brown has been discovering her gifts as a healer by opening up her presence, voice, and touch to an energy greater than herself. After connecting with that, then she obtains truth, comfort, ease, release, and other healing experiences can flow through her, like wholeness and acceptance. Just as the river that feared being swallowed up by the ocean finally learns that is does not disappear into the ocean rather it is being transformed and becomes whole- the entire ocean.

Brown says that there are many ways to develop our healer capacity. She’s used Reiki, massage, somatic bodywork, voice healing, tarot, and even witchcraft. Have you tried any of these? How did they work?

She understands a healer as a person who supports the birth of something – a doula of sorts, but not your regular birthing doula that assists birthing babies. Brown has found doula to be a role that applies to many aspects of life. Birth work teaches us to engage tension, but not to indulge drama. We can make the miraculous experience of this alternative birth easier, intervening with any systems that make the process harder, helping those attend to each other and really listen, and remain focused on the possibility and wisdom to know what is needed to heal.

When we are with someone as they re-connect their wholeness- we are doing the work of the healer. Brown feels her healing work is pushing back the external world, making space for people to feel themselves and all their emotions.

Sterling Toles, a Detroit musician friend of Brown’s, considers himself as he does this for others as a “dressing room where people can try on their most authentic selves.” This dressing room idea has been a guiding visual for Brown as she continues to engage in her healing work.

We all have been given the opportunity to love ourselves fully so we can tap into our healer capacity. May we be playful, scientific, as we explore what governs us. May we feed ourselves with goodness and better understand why and what we keep private. Let us connect with healthy chatter rather than with false narratives or harmful gossip.

May we listen and remain open, allowing ourselves to get clued into what we need to pay attention to and avoid the rest. And may we overcome any fear like the river found wholeness only when it flowed into the ocean and be open to learning as the mosaic student who found wholeness by creatively uniting broken parts together.

Adrienne Maree Brown said, “I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.” With that, I would challenge us to not become entrapped in the brokenness, rather we seek patterns of possibility and wholeness.

Spirit of Love, guide our feet to move beyond the usual busy-ness. Let us look to our wounded parts to inspire what needs transforming. May we develop our healing capacity making us ready to transform this world. 

Blessed be. Amen.