December 21, 7:00pm (Kevin Westling)
We need one another. We need one another like we need oxygen. We do not learn to believe in ourselves until we have experienced someone else believing in us. And if we have never known, from the outside-in, such a kindness, such a love, such a gentleness of inward touch, then we may never get to know it from the inside-out. It is possible of course, for those who have been emotionally starved to death from a very young age, to scratch their way up out of such deprivation, but it requires a miraculous healing, a spiritual healing… not self-healing. Self-healing only comes after spiritual healing.
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Trinity @ 7
December 20, 2009
by Cam Miller
Good evening.
That little muse from ee cummings
makes me think of Maslow’s “Hierarch of Needs”
that reminds us that we cannot reach up and
satisfy a loftier set of needs
if we are not grounded in the satisfaction
of a lower set of needs.
In other words,
the thirst for art and music and spirituality
is ignited only after the hunger for
food, clothing and shelter is satiated.
You and I,
even the poorest among us,
live in such relative affluence
that we often forget there is a hierarchy of need.
It operates on numerous levels.
If we are suffering from mental anguish –
depression,
grief,
anxiety –
it will be extremely difficult
to achieve any kind of spiritual balance or depth
until we have discovered how to bring a modicum
of reconciliation to our mind and emotions.
If we are desperate for affirmation,
starving for the kindness, affection and love
of people within the reach of our ordinary life,
the likelihood of self-confidence is thin.
As Cummings wrote:
“We do not believe in ourselves
until someone reveals that deep inside us
something is valuable,
worth listening to, worthy of our trust,
sacred to our touch.
Once we believe in ourselves
we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight
or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
In our highly psychologized culture,
we like to hear that confidence begins
with “Self-confidence”
and that we can’t depend upon
affirmation from others
because what we really need is to believe in ourselves.
But that is the voice of privilege speaking.
That is the voice
of a culture that believes in the myth of
self-sufficiency and self-actualization.
Both are BS.
There is no such thing as “Self-sufficiency”
or “Self-Actualization”.
Those are mythological blossoms in a garden
padded by so much affluence
that its resident’s
have forgotten
that every single plant in their garden
is planted, fed and watered by someone
lower on the economic food chain.
Self-sufficiency is a fantasy lived by those so affluent they have forgotten their dependency upon others.
Self-actualization is a fantasy lived by those with so much discretionary time and money
that they fell into a self-orbit
and got lost in their own space.
We need one another.
We need one another like we need oxygen.
We do not learn to believe in ourselves
until we have experienced someone else
believing in us.
And if we have never known,
from the outside-in,
such a kindness, such a love,
such a gentleness of inward touch,
then we may never get to know it from the inside-out.
It is possible of course,
for those who have been emotionally starved to death from a very young age,
to scratch their way up out of such deprivation,
but it requires a miraculous healing,
a spiritual healing…
not self-healing.
Self-healing only comes after spiritual healing.
But most of us,
the vast majority of us,
have had some kind of affirmation and kindness;
some kind of love and affection,
deposited in the soil of our soul.
It may not have been fabulous.
It may not have been the affirmation and kindness
we wanted or would have hoped for.
It may not have been the love
we think we should have received.
But if we scratch the surface,
and dig into our memories,
and forgive
those who were less than what we think they should have been,
we will likely hear affirmation.
We will likely feel a snippet of confirmation.
We will likely uncover a previously unseen
gift of kindness and love.
And that will be enough for us to work from.
We can be fed and nurtured by very small amounts
of love, affection and affirmation.
In fact,
it is awesome and amazing
just how far we can grow
on the smallest amounts of love, affection and affirmation.
“We do not believe in ourselves
until someone reveals that deep inside us
something is valuable,
worth listening to, worthy of our trust,
sacred to our touch.
Once we believe in ourselves
we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight
or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
So once we dig into that flowerbed of love
and affirmation inside,
and once we decide to believe
what others have believed about us,
then…
then… we can risk curiosity,
wonder, spontaneous
delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
That is how the hierarch works.
It builds upward,
feeding on itself and growing.
Actually,
upward imagines a staircase
when a more apt metaphor would be outward –
as in the rings of a tree.
Each ring the vestige of a season,
witness to the amount of nutrients that season offered.
There are times in our lives
when the rings are fat, fat, fat.
They reveal a lush season of love, affection
and affirmation that spurred growth and development.
Other times in our lives
the ring is thin, thin, thin.
They reveal a drought
when nourishment was scarce and maybe
we barely survived on a small kindness here
and a meager bit of affirmation there.
We have such seasons.
But it is the love, affection and affirmation
we received previously the powers us currently.
But once we have it,
even a little bit of it,
we can do amazing things,
and risk astounding journeys
and take on serious giants.
“We do not believe in ourselves
until someone reveals that deep inside us
something is valuable,
worth listening to, worthy of our trust,
sacred to our touch.
Once we believe in ourselves
we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight
or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
All of which is to say,
you and I can be more powerful than we ever imagined,
with the simple gift of affirmation.
A very small gift of affirmation,
a sip of affection,
a crumb of kindness
may ignite and power someone we know
to go great distances.
We may never know the impact
of the smallest of kindnesses given,
but we can be confident
that in giving them we have tilled the garden of someone’s growth
sometime
somewhere
somehow.
We absolutely are dependent upon one another
to feed and nourish
the gardens of our growth.
Wherever we happen to be
on the hierarchy of needs,
we can be certain
that we are utterly dependent upon one another
to feed and nourish our continued growth.
We need one another,
and that is as important to remember
in the times when we are givers
as it is when we are the needy receivers.
So, I invite you to light a candle to the need you have,
and to the need you will feed in someone else.
