Hello, my name is...

I had the opportunity last night to go listen to one of my favorite authors speak about her new book. The author is Nadia Bolz-Weber. She is a Lutheran pastor in Colorado with a congregation of what most of society would term as misfits. She is sarcastic, outspoken, cusses like a sailor, and is covered in tattoos. And she loves Jesus and broken people deeply. She has pretty much all the characteristics I love in a person.

Her first two books were both deeply unsettling and deeply healing to me as she explores her fundamentalist upbringing and her journey through addiction, redemption, and ministry call. 

I expected that her newest book would have the same effect. But I was apprehensive because it talked about sex. Not Harlequin romance sex, but the view of sex within the church. Traditional views of purity, homosexuality, and abortion. It looked at the history on those movements within the church. It talked a great deal about the shame and damage experienced by and inflicted upon those persons who don’t fit within the small circle of persons that the traditional church has deemed as pure. It looked at those persons that God planted in the corners.

I was right that I would be deeply unsettled. But unlike her other two books, I didn’t experience that same feeling of healing. I told a friend that I thought it would take time, and probably a re-read of the book for that feeling to settle in for me. Because what it did wasn’t make me feel better about my history, but worse. Not because of what the author said but because what she said caused me to look at things in a way that I hadn’t looked at them before. But in order to look at things in a different way, I had to look at them again.

There are a lot of things in my past I don’t want to look at again. Because they are painful. Because they are shameful. Because they remind me that some of the decisions I have made in my life showed me to be someone different than who I thought I was. 

And so as I got ready to go to this event last night, I experienced great anxiety at what my reaction might be. I have learned that as part of the process of healing from long buried abuse, sometimes discussions of similar trauma trigger me. I was afraid of being triggered last night. I shared that with the two dear friends who I was going to the event with. Because they are such dear friends, they first fed me good food, and tequila, and then let me sit between them where I could feel the physical touch of one or both of them the entire night. And then afterwards, we went out for ice cream together. Because I actually do have the world’s greatest friends.

I didn’t get triggered during the event like I feared. I just left feeling unhappy. Angry. Thoughtful. Sad. One of the things that she said though resonated with me and I realized that I still have a lot of work to do with looking at things I don’t want to look at. 

Not for the sake of looking at them and reliving the shame.  But looking at them, not in the shadow of shame where I have placed them all these years, but in the light of grace. In the recognition that this shame, the shame I have attached to many of the things I have, is misplaced. 

That the one big pile of ick I had placed things in wasn’t actually the way that these things needed to be sorted. That there are different stacks things need to be placed in. 

A stack of things done to me that I bear no blame in. 

A stack of things that I was a part of but was still mostly innocent in. 

A stack of things that I did to survive emotionally. 

A stack of things that have never been what they should have been because of the ways in which I’ve been shut down inside because of all those other stacks. 

As I thought this morning about this work that I need to do on this front, I realized part of why I had all those things from my past piled together into one pile of rotting, putrid shame.  

Not because they belonged there.

But because the messages I heard growing up told me that any sex outside a marriage between one man and one woman was a sin and abhorrent to God. 

Messages that told me that choosing to give away a part of myself that belonged to my future husband was robbing him of a gift that should belong only to him.

That’s a hell of a message for someone who had parts of herself taken at age 8.

That’s a hell of a message to tell a girl of 16 when the only way she thought she could hold on to her 23 year old boyfriend was to give parts of herself away she had always thought she would and should hold on to until she was married.

The hell of that message is that what happens when that’s the message you carry, a message of ideals you aren’t able to live up to, is you think you’re broken or faulty or unworthy. And unloved. Unloved because you are broken and faulty and unworthy. And so you spend the rest of your life trying to find worth in the ways that caused it to go missing in the first place. 

And you know what?

It doesn’t work.

The pile of shame that started when you were 8, and has grown taller over the years, grows taller still. With the rubbish of things you have done and shouldn’t. With the rubbish of things you should have been able to do but could not. With the carcasses of all the relationships that didn’t work the way they should have because you’ve never been able to connect the way you wanted to because, since you were 8 years old, you haven’t viewed yourself as clean and whole.

Because you are a person different than you thought you would be.

So as I thought about all these things this morning, I got angry.

Who told me that my body was something that was a gift for my husband rather than for me?

Who placed the shame in me so deeply that I was damaged because a part of myself was taken away before I was able to understand the importance of what it was? 

Who made me feel that I was unworthy of love, and because of that, for so many years, I tried to regain that feeling of worthiness, from men who didn’t have the ability, or the right to return it to me?

Who told me that my name was victim, slut, adulterer, divorcee, frigid, confused? Who told me that I was unworthy of love? Who told me that I was broken beyond repair?

The message I should have been given wasn’t that I should be very careful giving away the part of me that belonged to my future husband. 

The message I should have been given was that I should be very careful giving away the part of me that belonged to me.

The message I should have been given was that there is a difference between giving away a part of yourself and having it taken from you.

The message I should have been given is that it was my right to choose what I gave, and to who I gave it to, and when I gave it.

The message I should have been given was that my body, my innocence, my purity, are holy. Not because they were a gift to give to my husband but because they were mine. Given to me, by God, for my use. For my pleasure. As a gift to give to myself.

The message I should have been given was that no organization, no church, no person, no one, has the right to tell me what is mine to give and when and how it is right to give it.

That is mine to give.

And mine to decide who is worthy to receive it.

And mine to decide if I give it away just because I want to.

Mine.

Nadia says in her book that “Shame is like wearing our already forgiven sins like a spiritual name tag.” And she’s right.

I’ve worn those spiritual name tags for too many years because I felt if I took them off I wasn’t being honest about who I really was.

The truth is, it was the refusal to take those name tags off that kept me from being honest about who I really was, not the other way.

My name is not victim.

My name is not unclean.

My name is not adulterer or divorcee.

My name is not unworthy.

My name is PRECIOUS.

My name is CHERISHED.

My name is BELOVED.

My name is GLORIOUS.

My name is REDEEMED.

Who told me that?

My Jesus told me. And that’s the only voice that really matters.