From Your Minister
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What, I ask myself, does it take to live in at-one-ment? I can imagine the road I need to travel from where I am now to a place of living in at-one-ment with myself, with my friends and family, with my neighbors, with the world…
And then the spots where I need to turn toward some different course of action or practice tell me what atonement looks like in my life right now.
As I’ve reflected on it, the road to at-one-ment isn’t a complicated or obscure path. It’s just that lots of other stuff gets in our way! Here are three obstacles that I have encountered, and three tips for getting back onto the road.
One major roadblock is keeping secrets. Secrets often lead to dangerous driving and complex detours, some of which become elaborate superhighway systems all their own—but none of those roads lead to at-one-ment. Secrets are often accompanied by lies to cover up the secret. Even if we’re not outright lying, we fret about who might know, and build complex mechanisms in order to not know what we ourselves know or fear about the secret.
I know a woman who feared that her husband was secretly gay. She and her husband never talked about this—never. One day the woman’s mother said, “I really need to talk to you about something.” The woman responded, “If it’s about that thing I think it is, I will never talk to you about that.”
This woman was so preoccupied with her secret that every road sign she passed said, “BEWARE, SECRET!” rather than pointing to the natural wonders along the way, or even telling her where to find food and fuel. (All of this was long ago, and the fact that the woman told me this story indicates healing that has long since happened.)
If you feel as if you’re surrounded on all sides by a big secret, the way back on the road is to tell someone. It may start with telling yourself, if it is truly not safe to tell anyone else. It may be God. It may be going to a website like sixbillionsecrets.com. Ideally, you will trust another human being to stand by you, no matter what you tell them. Get back on the road—tell someone!
A second major obstacle that keeps us off the path to at-one-ment is shame. Whereas secrets cause us to be constantly scanning the environment for signs of danger, shame takes us off the road and right down into the deepest abyss, that place where we know that we are bad, sick or wrong. Shame doesn’t say “maybe” to our fundamental wrongness; it declares it with vehemence that can be mistaken for clarity. Recovering from shame is not an easy or a quick process. I recommend Brené Brown’s TedTalk on the topic, or her book, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t).
Shame is a big part not only of our relationships with ourselves, but also with those around us. It’s hard to look anyone else in the eye when we can’t look in the mirror. I am convinced that it is a major piece of how oppression works in most cultures. “White guilt” is probably a healthy response for white people to have both about unearned privilege and about the history of violence we inherit along with the family silver. It might lead to being more conscious and deliberate about how we use that privilege, which in turn would keep us on the road to at-one-ment. Shame, on the other hand, tells us that who we are is so bad that we don’t dare let ourselves know about it. It is an impediment to change and to consciousness.
For me, the first step towards freedom from shame is to wonder, “Is this shame I am feeling?” Ask yourself, when the world feels tarry and hopeless, when you feel as if no one will ever forgive you for the stupid thing you did (or you won’t forgive yourself), when the more people tell you you’re wonderful, the more you feel like a fraud. Asking yourself that question—“Is this shame I am feeling?”—is the first step towards defining shame as a feeling, not a reality, the first step out of the abyss and back onto the road to at-one-ment.
A third obstacle on that path is addiction. No route can lead to at-one-ment with addiction in the car, because addiction will never ride in the passenger’s seat. (That’s how you know it’s addiction.) It is that 12-year-old who shoves over the responsible adult and insists on driving. Addiction is so seductive that it becomes the whole road, car, and sense of self—while we tell ourselves it’s just a little suitcase in the trunk. Overcoming addiction is a one-step-at-a-time, day by day, focus. It involves telling secrets, overcoming shame, and a heap of other stuff.
When secrets, shame or addiction are taking up all the air inside the car, it can be hard to even remember where you were hoping to travel. But the road to at-one-ment is always there, even if we can’t always see it.
Spiritual community helps us with this—to be among companions who shout out when they see potholes or avalanches ahead, who help us find practices that restore us to center, with a chance to remember who we are. May we be on that road together!
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