By Rev. Hannah Adair Bonner
This post is for my Queer church folxs… but the rest of y’all can eavesdrop. Last week, I started physical therapy to try to get myself back to full-functioning after a 20 foot fall this year. For the past few months, every time my back started to hurt again, I shut down everything. If it was bad enough, I would try to lay still for days and hope it would stop. I was terrified, and every time the pain came back, I was convinced that I was broken again and that I’d never heal.
I did not understand what was happening in my body, or which parts of me the trauma had hurt. No one had ever explained it to me. No one took the time. The broken bones were obvious, but they were actually the first to heal. It was the deeper tissue that wasn’t making any progress, because I would not let it move and I would not let it heal.
I did not know what was wrong with me, and I was not getting the help I needed, so I gave up trying to ask for help.
Until last week, when I finally got a great physical therapist, who took the time to explain to me what was happening inside my body. He seemed totally convinced that I was going to be fine, and I started to believe it too.
Every time I had felt pain, I thought it was the bones, and I rushed to protect them. In doing so, I shut down the healing. The physical therapist explained that I was living my life too guarded. I was afraid of being broken again, so I was guarding that entire part of my body. I did not use my abs to sit up, I used my biceps to push myself up. I did not bend at the waist, I squatted with my quads. My arms and legs became a wall, protecting my core – they got stronger, while the rest of me got weak.
My back muscles – the ones responsible for my stability – atrophied, and I never helped them come back, because I interpreted the pain of healing as the pain of brokenness. My fear of being broken forever kept me from being able to recover.
My physical therapist could poke at my back and tell me the places that I had not let heal, because they were the places that were still tender, where I had shut down whenever they started to move and repair and heal.
“You’re moving so guarded. We’ll work on that.”
I’ve been thinking about how we as Queer folxs in the church have been moving in ways that are guarded, moving in ways that we have learned to move in order to survive and fend off the most vicious attacks. We intended to protect old brokenness, but we are actually blocking new healing.
I want to say to you today: We won’t be broken always. I want to believe that enough that you begin to believe it too. The way that my physical therapist believed me into believing.
I’ve been thinking about all the trauma that we’ve experienced, and the ways that we cannot even begin to understand the places that it has harmed us. I’ve been thinking about the walls that we build as Queer folxs in the church, ESPECIALLY my context, the United Methodist Church… ESPECIALLY those of us who are clergy. The way we use other parts of ourselves, and other emotions to guard what is tender and keep it from feeling anything… unknowingly keeping it from healing.
When I came out, my mother told family members, “Well, Hannah can just stay celibate.” She was very content with viewing a future for me where I would never use the muscle that is my heart, where it could atrophy for all she cared. If I listened to her, I would go through life feeling always that I was broken, never beginning to heal. So I keep trying to use it, clumsily and anxiously pushing through the pain, struggling to remember to breathe, trying to be less guarded, asking for the help I need. I believe my heart is a powerful muscle, and I want to use it well.
We church kids have built up a lot of defenses, afraid of experiencing and re-experiencing our deepest griefs – when the pain shoots up to 7 or 8 or 9 on a scale of 10. But maybe we’ll find that if we push through the 2 or 3 or 4, we can actually get ourselves down to a 1.
We’ll never heal if we are too afraid of the process, too afraid to ask for the help we need, too afraid to start somewhere, too afraid of the pain to be able to feel the joy.
We won’t be broken always… I want to believe that enough that you begin to believe it too.
Original Facebook post: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=4289563091094690&id=100001231239403&sfnsn=mo
Matt Horan