June 2, 2013

Clay Nelson

Pentecost 2     Luke 7:1-10

Video available on YouTube, Facebook

A month from today Lynette and I will be on our way to Barcelona via Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna and Amsterdam. As exciting as that adventure sounds I am aware that inside me are huge butterflies flapping around. The unknowns we face as well as all the things we need to accomplish before we leave have twisted my insides into knots, if the truth be told. I keep repeating that great piece of Kiwi wisdom to myself: “She’ll be right,” but the little kid inside me is not yet convinced -- no matter how brave a face I put on externally.

I’m confessing my existential reality to explain the lens through which I have reflected on Luke’s account of the Centurion sending Jewish elders to Jesus on his behalf to heal his valued servant. While it is yet another healing story about Jesus, the heart of the story is Jesus’ amazement at the faith of someone who is an outsider to the community, while insiders fail to accept him. I, too, am amazed by the Centurion but for a different reason. He is apparently a benevolent oppressor in that elders are willing to speak on his behalf to Jesus, but it strikes me as no small thing for him to reach out to a prophet from the people he is charged to keep intimidated. Yes, inside he is in crisis, even turmoil, over the potential loss of a cherished servant, but what if his commander or Herod himself should find out? I suspect they would hardly approve of his having done so. So there is a risk in doing it. It is that tension between his inside self that seeks hope and his outside self that must live according to the expectations of his profession that I identify with this morning. It is our relationship with what Jung called the Divine Child within each of us and that psychotherapists now call our inner child that intrigues me.

Apparently we all have one. No matter how old we are, no matter how accomplished, no matter how dignified we seem, there resides a child of the past who still lives inside of us and still influences and interrupts our adult life today. That’s why I laughed out loud at a video going around Facebook right now called “Baby and Me.”

It’s an ad for bottled water but you don’t know that until the end. It begins with a man waiting at a bus stop. The bus pulls up and he sees his reflection in the door of the bus, but instead of his adult self it is a little boy, himself as a toddler. He panics running down the street to look in the rear view mirror of a parked car. The little boy’s face looks back at him. He turns around and sees all of himself in a store window. He starts moving his hands to see if the reflection is really him and the boy moves with him. He starts moving his legs and the boy moves. He starts doing a funny dance and the boy dances. He starts to get into it looking like an idiot to those passing by. But then one by one they look at the window and see their three-year old selves. Pretty soon there is a crowd of people having great fun dancing and relating to their inner child. The end is even funnier but in case you happen to see it I won’t spoil it for you.

As much as I enjoyed the video and its message, when I first met my inner child in therapy it was not such a joyous occasion. Even though I had a fairly blessed childhood with loving parents, plenty to eat, a warm house and a good education -- unlike the 270,000 Kiwi children living in poverty and only having Weet Bix and milk to look forward to on school days, I was not happy with how he had dealt with the bruises, scars and hurt that shape every childhood. I was annoyed that in times of stress or when I am tired or facing critical life changes and am nervous, uneasy or ill, he often whispers irrational thoughts in my inner ear. When I feel a sense of inadequacy or helpless dependence or out of control or pointless loneliness or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms, then I know he is talking to me and I want to send him back to the nursery. It wasn’t until I realised that I had to thank that child for having survived even when he couldn’t rationally or intellectually think through what was happening to him that I could look at my outside self honestly. Only then could I understand that he might look vulnerable, but he is tough. He is resilient. Only then did I realise that I was wasting time creating armour not unlike what the Centurion wore by developing skills and aptitudes and attitudes to keep him hidden and protected from an outer world I feared would crush him. But, it is not the world that crushes the child it is the armour.

Poet Ted Hughes, husband of poet and novelist Silvia Plath, wrote how this happens to his son: “Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the armour, it has never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.”

The tragedy is he goes on to say is “that child is the only real thing in [us]. It’s [our] humanity, [our] real individuality…the carrier of all of [our] living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having.”

The solution he suggests is not what we want to hear. We have to take off the armour. “Whenever life takes us by surprise the inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive…that where it calls up its own resources…That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world.” His point is that we have to let the inner child find confidence and independence and test his abilities. It is no different in how we raise our own children. We have to let them venture out and scrape a few knees. Our inner child can only become fully alive if we can ignore our fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

I have only one caveat here. The inner child of some have been so badly mistreated and abused they may need to have gentle, professional help in removing the armour in a safe and secure environment.

Hughes concludes by telling his son “the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.” [i]

Returning to our Centurion, I think what amazed Jesus is that this outsider had the courage to allow the authenticity of his inside self, his divinity, if you will, as a human being to take a risk. And in doing so, both he and his servant were healed.

The next time you are tempted to walk around a puddle instead of through it, think long and hard about him. Do you have enough faith to splash through it? Maybe then you can dance with your inner child.

[i] Hughes, Ted, Letters of Ted Hughes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.