The Journey Home

I’ve been paying more attention to the way certain experiences, words, and encounters burrow themselves into the sacredness of my soul. I have found myself healing in returning to the religious music of my youth, though I remain skeptical. I didn’t think I’d find myself back here and… enjoying it. When I would hear Christian music or messages in the last decade, I would coil and feel repulsed. It stemmed from a place of anger, deep hurt, disillusionment, and imposed shame. However, as I open to healing and home this year, I am hearing these written lyrics with an enlightened, an affirming and social justice filter, mature discernment, a healing heart, and it feels, in a sense, coming home.

There are several songs that have been settling back into my heart. One of these is the Hillsong praise and worship song, “Hosanna.” Brooke (Fraser) Ligertwood was one of my favorite worship leader and songwriters. She is a genuine lover of Jesus, authentic in everything she does, and a good human. As I was brought back to this song recently, the lyrics “heal my heart and make it clean, open up my eyes to the things unseen,” “show me how to love like you have loved me,” “break my heart for what break yours, everything I am for your kingdom’s cause,” have halted me and made me truly reflect on their meaning. I loved this song as a youth. I love it differently today.

First of all, I know there’s Hillsong controversy around the conduct of their leadership currently and am heart broken by this as an ordained minister and one who has had experience with and in megachurches. I am grateful the folx abused, shunned, and taken advantage of are being seen, heard and taken seriously as those in church leadership can be abusers (not just sexually but emotionally, mentally, verbally, physically, and what I feel extremely painful and have experienced myself- scripturally). Thinking about the lyrics mentioned, I believe God’s heart is broken over this abuse and those deeply hurt. Naming a song written within this community, I could not readily avoid mentioning what is happening today.

When I listen with new ears “heal my heart and make it clean” speaks not only to the healing I have been engaging, but to engaging Christianity in a new, whole way. For years I held Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me deeply in my heart and would come back to that verse and its meaning to me many times. Through messages from my past, all preached to me, personally, by patriarchal conservative white Southern Baptist men, I believed something had to be wrong with me because I kept needing to repent and go forward for rededication after every large youth gathering when everyone’s head was bowed and eyes closed. I honestly believed for many years I was inherently bad and I could never be good enough for God. I constantly wanted a clean heart and to be “right” with God because I knew all of me loved God and desperately wanted to be accepted by God. Today, I see God the compassionate, loving Creator and Jesus leads an example of the healer desiring to touch our hurts and pain. I deeply resonated with the woman who touched Jesus’ garment as he walked. Jesus’ message and life tells us we are beloved and enough just as we are. I am beloved and enough just as I am, all of who God created me to be. No thank you to shame theology and purity culture, I serve a God who loves, accepts, forgives and affirms all that I am, we are, fully and wholly.

“Open up my eyes to the things unseen.” In the last decade, my awareness of my whiteness, my privilege and experience of the other has been painful and beautiful. I have done incredible work around racial awareness and justice, social awareness and justice, and spiritual and religious understanding, difference, and injustice. I have had the help of many good reads, podcasts, and discussions which maybe I will include in posts moving forward. “Show me how to love like you have loved me.” This speaks volumes to my greater understanding of God’s love. In the midst of my anger, isolation, struggle with identity and acceptance of every part of me, God never stopped loving me and I believe that more today than ever. God loves ALL, and God’s love does not discriminate. It’s compassionate, empathetic and forgiving. How hard loving others the way God loves me has been at times! Love your enemies, those that persecute you, betray you, judge you, and are mean to you… really?! Honestly, my work continues to be loving others and myself the way God has loved me. I believe I have grown greatly in my empathy for others, even those who taught me I was wrong, inherently bad, because I am a woman and even more, an ordained woman in the Gospel Ministry of Jesus Christ (a title I wear humbly, boldly and proudly).

A verse I memorized as a child and claimed innocently as my life verse truly has remained to this day: Romans 8: 38-39 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. For a period of time recently, all I knew for sure was that Jesus loves me and God was with me and would never leave me. However, God was/felt “out” there, beyond me. Several years ago I heard the hymn, O Love That Will Not Let Me Go. It bonded to me like Gorilla Glue to the love I knew to be true, it became my safe place. A place that I rested in the assurance of God’s love for me, that would not let me go and let me rest my weary soul in thee.

The greatest part of “Hosanna” that speaks to me most deeply is “break my heart for what breaks yours.” The question I keep coming back to and wonder if it really was thought out when writing this song and most of, for all believers when singing this song is: Do we really want our hearts broken for what breaks God’s heart? Are we open enough to really understand and become aware of what breaks God’s heart within humanity and not just the clear, obvious Sunday School reasons for which God’s heart breaks? By this I mean loss of a loved one, child, baby, pet, tragic sudden loss, loss of a job, divorce, financial strain, and/or a sudden change that causes upheaval and distress. The list I’m sure goes on. These are what I would consider “common known losses” that breaks God’s heart as God’s Creation is broken, hurting and experiencing pain.

Losses and heartbreak that I think may not be so common, depending on awareness and openness to the other, are hurts like bullying, judgment and exclusion. I think of the teenagers and children I work with in our psych hospital who are healing from suicidal attempts (and those who have completed) that face bullying and exclusion everyday whether on social media, text messages, or in school and many times all the above. Bullying many times for being uniquely who they are whether defined by their sexual identity and/or orientation, gender identity, religious and/or spiritual beliefs, the way they dress or like to do their hair, piercings and/or tattoos, a variety of things. Not always bullied by their peers but also by parents, family members and/or other adults in their life. I believe it breaks God’s heart when we discriminate because we don’t understand another’s beliefs or identity. Racism, social injustice, gender inequality, exclusion of others based on sexual identity and/or orientation, political and religious extremists who act out of hate, poverty and hunger, ANYTHING that causes pain, hate and division within humanity breaks God’s heart. God’s heart breaks when we choose not to love our neighbor. Everyone is our neighbor. Even those we consider the enemy. I don’t know your story. I can choose to reject you and lean into my explicit and implicit bias, experiences from my past, or immediate judgments I place on you, or I can assume you are doing the best you can with what you have, who you are, and that you are a new experience, a new person for me to meet and know, and choose to love over to hate/ostracize. Brene Brown calls this “generosity” and compassion. It’s a process but worth shifting into this state of mind.

This is just one praise and worship song that has been sitting with me and causing me to really reflect and think. Instead of just singing along next time, I hope you decide to take heart to what the words are you are singing. They really do hold meaning and do you really resonate with them? This is my continued hope.