Reflections...

A sermon preached at Kowloon Union Church on 14 April 2024, by Dr. Samuel J. Dubbleman. The scripture readings that day were Psalm 4, and Luke 24: 36b-48.

When you are disturbed

Take a minute to remember the last time you were deeply troubled. Maybe it was from the news: shootings at a concert in Russia, conflict between Hamas and Israel, conflict in Myanmar, earthquake in Taiwan. Maybe it was something closer to home: death, sickness, infidelity, anxiety, old age. The list could go on. The ravishment of time and loss catches up to us all. 

 

What do you do when you are disturbed? Today’s Psalm offers some advice: “When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent.” How can we in the midst of the unending plethora of disturbances that life has to offer state with the Psalmist that “you gave me room when I was in distress,” “you have put gladness in my heart more than when their grain and wine abound” and “I will both lie down and sleep in piece”? 

 

What do you do when you are disturbed? The advice of the Psalm seems to be 1) pray and trust in God; and 2) be silent. I will take the first bit of advice, to pray and trust in God, as an obvious good given the context, and focus on silence. 

 

I want to spend a little time today reflecting on how helpful this advice is—especailly the second element of silence—when we are faced with disturbances. 

 

I am not an OT scholar and do not know Hebrew, but the word “disturbed” has a few connotations in English. First, there is the meaning of interruption. “Did I disturb you?” That is, were you in the middle of something? Second, there is the use of the word to indicate an emotionally or mentally disturbed person that seems to stand out from the crowd. “She is a disturbed girl.” Think of the Adam’s family character Wednesday. Here are a few quotes from Wednesday in the recent Netflix series: 

 

I see the world as a place that must be endured, and my personal philosophy is kill or be killed. 

 

I act as if I don’t care if people dislike me. Deep down . . . I secretly enjoy it. 

 

Listen, people like me and you, we’re different. We’re original thinkers, intrepid outliers in this vast cesspool of adolescence. We don’t need these inane rites of passage to validate who we are.

 

Disturbed, yet charming, whimsical. Disturbance, as in Adam Family’s Wednesday-disturbed, is the outlier in the room, the oddball; the goth kid dressed in all black. 

 

If only disturbance was limited to these two meanings: 1) the interruption and 2) the oddball. But, there is another kind of disturbance that all of us, if we are blessed to live long enough, will come to know. This kind of disturbance is akin to anxiety, worry, fear, dread, shame; that icky feeling in your chest or your throat; those nagging negative thoughts and emotions that will not leave you alone. The feeling at the end of the day that you just don’t measure up; ruminating on past regrets; or constantly projecting your thoughts to an unknown and uncertain future. 

 

This third meaning of disturbance as anxiety or shame is often the nemesis of sleep. Disturbance steels sleep from us; sleeplessness, in turn, bolsters  the worry, the dread, the clenched jaw, the rumination. Poison begets more poison. It is of interest, then, that the Psalm mentions sleep. 

 

Because disturbance is, well disturbing, our natural response is avoidance, fight or flight. But if disturbance is inevitable, which it is, then maybe we should not run away or avoid it, but welcome these feelings as an invitation to a new way of being truly at home with ourselves, a door into the unknown horizon, one that feels like expansion, or what the Psalmist called gladness more than wine, of lying down and sleeping in peace. Let me explain. 

 

I am speaking from experience. Last year, after finishing teaching an afternoon class at LTS, I ran down To Fung Shan road, quickly packed my luggage and rushed to the airport for a two week trip to Scotland and the States. During the trip I was presenting at two conferences, while continuing to teach virtually classes LTS. I did not think too much about the demands. From graduate school I was accustomed to packing more and more into an already full life. (Business becomes a badge of honor; running here, running there like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland: “I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say ‘hello,’ ‘goodbye’). However, during take-off, I suddenly felt overheated. My hands, arms, and legs were sweaty. I had never been an anxious flyer before. What was going on?  I going to be sick? I didn’t know what to do. Eventually I realized I wasn’t going to throw up, so it must be something else. Anxiety? A panic attack? I dug down and drew on the best resource I had available at the time: Ted Lasso. What would Ted Lasso do? I closed my eyes, put a cool rag on my head, and focused on my breathing. Eventually the disturbance subsided, my heart stopped raising, and I felt normal. Silence. Peace. Thank God. 

 

Embarrassed, I didn’t really tell anyone and pushed on. There was work to do, people to see, and fun to have. I was in Edinburgh after all. I wanted to  see the sights, eat the haggis, and sample the scotch. And I did. What a glorious, medieval city. 

 

Life continued and I remained busy. But the plane departure was not an isolated incident and thereafter at unexpected times I would sometimes feel the flush, the heart race, the feeling of dread in my throat. It was overwhelming and embarrassing. I’ve always been capable, strong, able to handle a lot. What was wrong with me? I pushed on drawing on that ancient ingrained habit of fight or flight. 

 

Then last December I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night from extreme dizziness, and thought I was having a heart attack or stroke. I woke up McCall, my wife, and likely scared her half to death. 

 

After that night, I could no longer ignore my symptoms; something was wrong. My body forced me to attend to the situation. First, I just thought it was vertigo from an imbalance in my ears. This caused me to slow down, simply because I was not capable of juggling so many things at one time. Just walking to town felt exhausting. 

 

But, three months later, I’ve realized that these moments of disturbance, accompanied now with dizziness, are not just due to an imbalance in my ears. No. I’ve been disturbed by anxiety, by burnout, and by shame. The ten years of graduate school, moving my family to a foreign culture, the constant work, constant mental stress got to me. And I didn’t talk with people about it.  

 

I had been living a life of constant stimulation, especailly mental stimulation, and I’ve had to cut out or lesson a lot of activities, substances, and practices that fuelled the need for constant stimuli. Coffee. Alcohol. Social media. Rumination. Mind Wandering. Exercise has helped, so has mindfulness meditation, and talking about what I have been going through with trusted friends. And of course prayer, reaching out to resources beyond myself.

 

This is my story of disturbance. I am sure you have your own. Some of you may be going through something similar right now. 

 

“When you are disturbed, do not sin; ponder it on your beds, and be silent.” Does silence help when you are disturbed? Yes and no. Let me begin by recognizing that silence is many things, including the absence of vocalization and the absence of thought. 

 

Yes, quieting my thoughts, paying attention to my attention, focusing on the present moment devoid of critical judgments has helped. Likewise, constantly processing your problems does not help if it is rumination. Negativity catches our attention more than positivity, and we tend to pay attention—to mentally run back and forth—over negative memories, thoughts, and feelings. Negative rumination drags us down. In this regard, silence, both vocal and mental, can be a good strategy. 

 

On the other hand, if silence means the suppression of negative emotions and negative thoughts, then it is not helpful. The fight or flight symptom is hardwired into our psychology. Acceptance of our shortcomings is harder to come by. My coping mechanism of choice here is avoidance. Just ignore what is happening, bury it under more work or more stimulation. Here silence does not help. Instead, opening up and sharing about what you are going through with trusted people helps. 

 

Here, I have had to learn a little bit as well about shame and, in turn, the practice of self-compassion. A close companion of rumination is shame. We feel shame for not measuring up to who we think we should be, who we want to be. I’m not good enough, smart enough, attractive enough; pick your poison. Often these feelings, if they are accompanied by enough rumination makes us feel stuck, helpless. Evolutionarily, we are wired to feel like we might even die from shame, due to the threat of being excluded from the tribe. Thus, we usually intuitively react to shame as something to be avoided or to fight. It’s the enemy: destroy it or run as far away from it as you can. 

 

But I like what the poet David Whyte has recently said about this, shame not as something to avoid, but an invitation to the doorway that we are meant to walkthrough. In his words: 

 

Shame is nothing to be shameful about. Shame is the very physical, heart rending, painful measure of the way we hide from life and from others because we do not feel ourselves equal to what we meet.

In other words, all human beings experience it at every stage of their passage through life, most especially in moments where we need courage and presence and most emphatically as we approach our last breath. 

Shame calibrates all the ways, great and small that we don’t measure up: and therefore shame secretly affects even the outwardly shameless and is the core human driver of all human maturation. Shame outlines exactly the ways we feel inadequate and unequal to life and exactly the nature and place of our hiding. Shame provides us, generously and on a daily basis, with the invitation to understand all the ways we do not wish or do not deserve to be seen, to be touched or to be invited to join the extraordinary dance of the world: shame tells us instantly all the ways we desire to meet but dare not meet, all the ways we are desperate to play but do not play, and all the ways we desire to sing but do not sing. Shame tells us all the ways we long for real change but do not feel worthy of the transformation, all the ways we deeply desire to be enlivened or to feel pleasure in the extraordinary miracle nature of creation. Shame instructs us in all the ways we feel we do not deserve to be here.[1]

When you are disturbed I would encourage you to both be silent and to speak. Silence the rumination; speak about your shortcomings. Open up and share with others your inadequacies. In this way speaking silences the rumination and negative thinking. Shame, then, isn’t an enemy but an invitation that comes to one and all. Disturbances, then, can help us face our experiences of not measuring, which once accepted can help us have compassion on ourselves and those around us. In this way, disturbance and the feeling of not deserving any good ironically leads us to believe we deserve that promised peace spoken of so long ago in the Psalms or by the resurrected Christ. 

 

So, when you are disturbed be silent, and talk to a friend. 

 

I pray that you—when facing life’s inevitable disturbances—can be filled with the courage to be silent and not be silent, to speak and not to speak, to pray and not to pray, and in so doing will come to know the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding. 

 

Amen.