Loving Bravely
On love, fear, and growing our comfort zones
by the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon
UU Church of Columbia, MO
Last week, my one-year-old bit an old reusable straw and broke off two small and very pointy shards of hard plastic. One of the shards she spit out. The other shard was nowhere to be found.
For a moment, she was startled and afraid and came to me crying for comfort. But with a moment’s soothing she smiled at me and then laughed while I totally panicked, scrambling around the floor looking for the other shard.
Finally, I concluded with a deep dread that she must have swallowed it. I called the doctor’s office, learned there was nothing I could do but watch her for signs of distress, and spent the rest of the morning hovering around her, dripping fear like an anxious sweat and imagining all of the terrible things that could happen to her tender little body if I let her out of my sight ever again.
Hours later, I found the second shard, which she had not actually swallowed, but which had fallen to the floor and been kicked away… probably by me in my rush. So, all was well again, until the next inevitable scary incident.
In the meantime, I have invested in metal straws.
I consider managing my own fear while sending my children progressively out into the world to be the hardest thing I have to do every single day of my life.
And so it goes with every person or thing that we love.
Loving is one of the most terrifying things we do. When we love someone or something, we know that pain and loss are 100% guaranteed, at some time, one way or another.
How we manage to resist wrapping our loved ones up in bubble wrap and locking them in their rooms is kind of a mystery to me… except that it’s not because that is called imprisonment and abuse, and we recognize, for the most part and usually, that love should free rather than constrict the people we love.
Still, the fear I have felt for my loved ones has taught me something important about love, which is this:
That we love is essential to our humanity, but it also matters how we love.
It matters that we learn, as Marge Piercy writes, to:
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
The thing we sometimes forget is that loving people can cause us to contract just as much as it calls us to expand.
Our fierce love for our family can cause us to build walls and moats and guns to protect them.
A clenching, clinging, anxious love can lead to abuse.
A violent extremist is moved by obsessive love for people or ideology just as much as a nonviolent activist.
And any love can tend in the direction of constriction… yes even yours, even mine, even ours, because loving with hands wide open and doors banging on their hinges is difficult, terrifying, and even counter-instinctual.
Our loved ones will get hurt. We will too. And we want to protect them and ourselves, at all costs.
But the existential truth is, we can’t, not really. And so we have a choice. We can accept the risk, contingency, and fragility of all that we love and keep loving bigger and bigger anyway. Or we can cleave tightly to an illusion of safety that shrinks and shrinks our love to the very few we can control.
These things are true at the individual scale and communally.
One of the things we are being forced to grapple with as a human species, as climate and economic breakdown pick up speed around us, is the magnified and collective tension between fearful and courageous love.
This is the tension between a love for our families that battens down the hatches and a love for our humanity that lets others in to shelter with us. At the macro level, the difference between anxious/fearful love and courageous love has big consequences. It can mean the difference between cruel border policies and welcome to migrants, or between sticking with our international allies or abandoning them to invasion.
A few weeks back, I preached that if we are to survive these times with our humanity in tact, we are going to have to practice generosity like we are training for a giving-ultramarathon, because we are.
Our collective capacity for a generous love may mean the difference between millions of climate refugees dying or finding room in the abundance of our wealthy nation. It may mean the difference for our survival as a human species.
But let’s be clear that the kind of generosity being asked of us may not feel or be safe.
It’s less like a big dinner for our loved ones and friends, and more like stopping by the road in the middle of the night to help the scary looking guy in the beat up car. It’s less like giving a kid a teddy bear and more like giving a stranger your extra kidney.
This is why we center ourselves not just in love, but in the call to a courageous love as the core of our faith.
This year at the UU Church of Columbia, MO, we are focusing on our mission statement: “In the spirit of courageous love, we forge a community of radical welcome and deep connection that moves us together to heal the world.”
And the phrase courageous love is the very first thing we speak, because everything else we seek to do relies upon choosing the breadth and depth and risk of courageous love.
We cannot forge community, offer radical welcome, find deep connection, move together, or ever ever hope to heal the world until we train our spiritual muscles to accept the existential challenge of courageous love.
As Unitarian Universalists, we believe that when it comes to God’s Love, or the circle of Beloved Community, or human worth and dignity, everyone is in. But drawing the circle wide means dealing with our fear, because that kind of wild and inclusive love is fully outside our control. It will bring us face to face with dangerous characters. It will seat us right next to our own powerlessness.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch ; to love and let
go again and again.
Living our faith means dealing with our fear, because the calling of our faith and the way we will survive is by expanding our circles of love wider and wider and wider still. But our brains weren’t really made for such a thing.
The most ancient part of our brain, the amygdala, was made to control our automatic processes, and it was made to identify threat and to respond. And that ancient brain is very quick and very efficient. Our fear has helped us survive as individuals and as a species. But human life has gotten more and more complicated over the millennia, and the ancient brain is rather simple. One thing that we know is that it actually cannot perceive the difference between a physical threat and an intellectual or emotional one. In a fairly real way, our ancient brain cannot distinguish between discomfort and danger, or between unpleasant stress and mortal peril.
So, if we are to make our circles of love wider and wider still, we know that we must find out how to face the fear that is instinctual. And we know that if we want to be able to love beyond our habits of fear, we have some ancient brain work to do.
I have heard it said, that “Fear is a good instinct, but we have to do the work to know when we should override it.” And that is true. Fear helps us survive, even as it constricts our bodies and lives. To love bigger, we have to know when to override fear, but even beyond that, we have to learn some ancient brain and body tools to calm us down enough to even be able to override it.
I have lately been on a journey of discovery about trauma, toxic stress, and the human nervous system. One thing I have learned is that every body has a “window of tolerance,” a zone within which their nervous system can function well without spinning them into automatic and protective body responses of fight, flight, or freeze. The zone is different for all of us, based on natural personality traits, past experience of trauma, social location, and a million other things.
Let’s just call this the comfort zone. Within the comfort zone we are relationally present and flexible. Our bodies can take on stress, process it, and recover from it. Within the comfort zone, we can grow our circle of love and concern.
Outside the zone, things start to go amiss.
When we are frozen below the zone, we struggle to productively engage the sympathetic nervous system to get things done, therefore feeling perpetually stuck, detached, and unable to engage with our lives or anyone in them.
Above the zone, we stay in fight or flee, never able to calm the system enough to let the parasympathetic nervous system help us recover. We feel overwhelmed, defensive, aggressive, inflexible. We build up walls and lash out.
When our bodies stray outside the window of tolerance, courageous love is not an option because our ancient brains have high-jacked our capacity to be present and flexible.
We talk a lot in progressive circles about the need to get outside our comfort zones to make change. But in learning more about the ancient brain and the nervous system, I have come to believe that what we actually need is to stay inside our comfort zones, at their very edge, and to grow them wider.
I have come to suspect that a wise calling is not actually for people to spend all their time outside their comfort zone, because outside the zone is where we shut down or overwhelm. A wise calling is to support one another in making our comfort zones larger by stretching them, like we would a tight or tender muscle.
Luckily, neuroscientists, mental health professionals, and ancient religious traditions alike, all have prescriptions for how to do this stretching. It all comes back around to my toddler, who was scared when she bit that plastic straw and came to me to be rocked and held. Before we forget or override our instincts or have them squashed, our bodies know what they need to be soothed.
Learning how to stretch our comfort zones simply requires us to reconnect with the ways that our bodies are soothed.
We each have an organ in our body that works closely with the ancient brain. This organ is a decentralized network of sensory nerves called the Vagus Nerve or Wandering Nerve. It connects the brain to all of the systems of the body and regulates the bodies autonomic functions. The vagus nerve is what carries lightning fast messages from the amygdala to every part of the body preparing us to fight, flee, or freeze, but it is also what tells us that we’re ok and can relax.
Counselor and somatic healer Resma Menakem calls this organ the Soul Nerve. In his book My Grandmother’s Hands, he writes:
“When your body has an emotional response, such as when your stomach clenches, your voice catches, your pulse races, your shoulders tighten, your breathing quickens, your body braces for impact, or you have a sense that danger is lurking, that’s your soul nerve at work. […] When your body feels relaxed, open, settled, and in sync with other bodies, that’s your soul nerve functioning.”
Menakem tells us:
“You can learn to work with your soul nerve. With practice, you can begin to consciously and deliberately relax your muscles, settle your body, and soothe yourself during difficult or high-stress situations.”
To love well… courageously and widely, we need to learn how to soothe our bodies and stretch our comfort zones.
In My Grandmother’s Hands, Menakem shares several practices for stimulating the vagus nerve and thereby soothing and settling our bodies: deep humming, slow rocking or swaying, focused breathing, belly-rubbing, finger squeezing, and om-ing or chanting.
These are practices that can over time help us stretch our comfort zones wide and wider still. These are some of the practices that help us manage our fear and love more bravely. They lay the groundwork for courageous love. And, it turns out, most of them are common spiritual practices.
Learning to love differently is hard. The courageous love at the heart of our mission asks us to release and deepen and widen in a way that fights every instinct of protection and fear. And the stakes are very high. Never have we needed courageous love more in our world or lives,
But we have all the tools we need, as close to us as our breath, as close to us as the wandering soul nerve at our very core, as close to us as the memory of being rocked to sleep.
