Our primal wound

"God's story for us began in beautiful intimacy and goodness, but Adam and Eve soon found themselves east of Eden." - p. 140

Today I read chapter 6 in Chuck DeGroat's book 'Healing That's Within.' The chapter title is "Hidden Roots," and he discusses our primal wound. 

This is not a term I recall hearing before (which doesn't necessarily mean I haven't). Chuck says some account of this wound is told across most religions. As well, suffering, and its roots in disconnection, has long been mused on by philosophers, poets, mystics, theologians, and psychologists. 

Psychotherapists John Firman and Ann Gila write this description:

[The primal wound is] a break in the intricate web of relationships in which we live, move, and have our being. A fundamental trust and connection to the universe is betrayed, and we become strangers to ourselves and others, struggling for survival in a seemingly alien world. In psychological terms, our connection to our deeper Self is wounded. In religious and philosophical terms, it is our connection to Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, or the Divine that is broken. No matter how we elect to describe it, the fact remains that this wounding cuts us off from the deeper roots of our existence.

DeGroat says Genesis 3 is where we find this in the Christian tradition. Where Adam and Eve have doubt, shame, and anxiety, so do we. Where they grasped, and hid, we have too. Each of us is invited to explore how this ancient disconnection shows up in our own lives. As he calls it, "Echoes of the primal wound."

On p. 143 he suggests, "It's as if the serpent was whispering in my ear, 'You see, the world isn't safe. God can't be trusted. Pain is right around the corner.' It's an ache that runs deeper than the things that happened to us, an ache revealed as an ancient story that lives on within us..."

I thought this bit from Psychologist and former Trappist monk James Finley was eye-opening:

On the one hand there is the great truth that from the first moment of my existence the deepest dimension of my life is that I am made by God for union with himself. The deepest dimension of my identity as a human person is that I share in God's own life both now and in eternity in a relationship of untold intimacy.

On the other hand, my own daily experience impresses upon me the painful truth that my heart has listened to the serpent instead of to God. There is something within me that puts on fig leaves of concealment, kills my brother, builds towers of confusion, and brings cosmic chaos upon the earth. There is something in me that loves darkness rather than light, that rejects God and thereby rejects my own deepest reality as a human person made in the image and likeness of God.

Whew. Yeah... So it's not just me??

DeGroat ends the chapter by reminding us that both stories, both realities - connection and disconnection - live on within us. When we say things like, "You never know what other people are facing," we have to admit that's true for us too. We bear the wounds of what happened to us, ancestral wounds that passed through us, and this primal wound... "an intuition in our deep memory of Eden and how we've been severed from it." And yet, he says, God, the "Compassionate Witness," comes near.

He shares the story of a lady who'd had a terrible injustice done to her... and over time and with a lot of work... came out the other side. She says, "I even had to forgive God for not being the quick-acting police officer responding on cue to my frequent 911 prayers... I had to let a lot of what I believed about God die so that I could rediscover goodness and mercy..." 

Hmm... That's worth reading that last sentence again...

This is some powerful stuff. The same stuff Jesus told us about... and suffered with us. And God comes near...

 

This was a good chapter, and ends the section "Where are you?"