Responding well to Hurt: a Buddhist Christian Approach.

This is a difficult book to write, but I have had great encouragement from many,  including James Alison, whose work touches on some similar themes, and colleagues at the recent conference of BIAPT (the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology) where I presented work in progress; as well as personal friends.

here is the outline as it stands at present:

Introduction

Setting the context as outlined above, and clarifying the concept of ‘hurt’. Unlike terms like 'harm’, ‘evil’, ‘sin’ and ‘trauma’, it carries neither metaphysical nor psychological baggage, and has no link with one of the negative reactions. It simply denotes occasions when for some cause or other we find ourselves in a painful state and immediately reaching for a ‘solution’. The idea that we can respond ‘well’ to such hurt – rather than merely deal or cope with it – is fundamental to the book.

Part 1: Negative Reactions.

Faced with hurt, we can go on the attack and blame someone, we can internalise it into some kind of self-harm, or we can deny its existence or its importance to us. All three ways perpetuate the hurt.

1.‘You hurt me’: Blame.

All pervasive in our society is the need when things hurt to find a cause we can blame and eliminate and so find happiness. We expect – these days, in the affluent societies – to be healthy and fulfilled, and this leads to an ‘if only’ culture: if only we eliminated that disease or (more sinisterly) that group of ‘baddies’, all would be fine.
According to Girard and Alison, all civilisation rests on scapegoating, but our culture seems particularly addicted to the blaming and shaming of the other, and a denial of our own complicity in the complex causes of hurt

2.‘I hurt myself’: Shame.

But our culture also exhibits a high rate of suicide and mental infirmity which suggests the principal scapegoat is often ourselves. The book investigates why when we experience abuse and other kinds of trauma in childhood, we often feel we ‘deserve’ it and continue in patterns of behaviour that repeat and even deepen the original hurt.

3. ‘No-one can hurt me’: Disclaim.

A third response neither externalises nor assumes the hurt, but attempts to distance it. The hurt may be denied, or it may be denied that the hurt has or can really harm us; it is ‘all for the best’. We may find in religion a way of getting to a space where we are above all possibility of hurt. But it remains buried within us, as (in Buddhist terms) a bad karmic seed that will someday sprout.

4. Writing Hurt in Stone: Traditions that entrench the Negative.

The book will draw mainly on Buddhism and Christianity for positive ways of responding to hurt, but needs first to acknowledge that both faiths have often been used to encourage negative reactions to it. Christianity has often encouraged both blame and shame, while Buddhism and mystical versions of Christianity have often sought a position of invulnerability beyond all possible hurt. But secular approaches that render hurt abnormal have equally encouraged ‘blame, shame and disclaim’.

Part 2: Pathways of personal Healing

5. Simply Hurting: the Way of Therapy.

The alternative to the three reactions is not to put our hurt in a narrative that accuses, internalises or evades, but simply to say ‘I hurt’. Therapy can slowly release us from patterns of internalised or denied hurt by remembering and acknowledging it, but the book argues that therapy cannot take us decisively beyond the hurt and hurting self.

6. Realistic Witness: the Way of Silence.

In the author’s experience meditation has been key in enabling release from the negative narratives with which we habitually deal with hurt, enabling us to be silent and realistic witnesses of our own pain. In the words of Kalsched, describing Job, it teaches us to ‘stand astride our humanity’ without blame or shame, fight or flight. The way in which meditation can enable this essential process is explored

Tragicomedy: the Way of the Clown.

Tragic heroes like Orestes and Lear show how to ‘stand astride our humanity’ in the face of atrocity. But it is the comic fool who shows us how to live innocently and honestly in our vulnerability to pain.

8. Beginning Again: the Way of the Child.

In the teaching of Jesus, we need to be ‘born again,’ for children exemplify the only approach that enables us to ‘enter the Kingdom’. Meanwhile Buddhist traditions emphasise ahimsa – harmlessness –jinen – spontaneous naturalness – and what Zen calls ‘beginner’s mind’.This chapters explores the notion of innocence that seems to lie behind these teachings, and asks whether it can ever be wise and canny enough to offer a realistic path of transformation.

9. Wonderful just as you are: the Way of Forgiveness.

Our culture regards sins as the unforgivable hurts other people cause. In the case of ‘decent people like me’, on the other hand, confession of sin would involve a morbid kind of self-blame, which a little therapy ought to free me from! Many religions by contrast offer complex rituals whereby guilt can be expunged. This book urges a third way of unconditional acceptance, rooted in Buddhist Emptiness, and made available in the new humanity established by the risen Christ, who still bears his wounds.

Part 3: A World of Wounds Transformed

10. Society without Satan: Politics and the Press.

This book has mainly focused on personal responses to hurt, but the issues raised take us into the whole business of constructing a society free from ‘Satan’, the Accuser. In the press and in political life the Accuser dominates, always finding someone to blame when people hurt. What would life be like if we bid him farewell?

11. The Worm’s Forgiveness: life in a hurt Cosmos.

We turn to global ecological issues. From viewing nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’, we have come to see it, despairingly, as a fragile innocent victim of human greed. But nature’s powers of regeneration are amazingly strong. We need to work with them, and learn from them a robust and renewing forgiveness.

12. Wise Innocence.

Jesus urged us to be ‘wily as serpents and innocent as doves’. This book has advocated a wise innocence, a foolish wisdom, that opens a way, not to abolish hurt, but the harm it does through our bad narratives, a way of responding subtly and positively to the hurt that is our common lot, turning it to a prevailing good.