The Week of September 5th, 2021
“Why People Don’t Like Change” sermon series
Sermon Noodles on “The Wild Indigenous One”
Sermon text: Isaiah 53:4-6
We are in a series of sermons on why people don’t like change. We have come to the part where we simply answer that question: People don’t like change because it opens up past wounds that may lead to fear of abandonment, grief and loss at best, and a re-traumatization of past-events at worst.
It is impossible to overemphasis what is known as “The Wounded Child” when discussing spiritual growth and human development. Impossible. The #1 reason people get stuck in life, or lash out, or simply don’t do well is the lack of healing for the traumatic wounds of childhood primarily associated with injury and rejection.
1. Everyone gets wounded in some way or another during childhood. Around the age of three or four, we begin to develop childhood survival strategies in response to the wounds. The survival strategies are not evil or bad—they help us survive the war of childhood. The problem comes when we as adults continue to employ the strategies of the Wounded Child.
2. The Wounded Child has four main strategies for life:
A. The Victim: Broods at how life is unfair. Speaks primarily of the wrongs with other people. Takes little or no responsibility for their lives. The person whose strategy in life is never wrong and never at fault.
B. The Conformist: is the most common strategy of white middle class America and pursues security, comfort, money, prestige, and power over others. (Wild Mind 161). As children we may have been incessantly criticized and the fear of criticism leads us to want more than anything to fit it. We do.
C. The Rebel: is angry and against almost everything. Ironically finds a place of social belonging by associating with other rebels.
D. The Princess/Prince: this strategy shares the emotion of anger with the Rebel but unlike the rebel, this person is able to reap the rewards of her community. The Princess/Prince is the person born on 3rd base and goes through life thinking they hit a triple. Their sense of entitlement is profound and they use intimidation, condescension, control (like gaslighting) to get what they want.
3. As with all the other strategies of the “False Self,” these fragmented parts of us hijack our response to life at key moments—even in the midst of a conversation with a friend at coffee fellowship after church. They also “retraumatize” us by reliving the childhood wound and inflicting/transmitting it upon others (hence the biblical phrase “the sins of the father are passed down to the fourth and fifth generations”) and result in depression, addiction, and even suicide.
4. The Wounded Child tries to get their needs met through immature emotional strategies. This can powerfully curtain the development of “EQ” or our emotional IQ. Generally, Wounded Children want others to meet our basic needs. (Wild Mind 157)
5. The Wounded Child contains great and wonderful gifts, many of which we rejected in order to survive. The healing of the Wounded Child and reclaiming those gifts usually begins with assimilating unassimilated emotions, beginning with grief.Sermon Noodles for the week of August 22nd
We are in a series of sermons on “change” and looking at the “True Self” and “False Self” of Ephesians 4:22-24, where the Apostle Paul writes that we have “learned how to put on the True Self” and learned to “put off the False S elf.” Using Bill Plotkin’s nature-based map of the human psyche to describe the territory of the True and False Self, we are exploring the spiritual growth through the archetypal lens of The Nurturing Generative Adult (North), The Wild Indigenous One (South), The Innocent/Sage (East), and The Muse (West).
This week we look at the “Wild Indigenous One” archetype of the South. The South facet is “that dimension of our innate wholeness deliriously in love with our enthralling, sacred, and animate world” (Wild Mind 51). The “Wild One” is the part of us that loves to explore the landscape, jump in puddles, hug, dance, and stand in awe of rainbows. “When in the consciousness of our Wild Self, we’re sometimes so at home in our world, so in love with Earthly creation, so fully present to our moment and place that, in an ecstatic rapture, we lose awareness of all obligations.” (Wild Mind 52)
Read Colossians 1:15-17
Notice who this passage is speaking about. This passage is one of the major reasons Christians think of God as a trinity even though the word trinity isn’t in the Bible. Notice what exactly is created? Whom is holding everything together?
This is why the early church called the natural world “the first body of Christ” and the “first incarnation.” The Earth/universe is the first incarnation of God, Jesus is the second.
So when we go for a hike in the great outdoors, is it any wonder we feel renewed? We are walking out into the first incarnation of God, in which Christ holds it all together. Is it any wonder that when we go camping, golfing, fishing, go out into the back yard or even just look outside at the sun or the stars we feel better?
The Wild One is also informed by the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures like Job 12:7-8. My major point: why weren’t we taught about the True Self? Passages like Colossians 1 or Job 12?The reason is because this kind of life that is rooted in wonder and innocence and lives rooted in the Earth is the most not just suppressed but oppressed in western culture, especially in the church.
Bill Plotkin:
It is precisely this sense of belonging and kinship (with the Earth) . . . That would render impossible the Western and Westernized cultures we now live in, which, despite our aspirations to the contrary, are largely ecocidal, genocidal, dog-eat-dog, materialistic, unjust, defensive, imperialistic—in short isolated and isolating . . . By cultivating the Wild Indigenous One in ourselves and in our children, we’ll go along way toward forging new cultures that are not only life sustaining but also life enhancing. (Wild Mind 53)
Devotional Guide
1. What is your favorite outdoor activity? Take a moment and write a paragraph or two about what you love so much about the activity. Pay special attention to how it makes you feel in your body.
2. Read Genesis 2:15. Notice the word “work,” which in Hebrew is “abad” (aw-bad). Interestingly the word means “serve” just as much if not more as it means “work.” How does this change your understanding of the verse and our relationship as human beings with the natural world?
3. Respond to this quote from Bill Plotkin in his book, Wild Mind (pages 55-56): “From the perspective and experience of the Wild Indigenous One, we are enchanted in two ways. First, the South Self is utterly moved by, deeply touched by, the things of this world . . . when we’re alive in our South facet, all that we do, even “work” becomes play. The world fills us with wonder and awe. We’re also enchanted in a second, reciprocal sense: The things of this world are allured by us and to us!”