Followup, anger chair

I think back on my first or second posting I wrote about a woman who, per her therapist's suggestion, was carrying around a chair as a way of becoming "aware of how much anger she was carrying", as a result of childhood trauma. One key point in her description of her anger was that she was completely justified in being angry. The counselor was really wise to give her the suggestion of carrying around an actual chair, it's way too easy to think our hurts and emotions don't really affect us, because we can't always see them or feel them.

She carried the chair (decorated with anger, mad, all that she was feeling) for 5 weeks, she attracted a lot of attention and found that many people opened up to her about themselves, which was a blessing she did not expect. Making her anger visible and vulnerable helped give others permission to talk about their own stuff. She found that the chair didn't get heavier, it got lighter. She realized that she was an adult with new ways of coping and began to enjoy life, as an artist began enjoying her work.

She found the moment to put the chair down after speaking with a group of kids at a Lutheran church she was aked to visit, to speak about anger. The kids all wrote down things they were angry about and ripped up the papers, placing them in a basket on the chair. She says she is not a church goer, but she "had a stong feeling, an intuitive voice" that told her to leave her chair there. She says she felt she had given her anger to God and was able to walk away.

I am glad to read the follow up to this, it's good to tie up loose ends. I am so glad she found healing in that process.

Here's my take. I think it is amazing (although not suprising) that her journey led her to God. Even if she doesn't end up as a "Christian" because of it. That is probably some kind of heresy to some folks. I know that in my life, God has been most evident in the world, the outside, not in the church. He's there too, but where he is most present, in the most immediate, intimate sense, in in our life, is in the daily life and struggles, along the highways and byways. It's where he meets us, where we are, and although it may lead into a church eventually, we must know that he is everywhere, not contained within the comfortable box we'd like him to be.

Perhaps God would have wanted to this lady to be affected in such a way that she was driven to seek him, but the important part is that she was healed. Even if she does not recognize it in the conventional religious sense, she received salvation in the process. Perhaps that is the start of a wider healing she will see in a spiritual sense but in the end, she was healed, her ability to recogize or comprehend from whence it came does not lessen her healing.

I have felt for a long time, because of my personal experiences, that God is and has been breaking out of the confines of the Church. We have striven to keep him safely locked away, controlled and defined by how we think he ought to be, but that is not his way. He is and will always be the wind that we cannot catch, control or make to perform. He appears where we are embarassed to be, and touches those we won't touch. He steps in where we refuse to go and makes broken things whole. When we meet him, we meet him in the gutters and alley ways in our lives, either spiritual or physical and sometimes both. It's in that place that he reaches out and holds our hand, raises us up from the weight of the burdens we have allowed to crush us, or cripple us, and he says, right here and right now, put these things down.

That's where we need to look for him and where we will find him. When we go places we don't want to go and see people we don't want to see, we are in the perfect position to see him. It was this lady's willingness to tote around a silly marked up chair for FIVE weeks, to business meetings, buses, stores, where ever she went that put her in a position to hear God's voice. The question is how do I find the courage in my own life to be that brave?