“I don’t mean to complain,” she said

Fear of Falling

By Aaron McEmrys

Not very long ago, I helped organize a large conference. It was the first morning, and I was bustling, trying to find the members of my small group so we could get our first session together started. A woman walked over to me and asked, “Are you Aaron?” She was probably in her early sixties – her long and hearty red hair only beginning to fade a bit around a kind and open face.

I read her nametag, and mentally checked another person off my list of things to do, “Good morning, Sally – it’s good to meet you!” She was one of my small-group. “I was just trying to get everyone together so we can start on time. We’re just upstairs in the chapel. Right this way.”

I half-turned and started up the stairs, but quickly realized she wasn’t following me. “Our meeting is up there?”

“Yep, we’re up there in the chapel all weekend.”

“Oh.”

She took a reluctant half-step toward the stairs and then stopped. She had a strange look on her face, and her hands sort of fluttered up on their own, as if they were trying to speak. For the first time, she had my full attention. I looked at her for a moment, waiting to see if she would speak. When she didn’t I asked if the stairs were a problem.

Very slowly she answered, “No…its okay. I can make it. I can do it. It’s just…never mind…its fine.” “It’s just that I was in a bad car accident a while ago and both of my legs were broken – so stairs are kind of…but it’s okay. I can really do it. I don’t mean to complain.”

I was stunned. A flood of feeling washed through me. How could this be? Don’t mean to complain!?! I felt a powerful urge to bow down and beg her forgiveness – not for anything I did or for the painful fact that our building was not fully accessible or for her pain or broken legs – no, I felt like begging her forgiveness on behalf of everything that had ever happened that left her feeling that telling me she was in pain was not okay.

Before I knew it I heard myself saying “You know, I am sure you can make it up those stairs. But you don’t need to. We’re going to switch to a downstairs room. We’re a community here – and part of what that means is that we care for one another. So please, let us care for you.”

She looked at me intently for a minute, and it was as if a heavy load was lifted. She smiled and said, “Thanks. It’s just so hard to ask for help.”

It is hard to ask for help. It feels as if I’ve been struggling with that for my whole life, but lately I have become more and more aware of just how pervasive this terrible resistance is. I’ve taken to calling it the “Fear of Falling.”

The fear of falling seems to be everywhere, inside almost everyone, like some invisible and debilitating epidemic. So many of us can be open and aware and loving and honest – until we start to fall; start to fail. And then we may remain just as outwardly open and loving – but we’re not, not really. We’re covering up, soldiering on – using our powerful wills to keep our pain, anxiety and fear inside – ours and ours alone through broken bones and broken hearts; through grief and loneliness and despair and confusion. We don’t mean to complain.

But what can possibly be more natural, more human – than falling down? As Unitarian Universalist author Phillip Simmons wrote shortly before his death of Lou Gehrig’s disease,

“We have all suffered, and will suffer, our own falls. The fall from youthful ideals, the waning of physical strength, the failure of a cherished hope, the loss of our near and dear, the fall into injury or sickness, and late or soon, the fall to our certain ends. We have no choice but to fall, and little say as to the time or the means.”[1]

I am, as I suspect many of us are here today, all too familiar with the art and practice of falling down – both literally and figuratively.

When I was about ten years old, my family visited some distant cousins of ours in California. I don’t remember anything about the people we visited or the place we stayed – just that there was an enormous tree out back behind the house. It was one of the biggest trees I had ever seen, and utterly irresistible. I had to climb it. You see, it wasn’t just the sheer height of the tree that called to me – it was simply perfect for climbing. The bottom branches were low enough to the ground that a I could jump up and grab them, and they were evenly spaced above, so I could almost climb them like a ladder. But the most amazing thing of all, to my rural Wisconsin eyes, was that the entire tree, from top to bottom, was covered all around the outside with a thick net of vines. These vines, thick and ropey brown at the bottom and greenly graceful higher up were woven together like Celtic knot work like some kind of enormous veil that separated the inside of the tree from the rest of the world.

Up I went like a gangly and sunburned monkey. I was in another world – a whole self-enclosed world that was nothing but tree, nothing but climbing up and up and up.

I remember feeling exhilarated, knowing that I was now climbing higher than I ever had before. I remember reaching up above my head, almost in the top of the tree to pull myself up. I was consumed with the desire to poke my head up through the top of the vine canopy and see all there was to see. I was sure whatever it was would be incredible, forgetting in the glory of climbing that all I would really see were the dusty roofs of rather ordinary suburban houses.

I reached up and pulled, lifting my body up toward that next branch – when suddenly there was a dry crack and I was falling. I seemed to be falling for an eternity, bouncing off of tree branches all the way down. Then I hit the thick coil of vines at the bottom of the tree. I was whipped and snagged and poked, but the vines ultimately slowed my fall almost completely, dumping me unceremoniously me out of the tree with a dull dusty thud.

I was hyperventilating and throttled with adrenaline, and my arms and legs covered with thin itchy scratches and welts. Who knows where my glasses ended up. Had I been even a year younger I probably would have run in to my mother, crying, right then.

But I was ten, and a boy, at that, and I had already begun to learn about what was okay and what wasn’t. I sat out by the tree for a long time, trying to stop crying, trying to control my breathing through clenched jaws. Somehow, I don’t know how – I just knew that I could not go back inside until I could cover up what I was really feeling.

Eventually I did go back in, to be scolded for ruining my clothes. I tentatively told the grown ups what had happened, hoping so desperately that my mom would be very worried and pull me into a tight hug and say comforting things to me even as she scolded me – and that I would be able to cry and tell her what had really happened. Because it wasn’t the whips and tears and scratches that made me cry – it was the incredibly painful feeling of climbing to high, so gloriously high, my head literally twelve inches from the very top of the tallest tree I had ever seen – only to be betrayed by a dry branch and cast down so far and so fast.

I wasn’t stupid – I knew exactly how lucky I was. I knew exactly how badly I could have been hurt – and it horrified me. Never before, in all the countless trees I had climbed or stupid things I had done had it ever occurred to me that I could die – just like that. My little ten year old heart was near breaking with the terrible realization that the joy and exhilaration of climbing comes part and parcel with the brutally unfair risk of falling.

But my uncles, drinking their cold beers on that hot summer day, laughed, and told my mom to leave me alone – that boys will be boys and I’d better just dust myself off and forget about it. And she did let me go –and I never did tell her or anyone else about what had really happened to me that day.

While not all of us have the literal falling out of a tree kind of memory that I have just shared, I know that most, if not all of us – have learned similarly hard lessons: that we should be strong, brave and always ready to lend a hand to others in need – but also that to be good, to be mature and grown up partly means to suck it up, to soldier on, to endure – and most of all not to complain too much. Many of us have learned somewhere, somehow, that we can share all sorts of things – but that personal suffering, of whatever sort – is off-limits.

Our own Unitarian Universalist tradition is certainly not silent on this subject. Our tradition has always supported the notion that humans are perfectible, that through effort and creativity and the conscious development of the self, the arc of both individual and collective history must always bend upward. Unitarianism chief architect, William Ellery Channing called this “self-culture”, Ralph Waldo Emerson called this “Self-Reliance”, and our tradition remains rooted in these “onward and upward forever” theologies to this day, despite the fine contributions of contemporary theologians like Sharon Welch, Thandeka and Rebecca Parker, who offer us powerful and much more nuanced visions than we have ever had before.[2]

These old voices tell us that progress is the norm. With education, will and a more or less level playing field – there is no room for falling down. If you fall, it is probably because you haven’t worked hard enough. Falling, theologically speaking – points to a weakness of individual will. Ralph Waldo Emerson, that old icon of liberal religion sums this view up very succinctly, writing that, “Discontent, unhappiness, is the want of self-reliance. It is an infirmity of will.”[3] In this way, according to Emerson, we are largely responsible for our own experience of suffering.

I believe that the primary reason people find it so very hard to share their feelings, to ask for help – is because deep down part of us still believes that if we were really good enough, strong enough –we wouldn’t need help.

We Unitarian Universalists are, by and large – doing very well indeed. Many of us are capable, successful, creative and so much more. Our collective story is one of possibility, promise and hope. Compared to many, perhaps even most other segments of our society we seem to have little cause for complaint. But we all know that we do have cause for complaint – every single one of us. We all know that we worry and fear and fall. Our relationships fail, we struggle with money-stress, work-stress, self-doubt and loneliness just like every other person on this planet no matter what degrees we earn or how many books we read. But compared to other religious movements and denominations – we don’t talk about it very much.

Even those parts of our liturgies that do directly address suffering, pain and loss, often reinforce these old patterns. I have witnessed a lot of UUs sharing their joys and concerns in my time, but while people often share about the suffering, sickness, and needs of mothers and grandfathers and friends and strangers, I struggle to remember more than a couple times where someone stood up and said “I’m going through a tough time right now, and I welcome the support of this community.” Why is that? Why is it okay for us to lift up the needs of others, but not our own? Now it’s not as if our churches are sharing-free zones. A lot of sharing and caring happens in our communities all the time – but there’s still a lot of room to grow.

We need to face our fear of falling.

It just so happens that the story I shared earlier was one of falling, but it is also a story of rising, of ascent. But like all of us, I also have plenty of falling down stories where there is no striving at all, no ascent, no reaching or searching – just good old-fashioned falling on my face – slipping on the proverbial kitchen floor of life!

What would it mean if we could see rising and falling as deeply intertwined, inexplicably interwoven in the same sacred flow of life? What if we could come to see crying out for help as an offering to others, not as a burden? What if we could come to see that our spiritual growth is as dependant on falling as on rising? This would be a theology of falling, and we cannot reach beloved community without it, nor can we rise – because, paradoxically, without falling, rising is impossible.

I think all of us feel good, in a very deep and satisfying way, when we have the opportunity to be there for somebody, to make a difference in some one else’s life. Thus, our cries for help can become gifts for others, opportunities for others to grow and blossom through the act of caring. This kind of openness, this sharing of both rising and falling, of giving and receiving is the path of truly authentic relationship, community and radical hospitality.

Let me be clear: I do not want to see our congregations or our worship turn into large-group therapy sessions. Rather I want us to nurture genuine authenticity in all our relationships, which must include walking together in shadow as well as in sun. Neither am I calling for us to become so inwardly focused that we forget our place in the wider world. We must continue to strive to transform our communities and our wider world, but not so exclusively that we forget to care for ourselves and for one another. The inner and outer must always be in balance if our congregations are to remain healthy and our ministry sustainable.

The vast majority of newcomers to our congregations don’t just wake up one morning and think to themselves, “hmmm, I think I’ll go find a new church today.” Rather they are driven to it, pulled by life transitions of every conceivable description – and what all these life transitions have in common is that they fill people with a yearning for connection and relationship and meaning. And they come here.

Let us be a place where they can find those things – where all of us can find the genuine connection and meaning we seek. Let us be a place where all of us can nurture what my colleague Forrest Church calls the three kinds of courage: the courage to act, the courage to love and the courage to be – all of which plant their roots deep in the soil of authenticity and risk.[4]

A theology of falling is risky, and hard to embrace. “When we learn to fall we must learn to accept the vulnerability that is our human endowment, the cost of walking upright on the earth.”[5] Such a path calls us to trust one another even though we know that the people we trust will sometimes let us down. It is not easy to ask for help or to offer it, and this, I believe, is what religious communities are for – to help us live the way we are called to live, especially when it’s hard. I don’t pretend to know all the steps we must take on this journey, but I do know where we can begin: we can be brave enough to be more open and authentic ourselves, and we can also support others who drum up the courage to do it too. It’s all about baby steps.

Let me close with some advice from the great Sufi teacher, Jalaluddin Rumi:

Give your weakness

to one who helps.

Crying out loud and weeping are great resources.

A nursing mother, all she does

Is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning whimper,

And she’s there.

God created the child, that is, your wanting,

So that it might cry out, so that the milk might come.

Cry out! Don’t be stolid and silent

With your pain. Lament! And let the milk

Of loving flow into you.

The grief you cry out from

Draws you toward union.

Be patient. Respond to every call.[6]

[1] Phillip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of An Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam, 2002) p. 3

[2]James Freeman Clarke, Self Culture: Physical. Intellectual, Moral, and Spiritual (Boston, 1880); Manual of Unitarian Belief (Boston, 1884); Vexed Questions in Theology (Boston, 1886) pp. 10-16.

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 276

[4] Church, Forrest, Freedom from Fear: Finding the Courage to Act, Love and Be (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004) p. xvii

[5] Phillip Simmons, Learning to Fall: The Blessings of An Imperfect Life (New York: Bantam, 2002) p. 11

[6] The Essential Rumi, Coleman Barks and John Moyne, Trans. (Edison: Castle Books, 1997) pp 155 &157.