In a wonderfully serendipitous way, I’ve come across several things recently that have encouraged me in light of the pain, limitation, depression and uncertainty resulting from my having broken my leg recently. One of these was “What Does ‘Recovery’ from Severe Mental Illness Look Like?” that Jessie Creselious posted on Facebook. The author is Tony Zipple:

“For most people with a severe mental illness, recovery is an ongoing process. Since the illness is not likely to get totally resolved, there will be ongoing management of the condition. Recovery is a process of reclaiming one’s life from mental illness. As with other difficult events in life, over time, people learn to adjust to their challenges.

Recovery is about:

• finding one’s place in the world.
• attaining peace of mind.
• establishing relationships with friends and family.
• discovering opportunities to grow.
• finding happiness.

Recovery is not:

• a cure
• freedom from symptoms
• an end to challenges.
• the elimination of relapses.
• life as originally planned.

But it can be a good, if different, life.”

I do not mean to downplay the challenges of living with mental health concerns. I was struck, however, by how much this piece spoke to me about the various challenges I’ve faced in life. It speaks to transcending the challenges that all of us will face in some form or other. It speaks to the awe-inspiring resiliency of the human spirit and body in overcoming the difficulties life inevitably sends our way, as individuals and as communities. Recovery, in whatever form it takes, is always about reclaiming our lives and adjusting to the challenges we face. It’s about reclaiming our wholeness.

Zipple is honest about the brokenness in our lives. He also calls us to recognize and embrace the wholeness that underlies the brokenness. He encourages us to believe that finding our place in community, peace of mind, relationships, growth and happiness are indeed possible. And these things are possible even when there is no complete “cure,” when symptoms persist, and relapses happen. When our “new normal” isn’t the old normal.

We can transcend our challenges. In my view, to transcend them does not mean nor require leaving them behind. To the contrary, it means recognizing that they have left a permanent mark on us. They have left scars. We are not, and will not be, who we would have been without them. Physical, emotional and yes, spiritual scars come about as life offers up the bad along with the good. Those things become one aspect of the amazingly complex beings we are. They become part of our gift to those around us and to ourselves.

We are beginning to work through the challenges we face as a congregation. We will continue this process into the foreseeable future. We will be working to reclaim our health as a congregation. I will be doing the same as I work to reclaim as much of my life as possible. That we humans can do this work is, to me, awe-inspiring.

I’m inspired by the words of Unitarian Universalist minister the Reverend Erika Hewitt:

“We who are Unitarian Universalist not only affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person; we also affirm the inherent wholeness of every being—despite brokenness, real or apparent.

No one hearing these words is a stranger to pain, or to the knowledge that things break, or break down: promises, friendship, sobriety, hope, communication…. this breaking happens because our human hearts and our institutions are frail and imperfect. We make mistakes. Life is messy. Brokenness happens. [All the same can be said of bodies!]

We’re intimately acquainted with brokenness, then, even as we believe that no matter how fractured we are or once were, we can make whole people of ourselves. We are whole at our core, because of the great, unnamable, sometimes inconceivable Love in which we live.”

I choose to believe her words reflect how life really is at its unfathomable core.

~Rev. Julia