If you’ve never visited the Sinai or the Red Sea or the western edge of Egypt, take a peek at a map and ask yourself the same question generations have asked before you: why did it take forty years for the Hebrew people to cross from slavery in Egypt into their homeland? Maybe a month of slow trudging through the desert. Maybe a year if you really wanted to sit and reflect on the experience of becoming free people. But forty years? Forty years is two or two and a half generations (depending on the average age of first birth) or, at the time of these teachings being written down, an average human lifespan. That is a long time to cross a few kilometers. This week’s reading from Numbers (13:1-15:41) offers another explanation: the folk need to spend more years in the wilderness because they haven’t yet learned to trust the Holy. Instead, they give into their fears and wild stories about the inhabitants of the lands to which they’re headed (they’re descendants of the Nephilim and we are the size of grasshoppers compared to them!). Some of the wise leaders (Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and Caleb) immediately call the people back to trust, but the Holy says, no, these folk will not see the promised land. Their children will get to the promised land, the children they elders were ready to believe would be eaten like grasshoppers, but not the folks so prone to fear and delusions.
Trauma decimates and ravels the fabric of trust, trust in ourselves, one another, and the Holy. We might intellectually know we need to trust in order to sleep well at night, to work together, to do most anything on our own. But acting in trust is a whole other matter. If we’ve taken a bad fall and grown very wobbly because we’re afraid of falling again, we might need physical therapy and assistive devices and functional therapy to help us develop core strength, proprioception, and the trust to be upright and moving forward again (this also can happen for those of us using wheelchairs if we have a bad crash and are thrown from the chair and unable to get up and back where we can move again). We lose trust in ourselves to be able to navigate the world well, mostly safely, and trusting too that when we fall, we can rise again and go forward without undoing ourselves.
Here are the people, wandering in the wilderness of their lives, frightened and untrusting, an important part of themselves missing and not yet found. A few folks in the story for this week have that deep sense of trust that allows them to risk faithfully and perceive what is true about their surroundings, but when we become unbalanced and untrusting, we struggle to either risk faithfully or know what is true. Consider how many people feared for centuries that they could fall off the edge of the earth. Consider how much our sense of who we are has changed because of the picture “Earthrise” showing the whole spherical planet from orbit near our moon.
Developing trust is considered the first stage of faith development. I find it is an attitude toward being that I have visited and developed again and again through my life, moving into trust or out of it depending on other events in my life that challenge or strengthen my sense of who and how I am. In slavery, all the people could trust was fear, pain, and the very untrustworthiness and predatoriness of other people. Indeed, in order to survive perishing times, otherwise decent, kind, loving people might do very terrible things, teaching themselves and others of the fragility and untrustworthiness of us amid terrors. Those well-developed skills adapted to life as enslaved people will not and do not serve them as well in freedom, where we have to learn how to work together, to trust one another in our differences (skills, gifts, beliefs, practices, cultures), and to trust ourselves as both worthy of trust (and love) and offering trust (and love) to others. When we have lost trust in ourselves, one another, or the Holy, how do we start to repair and rebuild this fundamental spiritual-emotional-social skill?
Sometimes when we’re cruising along reactively we can further endanger ourselves unintentionally. I am, for example, violently allergic to beestings. But I work around bees whenever I am on the farm. I had to figure out how to slow down my own reactivity so as not to put myself into more danger. Slowing down to notice the bees and move with them, quietly, trusting them not to sting me unless I presented a threat to them took me a while — and I still have to consciously practice this when I am tired, because I have so many more years of experience being taught not to trust bees. One of the reasons I teach people to pause and breathe when we are stressed, frightened, or whelmed, is that the act of giving us a little spaciousness in our lives sometimes gives us enough room to observe what is really going on. Practices of awareness of what’s happening for us inside and what’s going on in the world around us help us cultivate a spaciousness for curiosity and, eventually, trust to grow. If I do this, what happens? If I move this way, what happens? When I trust this person in this small way, what happens? When I trust in this bigger way, what happens? Each experience of learning to trust brings a bit of healing, and a bit more of a platform from which to move in further faithful risking.
In our political and news cycles that tend to cultivate fear and mistrust (we’re like grasshoppers, to be crushed and consumed by all the awful badness and that’s why we should build more walls and give our authority to those who say they can protect us) we can lose ourselves. We can lose our sense of life being basically good (what evidence is being offered to the contrary, the token good news story at the end of the broadcast not enough to counter the fear and anger surges earlier in the half hour). We can lose our sense of being active agents who have authority in our lives to choose to work together for goodness’ sake, to cultivate awe and wonder, to celebrate in thanksgiving and to create lives worth dreaming of. We can lose our sense of trusting one another enough to actually work together or live together and find ourselves cut off, isolated, lonely, and hurting. We can lose our sense of trusting the Holy that there are blessings ahead and indeed all around us. We can lose ourselves in fear and mistrust. But we are free people and we can claim ourselves once again, in the middle of these trials and troubles, choosing to risk a little bit more, choosing a little more curiosity to try something else, choosing a life where fear cannot ensnare us. We may not wake up one day trusting ourselves, one another, and the Ground of Being wholly and delightedly. Yet we can nurture this practice of developing trust and being trustworthy bit by bit, faithful risk by faithful risk, and claim our whole selves ransomed from dread and fear.
