Consenting to your own story

Finding freedom from your past

Like a treasure hidden in a field, I discovered God's love. I believed I had relinquished everything to possess it. Yet, numerous things still hold claim over me, preventing me from fully experiencing and embracing this love. Like a tug on my soul, these attachments distract me from God's love, demanding my attention and misdirecting me.

Before modern psychology discovered attachment theory, St. Ignatius was aware of human nature and what he called our 'inordinate attachments'. By this, he meant the clinging to something that directs us away from the ends for which we are made. Inordinate attachments are those emotional, spiritual, or physical things that hinder our ability to choose or respond to God's will freely.

My False Attachments

I have worked through many false attachments and found healing and freedom. Yet, I am regularly surprised at how issues of success/failure, money, position/title and circumstances tie me up, control, and constrain me from experiencing more of God.  

The roots of attachments run deep and are often, if not always, about survival. They are about how our needs were met in the past, generating fears about how our needs will be met now and in the future. To know what you are attached to, pause and reflect on what you fear losing and why.

My parent's attitudes to work and money placed me at significant risk, so I resolved to work hard. But I became a workaholic as a way to cope and feel safe and in control. I have found freedom from this, but it was a painful process to let go of my attachment to overwork.

Attachments to My Past

The older we get, the more our past becomes present to us. The abuse of my mother and my Dad abandoning me caused me great harm when I was young. As I get older, that harm continues and accumulates. They have not been present in the hard times of life to love and support me. There is no inheritance to help me in mid-life. When life becomes challenging, I experience this lack and often fall into envy of friends who have loving, providing parents.

In The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius says something in The Principal and Foundation that speaks to my lack and loss:

In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some responsibility. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a more loving response to our life forever with God (#1).

Everything has the potential to call forth a more loving response. Even the worst of my past and the most painful lack in my life has potential, in God's Kingdom, to bring me into more of His love, not the lack and less that I fear.

Here, Ignatius seems aligned with Romans 8:

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness ordanger or sword?..

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[b] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Consenting to the Constraints of Our Own Story

Recently, with challenging life circumstances, I have suffered from the lure of my false, inordinate attachments to my past. I feel disadvantaged as if my story continues to influence my present and places my future at risk. But as I have sought God, I feel an invitation to discover how, at this time and season, the challenges of my past are a site of potential for God's work in my life.  

In his wonderful book Finding Freedom in Constraint, Jared Boyd invites us to 'consent to the constraints of our own story'.¹ Many things in life constrain us due to our choices about life. "But here are also constraints on our lives that we have not chosen".² For example, the time and place we live in and what has happened to us due to others.

Boyd's invitation is profound and freeing. Instead of wishing my past and lack due to others were different, I can accept and consent to it. It is my past and part of me, making me who I am, for good or ill. I give up my need to make up for my past and protect myself. Instead of directing me away from God and into fear and envy, I can accept and welcome my story and be pulled further into God's love and purposes for my life.

As I practice consenting to my story, I know it will take some time and repeated consent for acceptance to take hold of me. I feel the bonds of the past being loosened every time I notice my attachment to the past and welcome my story.

Consent as Welcome

This practice of consent is about acceptance and welcome. It is not about minimising, dismissing, or approving what others did to me. It is something else entirely. I can and am allowed to feel the pain and lack, but instead of being attached to it, caught up in it, and trapped in it, I embrace it as it is to be released from it.

This mode of consenting reminds me of The Welcoming Prayer, which I have been praying daily for the last few years.

The purpose of the Welcoming Prayer is to deepen our relationship with God through consenting in ordinary activities. The Welcoming Prayer helps to dismantle the emotional programs of the false-self system and to heal the wounds of a lifetime by addressing them where they are stored — in the body.

Here is the prayer:

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it's for my healing.

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for power and control.

I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure.

I let go of my desire for survival and security.

I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself.

I open to the love and presence of God and God's action within. Amen

My greatest pain arises from not receiving what I need the most. When I think back to the worst in my story, I can become trapped, afraid and overwhelmed, stuck in the early stages of the grief cycle - anger, disappointment, and deep sadness. But in acceptance, welcome and consent, I discover healing and the love of God.

1. Jared Boyd, Finding Freedom in Constraint, 181.

2. Ibid., 182.