Meetinghouse closed due to storm. Worship was zoom-only.
Living Love through the Practice of Inclusion: Welcoming the Whole Self
Looking back, I’m awed by the way that embracing everything—from what I got right to what I got wrong—invites the grace of wholeness.
Parker J. Palmer. On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old.
Welcoming the Whole Self
Rev Joe Cleveland
February, 9, 2025
Beginning with yourself, you can change the world. You have not finished learning about who you are.
I was wandering around Northshire one day, as I often do, and I picked up this kid’s picture book called, I Am WE. The way the book started kinda floored me. “I know it is important to take care of me. To focus on my own breath, my own needs. To be kind to my mind.” I am not an expert in children’s literature, but I can’t think of another children’s book that makes such a statement. They often say stuff about how you should feel good about yourself, that you shouldn’t judge yourself or shame yourself. But I can’t think of another kids’ book that advises kids that “it is important to take care of me.” If it’s not pride-in-yourself stuff, it’s think-about-other-people stuff that’s in kids’ books, in my experience. Thinking about yourself is selfish.
I was an angsty teenager, and when I got to college, I was an angsty college student. I’m probably still a pretty angsty adult. I have been reading a lot of poetry since I was young, but when I got to college, it turned into reading a lot of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell and John Berryman and others who were not happy people, generally, if their poetry is anything to judge by. It felt like they were pretty angsty adults. My tribe! And a-angsting I shall go. …
Knowing that I liked poetry, my best friend at the time, and my college roommate, gave me a copy of the Complete Poems of Walt Whitman. Those poets that I’d been reading are generally called “confessional” poets. They write about themselves, the trials of their own lives, what they are feeling about, well, everything.
Whitman writes A LOT about himself. But Whitman’s poetry is nothing like those ‘confessional’ poets. It still felt deep and wonderful, but there is a pervasive sense of joy in it. I’d read Whitman, and my spirits would lift. I’d read a Walt Whitman poem, almost any Whitman poem — open the book at random and read — and I’d feel better.
A therapist named Prentis Hemphill, was part of the first meeting of what became Los Angeles Black Lives Matter. The role they were given was to facilitate a discussion of “healing justice.” They asked the people who gathered in their corner of the room one question: “What will it take for us to heal?” And as Hemphill continued their work as a therapist and with Black Lives Matter, they came to realize that
This question I’d been asking, “What will it take for us to heal?” wasn’t a question that took us away from serious social change. It was a question that showed us where we were headed and how to get there, what it could feel like.
The conditions of the healing that Hemphill was striving for — they were not separate from the social change they wanted to achieve in the world. The way of healing is the creation of the world in which we can live as healed beings.
The epigraph to Hemphill’s book is two sentences from Grace Lee Boggs:
A revolution involves making an evolutionary / revolutionary leap toward becoming more socially responsible and more self-critical human beings. In order to transform the world, we must transform ourselves.
Revolution requires self-transformation. Hemphill tells us,
I had pursued justice and healing work as separate solutions, but I was beginning to realize how deeply interwoven they were, how one enriched and made possible the other.
It isn’t really selfishness we are serving when we heal ourselves, when we come to an awareness of ourselves in our wholeness. When we do that, we see that we are part of a larger, interwoven, interconnected, interdependent community. And, as the picture book says, “When we each take the goodness and self-compassion inside and turn it outward, that is how we make progress and change.” Hemphill says that when we neglect ourselves, even if that neglect is thought to be in service to working for social change, “we fracture, and succumb to what we are unwilling to face.”
Whitman says at one point,
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then…. I contradict myself;
I am large…. I contain multitudes.
I contain multitudes. We ALL contain multitudes.
But what’s really remarkable is the extent to which Whitman takes that. The fine and the vulgar, the good and the evil, Whitman admits all of it. He says,
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any [one] hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
And that’s the second revelation: the challenge of being yourself is to know yourself in your wholeness, even the parts of yourself that you suppress or don’t like.
I believe that part of what it takes to heal is to be able to see or acknowledge yourself in your wholeness. We all have parts that we have tried —or still try— to deny, parts of ourselves that we might try to hide out of shame or hide in order to protection from harm. When those vulnerable parts of us can be seen and accepted…
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about moments when they felt seen. Revelatory moments of relief and transformation. I am pretty good at empathy, so I have, I think been able to have some sense of what that experience is like. But it’s only recently that I think I’ve had an experience of that myself.
I was diagnosed with depression in graduate school. I was studying a bunch of moody poets, depressed, manic-depressive, and many of them suicidal. So I was ok with that diagnosis. It was ok to be depressed. I knew lots of writers whose abilities I admired, even if I didn’t admire their lives. You could be depressed and still be ok. Some people would still care for you and you could have some success. And depression seemed to run in my family, too, so I was ok with being depressed. There’s nothing unusual about it. I started therapy and medication. I have continued therapy and medication. The depressed aspect of me I can mostly deal with. I move through life as someone who is subject to depression. And that way of thinking of myself felt ok to me.
Then, after I graduated seminary, a therapist I was seeing thought that I should be formally evaluated to see if I might have ADHD. I passed with flying colors! But I had only really thought of ADHD as something that kids have — it’s something we grow out of it, right? Apparently not. And it’s really only in the past two months that I’ve really begun to own that the brain I have is an ADHD brain.
My wife likes a fun and funny youtube video now and again, and one of the content creators she likes is the couple of Penn and Kim Holderness. Penn has ADHD and Kim does not. And together, they’ve now written a book, just published this year called ADHD Is Awesome. Reading it felt a bit like reading Whitman: “I celebrate myself …”! And it also felt a little awkward. Penn does not hold back on telling some pretty embarrassing stories about himself. And I am not Penn and I’ve never done the things that Penn has done. I have never lost my keys in the refrigerator. But I do things LIKE Penn does all the time. I haven’t enjoyed admitting that.
Being depressed, you can be moody and cool. Being ADHD? Your brain is all over the place. You forget things when they are not right in front of you. Keys, shoes, your phone, people. The passage of time is a complete mystery to me. I miss deadlines and birthdays. I’m always sending belated birthday presents to my nieces. Belated Xmas presents. To my brother. I don’t think it has ever been true for me to say “I am reading a book,” because I’m always reading half a dozen or more and I often wander off when I’m only partway through, even if I really like the book. These are all aspects of myself that I have worked to suppress and deny and eliminate. For years and years. With no success. It turns out that they are all aspects of what is characteristic of ADHD. I did finish reading all of ADHD Is Awesome. I need to read it a few more times.
I really had the experience, I think, of feeling seen while I was reading the book I started after ADHD Is Awesome. Now I’m reading How to ADHD written by another YouTuber named Jessica McCabe who totally has ADHD. There was a sentence I read that must have been at the same time there was a bunch of pollen or something in the air, because water came to my eyes. She wrote:
Most of my life has been a battle between me, who knows this thing is important, and my brain, which doesn’t want to do it.
Oof. I have felt like that. When I was young, or when it was yesterday.
I am only at the beginning of coming to terms with actually having, yes I do, ADHD — which, by the way, is the worst-named condition ever. I have a great therapist, but a great therapist can’t make you look at what you won’t see. I am only just now seeing it. I have been trying to work against my brain. I am only just now coming to understand what it might be like to work with my brain instead. You have to train the dog you have, not the dog you want. You have to raise the child you have, not the child you want.
Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any [one] hearty and clean,
Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
The exiled parts of yourself, parts of yourself that you actively deny the existence of? Because they are at the center of all the work you do to deny that they exist, that denied part of yourself is at the center of the fractured self the denial creates. Only when you can see them, have compassion for them, can these exiles come home, and only then can you center yourself differently.
Unitarian Universalists value transformation to a more just and equitable world, a more generous world, a world where we all recognize our interdependence and honor the pluralistic nature of humanity, where many ideas can be valued at once, a world where there is a whole lot more love. But to get to those other values, we need to begin with ourselves.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from;
The scent of these arm-pits is aroma finer than prayer,
This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds.
Oh, it feels good to read Whitman.
Maybe you won’t celebrate your armpits quite as much as Whitman does. But may you and I come to know ourselves more whole and holy. May you come to center yourself more and more in the creative, compassionate, calm, courageous you,* the beloved you that you are. The you that by being you can’t help but make a difference in the world. The you that is making a difference in the world.
You can change the world, beginning with yourself. You have not finished learning about who you are.
may all beings come to know peace
may all beings come to know healing
may all beings come to know love
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*These descriptors of one’s true self I get from Richard C. Schwartz, who developed an approach to therapy called “Internal Family Systems.” See his Introduction to the Internal Family Systems Model.
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Resources
Susan Verde. Peter H. Reynolds, illustrator. I Am We: A Book of Community (A Picture Book). Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2024.
Prentis Hemphill. What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. Diversified Publishing, 2024.
Jessica McCabe. How to ADHD: An Insider’s Guide to Working with Your Brain (Not Against It). Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2024.
Jessica McCabe’s YouTube channel, How to ADHD.
Penn and Kim Holderness. ADHD is Awesome: A Guide to (Mostly) Thriving with ADHD. Harper Horizon, 2024.
Penn and Kim’s Holderness Family Laughs YouTube channel.
Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman: Selected Poems 1855-1892. Edited by Gary Schmidgall. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2013.
Topics: Depression, Inclusion, Mental Health, Wholeness