Ted Haggard and Personal Healing

My local paper this morning reported on an interview Ted Haggard gave with Good Morning America in which he described being sexually abused by a man when he was seven.  He described how he’d never fully addressed that and despite becoming a "a conservative Republican, loving the word of God, an evangelical, born-again, spirit-filled, charismatic, all those things" (the ordering of those statements seems of interest in a different way than we’re heading, but I’ll let that go), that wound never left him and contributed to the pervasive, destructive behavior that brought him down.

I don’t know your take on Haggard.  I’m sympathetic to those who cut him loose after his mega-scandal, and there’s much to question in his conservative stridency and, I suppose, to being a mega-church pastor in general.  But, despite all, I’ve appreciated Haggard over the years and have learned from him (I may address some of the things he’s taught me in subsequent posts).  So all I felt in his fall was sadness.  And today’s story strikes me as the ultimate “no duh.”  Of course he was abused as a child!  The extent of his acting out despite his vocal preaching against those very sins speak of a man in conflict with himself, driven by things he’d like to suppress.  Maybe, as some secular writers suggested, this spoke of his being at odds with his fundamental sexual orientation.  Maybe.  But today’s story resonates more deeply with me.

This is an oft-repeated story—the gifted follower of God is knocked out by unaddressed wounds.  You could argue that Mother Teresa got away with this in her life only to be outed in her death, when her anguish-filled journals were published with the upshot that she’d found little to no joy in God for many decades.  She got the Haggard treatment in some circles—i.e. this proves that she was living a false front at best and a lie at worst.  I regard this just as I regard the Haggard story.  To me, she was totally sincere in what her life was about.  But she had unaddressed wounding from her youth that had to be kept under wraps for the sake of her life’s work.

Why couldn’t Haggard get actual help for that wounding and the acting out that came out of it?  Of course I don’t know, but I have a guess.  His culture would encourage him to shape up—clearly his behavior was out of bounds.  His marriage and ministry were totally at risk if he addressed these things, so his only choice was to take this as a matter of personal will and suck it up.  Mother Teresa did have a confessor with whom she shared these things, but I haven’t heard how she addressed the early wounds themselves rather than their manifestations.

I could go on.  Lonnie Frisbee, this guileless product of the hippie Jesus Movement, had a substantial part in the founding of two significant church movements—my own (the Vineyard) and Calvary Chapel.  And he’s rarely mentioned in those histories because of the unraveling of his own life and his ultimate death from AIDS.  (There’s a gripping if jaded documentary about him if you want to learn more.)

Complex wounds from my own childhood led to ten years of on-again-off-again mild depression before a blend of prayer, wise counsel and my own ongoing dialogue with God moved me past that.  Just this week I’m seeing other opportunities for addressing those wounds—and, thanks to folks like these, getting friendly hints from God of consequences for leaving them unaddressed. 

My pitch: Anyone interested enough in lifelong, potent faith to read a blog like this would be well-advised to learn one more lesson from Ted Haggard and Mother Teresa and Lonnie Frisbee.  Our behavior and mood are driven by something.  Relentless openness to our spiritual friends and to God himself seems like a great start towards getting the kind of powerful prayer and wise counsel that can keep us moving towards God and others for a lifetime.  Taking our issues into our own hands through continual re-resolve to do better and the secrecy that comes with that… that’s a lonely and stressful path, along with being a big, big risk with uncertain, at best, rewards.