Risking Trust ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
February 3, 2019
Recently a young woman wrote to a newspaper advice column looking for help in coping with the end of a romantic relationship. Her partner, who had been mentioning marriage, suddenly announced he didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore. “My trust in love was absolutely shattered,” she wrote… “How can I feel comfortable believing in someone again?” The letter was signed “No Trust”. (Love Letters, by Meredith Goldstein, Boston Globe, Tuesday, January 29, 2019.)
It’s a familiar lament. Surely, if we haven’t had an experience like this ourselves, we have friends or family members who have. We can offer people our fragile hearts, and they can be broken. Where do we find the courage to try it again?
It seems as though everywhere we look these days, we see evidence of betrayal. Our national affairs need no comment here. Closer to home, we learned this week of a lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey against Purdue Pharma, alleging that the company, makers of the narcotic OxyContin, knew for years of the burgeoning addiction problems caused by the drug, and chose to continue aggressively marketing it to physicians anyway. (“Lawsuit Details How the Sackler Family Allegedly Built an OxyContin Fortune,” National Public Radio, February 1, 2019. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/02/01/690556552/lawsuit-details-how-the-sackler-family-allegedly-built-an-oxycontin-fortune)
It’s heartbreaking to hear that company owners entrusted with helping people to alleviate their pain allegedly created more problems, created addiction, in the interest of maximizing personal gain. Think of the lives and the relationships ruined, the lives lost.
And then, on top of all the stories we read and hear, there is the distrust expressed about the news itself. Fake news. Alternative facts. Russian disinformation. Do we know who and what to believe?
To paraphrase the young woman writing to the advice column, “How can we feel comfortable trusting anyone again?”
Given all that we read about and experience in our lives, it’s a good time to think more deeply about trust. We see how quickly our trust can be lost, how completely it can be betrayed. Have you ever wondered where it comes from in the first place? How is trust created?
When I started asking these questions, I turned first to a frequent (and trusted) source: research professor Dr. Brene Brown. Out of her studies Dr. Brown offered a clear answer to my question of how trust is developed.
It turns out that trust is built from small gestures, little moments that offer connection. This makes so much sense. Think about the stories we have been hearing this morning – a little girl sits on a fence, and offers her presence, day after day. A woman, unable to recognize her own needs, learns awareness by caring for a potted plant.
Researchers have asked people what made them trust someone, and over and over again, they heard the same type of responses: people who remembered your relatives’ names. People who showed up at a funeral for your friend or relative. People who took the chance, the risk, of asking you for help when they needed it. These small actions helped to create trust between people. They feel minor, inconsequential, but they represent building blocks that lead to trust. (Brene Brown, “The Anatomy of Trust,” https://brenebrown.com/videos/anatomy-trust-video/)
This research really resonated with me – really felt authentic and true. I think back to when this congregation called me to serve as your minister. It was almost four years ago now, and after a whirlwind of meetings, conversations, potluck meals and worship services, you held a congregational meeting and decided, voted, then and there, to call me. You offered me your trust, and I accepted it, and offered you mine in response.
It’s a little bit mysterious, this process of calling a minister. It’s a big risk: offering your hearts and your trust, and I’ve thought about it a lot since that wonderful day. And what I have always understood was that you offered me your trust provisionally. You offered it before I had truly had a chance to earn it by serving you and living among you, sharing our lives. And so I had to start here by earning your trust, day after day, service after service, meeting after meeting, in so many small ways. I continue to work to earn your trust, and I always will.
And of course, the way in which I have sought to build trust between us has been through the small moments – simply being here for you and with you, offering what knowledge I have, trying to be reliable and accountable, being who I say that I am. It’s the small things. For I understood that there simply were no large gestures I could make that would build trust between us. I couldn’t wave a magic wand and renovate the sanctuary, or create a budget surplus. In fact, even if I could have, you wouldn’t have trusted me as a result. No, the building blocks of trust had to be small.
I have come to understand that trust essentially is about creating connections – about demonstrating over and over that you care and that you can be depended on in a variety of ways. There are no shortcuts, and we are never done. The essence of trust is connection between people.
That is why betrayal is so painful. Betrayal, the loss of trust, is painful because it represents the loss of connection. A relative steals some money. A partner cheats on you. That loss of trust severs a tie, and leaves a hole in your heart, in your soul, that can be very hard to fill again. The risk of offering ourselves again can feel too great. But risk we must, or else we will find ourselves without the life-giving connections of trusting relationships.
As we said in our responsive reading, “But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”
We must take risks. And we do so knowing that eventually, sometime, somehow, we will be betrayed. And so the question becomes – if we must take risks, how do we dare to take chances, how do we learn to trust again once we have been betrayed? Not if, but when.
The answer, as Gert found out in caring for the geranium, is in learning to trust ourselves.
Brene Brown points out that we lose trust in ourselves just as easily as we can lose trust in others. Think about a time when you’ve been betrayed by someone. Have you ever thought to yourself, ‘Boy, was that stupid of me; I never should have trusted him,” or “I am not a good judge of partners – I always end up falling for the wrong person.” We can feel gullible, irresponsible, blind, or just plain stupid. It’s a terrible feeling, and it can result in us creating walls within ourselves to try to protect ourselves. “I’m all done dating!” “I’ll never give anyone a loan again!” Possibly you can fill in your own statement here.
But before we can offer our trust to other people, before we can treat other people with integrity, with generosity, we have to treat ourselves that way. As I so often say about compassion – you have to have compassion for yourself before you can extend compassion to anyone else. If you don’t love yourself, if you aren’t willing to treat yourself kindly and generously, how can you possibly extend compassion, and trust, to anyone else? Put another way, if you have broken the connection with your own heart, how can you forge connection and trust with another?
Brene Brown said, “We can’t ask people to give something to us if we don’t believe we’re worthy of receiving it.” (Ibid.)
In our reading earlier, Gert was a survivor of violence and trauma. She forgot how to listen to her still, small voice within, how to identify her innermost needs and wants, how to treat herself kindly and compassionately. She couldn’t hear her inner voice, the voice of her soul, in order to develop the trust in herself that she needed in order to be able to embrace all that made up her life. Gert had to be taught how to connect, first with herself, and then with others, by first connecting with a plant. She had to learn how to pay attention, to listen and watch for needs being expressed. At the beginning, she doubted that she could keep a plant alive. There, in those words, is the lack of self-trust. “I can’t take care of anything – I can’t keep a plant alive!” Gert didn’t trust herself. But bit by bit, one small gesture at a time, she learned how to keep a plant alive. And at the end of the story she trusted herself with a large garden, healthy and a riot of color.
“To reach for another is to risk involvement.
To expose your feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.” (William Ward)
My friends, before we can trust each other, we must be able to trust ourselves. We must risk opening, sharing, being vulnerable, first with ourselves, and then with others. Only in these small ways, one gesture at a time, can we develop trust in other people. We develop trust in ourselves, in our basic goodness, in our desire for connection and relationship, and then can move outward to offer that trust to others. Sometimes, the trust is not rewarded. There can be betrayal, and a lost connection, a lost relationship. But if we return to ourselves with kindness and compassion, with self-respect, we can develop the trust again. And then we can move outward, and offer ourselves freely and generously and bravely to life and love and to one another. We can begin with one small geranium, and finish with an enormous garden that’s a riot of color.
May it be so.
