Healing Our Religious Wounds with Lauri Ann Lumby

Course Title: Healing Our Religious Wounds
Format:  Self-Paced – You may join anytime
Guides/Instructors:  Lauri Ann Lumby
Investment:  $49.99
Registration: register online
Length: 23 modules

While religion has provided a great service to humanity, it has also done great harm.  If you are one who has felt harmed, rejected, condemned, judged, ridiculed, stifled, silenced, by religion, you are not alone. In fact, the second largest “religious” denomination in the United States is made up of 42.7 million non-practicing Catholics – those who have left the Church because they no longer felt welcome or at home.  Perhaps like me, you are one of those.  Whatever it is that brought you to this class, “Healing Our Religious Wounds,” know that here you are welcome!  Here you will find acceptance, unconditional love and support for healing the wounds that you experienced at the hands of religious institutions or from those associated with that religion (even when those may have been your own parents or loved ones).

Introduction

The structure of this class will be four-fold:

• To name and claim the harm that we have experienced through religion and to find unconditional support for claiming these wounds.
• To grieve the losses that we have experienced as a result of these wounds: loss of community, loss of familiar rituals, loss of perceived belonging, loss of God*, loss of self.
• To provide a space upon which you can heal religious wounds by confronting some of the core “beliefs” that are often the platform upon which this wounding has taken place.
• In doing so, providing space in which you can build a belief system of your own, perhaps discovering that in doing so, you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater (which many, sadly have).

The format of this course will be part storytelling, part recorded lecture, part written content, and part personal reflection and meditation. You are invited to share what you are comfortable sharing throughout the course and you are free to refrain from sharing if this is how you are called.

Topics Covered:

• Telling our story
• Grief
• Guilt
• Images of God
• Re-examining “The Trinity”
• The question of salvation
• Jesus – Redeemer or Revealer?
• Scripture
• Outside perceived authority vs inner truth
• Prayer – speaking to vs. listening to God
• Religion vs. Spirituality
• Naming and claiming your own truth

*A note about “God.”  Throughout this course you will see the use of the word “God.”  I will also interchange this with “The Divine.”  Please know that in the use of these terms, I impose no specific belief or understanding of what that means….but that it has nothing to do with the traditional “Old Man in the Sky” god and everything to do with the “God of your understanding.”  If you have a hard time with the word “God,” please feel free to replace it with “Love” or “Peace” or any word that describes your current understanding of our Origin and our Source.

A Note about Scripture:   I will be using Judeo-Christian scripture throughout this course.  I do so because it is the primary text which has been used as a weapon for harm.  In my own healing journey, I have discovered the beauty of scripture when examined through the light of love.  Scripture was never meant to cause harm, but to be a vehicle through which we can find ourselves, and in finding ourselves, finding our own understanding of “God.” My hope in using scripture, along with the proper tools, is that you will find this also to be true.

What you will need:

• Yourself
• A computer with internet access
• A notebook or journal
• A music source (your computer will suffice)
• A box of crayons (Crayola 64 count is my favorite)
• Time