Author Archive
My wife Kimberly had a headache today and in misery went to make herself lunch. “Tell me a funny story,” she groaned, So I started a tale about a clown that went to a nearby school to make balloon animals for the kids. I thought my clown would add humor, but he did nothing to make us chuckle. Okay, mistakes make good jokes, so my jester ended up making balloon animals that no one could recognize… and the kids criticized his work. I paused and said, “I’m clearly no good at telling funny stories.” So the inept clown naturally got depressed over his rejected creations and made them all commit animal-balloon suicide.
Kimberly chortled, “Wait till I tell my girlfriends that I asked you for a funny story and you told me about a depressed clown that performed balloon animal suicides for children.” I said, “Well, you have to know your audience,” and we both burst into laughter. “Why don’t I horrify our friends on Facebook with our bleak sense of humor,” I gasped, and the very thought sent me into paroxysms of laughter, howling and shrieking till the tears streaked down my face and my stomach cramped. If folks only knew! [Yes, I linked this to my Facebook page ;-)]
“Grace… [is] the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
“It is amazing. I do not at all understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” –Anne Lamott Traveling Mercies
Kimberly and I have been reading together Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. She is funny and gently provocative, mostly by relating her own shortcomings. We just read a chapter on forgiveness that sparked memories of a story I want to tell, a story of my own failure and awakening. But I’m only a mediocre writer among so many great authors, why do I want to add more words to that crush of voices? If I want to inspire, why not simply point folks to the riches I’ve discovered in others?
After brief reflection I realized that my impulse is not to share information, but to share life. It is personal and communal, a desire to reach out to others who can identify with my own experiences. Eloquence is much less important to me than honesty. So let me encourage those of you who write, even to an audience of two or three–keep gifting your friendship. Numbers don’t matter. And as readers let’s interact with those who write, share personally and make a connection in our comments. It will complete the circle of relationship offered and make our reading richer, more meaningful.
Kimberly and I have had rough weather for the last few months, not only in our individual souls, but in the soul of our marriage. We have wanted to sort it all out and have tried, but we’re still baffled, unable to do anything but cling to our seats as we ride out the turbulence. In spite of the conflicts that keep popping up, I want her to know that she is precious to me, and sometimes words of appreciation ring truer when we overhear them, so let me share with my friends here the treasure she is to me.
She is gentle. She is accepting. She is courageous. She is true and genuine. She is self-reflective and in touch with her soul as few people are. She is determined and tough in spite of setbacks. She is vulnerable and open. She naturally believes the best of others, and stands up for the underdog. She is empathetic and understanding. She is a great listener. She is wise and insightful and talks for hours about deep things. She is welcoming of the weak and broken and marginalized. She is responsible and capable. She calls out the best in others by being okay with their faults and foibles and valuing them for who they are, not what they do or fail to do. She is a woman of grace, even when it hurts her. She shares her true self with others even when they have crushed her spirit, but she is also good at keeping healthy boundaries. She never gives up on herself or on others.
She accepts me as I am and makes room for my weaknesses, encouraging me to support myself even when it is hard on her. She has an incredible commitment to personal growth and wholeness, and though she started out far behind others in her childhood environment, she has far surpassed most others in becoming her true self. She welcomes all of who I am, even the broken parts, and loves me as I am, and so she has taught me to love myself. In other words, she is for me the truest experience of the gospel with skin on. When my insecurities and weaknesses break out against her, she does not retaliate, but hangs on through the tensions until we work it out.
She is not perfect, and I wouldn’t want her to be (how intimidating would that be!). She has her own hangups, insecurities, and weaknesses. But we have discovered that the deepest and truest bonds come through our frailties more than our strengths. I’ve never met anyone like her, and we do life together in extraordinary fashion… even our stumbles seem to add something beautiful to the rhythm of the dance. We’re still figuring out the steps to this new rumba, and we often as not step on each other’s feet, but we’ll keep swinging till we get it down. It is in the hard times that love proves its character. Ours is a tough love.
I grew up the son of a preacher. We went to Sunday school, Sunday morning service, Sunday evening service, and Wednesday prayer meeting. We had daily family devotions with Bibles and hymn books, and all six kids, without exception, prayed out loud. But we looked on liturgy with suspicion. A real relationship with God was spontaneous, not circumscribed by rituals like all those unsaved Roman Catholics. I never even heard of Lent until I was an adult, but we lived Lent all year long–self-examination, repentance, discipline, sacrifice. The problem is that we never got out of Lent.
By the time I discovered grace, I had enough Lent practice behind me to cover several lives over. Last year was my first participation in Lent, and I approached it with the eyes of grace–to bless my soul by releasing it from some burden that weighed it down, to sacrifice a problem not a pleasure. I decided to sacrifice busyness and embrace rest. It was so good for my heart, that after 40 days I made it my spiritual emphasis for the year. I have planned another year-long Lenten emphasis for 2013–sacrificing my need to figure things out (and so a reliance on my acuity), in other words, I am embracing ignorance.
I did not come to this point willingly. I begged and pleaded for insight, thought myself into and out of a thousand speculations, tried to pry the lid off that sealed box of truth, and finally gave up. Learning to trust God with a confused mind is a bit crazy and doesn’t feel very safe. I was just now reminded that learning to trust God last year was pretty tough too–expecting more from doing less? That doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense either. I don’t know if my brain needs a break, but I’m pretty sure my reliance on it is false security. I have enough faith to take this path, I need more faith if I am to find peace along this way instead of turmoil and fear.
Last night Kimberly and I watched Beyond the Gates, a movie about the Rwandan genocide when 800,000 men, women, and children were hacked to death as the world looked on and did nothing. It was terrible. It was real. It was a small window onto the depths of human depravity which ravage our world daily. If you keep your peace of mind by sweeping darker parts of reality into a seldom-used corner of your mind, perhaps you buy happiness at too great a cost. If the evil filling this earth does not burn in your heart and shape your daily decisions, you may be living in a fantasy world of your own making.
Frederick Buechner tells of his professor, James Mullenberg:
“‘Every morning when you wake up,’ he used to say, ‘before you reaffirm your faith in the majesty of a loving God, before you say I believe for another day, read the Daily News with its record of the latest crimes and tragedies of mankind and then see if you can honestly say it again.’
He was a fool in the sense that he didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t resolve, intellectualize, evade, the tensions of his faith but lived those tensions out, torn almost in two by them at times. His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing, the tears showing, a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storm.
To love a hurting world is to suffer with it. Do you see this world as God sees it? There is a reason the prophets of old, the seers, were mostly melancholy men and why the Messiah was called the Man of Sorrows. Some of us by nature are more touched by the shadows. It is not only the deep fissures in the ghettos and war-crushed countries, but the cracks in my own heart that torment me. My own little hatreds and conspiracies, defensive moves and fear-driven words awake in me an understanding of and identification with history’s villains.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But I realized something today. I am not big enough to absorb all that pain. I can’t handle that much truth… I have to shut some of it out so that it does not capsize my little boat. I want the brokenness of the world to inform my outlook, but not to cripple it. I instinctively have known this all along and have protected myself from those things that have pulled me too far down, especially when my emotional reserves are low, but I felt cowardly. When I dropped Facebook friends because their posts or comments were too disturbing or I avoided confrontation with family, my love seemed limited and weak. Well, since I am not God, my love certainly is limited and weak, and I cannot demand of it more than I am able to give. I must live within my means not only financially, but emotionally, because if I have too many overdrafts, I will crash. My heart will always be touched more profoundly by the tragedies around me–it is how I was designed–so I need to soak my bruised soul more deeply, more often in the pools of grace away from the harsher sides of reality.
HOLDING IT TOGETHER
Yesterday I was so sick at heart I felt nauseous. Life does not make sense to me right now. My last few blogs show I am oscillating between anger, faith, sarcasm, acceptance, doubt, misery, hope… the only constant is depression, which drains my energy and darkens my outlook. What used to restore my spirit no longer works. “Happiness is a choice,” they say. Balderdash. You can decide your actions, and to some extent you can direct your thoughts, but you cannot pick your feelings like a vending machine treat. Some folks find cheer in thankfulness or service or friendship, while others find comfort in meditation or nature. You can keep an eye out for happiness, but it may not show up at any of these stops. I don’t control it’s schedule. I can only wait for it.
For some years now I have found consolation in discovering and working to heal my soul’s wounds, but I cannot get at the root of my current turmoil. That process simply doesn’t work for me now. Kimberly and I have also solved our conflicts by talking through our issues, but since we can’t make sense of what we are going through now, that approach doesn’t work. When my emotional energy is dragging, I don’t have enough flex in my shock-absorbers to cushion the bumps, so I’m easily disheartened or hurt or agitated, and Kimberly feels it more sharply because she’s also deflated. The proverb “as iron sharpens iron” has been profoundly true of us through the years, but during this season it seems often to be “as iron notches iron.” We need to find a new way of supporting ourselves and one another. I know we will find a way, we always do, but in the meantime it is painful and discouraging.
I love mystery in arts and entertainment, but I don’t want it following me into the parking lot and hitching a ride home. If insight is a blessing, mystery is a curse. If knowledge is power, mystery is paralysis. What possible good can it bring? Of course, there was that little incident over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that ended rather badly. Apparently some knowledge and control is better left in God’s hands. But it’s scary to be left in the dark. It feels like it’s my fault, as though God is put out with me and won’t turn on the light, not as though he’s doing it out of love and support. I’m really struggling to trust God with my unresolved ignorance and confusion. Mystery has never been part of my spiritual tool chest. Gerald May explains why:
When we were children, most of us were good friends with mystery. The world was full of it and we loved it. Then as we grew older, we slowly accepted the indoctrination that mystery exists only to be solved. For many of us, mystery became an adversary; unknowing became a weakness. The contemplative spiritual life is an ongoing reversal of this adjustment. It is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming “as little children” again, in which we first make friends with mystery and finally fall in love again with it. And in that love we find an ever increasing freedom to be who we really are in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are freed to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are.
We’re just getting reacquainted. It’s going to take a lot more time before mystery is a friend, especially a trusted friend.
My mother in her quirky way used to make us Christmas gifts of various kinds. This Christmas I noticed my dad is still using a bathrobe she made for him 30 years ago. She must have made it out of upholstery material, because it is soft and warm on the outside and stiff and scratchy on the skin-side. My older brother David once unwrapped a gift from her and responded graciously, “I love it! What is it?” Indecipherable love. God’s been putting together a special gift for me this year as a resource for my spiritual growth, and it looks like a box full of confusion, without an instruction manual. God, you know I’m already depressed, right? What the heck do I do with this?
Hundreds of years ago St. John of the Cross descended into “the dark night of the soul” and left a consoling account for those who followed. The Christian psychiatrist Gerald May describes his own experience of it:
[This spirit of virtigo] seems specifically designed for people like me, people who refuse to relinquish the idea that if only I could understand things, I could make them right. Having lost the old willpower and its satisfactions, we desperately try to figure out where we have gone astray. “What’s happening here? Where have I gone wrong? Maybe my problem is this… No, maybe it’s that… Perhaps I should try this… Or that….”
Every effort at soul-diagnosis and cure fails. We are left in the dark. And that is for our salvation, May says: “Sooner or later, there is nothing left to do but give up. And that is precisely the point, the purpose of the ‘dizzy spirit.’ In each relinquishment… reliance upon God is deepened.” I’ve been mapquesting God for directions to my soul’s healing and taking every turn He signaled. Apparently I’m in the Slough of Despond not from getting confused and careening off the road, but from following His bullet points. He drove me straight into the bog.
MARSH RD, DESERT RD, DITCH RD, Hmmm
There are some advantages of sinking into the quagmire. No worries about getting lost if you’re already there. No wrong turns to make if you can’t move. No real expectations to fail if there are no goals. If it’s God’s move; all I can do is wait… and trust. That’s always the tough part, especially for us hard-working, self-reliant types. “Be still and know that I am God” is a much deeper concept than I realized–not simply self control in quieting myself, but learning to patiently accept God’s time-outs for my soul, letting something work which I cannot see or measure and over which I have no control. Who knew being out of control was a sign of spiritual progress?
As I said in my last post, I am stuck with God. When Jesus got weird on his disciples (John 6), many of them left. He asked his twelve, “Will you leave too?” and Peter answered, “Where else can we go?” Yes. Exactly. We’re in the middle of the ocean, freezing cold, living on bread, squatting on steel decks and the captain of the boat says, “Feel free to leave.” And where would that be? Trust me, we are not staying because we like it here. St. Teresa of Avila once complained to God, “If this is the way you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few!”
As I ended my last post, this story in John came to mind, and I felt bad for not having Peter’s good attitude. He answered Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.” I heard Peter saying, “You’ve got it all–peace, joy, fulfillment. Why would we leave? We like it here.” I was confusing ‘eternal life’ with ‘the good life’… spiritually speaking, of course–the delights of fellowship with God. What was I thinking? You want encouragement of the Biblical kind? Acts 14 tells us that the apostle Paul was “strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith,” –what was his supportive message?– “and saying, ‘Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God.’” What ever happened to “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands”?
Jesus’ message was loony: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life.” These are the “words of eternal life” to Peter? Everyone was stumped, and many left Jesus over this cannibal homily–“If we understand what he is saying, it’s a problem… and if we don’t understand what he is saying, it’s a problem.” Simon Peter, for all his flowery speech, was just as baffled. Had he known Jesus spoke of his own sacrificial death, Peter would have corrected the Son of God himself. For Peter, this was the one thing the “words of eternal life” could not possibly mean–the cross.
I think in all his fog, Impetuous Pete spoke the truth after all. There is nowhere else to go because these are the words of eternal life, even if it leads through more pain and perplexity than other roads. Those who stayed with Jesus after this sermon did so in confusion, not clarity, but they found him worth trusting right through the dark. Even Peter finally followed him to his own crucifixion. That is the one serious problem with resurrection–you have to die to get there.
Janathan Grace Reflections 