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.
I have been soul-sick for several months now. But today I feel okay. Both the pain and the relief are inexplicable. I accept mystery… as long as it stays theoretical. But I find practical mysteries at best annoying: where are my glasses, which street do I take, why is the car making that noise? When not knowing is costing me money or making me late or (more profoundly) hurting my relationships or my heart, I become agitated. For me, ignorance is not bliss, it is often agony. My method for coping with a scary, unpredictable world is to figure it out, experiment till I get it working, find new configurations for the parts lying on the floor. As long as I have untried options, I can keep hope alive.
TRY THIS IN THE DARK
But I seem to have run out of options. I don’t know why I am depressed and I can do nothing to change it. It is a mystery of the worst kind. Mystery is just a highfalutin word for confusion, and being lost and blind does not make me happy, especially when I bash my shins every other step. Kimberly is struggling in the same way, and it has driven us to our new year’s resolution or annual theme of life: be okay with not being okay. It is our stumbling way of embracing faith. It doesn’t light our path or clear away the rubble, but it is our way of handing back the situation to God: “We’ve tried everything, and it doesn’t work, so we’ll try to adjust ourselves to whatever might come.”
I commented to Kimberly in our prayer time two nights ago that I’m stuck with God. If I thought I could find more peace with the devil, I’d look up his address, but I know leaving God would make me even more miserable. I can make no sense of what God does, but I trust who He is, and for now that has to be enough.
Today I ran across this video from 2011. It is a vignette of two famous actors who have been in the gutter more than once, but prop each other up with forgiveness and acceptance as they stumble along. Hollywood films portray beautiful truths, but Hollywood lives rarely do. Here is a two minute “acceptance speech” by Walter Downey Jr. that is a message of hope for those of us who are recovering sinners
EMBRACING THE FALLEN
I am not a good writer by nature. My sister is. My wife is. Creative words just stream from their fingers. I envy those of you who can do this. I have to slave for hours over a paragraph or two, partly because I am trying to disentangle my thoughts, but even more because I am trying to sort out my words. I never suffer from writer’s block–my mind pumps out countless fresh ideas and insights. I have boxes and file folders full of scribbled notes on the backs of envelopes and the borders of bulletins. Instead, I struggle from writer’s bottle-neck–all those ideas pile up behind my cramped ability to express them.
It seems the real artists among us are forced to express themselves. They find relief and release and fire for their souls. It is their antidote to depression. Writing fills their tank, but it empties mine, and since I live with just enough fuel to make it through each day, I often have no energy to write. Thank you for sticking with me anyway and finding some benefit in what I say, and especially for responding, which does actually energize me. May each of you be blessed with a fresh taste of God’s grace today.
I am clinging to Christmas past: playing Christmas music, plugging in the tree, snacking on holiday food and drink. My neat wife likes to box up the season quick, but I’ve talked her into observing the 12 days of Christmas, not because I’m liturgically inclined, but because I’m trying to hold at bay the cheerless, cold, dark march of winter days. Our second advent theme this year was celebration, and all our decorations and colored lights inside and out speak of good cheer, pushing back the bleakness beyond.
The first Christmas was a true celebration, the Savior had been born and his whole life of healing and redemption lay ahead of him. His birth was the great crack in space and time through which God poured in. It changed everything. But our little christmases change nothing. We pause to celebrate for a few weeks and then go back to life as usual; our sugar high dumps us on the doorstep of New Years with our purses a good bit thinner and our paunches a good bit thicker. Our celebrations leave us worse off, our only defense the remorse of resolutions to do better in the next 12 months.
As I say goodbye to extended family, vacation, wrapped gifts, boxes of chocolate, TV specials and Christmas carols and return to the mundane of alarm clocks, office memos, bologna sandwiches, and the monthly mortgage, how can I keep alive the magic of Christmas? If there is any real magic in Christmas and not just pretend magic, it must be that God himself is with me–Immanuel–and my ongoing celebration, not simply of his memory from 2000 years ago, but of his daily presence. Any suggestions for how a celebration of that might look?
The bright-faced children (and adults) whose lives were snuffed out in Newtown look out at me from the screen as their talents and personalities and families are profiled. It makes me cry. It is not just the sadness of this one event, but the tragedy of the whole history of the world that washes over me. Even as I write this and you read this, folks all over the world are being mutilated, raped, burned alive, enslaved, beaten, starved; they are being traumatized, rejected, hated, abandoned. As my wife says, “Why did God think this was a good idea?”
Whatever clever answers we give theologically, our daily reality is inescapable–we live in a malicious, dangerous world and we are not safe from harm. Faith-filled followers of God are raped, blinded, stoned alive; some lose family and friends, a good reputation, mental health, productive ministry, even a sense of God’s presence all through no fault of their own. It is a scary world, and that makes me cling all the more tightly to every bit of control I can leverage.
The more I control, the safer I feel. I create a safe theology of a loving God who would allow no harm to his children… and 20 kindergarteners are massacred. Suddenly, my theology cracks and fissures. If I cannot predict what love will do, how can I trust it… how can I even understand it? God himself no longer feels safe. The cross in my past and the heaven in my future counterbalance these doubts but do not resolve them. A gap remains between the theology of a loving God and the reality of a terrible world, and it cannot be bridged rationally. The ‘why’ is never fully answered. An honest faith is much more strenuous than I ever realized.
I recognize this dynamic in my marriage. My wife loves me at a fundamental level, and I trust this love when I smack against painful and scary tensions, conflicts, and misunderstandings in our relationship. We eventually sort it out, we are both better for it, and our relationship, love, and commitment are deepened. In the middle of the fight, I can easily doubt her love, but it is not a fundamental doubt–I do not question our marriage. We have been through so many things together without breaking apart that I trust the relationship even when my feelings are in full retreat. A strong relationship is not one without doubts, but one that endures the doubts.
Janathan Grace Reflections 