by Rev. Cathy Fransson
Barbara Brown Taylor, the extraordinary Episcopal preacher, remarked at a seminar in Seattle several years ago, “When I preach, I always assume there is at least one person in the congregation who is dying. And I never want to waste that person’s time.” Shocking but true. Joan Didion begins her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking in a similarly blunt way: Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. In a broad way, all of us live with the inescapable realities of life in the midst of death. For us to come to such a sanctuary, and I use the term with all its meanings, is to say we all need support, insight, wisdom and hope to lighten our darkness.
In our world it is not unreasonable to be depressed. But we cope. Some In this room work the political process. Others find ways to assist those without resources, homes, and food. Others of us come fresh with grief, in need of recovery, or have just received an unwelcome diagnosis. Some face surgery; some struggle with a strained relationship, a difficult person, disappointment with our own parents, our children, or grandchildren.
Since none of us can control the lives of others or many of our circumstances, all of us must come to terms with the things we cannot change, the things we might change, and the challenge of discerning which is which.
Faith has been too quick to gloss over the pain of these realities, jumping to the joyous assurance that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to God’s purpose,” often pronounced in a gleeful sing song as if to say, Don’t worry about it! And lest you think I don’t believe that—and I do—let me hasten to say there is a process that precedes such deep confidence. Where do we begin?
First, as much as we deny it, we need to rid ourselves of a kind of unconscious tribal moralism: we equate good fortune with the presence of God and bad fortune with God’s absence. The first question we ask when we learn of a bad diagnosis is, what did they do wrong? We congratulate ourselves we are free of disease, for now, and worry about our own vulnerability. We think freedom from illness means we are doing something right, and everyone else must have messed up. Or God smiles on those free from misfortune and must be neglecting those who suffer. Reject this myth, my friends. It is high time we let God be God: the creator of all things, the Ground of Being who holds both the good and the bad in hand, lest we point fingers and reduce life to a tribal
moral script.
What is our alternative? Here’s an example of how to handle pain differently. When everything went south for Job, he sat down and sang out a medley of curses. He wept. He railed against his circumstances. He acknowledged the revolting developments in his life, and complained. “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death but it doesn’t come … why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in? For my sighing comes like my bread and my groanings are poured out like water.” Primitive peoples did not practice the politically correct, polite euphemisms we use to gloss over our pain. As a result, like Job, they felt everything, the beauty and the terror, and kept going. We can learn from them. Although his friends moralized and offered opinions, Job encounters God and is reduced to humility and awe.
Job’s laments were like the negative psalms we like to skip over--“psalms of disorientation,” Walter Brueggemann calls them. They challenge the polite assumption that our life is nicely ordered and that’s all we ought to notice. Brueggemann thinks when we limit our choice of psalms only to celebration, we’re being disingenuous. We exclude pain in our worship, thinking we should only praise God—not complain. But Brueggemann says, “For the trusting community, [the use of Psalms of Darkness] is an act of bold faith…a transformed faith.” Psalms of lament insist “the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way….[such faith] is bold because it insists that all experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God.” Brueggemann believes “everything must be bought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life.”
The African American spirituals we heard last week are a perfect example of such lament. Singing into the pain lightened the darkness. Nobody knows the trouble I seen….I been in the storm too long. We all know what that feels like.
So Scott Peck did us a world of good by beginning his first book with the line, Life is difficult. If we grew up without that honesty, we tended to think we could control things, and bought into the myth that trouble means God’s not paying attention. To admit life is difficult is to offer all of us, friend and foe alike, the compassion we need when assaulted by unpredictable, unexpected, and unfortunate, but ordinary events. Life is not fair. And sometimes life sucks. Period.
This is the time for lament, complaint, tears, and sadness--good, healing emotions and ones we ought to express some of the time. In their book about negative emotions James and Evelyn Whitehead write, “Emotions are social strategies directed toward our interaction with other people. They attune us to the web of connections that link us to one another.” They illustrate this with the Chinese character for patience: a knife poised over the heart--meaning, we must endure a threat until we learn its mission. Feelings are signals that something is amiss. They demand we pay fierce attention until we understand what our feelings are telling us.
So if we discard the tribal myth, we must then accept the faithful life will not save us from pain. The faithful life will only offer us resources for the inevitable pain all of us face. So if we cannot glibly assume God will “fix” the pain, what can we assume, what can we learn, to allow God to be God, and to transform that pain into the abundant life?
At the Fear of Death seminar with Marcus Borg three weeks ago someone said, we live with a fear of dying; but those souls free in the cosmos live in fear of being born on the earth! There is no escaping the angst of consciousness.
I am talking about light in our darkness. Jesus is that light: Walk while you have the light, Jesus says, so that the darkness may not overtake you … believe in the light, so that you may become children of light. Light is hope, faith, the thing that lifts our cynicism, depression, and sadness and shows us a new perspective--to see ourselves from a different angle, held in the hand of God where everything that happens to us is significant and redeemable, whatever it is. Jesus does not say, darkness will not happen to us. He suggests if we walk in the light, darkness may not overtake us. If we become his followers, children of light, we will not get lost in the darkness that comes to us all.
At this year’s women’s retreat we explored how our wounds do not have to limit us; they can invite us beyond ourselves. We are all broken; we can grow strong in the broken places. There is always something more to learn, to explore, to grow up to, or to beckon us to greater consciousness. We are finite beings with an infinite potential, the capacity to see beyond our brokenness to the wholeness of all of life. John announces this theme at the very beginning of his gospel: “What has come into being in [the Word is] life, and the life [is] the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness [does] not overcome it.”
Jesus demonstrated God’s power over death, paradoxically, through his own death. Though he died, Jesus grew in the hearts of his followers until over two thousand years later, we continue to proclaim the works of God, pointing to Jesus who accepted both the beauty and the terror of his life and whose spirit speaks with us today. Because of his example we continue to experience life-overwhelming-death in mysterious ways, even though death be unexpected, hard, or futile, as the loss of lives in Iraq seems to be.
Sharing our burdens, our fear of death and illness, is what begins healing. We may not have a solution to the problem of evil; we cannot cure all the diseases known to humankind, and we do not even cure the known diseases because we are too arrogant to share on a large enough scale. But if we bear one another’s burdens, we can begin to heal the pain we all know.
We recoil at the first sight of pain and disease. Then we struggle with it. Joan Chittester writes, “Struggle is the great crossover moment of life. It never leaves us neutral. It demands that we make a choice: either we dig down deep into the wellspring that is our innermost selves and go on beyond where we were, despite where we were, or we simply give up, stop in our tracks rooted to the spot, up to our ankles in bitterness and despair, satisfied to be less than all our personal gifts indicate that we are called to be.” When we struggle with our pain, we prevail and are changed; we change, and prevail. And “When we prevail…we are transformed. We become someone with a gift to give to others on the way.”
You remember the story. Jacob wrestles all night long, and then claims, “I have seen God face to face and I have survived.” He knew he was struggling for his life. He did not let go. He did not give up. He met the foe and struggled until he prevailed over his own weakness. Chittester asserts it is the very act of resisting despair that abolishes it. Wrestling with the pain turns change into conversion, isolation into independence, darkness into faith, and fear into
courage. Out of all these things come new strength and a new sense of self.
We must be willing to believe where we find ourselves, bad as it may seem, must be as good, somehow, as where we once wanted to be. The struggle assumes we are open to God, open to newness, wonder and surprise. She concludes hope is never a denial of reality. It is a radical affirmation of the Light of the World in our midst. In spite of the tragedy yawning before us, pain, loss, and struggle, God is with us in the trenches of our despair, strengthening us to acknowledge the darkness and keep on going. “Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.”
You and I know people living with cancer and its debilitating treatment, we know people with Parkinsons and MS, fybromyalgia, chronic fatigue, stroke, diabetes, and heart disease. Are you present to this? This sanctuary is a sanctuary from where others flee from such things, lest they feel their own fear. In the face of our humanness, and all the things that are outside our control, here we celebrate a paradox: the life that comes from death, the light that cannot be put out. We stand together with the least, the last and the lost to sing not only the psalms of joy, but the laments as well, in the full confidence of life in God.
“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” Paul is the first follower of Jesus who wrote honestly of his paradoxical life. He sought to kill Christians until blinded by the Light himself, and though beleaguered, imprisoned, tortured, and abused, was transformed into the first missionary of the church. In this sanctuary we have a choice: we can share one another’s lives and burdens. Or we can turn away, We can engage with others suffering from things we’d rather not know about, and learn from them. We can contribute to this community, believing in its mission within and without these walls, or give a polite pledge and walk away, thinking we have done the minimum required. We can contribute our own time and talent to the corporate struggle to make this congregation, with its rich array of leaders, a viable voice in our community, or we can come expecting others to perform for us. We can drift in and out not taking any time or courage to plumb our own darkness, or engage with strangers through whom, sometimes, the light begins to dawn.
Either we dig down deep into the wellspring within and go on beyond where we were, despite where we were, or we simply give up, stop in our tracks rooted to the spot, up to our ankles in bitterness and despair, satisfied to be less than all our personal gifts indicate that we are called to be. God’s invitation is to go beyond ourselves, to see challenge as close to God as riches are, and to struggle with the circumstances, confident in the resources God pours upon us even without our knowing.
If we aren’t going to waste everyone’s time, we need to be about God’s business, bringing peace out of pain, purpose out of struggle, and light out of darkness. If we but allow God to be God, God transforms every circumstance we face. Today is a good day to begin.
[
Rev. Cathy Fransson is an associate minister at Seattle First Baptist Church in Seattle, WA. Thanks to David Enroth (SpiritWarriorSky@aol.com) for forwarding.]
