Security-strategies for the soul, and the invitation to rest

In Susan Howatch’s great novel, Glittering Images, Charles Ashworth is an Anglican priest and canon who is sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury to do some investigate work on a controversial Bishop is suspected to be living a double life.  His journey into the seductively powerful world of church politics, however, exposes a deeper seduction within – an inner conflict which prevents him from seeing his world clearly, and compels him to live out of a false self – a “glittering image” committed to protecting him not only from the pain of his external world, but his internal pain as well.  In a moment of crisis, Ashworth meets Jon Darrow, a spiritual director who dares to ask about the self behind the glittering image.  Darrow sees Ashworth for who he really is – a man burdened by the world’s demands and his own internal demand to be successful.

Speaking to Ashworth’s hidden, burdened self within, Darrow says, “He must be exhausted.  Has he never been tempted to set down the burden by telling someone about it?”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Who’s ‘I’?” said Darrow.

“The glittering image.”

“Ah yes,” said Darrow, ” and of course that’s the only Charles Ashworth that the world’s allowed to see, but you’re out of the world now, aren’t you, and I’m different from everyone else because I know there are two of you.  I’m becoming interested in this other self of yours, the self nobody meets.  I’d like to help him come out from behind that glittering image and set down this appalling burden which has been tormenting him for so long.”

“He can’t come out.”

“Why not?”

“You wouldn’t like or approve of him.”

“Charles, when a traveller’s staggering along with a back-breaking amount of luggage he doesn’t need someone to pat him on the head and tell him how wonderful he is.  He needs someone who’ll offer to share the load.”

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

The words of Jesus I find more comforting than any others are these: Come to me, all you who are weary and heavily burdened, and I will give you rest.  No words may better summarize his priestly mission.  No words may better expose our self-righteous hearts.

Prone to manage our own burdens, we develop sophisticated strategies to cope.  Our psyche is so wonderfully complex, and yet so quick to participate as an accomplice in our self-redemptive strategizing.  Perhaps even more disturbing is that so much of this takes place subconsciously.  Most of us don’t wake up one morning was a commitment to develop a sophisticated mask, a false self that rejects Christ’s invitation to give our burdens over, and stubbornly commits to managing life alone.  I’ve never seen anyone for counseling who has confessed, “At age 7, I recognized that what people liked in me was ‘The Joker’, and that I’d be accepted if I was the funny guy for the rest of my life.”  Yet, with some time and reflection, many people do remember a subtle shift, a pull from within to hide their baggage and show their best image.

I was a skinny kid with big ears, and a huge burden of fear within.  No one knew of this fear, of course.  My parents did their best to tell him the right things.  But they, and everyone else, did what he all do as adults in a child’s world – accentuate the good, and deny the bad.  I do it with my kids all the time.

“Daddy, I can’t wear these baggy pants to school, everyone will laugh,” my 7 year old says.

“No they won’t,” I say.  “You look great.  Just hang in there and it will be ok.”

Did I just set my child up for a lifetime of therapy?  That’s a complicated answer.  As a kid, what I learned was that my fear was never justified, that it was some silly thing that could be handled by just getting over it.  In time, I learned more sophisticated ways of doing it.  I became good at things – music and academics, and of course, people-pleasing and strategizing my life in such as a way as to maximize my feeling of achievement and minimize, even eradicate, the inner voice that said, “I’m scared.”  Being fearful was not alright.

Like the Israelites on the first Exodus journey, we suspect that burying our burdens under a thousand different security-strategies will save us.  We respond to Jesus like a Pharisee – “we’re managing our burdens just fine, Rabbi…in fact, we’ve created a whole system of security maintenance that we think you’d really appreciate.”  Yet, like Jon Darrow to Charles Ashworth, Jesus says, “But you look exhausted.  Let me carry the load.  My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

One of the difficult recognitions in my own life is that while I had an expansive theology that claimed that God was Sovereign, that Jesus was Lord, and that I was in need of grace, my life did not match my theology at all.  In fact, I’d be lying if I said it does now.  There are parts of me that refuse to relinquish control.  In fact, they love control.  They stand alongside me whispering, “All of this New Exodus talk about taking the wilderness way is fine, Chuck, but you’re not going to do it.  It’s way too dangerous.”

Progress along the New Exodus way requires listening to that voice of Jesus, like the voice of Jon Darrow to Charles Ashworth, acknowledging your exhaustion and offering not a pat on the back, but a load off of your back.  There will be many other voices within and without, however, fighting this, enraged that you’d trust anyone but yourself to navigate life’s rugged terrain.  A spiritual discipline required for this stage of the journey, therefore, is listening. Through the noise, you’ll recognize the voice of Jesus, and it will slowly grow to become your own voice.  From that new place, you’ll be able to speak again, not from the glittering image, but from the new self, emerging out of the wilderness of shame, venturing on to the promised rest for weary souls…

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

When you read the dialogue between Darrow and Ashworth, do you recognize yourself in it?

What is your version of the “glittering image?”

What burdens does the “glittering image” refuse to let go of? 

 

 

Wilderness Emergence: Living from the New Self

“The dark night helps the false self to wither.  It liberates our true self.  The false self will continue to remain, perhaps, all our lives.  But thanks to God’s grace, the false self’s influence on us will be much reduced.”  Daniel Schrock, The Dark Night: A Gift of God

“So I am not the one doing wrong; it is sin living in me that does it.  There is another power within me that is at war with my mind.  I see another law at work in the members of my body.” St. Paul, from Rom 7

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +

One of the difficult realities of our journey from the encumbering slavery of Egypt to the expansive freedom of the Promised Land is that it takes a lifetime to get free, really free, of the ugly stench of our former enslavement.  It takes just a moment to be freed from slavery.  It takes a lifetime to get the mindset of a slave out of us.

St. Paul seems to agree.  His words in the quote from Romans 7 (above) are curious:  it’s not me sinning, it’s sin in me. Is St. Paul blame-shifting?  Is this a bit of legal maneuvering?:  I didn’t do it, your honor!  It was my alter-ego Saul, the murderer! And what’s this talk of a war within?  He’s preoccupied with another “law” or “power” within, countering his new identity in Jesus.  And he seems to indicate that this other “law” or “power” is more complex, at work in the “members” of his body.  Apparently, this dynamic within is multiple.  Does St. Paul suffer from multiple personalities?  Or, is he putting his 1st-century finger on a psychological sin-complex that speaks to the depth and scope of human brokenness?

In a series of previous posts, I introduced the idea of the “divided heart,” a biblical way of talking about the internal polarization which takes place as a result of both sin and woundedness.  But we didn’t go into depth on how to break free from this kind of internal slavery.  In the last post, I mentioned that the process of change is often over-simplified, particular among Christians who reduce change down to a behavioral choice or a mental formula.  What I’d want to argue is that St. Paul thought differently – that our inner world is more complex, that our self-reliant strategies for coping with life’s pain are more advanced, that his metaphor of “war” actually challenges simplistic versions of change.  The complexity is embedded in a Pauline phrase – “members of the body.”  These warring and dividing “members of the body” are inside, and become an illustration for what happens outside, among people.  In some respects, these internal members of the body are like an internal family, called to be unified by polarized by their different agendas.  N.T. Wright, in fact, calls these “members of the body” parts of our psyche. And sometimes these different parts of us, like members of a family, don’t get along.

Think about this practically.  We’ll often use language saying, “My heart says yes, but my head says no.”  Sometimes, we’ll say, “Part of me wants to stay in the relationship, but another part of me doesn’t.”  Or, a good friend will hear us tell her that we’re doing fantastic, but will read on our face that we’re really a mess.  Or, we’ll read a good many authors who talk about a false self or mask that we wear which isn’t our true self or core.  It seems that we’re divided within.  I illustrated this in that previous post with the ambivalence of the Israelites who, on the one hand, wanted everything the Promised Land had to offer, but on the other hand wanted the security of Egypt.  St. Paul in Rom. 7 can say, “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.”

While I spelled out the problem in my previous post, I did not elaborate on the process of growth, change, and restoration.  The first insight for wilderness emergence comes from St. Paul himself, when he says, “it’s not me sinning, it’s sin in me.” The point, for Paul, is that something new and good exists within.  He calls this “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), among other things.  It is new life inside of us.  It is a regenerated heart.  It is a temple of the Holy Spirit.  And for this new self, Paul prays for strength “with power through the Spirit in your inner being” (Eph. 3:16).  This is not another “part” of us, it is a new self, a new center, a new organizing principle amidst the disorganized and chaotic parts of the old self.  It is this new self, the home of God Himself, that becomes the redemptive center in a wounded soul.

Now, the problem is that many of us live more from a part of ourselves, a false self, than this new self.  In fact, sometimes these parts of us take over, going to war against this new self and sending us into a tailspin.  Often, we’ll say, “My anxiety takes over and I just can’t think,” or “When I’m depressed I just don’t feel like myself,” or “When I blow up at my wife, I don’t feel like it’s me, and I hate who I’ve become.”  The truth is, it is not you. You, the new you, the real you, the redeemed you, could not and would not do that.  This is why St. Paul can say, “It’s not me, it’s sin in me.”

While we’ll learn more about how these warring parts of us work in future posts, it is important to know that what you need to begin growing, changing, healing, and maturing is already in you.  It is not in your spouse.  It is not in a counselor.  It is not in a substance.  It is not a religious ritual.  And it is not in your self, or your “old self,” that is.  Sometimes, we expect people to fix us, or substances to fix us, or even false images of ourselves to fix us.  And while these things can be helpful to point us to growth, challenge us to maturity, and sustain us in our journey, they cannot fix us.  But if St. Paul is right, God has pitched his tent in us, and is committed to seeing this new seed of life grow, flourish, and change us from the inside out.  As a therapist, this is a great relief, in some respects, because God Himself is far more committed to seeing change take place within people than I am.  It’s a great relief, but also a great Hope as well.  The Kingdom of God, like a mustard seed, is growing within.

Emerging from the wilderness, we recognize that God had a purpose all along: “The dark night helps the false self to wither.  It liberates our true self” (Daniel Schrock).  The dark night, in fact, often makes us strikingly aware of old patterns and habits that enslaved us.  But how do we begin to recognize that centered place, that new self, that core where God resides, particularly when we feel like we’ve succumbed to identity theft?  St. John of the Cross counseled that you find “you” by identifying what isn’t you.  Sounds confusing, right?  This, for St. John, was a contemplative exercise, an exercise in self-awareness where you pay close attention to feelings or thoughts that are not you.  For our 21st century practical purposes, let’s do an exercise.

Imagine that you are standing at the foot of a mountain.  At the foot of the mountain, begin to identify and greet the different “you’s” that have been taking over.  For example, I’d see the Chuck who is a competent workaholic who finds identity in achievement, and the distant loner who finds (false) satisfaction and safety in my own mind, and the chronic helper who has trouble saying no, and the anxious plate-spinner who vigilantly obsesses on details, and the insecure little boy who rarely emerges but wields great power from his hidden place, or the lonely need-vacuum who longs for affection and approval, and many, many other Chuck’s who operate within my orbit.  In this exercise, we are not yet working with these varying parts of ourselves, just getting to know our core self.  So, as you see and experience each part of you, acknowledge it, and tell it you’ll get to know it later, but walk on and up the hillside.  As another false self greets you, acknowledge it, but ask it to stay behind.  Some of these you may greet as old, longtime friends.  Some may come as a surprise.  I was surprised to be greeted, at one point, by a very strategic part of me that was far more manipulative in my world than I knew.  Again, the point is to greet the part of you, and walk onward and upward, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress.  As St. John taught, the more we identify what isn’t us, the real us, the more we begin to get a glimpse of that unfettered treasure that is our new self.  At the top of the mountain, when these varying parts of you have stepped back, take some time to sit and be silent, experiencing God’s nearness as you can, experiencing the spaciousness of an inner place that “flows with milk and honey.”

Rest and enjoy.

Now that you’ve moved through the winding path upward, greeting your many counter-identities, alter-ego’s, and false selves, you’ll be more ready to greet them on the way back down from a place of greater love and sanctified compassion.  After all, these parts of you reflect good and godly longings which have become mis-directed toward achieving intimacy, purpose, and glory in our own way and in our own timing.  They have chosen Egypt over the patient longing for the land flowing with milk and honey.  They’ve chosen management over trust, and in so doing have thrown our hearts into disorder.  In the coming weeks, we’ll explore how to meet God at the mountain top, and return to our disordered world with God’s intention to love and redeem.

Until then, God’s peace.

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Emerging from the Wilderness: How We Get Change All Wrong

We’ve talked much about how the wilderness is a place of both great suffering and extraordinary promise.  It is in the wilderness that we’re stripped of every cheap hope to which we’ve clung, every alter-ego that we thought could help us save face, every manufactured identity that would win God’s approval (and that of our friends), every claim to control over our own lives.  When we fully recognize our addiction to Egypt, we pray for a wilderness.  It’s not that we’re masochistic.  Quite the contrary.  We’re hungry for life, and life to the full.  And so the wilderness provides fertile ground for the hard work of recovering our identity, the original imago, the true self once hidden behind a thousand masks.

But how? you ask.  This is where theologians and counselors alike begin becoming far too simplistic in their soul-remedies.  I recently read the draft of an academic paper by a well-known theologian writing on this very thing.  Like many in the psychological world who buy into the majority paradigm – Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy – this theologian seemed to reduce change down to “telling yourself the truth.”  And so, the Christian platitudes follow.  We’re told to remind ourselves of our justification every day, and rejoice in our forgiveness, and preach the Gospel to ourselves.  Amen…but…

These remedies, if they really worked, would make genuises out of all of us.  We’d sell best-selling books.  And some do.  But they don’t work, at least not fully.  For many, they lead to more frustration and futility.  Telling ourselves that we’re justified doesn’t make depression go away.  In fact, it tricks us a bit.  After all, it’s true that we’re loved and forgiven.  But, other voices are at work within challenging that truth over and again.  We’ll get to those “other voices” in another blog, but let’s talk first about the complexity of human change and growth.

What is most troubling, in my estimation, is the idea that we’re capable of telling ourselves to feel better when the reality is that life, on this side of the return of Jesus, is still marked by struggle in the “wilderness” in large part.  We’re aliens and strangers (1 Peter 2:11), even still, looking for that “better country” (Heb. 11:16).  And if this is the case, at least in part, then life is still chock full of suffering and struggle.  Even the saints who have already gone to heaven know this, crying out, “How long until justice comes?” (Rev. 6:10).  It’s the loud voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the muted voice of a genocide survivor.  It’s the desperate voice of a middle-aged housewife struggling from depression and a 13 year old enslaved by a San Francisco urban sex-slave pimp.  Tell desperate people to just “tell yourself the truth,” and if they’re honest they’ll answer with the same contempt with which C.S. Lewis responded to his truth-telling colleagues after the death of his wife.

Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke once summarized the Old Testament Book of Job in a lecture, saying, “Job was honest and God commended him.  Job’s friends told the truth, and were scolded.”  Sometimes the truth does not set us free.  Sometimes the truth denies the God-ordained pattern of wrestling and lamenting that might actually lead to real freedom, and lived-truth.

In a previous post, I talked about the importance of this process, the process of lament.  I talked about how Old Testament scholars view Jeremiah’s lament as an acrostic, meticulously detailing every jot and tittle of his emotional storehouse.  All details must be heard.  All suffering must be acknowledged.  And frankly, this process is just too long and messy for most of us.  We’d rather clean up suffering, and we’d rather make change manageable – just change your mind.  Well, that doesn’t work, and it’s also oblivious to the reality that change, in the Bible, was extraordinary long and hard, and consisted of many failures along the way.  If change were that easy, St. Paul’s congregations would have been models of spiritual victory, as he told them the truth over and again.  Sadly, his congregations were a mess.

In the coming blogs, we’ll explore the details of lament.  What we’ll see is that change is, at the very least, a change of mind, but in actuality far more.  We’ll see that the recovery of identity, of the imago, demands a serious appraisal of our many false identities and the ways in which they operate within us.  We’ll see that St. Paul, himself, was a living contradiction, a man of competing allegiances.  We’ll also see that St. Paul was a panoply of identities nevertheless anchored in a core identity.  And we’ll see how this is true of us, too.  We’ll see how God accommodates to our own internal brokenness with a myriad of different voices and images, knowing full well that the body has many members, each needing care.  Stay tuned, because this is the part that gets both fun and controversial…and, in my estimation, tells God’s story in technicolor, the way it was meant to be told.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

The fruit that takes away life, and the fruit that gives it

“Surrender don’t come naturally to me.” (Rich Mullins from his song Hold Me Jesus)

As you see more dearly that your vocation is to be a witness to God’s love in this world, and as you become more determined to live out that vocation, the attacks of the enemy will increase. You will hear voices saying, ‘You are worthless, you have nothing to offer, you are unattractive, undesirable, unlovable: The more you sense God’s call, the more you will discover in your own soul the cosmic battle between God and Satan. Do not be afraid. Keep deepening your conviction that God’s love for you is enough, that you are in safe hands, and that you are being guided every step of the way. What is important is to keep clinging to the real, lasting, and unambiguous love of Jesus. Whenever you doubt that love, return to your inner spiritual home and listen there to love’s voice. Only when you know in your deepest being that you are intimately loved can you face the dark voices of the enemy without being seduced by them.  The love of Jesus will give you an ever-clearer vision of your call as well as of the many attempts to pull you away from that call. The more you are called to speak for God’s love, the more you will need to deepen the knowledge of that love in your own heart. The farther the outward journey takes you, the deeper the inward journey must be. Only when your roots are deep can your fruits be abundant.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  (St. Paul)

+ + + + + + + + + +

One of the hardest things I’ve learned (correct that:  am learning) is that surrender doesn’t come naturally to me.  Rich Mullins was right.  I’d rather cling to the old rags of Egypt rather than surrender to the infinite treasures of the New Eden.  Emerging out of the sufferings of the wilderness, I find myself stripped of those old rags…yet I remember them.  And in remembering, I sometimes lust after them again.  In their day, they held great weight.

I’ve found that my prayer in recent years has become a simple one:  Hide my life in yours, Jesus. It comes from St. Paul:  For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. This is vintage ‘New Exodus’ Paul.  It’s the death-to-life pattern of Jesus, living out the Exodus pattern of Israel.  We were lost in the wilderness, but now we’re found – found to God, found to others, found to ourselves.

I hide in a thousand other things.  I avoid God, and in doing so avoid myself in the many false selves and false identities I live out of.  After a while, I’ve forgotten myself, and feel lost to God.  Descending into the wilderness, I am stripped of these counter-identities, and reminded of my Eden-born identity as God’s image, never completely lost but hidden as a treasure in God’s heart.  The lessons of the wilderness are hard.  I find that I’m stripped of reputation, identity-through-achievement, love when I want it, progress on my terms, and more.  But as we’ve said before, it is a stripping down which actually reveals our hidden life in God, our real selves, our deepest identity.

The journey up and out of the wilderness leads to the freedom of life as it was meant to be lived.  And St. Paul gives definition to that, as well.  He calls it “fruit” – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  Love, once mis-directed to a thousand false loves, is now re-directed and renewed in its First Love.  Joy, once found in a temporary pleasure that could be bought or controlled at will, is now found in longing, sometimes without immediate gratification, for the greater Joy.  Peace, defined as conflict avoidance and repressed desire, now becomes a verb – the renewal of shalom, the re-ordering of relationships and the reconciliation of those at war with one another.  Patience, replaced by remote-controls that falsely convince us that we can control pleasure and quick spiritual fixes which sell us on 3 steps to our best life, now finds renewal in a heart that waits longingly for a deeper satisfaction.  Kindness, domesticated in fixed smiles on Christian faces, now becomes a risky compassion (suffering with another) that deepens relationship and bestows dignity on another.  Faithfulness, crushed into definitions mandating dogmatic certainty at the expense of relationship, now flourishes in commitment to living out (delightfully) the command to love our neighbors and relentlessly pursue (rather than demonize) those we differ with.  Gentleness, exposing our need to power over and control, invites a vulnerability which may in fact expose our weakness but show Christ’s strength.  Self-control, rather than a behavioral call to pull-ourselves-up-by-our-bootstraps, actually manifests in surrender to God, which can feel like being out-of-control to control freaks like me.

These are the fruits of the New Exodus journey.

But Henri Nouwen is right.  Read the quote at the top of the blog again.  It is precisely at this moment that the memories of Egypt stir, the old demons awake, and we imagine that the control we had and the pleasures we experienced and the identities we formed back then might actually be better and more satisfying.

Hide me in you, Jesus.

Ever since Adam and Eve took a bite into the deadly passion-fruit, we’ve been hiding…hiding from who we were truly meant to be, how we were truly made to live.  Freedom and joy awaits the one who finds that hidden self bound up in God.  That is fruit that nourishes…us, and those around us…

+ + + + + + + + + + + + +

What are the old identities God is calling you to surrender?

What is the cost of losing that identity?  How has it defined you…to yourself, and to others?

What “fruits of the Spirit” do you feel are most difficult for you to live into?  How does your struggle reveal what you are most attached to right now, and how you might need Jesus?

fixed or found? the journey from self-reliance to surrender.

In the last post entitled Opening Our Clenched Fists and Reaching Out Towards Hope, I began to paint a picture of the scary but glorious emergence from the dark valley of pain.  Nouwen’s metaphor of clenched fists opening – released from tension and clamoring – is a beautiful metaphor for a heart that releases its grip on control (manifested in the many self-remedies we choose) and surrenders its past, present, and future to a God that Walter Brueggemann once described as “wild, unfettered, and free.”  It must have seemed crazy to the Israelites, and so it also feels crazy to us to trust this Divine Mystery.  Perhaps, though, the second generation of Israelites, having seen the follies of their parents, intuited C.S. Lewis’ insights on Aslan’s character in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe -

“‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver…’Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”

And perhaps we, too, having seen the follies of our parents (the wounds inflicted in Egypt) and the folly of our own self-remedies (the wickedness revealed at Sinai) find ourselves plunged into the valley of the shadow of death only to discover, at some point, that we’ve been released from the burden of blaming others or fixing ourselves and propelled into freedom.  These New Exodus moments can be so rare, but the beauty and joy we find in them is profound.  Surrender is a glorious thing.

But how on God’s green earth do we surrender, you say?

The theologically appropriate answer, at this point, is – the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit blew in like a fresh wind at Pentecost, re-animating a New Humanity, a New Adam with the breath of life.  And on this New Exodus journey, we find at our darkest valleys and lowest moments that we are powerless, that the First Step in the Twelve Steps is the starting place – Blessed are the poor (ptochos – broken, beggarly, powerless) in spirit. Those impoverished in spirit need a Holy Spirit.  Those who have drowned need new life.  We simply cannot revive ourselves.

But how does this theologically appropriate answer translate into our daily battles with anorexia and sex addiction, workaholism and achievement addiction, depression and grief?  How does “surrender” fix our problems?

I’m convinced that our problems may actually be God’s way of leading us to surrender.

You see, we are not problems to be fixed.  Rather, we are broken and beautiful children of the King needing to be found.

Fixing is the problem.  Think about it this way.  It is in trying to fix ourselves that we continue to perpetuate our anxiety and depression.  It is in trying to fix ourselves that we run headlong into addiction.  It is in trying to fix ourselves that childhood wounds actually fester and grow.

The Prodigal Son tried to fix his problem (hunger) by eating the pods of a carob tree, a meal that middle-eastern scholar Kenneth Bailey claims would have given him no satisfaction, no nutrition, and no relief from his hunger pains.  He needed to be Found.

The Prodigal Son tried to fix his problem (despair) by going back to his father and asking to be a slave.  His problem was fixed by being Found…greeted by a Father who would run to him in his mess, not away from him, saying, “My son was lost and now is found.”

The Elder Son tried to fix his problem (insecurity) by becoming a narcissistic, self-promoting do-gooder.  The father told him that what he perceived to be the problem was never a problem.  “Everything I have is yours.”  He was lost and needed to be found, and hadn’t even left.

Our problems reveal the specific cure we need.  They reflect parts of us that crave God’s original shalom.  Our problem (sex addiction) is not an internet connection to be cut off, but a longing to be found intimately by another.  Our problem (depression) is not simply a feeling that should go away, but a longing to be known, loved, and found in our tears.  Our problem (eating disorder) is not about more food being eaten, but about a person who wants to disappear being found by One who sees and loves.  Our problem (cutting/self-mutiliation) is not simply a bad behavior to stop, but a longing to be released from a deeper pain and held in the arms of One who was cut on for our sakes.  Our problem (marital issues) is not a problem to be solved, but two people who long to be better known, understood, and intimately allied with one another and God.  Our problem (abuse) is not a memory to be erased, but reveals a longing to be held in the healing safety of Another.

You see, we surrender our need to be fixed, or fix ourselves.  We embrace the mysterious cure found in the strong, yet intimate, care of a Good (but not safe…) God.  Repentance, then, becomes something more than a mechanical prayer we say when we feel guilty.  It becomes an active and daily turning away from self-reliance and into the loving embrace of a God who isn’t mad, but delighted…

This process takes a lifetime.  For behind each clenched fist is another.  Our brokenness runs deep.  It is embedded in decades of hard memories, brain chemistry which has adapted and actually fosters the self-fix, the torrent of a powerful unconscious which lurks beneath our awareness, the body-memory of a place where our abuser violated us, and the seemingly inviolable patterns and habits which have emerged from years of resistance.

But here is what is liberating.  To assume we can fixed leads us further into a desperate search for the illusive pod that the Prodigal sought to devour.  It leads us to the lie of quick fixes and the false promises of hotshot preachers and therapists who pretend to be gods.  Instead, we’re lead out of the wilderness and into the embrace of the Father, to be Found.  This “being found” is a lifetime journey.  We’re prone to forget, and leave the safe arms of God and our community for more familiar lovers – less-Wild lovers.  But in those times, when we’re prone to find the fix again, let the quiet whisper of the one who longs to find you say again, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy ladened and I will give you rest.”

Found.

Where surrender is possible.

May the Spirit blow this new wind your way…

+ + + + + + + + + + +

Think about a significant “problem” you struggle with.  How have you attempted to fix it?

How is “fixing” a way we actually assume we can manage our own problems?  How does it actually minimize our need for grace, for love – to be Found?

How might it be frightening to abandon your “fixing” project?

How would your life look different if you stepped into this new reality of being Found?

Feel free to post comments about your journey.

Opening our clenched fists and reaching toward Hope

Night journeys, both actual and spiritual, may fall to the lot of those who carry Jesus with them.  Even the Son of God, who is pre-eminent above all others, must depart into Egypt like the rest of the family and must only come out when He is called.  Let us not wonder if we, also, have to go down to Egypt, and go in a hurry, and go by night, and are allowed to stay there for many a day.  We, too, shall be called out in due time by Him whose call is effectual.  The angel who leads us into Egypt will bring us word to come out. (Charles Spurgeon)

+ + + + + + + + + + +

Spurgeon was on to something.  For Spurgeon, the wilderness was much like going back to Egypt, back into exile, in order to learn the way of suffering with which Jesus was acquainted.  In the wilderness, people sometimes feel hopelessly mired in their enslavements. The hope, of course, is that struggling people will emerge from this darkness, just as Jesus did, and experience what St. John of the Cross called illumination, the soul’s emergence from its sufferings into the beauty and freedom of resurrection life.  From death comes life – God-breathed life, Spirit-animated life.

Now the ancient word illumination is a tricky one, because for some it might suggest that real spirituality involves some sort of Gnostic awakening reserved for only a few who have more deep and profound experiences of God.  However, as it was used by spiritual writers of old, illumination assumes that every person experiences pain and struggle, and every person has the opportunity to emerge from the darkness with hope.  Of course, many do not.  As has been said, for some the choice to return to the habitual enslavements of Egypt seems easier.  Indeed, God’s way seems like a cruel bait-and-switch that offers life in a Promised Land but delivers misery.  Trust is hard.  Illumination, though, is the fruit of trust, ripened in the rocky terrain and difficult weather of the wilderness.

Nouwen (1995) speaks to this difficulty in moving through the wilderness into freedom, offering the metaphor of clenched fists.  Our angry and self-protective fists, he notes, are created out of life’s pain, and show a rugged determination to take life into our own hands, to craft our own solutions, to blame, to continually live as a victim, to bandage our own wounds.  So many of us live perpetually in this place.  As a counselor, I have had many clients walk down the road of taking their pain more seriously.  This is often a very good thing, an entry into wilderness reality and the possibility of lament.  However, some have chosen to stay attached to the pain, feeling empowered by it, but never being freed from it.  With fists clenched around the neck of their victims (but ultimately themselves), they choke out life, refusing to take the next step – letting go of power, letting go of control, letting go of their version of another’s repentance, letting go of the need to be validated.  They never move from lament to forgiveness and reconciliation, and often become the angry, bitter, and loveless person they most despise.  Theologians call this state homo incurvatus in se – a person turned in on herself.  In this place, our soul shrivels up and dies.

Trust, however, requires opening one’s clenched fists, releasing the burdens that are carried, and assuming a posture of relationship and receptivity before God and others.  Nouwen, however, empathizes with our reluctance.  He writes, “It is a long spiritual journey of trust…Much has happened in your life to make all those fists” (p. 18).  We ought to be patient with those who find it hard to move from anger to forgiveness, and from blame to reconciliation in this respect.  They are fighting a deep battle within, and once again God alone can deliver freedom.  This long journey is akin to Israel’s journey.  She, too, walked the long path through the wilderness, fighting God along the way before relinquishing her control over the journey.  Iain Matthew (1995) writes, “It is not surprising that the admission comes to us slowly: it took Israel most of her history to learn it” (p. 69).

Illumination, in its most basic sense, is an opening of one’s hands.  It indicates a posture of trust – “God, I surrender myself and my own failed solutions, and embrace You.”  It recognizes that staying in Egypt and living out of the addictions, enslavements, and self-saving strategies of the past only bring a more fatal pain.  The wilderness of purgation is redemptive, ultimately.  In being stripped of the things that bind, one is freed to live more radically for others.  After a time of lamenting the loss of his son, theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff (1987) wrote, “In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness are brewed.  But there also character is made.  The valley of suffering is the vale of soul-making” (p. 97).  Illumination assumes that by being broken, we are actually freed up to love and serve others not merely because we should, but because we have tasted God’s love through the trial.  St. Paul wrote,

Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (Rom. 5:3-5)

Illumination, it must be emphasized, is not some special level of spirituality.  In fact, young and old experience tastes of this freedom every day.  However, fewer live here.  Nouwen was right.  Living self-protectively is simply easier, at times.  Yet, the Exodus narrative opens a door of hope.  Within the narrative, life emerges out of death.

Across the Jordan lies a land where the Spirit blows life into dead bones, animating souls for joyful freedom.  Across the Jordan crazy things happen – wounded souls forgive abusers, broken hearts trust again, clenched fists open.  Across the Jordan, Eden’s memory is alive and well, pulsing with the shalom of God, a reconciliation of all things and all people.  Though the foretastes here-and-now are rare, and though the Church is often the poorest example of this Spirit-animated reality, we get glimpses along the way.  I’ll leave you with just one:

+ + + + + + + + + + +

Ben and Sarah counseled with me many years ago.  She was slowly awakening to the reality that Ben was an angry, angry man.  But his anger was subtle and quiet, rarely erupting but always simmering.  Her awakening was coupled with his denial, further alienating the two.  By all accounts, their marriage was dying.  And their marriage, as it was, needed to die.  Sarah moved into a stage of both trying to change Ben and punishing him, relentlessly beating him with angry words and firm demands.  Ben, in turn, became indignant.  He would fight back, but most often stonewall.  They slept in separate beds before she eventually left him.

Death.

And then Ben began to shift.  He didn’t agree with everything Sarah had said or done, but he began to see his subtle, simmering anger as his assault with a deadly weapon in their marriage.  And it broke him.  I felt hope for them for the first time.  But Sarah didn’t believe him.  She felt as if his brokenness was a ploy to get her back, and she resisted.  Yet, this is where Ben’s movement from death to life, from darkness into illumination, became real.  He didn’t need to convince her.  And he didn’t get angry. In fact, Ben became more sad and broken, recognizing that his own anger had contributed to Sarah’s hardness.  He gradually opened his hands, and did his pleading with God, not with Sarah.  He let time and Providence work on Sarah’s heart.

Life.

She let him back home one day.  Something shifted.  She just began to trust again.  And he came back in – first for a visit with the kids, and then for a date, and then for a dinner at home, and then for an entire evening.  They did the dance of distrust.  They slipped into old patterns.  They revisited Egypt again and again.  But something new was breaking through, and we all could see it.

Shortly after Ben moved back in, they conceived their fourth child.  I remember when they called me to tell me the news.  Later that evening, I balled my eyes out.  I’m convinced the angels were dancing that evening, and I was too.  In Ben and Sarah, I saw something akin to resurrection.  I saw the awakening of dead and hardened hearts.  And I watched more as a witness than as an actual contributor to the healing, because it was Sacred Ground.  The movement from death to life is always God-breathed.

I’m convinced that it is this picture that says to a watching world that the death and resurrection of Jesus is real – not just real as a matter of a one-time event, but real as a continuing witness, as an ongoing embodiment in men and women who participate in the sufferings, death, and resurrection of a living Savior (Philippians 3).  Perhaps, the reason the world laughs at us is because we fail so often to live into this and up to this.  But as we saw last time, it is only as we’re taken, blessed, and broken that we can be given to the world.  May we be men and women who willingly lay down our lives, and open our clenched fists, in order to experience the new God-breathed, Spirit-animated life that enables us to beautify a broken world.

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

Where does this piece connect with your life?  Do you feel stuck in the wilderness?  Have you experienced some of the freedom beyond it?

What is prone to keep you stuck (anger, resentment, hopelessness, shame, blame, etc.)?  Reflect on and write down how staying in this state actually works for you, or protects you from something.

Reflect on and write down what might be scary about opening your clenched fists, and giving up some of the power of those “wilderness” feelings.

Reflect on and write down what excites you about living in this new way, and experiencing what John of the Cross called “illumination” – the new life that emerges out of death.

+ + + + + + + + + + +

“Drown me in your waters”: Why hope doesn’t float

“To get at the core of God at His greatest, one must first get into the core of himself at his least.” Meister Eckhart

“It is only when we have reached the bottom of the abyss of our nothingness and are firmly established there that we can walk before God in justice and truth.” Jean-Pierre Caussade

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

I’ll never forget the advice of a counseling supervisor early in my internship.  A client was neck deep in the tumultuous waters of long running addiction.  Together, we’d conceive of ways for him to keep his head above water – strategies to avoid the temptation.  Each week, he’d come back having found some way around our strategy, feeling even more guilty and desperate in his struggle.

My supervisor watched our sessions, sensing my growing futility and desperation.  She knew I had some lifeguard training in my past, and said, “Don’t you know not to let a drowning man grab a hold of you?  You’ll both drown.”

“But nothing we do is successful,” I said, missing the point.  “He just wants to stop sinning.  And my job is to help.”

“Then you’ve missed the point,” she said.  “Maturity is not about not-sinning.  Salvation comes through death.  You need to stop playing your version of ‘God’ and let him drown.”

+ + + + + + + + + + + +

The Western church, in large part, has little room for a theology of drowning.  We help.  We give pep talks.  We teach sin management.  We motivate.  Rarely do we provide a context for drowning.

The New Exodus way is through the waters, down into the tumultuous deeps, into death.

One of the difficulties of pastoral and clinical counseling is that most people come for help – to get better, to overcome, to feel a bit more stable, to stop sinning.  Rarely do people come saying, “Help me drown.  Push me under.  I cannot live until I die.”  I find this often in marriage counseling.  A number of years ago, I led a church marriage retreat and called it On the Death of your Marriage. People came for advice.  I came to tell them how irreparably screwed up they are and (as a consequence) their marriages are.  I told them that until they get really honest about the mess they’re in, change can’t happen.  Predictably, half the room left feeling more hopeful than they ever have, for their marriage and for themselves.  The other half left puzzled.

The New Exodus wilderness is where the darkness overcomes the light.  With an abusive Empire behind them and a seemingly unconquerable Enemy ahead of them, the Israelites found themselves where we find ourselves – in wilderness paralysis.  The only thing we know to do is survive, to keep our heads above water.  All around us, well-dressed and smiling pastor-lifeguards try to convince us that it’s not that bad, that we’re not that bad, that human brokenness is just a minor crack in the road.

Prophets and priests and everyone in between
twist words and doctor truth.
My dear Daughter—my people—broken, shattered,
and yet they put on Band-Aids,
Saying, “It’s not so bad. You’ll be just fine.”
But things are not “just fine”! (from Jer. 8, The Message)

Things are not just fine.  But this is why God leads us into a deep waters to drown, a wilderness to die.  The quotes to begin the post tell the story.  Death to life is the pattern.  It is the cruciform pattern – the way of Jesus himself.  God, in this scenario, is in no way distant and arbitrary, insensitive and punitive.  God paved this road with his blood and tears. Saints and mystics picked up on this through Paul’s description in Philippians 2:  Christ emptied himself.  And in our drowning and death, we are emptied – of pride, of self-reliance, of band-aid remedies, of pointless strategies, of boasting in our own resilience, of cheap substitutes for happiness, of self-pity, of desires far-too-small, of faking it in our marriages, of futile ways we’ve used to treat childhood wounds, of religious performances, of a belief that we’re capable of not sinning, of constant theological finger-pointing, of lifeguard-pastoring.

“In my end is my beginning,” T.S. Eliot wrote.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, the mourners, the hungry,” Jesus said.

If this isn’t the case, then growth and maturity is merely about improvement. And if that’s the case, then we don’t need a Savior, we need a coach with a loud whistle and a strict program of self-help.  However, my sense is that along this wilderness road, we do no favors to one another or those we’re privileged to help if we deprive them of the truth of just how broken they are, we are, and the world is.  But consider this, too.  A realistic view of brokenness breeds compassion, not condescension.  It creates a community of broken (but not hopelessly broken!) men and women who need one another, and need a Big God.  We can enter the messes of others if we know we’re a mess.  We become available to others when they see that we’re accessible, not because we’ve got it all together, but because we’re deeply needy too.

At the center of Christian worship is a eucharistic table which proclaims the death and resurrection of Christ, and invites our own journey through death into resurrection.  The celebrant takes, blesses, breaks, and gives the elements.  Likewise, Christ takes us, blesses us, and breaks us so that He might give us to one another, to the world, and to God. Blessed is the broken road, paved with the blood and tears of Christ and each other, stretching forward to the heavenly city “where there will be no more tears.”  Our invitation is to enter in to this story, to die, to drown.  It’s scary.  It’s counter-intuitive.  It’s paradoxical.  And it’s extraordinarily freeing…

+ + + + + + + + + + +

How are you bandaging yourself?  What motivates our self-bandaging?

Our society (and even our churches) creates little space for the way we’ve talked about.  What is scary about moving in this “way of Jesus”?

Have you experienced church or community where this Jesus-way is lived?  Respond to this blog with stories.

Risk much. Fail often. The wisdom of the desert.

Back in the 16th century, a Reformation was happening.  But it’s not the Reformation you’re thinking of.  There was, of course, the well-known and dramatic ‘protest’ of Martin Luther which captured the headlines.  But over in Spain, a tag-team reform duo was hard at work re-branding monastic life in a way that would draw persecution, expulsion, and even imprisonment.  Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were, by all accounts, not-your-typical-mystics.  They were reformers and movement leaders who attacked the lax, bureaucratic, and behavior-driven life of the Spanish monastics.  In a very different way than Calvin and Luther, theirs was a back-to-the-heart, back-to-grace, and back-to-Jesus reform movement.  But their special contribution, particularly for our purposes, is an emphasis on a journey through the wilderness of sin (defined as attachment) to the Promised Land of freedom.

Attachment is the key word for us.  Sin tends to indicate a behavioral flaw, but attachment describes a heart ‘nailed’ to something or someone, bound to it, enslaved to it.  By using this word, Teresa and John were able to talk about hearts nailed to the objects of their affection in Egypt, and slowly released from their enslavement through the “dark night” of the wilderness.  In other words, they described an existential and spiritual process, in great detail and remarkable psychological precision, of growth and maturation.  And they began to make sense out of suffering for people who believed that God had abandoned them or was punishing them.

You see, we misunderstand the suffering of the wilderness if we view it as punitive.  That leads us in directions that hint at an arbitrary and wrathful God only interested in targeting specific sins.  We can pick out episodes in the Bible where God did inflict suffering on “sinful nations,” but God’s furnace was reserved for His chosen, not for the outsiders.  John of the Cross calls this furnace an “immense fire of love” which enkindles the heart in order to enliven and free it.  It’s a purifying fire, though it feels like hell going through it.  And rather than being punitive, this fire is the “living flame of love,” according to John.

In other words, God in His love sends us down into the wilderness because it is in the wilderness where the chains of our slavery are melted.

It is a well-known male initiation rite in many cultures that a father takes his son from his mother at the appropriate age, and casts him into the wilderness.  Though devastating to son and mother, the father knows that it is the son’s time to mature beyond the milk of his mother, learning to live out his own story. “But this is cruel,” the son may say.  “I need my mother’s milk to survive.”  The father, however, knows what it takes for the boy to thrive.  And so, God knows that the milk that we became addicted to in Egypt is ultimately life-depriving, a poison that will kill.  Life – real life – depends on wilderness sufferings.  So God kicks us out of home so that we might find Home.

John of the Cross describes this life-giving process at work, saying:

The soul feels its ardor strengthen and increase and its love become so refined that seemingly there are seas of loving fire within it, reaching to the heights and depths of earthly and heavenly spheres, imbuing all with love.

This is why John the Baptist became a desert-prophet.  This is why Jesus was cast into the wilderness.  This is why St. Paul was blinded on the road.  The wilderness actually awakens us.  C.S. Lewis wrote, “Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  You see, pain peels us away from our survival strategies, our silly ways of coping, our reluctance to risk again.  When things are going well, we play it safe.  But, when suffering greets us, we find ourselves once again radically dependent on God.  In those male initiation rites, fathers sent their sons into the wilderness precisely because they wanted them to experience powerlessness.  It was in the midst of powerlessness that they would discover the inner resources needed to thrive.  The prodigal son left home, and got the party.  The elder brother stayed home, and was too angry to celebrate.  Without suffering, we’re joyless.  Without leaving, we cannot experience the ecstasy of return.

Now, as I said in the last post, the answer to suffering is lament.  Plastering a happy face on an otherwise despairing soul is tragic, but this is what a Christian subculture often expects.  Lament, expressed in disappointment and even rage toward God, actually activates that deep, life-giving well of God-planted resources.  I’ve often said to people that depression is a symptom of the soul’s reluctance to engage God honestly, leading to the slow death of self-pity.  Empty platitudes and pasted-on smiles don’t bring life in the midst of suffering.  In the wilderness, we cry out, much like Jesus did in His final sufferings.  This was God’s permission to rage.

As we engage suffering, descending down into the wilderness rather than trying to anesthetize it or escape from it, we experience what John of the Cross described so long ago – a sea of loving fire welling up from our soul, a hard-earned joy that is real and not cosmetic, a freedom from the attachments we’ve been nailed to – reputation, predictability, money, appearance, sexual possessiveness, the eternal ‘buzz’, an unrealistic conception of romantic love, a religious high.  In losing, we gain much.  In dying, we live.  In weakness, we become strong.

So, I think it’d be safe to say that John and Teresa would offer this advice to you:

Risk much.  Fail often.  Lose willingly.  Suffer honestly.  This is the wisdom of the desert.

And take the low road, down through the wilderness…because real joy awaits on the other side.

+ + + + + + + + + +

What personal, family, or cultural customs or ideas does this framework for thinking about suffering challenge?

How does it change your understanding of suffering to know that it is not punitive, but restorative and formative and refining?

Think of suffering you’ve experienced and/or are experiencing.  What is God pulling you away from?  What were you “attached to” that might be loosening?

On John Piper and tornadoes sent by God…

I pause for this commercial break in the New Exodus book blog, in part because I’m so terribly irritated by John Piper’s recent blog and in part because this is one of those “teaching moments” which coincides with the narrative location of our recent New Exodus journey.

If you’d peek at my library, I have about a dozen John Piper books.  When I was a seminary student in the mid-90’s, Piper came and spoke, flooring us with both his powerful message and evident humility.  Over time, I’ve noticed that he has spent considerable ink on people he disagrees with – the Emergent folk, Greg Boyd, Tom Wright, and more.  Listen, that’s cool.  I’ve learned a lot from some of those academic debates, finding myself more sympathetic (on the whole) with Piper when he debates Boyd, and a bit less sympathetic in his disagreements with Wright.  I’ve especially loved his historic windows into suffering saints, and (like many) was ’saved’ through his invitation to Gospel hedonism.

But Piper said something this past week that we’ve heard from the likes of Falwell and Robertson, and it’s disturbing.  He placed himself in the control tower, monitoring tornado flights in and out of Sin City.  And he played God in the process.  That’s not cool.  In his blog, he builds a series of premises in his tornadic syllogism toward a logical conclusion:  “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin.”

Let’s talk.  First, this business of who suffers and when they suffer is quite mysterious.  Indeed, suffering seems to be a clear mark, in the New Testament, of obedience, not disobedience.  St. Paul is literally chased down by literal storms and pharisaic stormtroopers.  Piper knows (and this is what makes this whole thing so baffling) that it’s the televangelists who prey on a quid pro quo theology: have faith, be spared from suffering, and acquire great wealth!  It’s clearly a mystery when we see a good (and godly!) family suffer the loss of children (think Samuel Rutherford, Dr. Piper), and an abusive Dad thrive in his life and business.  In this mystery, the biblical invitation is not to play “air traffic controller” for divine tornadic activity, but to pray and lament.  Only a few prophets along the way get to ‘divine’ God’s ways…

…Which leads me to the second point.  Piper has been around longer than I have.  It probably requires a lot of gray hair to pronounce a “Woe to you” complete with tornadic proof.  I’ve wanted lightning bolts to hit the foreheads of sexually abusive fathers who recited prayers over their victims (yes, I’ve counseled people who have experienced this).  I’ve wanted God to strike down white-collared politicians who have turned a blind eye to the poor.  But it takes a lot of guts, and perhaps a divine mandate, to follow through with a “Woe to you.”  Perhaps Piper has earned the chips in heaven to make prophetic weather announcements.  But it seems to me that these divine initiatives only take place when hurricanes place a bullseye on New Orleans, Tsunami’s race toward pagan coasts, or tornadoes bear down on a denominational meeting where homosexuality is being debated.  Hmmm.  It seems that Jesus, the Tornado Incarnate, directed his deadliest winds at the religious establishment, choosing to blow gentler breezes in the direction of the sinners Piper is so concerned about.  Just saying…

Third, in this instance, I suspect it would do much of us good to look hard at how we’ve further shamed, insulted, belittled, and alienated those who struggle mightily with gender identity (bracketing off for a moment what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’).  I counsel people in these places of confusion.  They hear Piper’s quotation of 1 Cor. 6:9-10 and either a) believe they’re damned and descend into self-sabotage or b) recoil with anger at the church.  Few bother to explain that St. Paul was a follower of Jesus, who turned the law on its head and pointed the finger squarely at those who were self-righteous.  The adulterers, the immoral, the greedy, the drunkards – that’s us.  Jesus so radicalized it that the thought of lust made us adulterers.  That said, we need to be careful to point the finger, making sure that those to whom we point it know that we’re aware of our own junk.  Maybe Piper has a relationship with the ELCA leaders I don’t know about.  Maybe he’s done much more than I know to repent on behalf of all of us who in the name of Christ shame and mock homosexuals, using a few key verses to pronounce their very near damnation.  I apologize, Dr. Piper, if all of this has been done.  But from your blog, it appears that you are throwing stones, or more accurately, predicting divinely judgmental weather patterns.  This has the smell of a prophetic mandate.  And Jesus, being the Final Prophet, turned his tornadic activity in different directions…

Finally, God is in the business of (mysteriously) using suffering in order to make us into something better than we are.  It can make us aware of how we’ve been hurt, and how we’ve hurt others.  Always, God is not surprised by it.  This is where I disagree with Boyd and agree with Piper.  Let’s face it:  if you have a big God, you have to deal with big Mystery.  You can’t explain away verses about God’s rule over the bad and good in the world with an Oprah-like, “My God would never do such a thing.”  That’s great for your God.  But, reckoning with the hard realities of Scripture is more difficult.  Some people choose to re-write the narrative.  I’m with Piper in the stream of those who place themselves within it.  But like a good (but hard) Story, we don’t always know the motives of the characters, let alone what the Author was divining.  We trust the Author.  We engage the plot.  We await its final outcome.  And along the way, crap happens, and we lament, cry, scream, beat God on the chest, and wonder along with the wisdom-writer why He blesses the evil doer and curses the obedient.  With the huge weight of our own junk and the world’s mess, I hardly believe that Piper has time to pontificate on tornadoes and ELCA evil-doers who will not enter the kingdom-of-heaven.  If our right-or-wrong view on homosexuality is the litmus test, then I’ve seriously misread the Gospels.  If Jesus is right and we’re all a mess, then by all means let us all look at the grand logs in our own eyes and get on with forgiving others for the speck in theirs.

With that in mind, I’ll end with an ever-present feeling of dread, knowing all-too-well that I’m so often very wrong.  Calvin himself said that our theological ramblings are but baby-talk.  If we’d take our theological forefather seriously, perhaps we’d be attempting to better play with each other as the children of God we are rather than criticizing the messes we’ve made in our diapers.  Piper, this one is worth a retraction.  You are too good of a man, preacher, author, mentor and more to be writing this stuff.  Retract, and then come out and play…even with those whose messes smell worse than yours…

Grace and peace.

Suffering and sanity: How lament can save us in our darkest moments

It is a key insight of Freud that until there is an embrace of honest helplessness, there is no true Gospel that can be heard.  It is telling that the Psalms use the words pit/Sheol/waters/depth (as images of the dangerous realities of life), for in therapy, one must be “in the depths” to experience new life.  Freud has seen that the utter abandonment of pretense is a prerequisite to real joy. (Walter Brueggemann & Patrick Miller, The Psalms and the Life of Faith).

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

I don’t do suffering well.  In fact, I despise suffering.  My daughter’s tears bring out the worst in me.  My first thought is “How do I fix this?”  It’s easily translated in to pastoral care or clinical counseling.  “What should I say?  How can I help?”  I’ve been habituated to respond to suffering with answers.

It’s because I despise suffering and its nasty side-effects that I take a kind of twisted pride in how well my community, my church, and my nation deal with suffering.  We seem to be so civil about it.  A slight tear brings out the Kleenex, and suffering is wiped clean.  (Suffering can be wiped clean, incidentally, in scented Kleenex or Kleenex with aloe.)  We’re domesticated sufferers.  Our churches acknowledge suffering only as something true faith can mitigate; we deny its reality, and in doing so evade the possibility that we might have to dive in to uncivilized grief, grief with tears that cannot be quenched.

And it is with a degree of arrogance that I watch the Nightly News, shaking my head at the very uncivilized displays of communal lament among the “ancient peoples” of the mideast.  Poor souls…they look so miserable as they march through the streets, wailing with fists raised at their impotent deity.  If only they would embrace my form of civil suffering…my Kleenex theology…then they might not subject themselves to awful displays of raw and uncontrolled emotion.  Poor, uncivilized souls.

Of course, the secret truth is that I admire them.  Don’t tell anyone, but it’s true.  I long to lament in a way that releases me to surrender as Jacob was released at Peniel.  I long to join the ancient cry that was rarely private: “How long, O Lord…”  I long to abandon my sanitized Kleenex theology for a messy one, one that even allows saints already in heaven to lament before God (Revelation 6), one that acknowledges the paradox of God incarnate crying, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  In other words, I long secretly to know the ancient art of crying our prayers before a God who doesn’t offer fast food fixes or purpose-driven principles, but who enters my pain in order to know me, and I Him.  That sounds like biblical faith.  And more and more, I’m convinced it is.

Honest Expression

“If I would have wanted my pain theologized away, I would have gone to Job’s friends.”  So said a very wise, very wounded client of mine early in my clinical counseling internship.  She was incapable of such wisdom, or so I thought.  I was the wise one, the expert, the one in the cozy leather chair with a hand stroking my beard, looking the part of clinician.  Her comment struck me dumb.  She needed Jesus, one who would leave the comforts of heavenly bliss to engage suffering face to face.  Instead, she got a theologian, a medical doctor of the soul, applying theories, making generalizations, testing cures.  I had failed her.  But she had the courage to speak.

In God’s ironic grace, my failure was the gateway to her renewed journey of Hope.  She had spoken, and spoken honestly, not only to her counselor but to a minister, a spiritual leader, much like the ones responsible for beating hope out of her for so many years.  The child of a pastor, she had known only spiritual platitudes and proper ways of interacting.  She had known only a Gospel of principles for better living.  Never challenged to use her voice, never encouraged to speak her doubts, never engaged by people willing to wade in her murky waters, she lived a lonely, isolated life.  Referred by her pastor, her presenting problem was “depression.”  Categorized, isolated, marginalized and referred to professionals for help, she had begun to believe the message her church was feeding her:  “You’re too messy.  When you get better, we’ll invite you back in to ministry.”  In the months following, she learned to lament and not be ashamed of it.  In offering her desires to God in tears, she found new hope released in her soul.  She began to see the world in color.  However, her journey required a path of validated suffering.

Job needed friends to engage the pain, not interpret the pain.  Job needed friends who would join in the chorus of lament, not offer the secret prayer to a life of blessing.  Job needed what Henri Nouwen calls “Wounded Healers” to enter the pain with him, but he had friends who were “Healed Wounders.”  Blinded by their own comfort, security and sense of well-being, they arrogantly jabbed at Job, attempting to come up with a rational explanation for the mess at hand.  Job lamented before God, not only because he had been subjected to terrible trouble, but because his friends had failed him.  “A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends,” Job cried, “but they’re as undependable as intermittent streams.”  In the end, Job is commended for his honesty.  His theologically correct buddies are scolded for their insensitivity.

Ordered Messiness

I like how Barry Webb describes the Book of Lamentations:  Ordered Messiness.

Biblical lament, much to the relief of the “Healed Wounder,” is not ultimately chaotic.  To the contrary, biblical lament has a beginning and an end.  While the middle may be messy, while it may seem to go on and on without relief, lament, properly understood, rests finally in the Sovereign hand of God.  Eugene Peterson echoes Webb when he describes the form of Lamentations as a series of 5 acrostics (much like Psalm 119), literary patterns that travel the alphabet slowly, in meticulous detail, from beginning to end.  Lament begins at aleph and ends at tau, proceeding with careful detail and extraordinarily honest expression through each letter.  5 times in 5 distinct poems the writer revisits his pain, most often in communal expression, with a brief interlude for private weeping.  The writer’s intent is clear…every detail of pain is important. Suffering cannot and should not be wasted on quick fix alphabet dances that deny proper expression.  Acrostic was used as a memory device, as Peterson points out, emphasizing that every jot and tittle of suffering be remembered and experienced.

Thus, the message of Lamentations is that the denial of lament is the denial of reality.  Interestingly, neurosis is often defined as the denial of reality.  Perhaps, providing a context for lament might be a way to alleviate the neurosis of a culture that feeds on un-reality, false reality, and virtual reality.  Perhaps, too, this provides a challenge to the church that works hard to keep lament on the margins.  In denying the opportunity for an embrace of lament, we miss a Christ-formed life of pain-sharing, compassion, incarnation and Gospel-healing.  We miss the opportunity, in other words, to become more like Jesus.

Lament, the Most Hopeful of Things

“Do everything without complaining or arguing,” St. Paul once wrote.  “Rejoice in the Lord always.”  It’s amazing how we pluck verses like these out and use them as evidence that the day of lament is over and the day of rejoicing has come.  St. Paul wrote these words in a letter to the Philippian church, the same letter in which he laments over his long and continuing earthly pilgrimage, the same letter in which he calls “suffering” a gift from God along with faith, the same letter that plainly identifies the reality of his culture as “crooked and depraved”, the same letter that invites the cruciformed Christian to follow the downward path of Christ to humility, suffering and even death, for the sake of knowing Christ.  St. Paul, in other words, was not at all afraid of suffering.  His hope came in the embrace of it.

Lament is ultimately hopeful.  Seems paradoxical, doesn’t it?  The person sitting before you is weeping and wailing about his pain, and it is supposed to produce hope?  There, of course, is a fine line between complaining and lamenting, but too often we dismiss the baby with the bath water.  Dan Allender says that one who laments often looks like a grumbler or complainer, but that biblical lament is nothing of the sort.  Instead, lament contains in itself the possibility of extraordinary hope, restored desire, a changed heart.  Lament is, at its core, a search for  God.  It is not a search for answers.  It is not an invitation to fix an ailment.  Rather, lament enters the agony with the recognition that it might not go away for days, months, even years.  And yet, the lament carries with it the hope that God will eventually show.  Dan Allender puts it this way:  “Lament is a search – a declaration of desire that will neither rest with a pious refusal to ache, nor an arrogant self-reliance that is a hardened refusal to search.”

Of course, you won’t know the hope of lament if you don’t risk walking through the valley.  But we need not venture in to the valley alone.  We journey with a host of biblical witnesses, and hopefully, a community of faith and friends more dependable than Job’s.  The biblical model for lament, whether in the Psalms, Lamentations, Job, Jesus, Paul or the saints in heaven reflects a rugged heart born for a risky, but incredibly rewarding, journey Home.  The cry of lament, as Allender writes, is the deepest and most honest cry of the homeless person.  Our journey is no different than the saints of Hebrews 11 who, by faith, kept on their sojourn because their hope was in a heavenly city.  In other words, we walk in familiar company, men and women who longed deeply for God’s presence in times of trouble, people thrown to the lions and hung on crosses and beaten mercilessly for the sake of the Kingdom.  Our hopeful lament is caught up in the universal cry reaching up in to the heavens, even among the saints.  God has given his community permission to lament.  In fact, he has given his family permission even to make their complaints known to Him.  Psalm 44 and Psalm 80, for instance, bring accusations before God that send chills down the spine:

Rembrandt, "The Prophet Jeremiah"

You have fed us the bread of tears

You have made us drink tears by the bowlful

You have made us a source of contention to our neighbors.  (Ps. 80:5-6)

However, we speak with the confidence that our complaint will be heard, contained, validated, listened to, and ultimately bring about a change in our circumstances.  Like Jacob, our wrestling leads to surrender, deeper relationship, greater trust, a heart made soft by its honesty before God.  It is a sure indication that we are fully alive human beings, says Barry Webb, open to the full possibilities of God’s wild and risky involvement in our lives.

This wild trust, this openness to surrender, is precisely how God brings about radical transformation in the hearts of sinners.  But it is a transformation that takes time, that is often un-remarkable, that doesn’t change the facts and circumstances of life very quickly.   Lament without a quick fix or a happy principle to mitigate it is lament that is ugly and un-productive to modern, ‘results-driven’, western Christians.  However, the gift to be patient and engage suffering not to fix or make sense of it, but simply to experience it before the face of God honestly, is a gift that stirs the deepest hope, the hope of the saints, the hope of the very un-broken, tear-free world to come.

He Will Wipe Away Every Tear

God is not in the business of quenching hope.  His way, however, often is the longer, harder road through rough wilderness terrain.  The oft-quoted proverb, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” speaks of the reality of life in the now.  Suffering is just plain sickening.  I hate to see it.  I hate it for myself, and I hate it for my friends.  It angers me, and it causes me to jump-start quick cures to get through it.  I almost always have a better plan than God’s, but His wisdom wins the day.

In St. John’s apocalyptic history of the world, The Book of Revelation, God does respond with force and fury to the enemies of His people.  The Satanic trinity of dragon, beast and false prophet are, once and for all, thrown in to the lake of fire.  God’s wilderness-wandering people are vindicated, saved, and prepared for their heavenly betrothal.  The weary Bride, tainted and tarnished from her long journey through dark valley’s of self-indulgence, and the rough terrains of persecution, is now readied for eternal glory, fitted in her pristine white wedding dress for her heavenly Pursuer and Rescuer.  Gently wiping away her tears, He speaks to her words she has longed to hear:  “There will be no more weeping or mourning.  Isaiah’s prophecies have come to fruition.  No more death, no more pain, no more struggle.  You’re mine, and I’m yours, eternally.  Lament no more.”

The end of the Story is a happy one.  The Gospel is for those who love comedy, tragedy, and a good, true fairy tale, as Frederick Buechner loves to say.  In Revelation 21, the scene shifts from epic battle to unimaginable glory and ecstasy.  The Bride is given back her lost Eden, the paradise-city she remembered only in her dreams.  CS Lewis reminds us that the first Eden has always existed, if only in our memory, urging us own to lives of holy desire as we search out our Paradise-Home.  The Bride gets all she has ever desired, and much more.  Her ancient lament, raised to God not as an angry fist of rebellion but as an impassioned complaint rooted in desire, is heard, received and acted upon.  Her Groom has come to the rescue.  And now, eternal happiness.

The Glory of the Gospel is that our lives, our worship, and our relationships need not end in a minor key.  The kingdom Hope is the dominant tune, albeit thrown off-key by our trials and tribulations.  The minor key of lament is an important reminder that we’re not Home yet, and an invitation to sing songs that reflect our deep hearts and truest struggles, knowing always that our long-suffering Savior will win the day.

So, lament.  Join the chorus of ancient voices in their universal cry.  Speak honest words to a God who does not fear a complaint born in desire, but actually responds to it.  And by all means, live.  Pain, as CS Lewis says, is God’s megaphone to call us to be awake, and the awakened, passionate life is a lot better than the false realities our neurotic and fearful world has to offer.  Lean hopefully in to lament, and be honest with those who don’t lean with you.  The wintry valley of suffering will eventually lead to green pastures, tall-snow capped mountains, and a sunrise that will break through the darkness to a final chorus of praise.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + +

Most people tell me they have no idea how to lament, or are afraid to offend God.  Can you relate?

What is it like to read this and hear that God invites your honest expression of pain?  Do you believe He can handle all you throw His way?

If you’re reading this and are not a Christian, how has the Church’s unwillingness to deal honestly with painful realities affected your attitude towards it?  Would engaging the Church or Christians be more appealing to you if it took suffering and lament more seriously instead of offering quick fixes or guilt?