Finally freed of my academic obligations, I was at complete liberty to brood without guilt. There was room at last for my mind to breathe yet I only found myself perturbed and afraid of the conclusions it might reach if it did.
I still don't know if it was coincidence that my new iPod was out of batteries, that those old sermon tapes were still sitting on the dashboard of my car, that the 4 hour drive down to Virginia had me bored of John Mayer before I could even leave the state. All I know is that something compelled me to dust off a cassette my parents had left in the car years ago and listen in surreal surprise as the piercing voice of my old pastor came through the speakers to say:
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the desert,
where your fathers tested and tried me
and for forty years saw what I did.
See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called Today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first...
I was immediately transported to the moment I first heard that message. I remember sitting on the right side of the sanctuary, close to the front, where I could nearly see the tears as they ran down his face. I was gripped by the same tightness in my gut as he described how one of his youth group kids was killed in a tragic car accident the night before. I remembered it all so clearly, and it reminded me that all the events that shook my faith so severely began with the announcement that this pastor, this man I had come to love and trust so much, was leaving our church. I remembered how much I missed his voice and the messages it carried.
The stereo crackled as the car trundled over the massive bridge spanning the Delaware Water Gap. I could see the sun setting just ahead of me, obscured just enough by distant cloudy wisps to bathe the horizon in gold and orange hues. It was serene and tense, a Sunday afternoon-like moment that captured the pang and pleasure of time split in between other moments of significance. The scene captured the ambiguous sentiments I had towards myself: a body in motion, transient and uncertain, hovering yet moving towards a destination of intangible and overwhelming meaning. Unspeaking and immaterial, indifferent and all-encompassing, eternal and momentary, stood this magnificent sunset to remind me of... what?
Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts...
I listened to him speak. I knew what he would say, knew what my response would be even before it happened. I could feel the hardness of my own heart, its cold resistance constantly accusing and justifying and lashing out in anger and hurt at this god, this so-called god, this cruel and petty god, this weak and foolish god...
...if we hold till the end the confidence we had at first.
And I knew that I wanted him back. More than anything in my life, I wanted God back. I wanted to be free from the self-pity, the nagging insecurities, the constant doubts and questions and philosophical excuses to refuse belief. I wanted to be naive, to trust and have faith, to believe in something anything one thing I could say I knew was true.
He talked about how Jesus stopped and drew near to poor and blind Bartimaeus to ask him, "What do you want me to do for you?", how God was stopping even now to ask the same question to us. And my heart leapt and yearned within me and screamed, "I want you! I want to be happy again! I want to know you want me too! I want to believe! I want I want I want I want..." and all the suppressed anguish and sorrow and longing over the past year spilled out and the tears blurred the sky until it streaked blood-red in my eyes and died in the west and I cried and sobbed and heaved and retched until I realized the last time I did this was when I truly realized that Sonia was dead and would never come back and that it was all so messed up and awful and god why god why god why god why?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Learning to Pray
I don't know how to pray, but I do it anyway.
I must admit that most of my prayers feel like a gamble at Russian roulette: something as important as a life can be at stake and yet, despite earnest and hopeful intentions, I still find myself dreading the outcome. To pray requires the kind of desperation only found in games of chance. It is an act of last resorts, admitting that my own means and ways of seeking resolution have failed and that the sparing or taking of life is now at the mercy of something I can't see that happens to have a record of unpredictably dispensing both pleasure and pain.
It constantly makes me wonder if the Christian platitudes that God "makes all things work for the good of those he loves" are really simply wishful thinking that struggles to give the random outcomes of life - illnesses, failed ambitions, unexpected rewards - some sort of meaning and sense. Could we simply be at the mercy of quantum dice, and is the image of an omnipotent and omniscient God any more beneficial than the narrative we weave for ourselves? Perhaps God is even malevolent or capricious like the Greek deities, teasing us with guilt and pleasure for the sheer sake of taking entertainment in our obsequious praises and the incredible lengths gone through to win favor.
I think it really comes down to the question of whether or not you trust God. Do you trust that he is good? It does not take much to interpret the events of your life in a way that paints a benevolent portrait of God, much in the way Pip fantasized about his benefactor in Great Expectations. Do you trust him to be hostile? Again, it does not take a large stretch in the imagination to see God as one who consistently tortures his creation. Do you trust him to be completely unreliable? This is perhaps the easiest delusion of them all.
To me, God simply defends himself by giving me a situation that definitively demonstrates my own pathetic inability to control my small life, piercing me with the image of the suffering Emmanuel, and leaving me with the pregnant silence of a personal decision. It is as if he says, "If you will take me, you must take me as I AM. You must trust me as I AM and learn to know and respect and love me as I AM. I have done no less for you."
And so I pray out of desperation and longing and fear because God is, by nature, someone who is invisible, largely unknowable, and immensely dangerous. But I must learn to pray out of trust and love and compassion because that is - generally and vaguely speaking - exactly who he says he is. I suppose there is little choice but to take him at his word.
Our father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come, your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give me this day my daily bread
And forgive my transgressions,
As I have forgiven my transgressors
And lead me not into temptation
But deliver me from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and the glory
And the power forever,
Amen.
I must admit that most of my prayers feel like a gamble at Russian roulette: something as important as a life can be at stake and yet, despite earnest and hopeful intentions, I still find myself dreading the outcome. To pray requires the kind of desperation only found in games of chance. It is an act of last resorts, admitting that my own means and ways of seeking resolution have failed and that the sparing or taking of life is now at the mercy of something I can't see that happens to have a record of unpredictably dispensing both pleasure and pain.
It constantly makes me wonder if the Christian platitudes that God "makes all things work for the good of those he loves" are really simply wishful thinking that struggles to give the random outcomes of life - illnesses, failed ambitions, unexpected rewards - some sort of meaning and sense. Could we simply be at the mercy of quantum dice, and is the image of an omnipotent and omniscient God any more beneficial than the narrative we weave for ourselves? Perhaps God is even malevolent or capricious like the Greek deities, teasing us with guilt and pleasure for the sheer sake of taking entertainment in our obsequious praises and the incredible lengths gone through to win favor.
I think it really comes down to the question of whether or not you trust God. Do you trust that he is good? It does not take much to interpret the events of your life in a way that paints a benevolent portrait of God, much in the way Pip fantasized about his benefactor in Great Expectations. Do you trust him to be hostile? Again, it does not take a large stretch in the imagination to see God as one who consistently tortures his creation. Do you trust him to be completely unreliable? This is perhaps the easiest delusion of them all.
To me, God simply defends himself by giving me a situation that definitively demonstrates my own pathetic inability to control my small life, piercing me with the image of the suffering Emmanuel, and leaving me with the pregnant silence of a personal decision. It is as if he says, "If you will take me, you must take me as I AM. You must trust me as I AM and learn to know and respect and love me as I AM. I have done no less for you."
And so I pray out of desperation and longing and fear because God is, by nature, someone who is invisible, largely unknowable, and immensely dangerous. But I must learn to pray out of trust and love and compassion because that is - generally and vaguely speaking - exactly who he says he is. I suppose there is little choice but to take him at his word.
Our father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be your name
Your kingdom come, your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give me this day my daily bread
And forgive my transgressions,
As I have forgiven my transgressors
And lead me not into temptation
But deliver me from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and the glory
And the power forever,
Amen.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Who Will Cry For the Little Boy?
by Antwone Fisher
Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone?
Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own?
Who will cry for the little boy? He cried himself to sleep.
Who will cry for the little boy? He never had for keeps.
Who will cry for the little boy? He walked the burning sand.
Who will cry for the little boy? The boy inside the man.
Who will cry for the little boy? Who knows well hurt and pain.
Who will cry for the little boy? He died and died again.
Who will cry for the little boy? A good boy he tried to be.
Who will cry for the little boy, who cries inside of me?
This poem and story comes from one of my favorite movies, Antwone Fisher, written and directed by the man himself. It describes a young man's journey in coping with a dark history of childhood abuse and psychological trauma in the context of the foster care system. Wikipedia describes a pivotal instance in his life when he finally made contact with his biological mother, quoting him as saying: "In the place inside me where the hurt of abandonment had been, now only compassion lived." I wonder what kind of transformation happened there, to take something that had only brought him the pain of unfulfilled hope and exchange it for something meaningful. It must be something divine.
Who will cry for the little boy, lost and all alone?
Who will cry for the little boy, abandoned without his own?
Who will cry for the little boy? He cried himself to sleep.
Who will cry for the little boy? He never had for keeps.
Who will cry for the little boy? He walked the burning sand.
Who will cry for the little boy? The boy inside the man.
Who will cry for the little boy? Who knows well hurt and pain.
Who will cry for the little boy? He died and died again.
Who will cry for the little boy? A good boy he tried to be.
Who will cry for the little boy, who cries inside of me?
This poem and story comes from one of my favorite movies, Antwone Fisher, written and directed by the man himself. It describes a young man's journey in coping with a dark history of childhood abuse and psychological trauma in the context of the foster care system. Wikipedia describes a pivotal instance in his life when he finally made contact with his biological mother, quoting him as saying: "In the place inside me where the hurt of abandonment had been, now only compassion lived." I wonder what kind of transformation happened there, to take something that had only brought him the pain of unfulfilled hope and exchange it for something meaningful. It must be something divine.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Anger
I looked at the scratches on the car and felt an odd, familiar emotion sweep over me. It was the emotion of wanting to find the perpetrator and give him (or her) retribution. Not justice - which could have been measured in dollars and cents - but cold vengeance. I wanted to see fear, perhaps even terror in his eyes, and if I could not extract that, then I wanted a pound of flesh.
The scratches were not accidental. They clearly spelled the word "ASS". And they were not on my car, but my sister's.
The frigid and intense fury that overwhelmed me was one I had not felt for some time. It was the anger I felt in college when I found my bicycle trashed by drunk students the night before. It was the anger I felt when tormented in middle school by crude children. It was the anger when I saw graffiti on my locker in high school that made unmistakable and perverted references to my sister. It was the anger one feels when violated by those who hide behind a cloak of anonymity, who are cruel and petty, who take pleasure and humor in the needless and helpless pain of others and know full well that no retribution will be made: the school bullies, the sadists, the rapists, the murderers. It was the anger that can only be bred by frustration and the recognition that true justice in this lifetime is a futile and ironic pursuit.
It is so easy to insulate ourselves from the insanity that is humanity. Surrounded by the security of friends, acquaintances, and those who pretend to respect civility, we forget that our baser human instincts lie thinly beneath the facade. Our truest and most visceral understanding of pain knows full well that the ability to instill fear through the threat of suffering is the ultimate expression of self empowerment. Only fools deny it and posture to be morally superior to the competitive destruction. Only fools believe that they are not prone to employing the same manipulations.
Fools simply dress it up as self-righteousness.
I did not want justice; I wanted vengeance. I wanted to assuage my insecurities by asserting my own form of dominance and cruelty and hate under the guise of equal retribution. Such pretense, I believe, is the rationalization that drives much of the "justice" in my own sick mind and our own sick world. The ultimate mockery of such a noble concept!
In my room is a poster with the entire text of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The only reason I have it is for Shylock's speech:
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Perhaps these words surprise you about myself, a person who gives off the appearance of being dedicated to compassion. But who can understand the power of healing that does not also recognize the power of pain? Given the opportunity for vengeance, which of us would not revert to the same form of playground pettiness?
I scare myself. I don't like to think that I would ever be so cruel... but I know I could. I know how tempting it is to enter into the unforgiving cycle of violence because I know what it means to be afraid and what it means to be angry. And this is why I find the person of Jesus to be so incomprehensible, that any being with a shred of humanity within could say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," and then willingly die a cruel and stupid death.
I want that kind of liberation.
I want that kind of love.
I know a place,
A wonderful place
Where confused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with him
There on the cross.
- At the Cross, by Randy & Terry Butler
The scratches were not accidental. They clearly spelled the word "ASS". And they were not on my car, but my sister's.
The frigid and intense fury that overwhelmed me was one I had not felt for some time. It was the anger I felt in college when I found my bicycle trashed by drunk students the night before. It was the anger I felt when tormented in middle school by crude children. It was the anger when I saw graffiti on my locker in high school that made unmistakable and perverted references to my sister. It was the anger one feels when violated by those who hide behind a cloak of anonymity, who are cruel and petty, who take pleasure and humor in the needless and helpless pain of others and know full well that no retribution will be made: the school bullies, the sadists, the rapists, the murderers. It was the anger that can only be bred by frustration and the recognition that true justice in this lifetime is a futile and ironic pursuit.
It is so easy to insulate ourselves from the insanity that is humanity. Surrounded by the security of friends, acquaintances, and those who pretend to respect civility, we forget that our baser human instincts lie thinly beneath the facade. Our truest and most visceral understanding of pain knows full well that the ability to instill fear through the threat of suffering is the ultimate expression of self empowerment. Only fools deny it and posture to be morally superior to the competitive destruction. Only fools believe that they are not prone to employing the same manipulations.
Fools simply dress it up as self-righteousness.
I did not want justice; I wanted vengeance. I wanted to assuage my insecurities by asserting my own form of dominance and cruelty and hate under the guise of equal retribution. Such pretense, I believe, is the rationalization that drives much of the "justice" in my own sick mind and our own sick world. The ultimate mockery of such a noble concept!
In my room is a poster with the entire text of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The only reason I have it is for Shylock's speech:
Hath not a Jew eyes?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions;
fed with the same food,
hurt with the same weapons,
subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Perhaps these words surprise you about myself, a person who gives off the appearance of being dedicated to compassion. But who can understand the power of healing that does not also recognize the power of pain? Given the opportunity for vengeance, which of us would not revert to the same form of playground pettiness?
I scare myself. I don't like to think that I would ever be so cruel... but I know I could. I know how tempting it is to enter into the unforgiving cycle of violence because I know what it means to be afraid and what it means to be angry. And this is why I find the person of Jesus to be so incomprehensible, that any being with a shred of humanity within could say, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," and then willingly die a cruel and stupid death.
I want that kind of liberation.
I want that kind of love.
I know a place,
A wonderful place
Where confused and condemned
Find mercy and grace
Where the wrongs we have done
And the wrongs done to us
Were nailed there with him
There on the cross.
- At the Cross, by Randy & Terry Butler
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Loneliness
I tried to describe it once in a more creative fashion:
It was far more pleasurable to pity and be pitied. Comfort often comes at the expense of truth.
And love? It was the opportunity to feel sorrow, to risk. Nothing more.
He paused. Did he really believe that? Was that really the truth? It sounded so dark, so depressing, and yet somehow so right. He wanted to believe that he was a martyr, blighted for a noble cause that merited some form of applause or recognition. He wanted to wear his wounds with pride, to carry the sorrow like a crown of thorns that he could say he suffered for the sake of something equally glorious.
But it wasn't true. He wore it for nothing, and he hated that realization because it was far more convenient for him to think that this self-crucifixion, this travesty against his soul was worth something even if was self-inflicted. It let him feel that he, and he alone, could bear something of this magnitude. That he was, if only by suffering, someone who did something special.
But it wasn't true. He suffered needlessly and stupidly, without wisdom and without reason. This was the bane of his existence and he clutched it with a desperate dignity, hoping against hope that there was a fragment of the admirable in his pride.
It was far more pleasurable to pity and be pitied. Comfort often comes at the expense of truth.
And love? It was the opportunity to feel sorrow, to risk. Nothing more.
He paused. Did he really believe that? Was that really the truth? It sounded so dark, so depressing, and yet somehow so right. He wanted to believe that he was a martyr, blighted for a noble cause that merited some form of applause or recognition. He wanted to wear his wounds with pride, to carry the sorrow like a crown of thorns that he could say he suffered for the sake of something equally glorious.
But it wasn't true. He wore it for nothing, and he hated that realization because it was far more convenient for him to think that this self-crucifixion, this travesty against his soul was worth something even if was self-inflicted. It let him feel that he, and he alone, could bear something of this magnitude. That he was, if only by suffering, someone who did something special.
But it wasn't true. He suffered needlessly and stupidly, without wisdom and without reason. This was the bane of his existence and he clutched it with a desperate dignity, hoping against hope that there was a fragment of the admirable in his pride.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Mysticism without superstition
A few years go, I went out to eat chinese food a few days before a big organic chemistry exam. I hadn't done too well on previous exams, so before opening the fortune cookie I thought to myself, "Let's see if this fortune applies to my test; I could use some luck."
The fortune read, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
The incident comes to mind every time I think about superstition. Curiously enough, the English word for superstition finds its roots in religious practices. According to wikipedia:
The earliest English uses of the word in the modern era refer critically to Catholic practices such as censing, rosaries, holy water and other practices that Protestants believed went beyond - or were set up above - their own interpretation of the New Testament practices of Christianity. From there the uses of the term expanded to include non-Christian religious practices, and beliefs that seemed unfounded or primitive in the light of modern knowledge.
This entry is not meant as a criticism of Catholic practices. From my own experiences with Catholicism, I see in their symbols - rosaries, genuflection, holy water - many rich reminders of the presence of the divine through mundane means. In commenting on superstition, I only mean to say that when I am superstitious, I am relying on a particular action, ritual, or incident to bless me with good fortune. I pray before an exam for good results; I prepare my heart for communion so that I am not struck dead; I read my Bible so that it will make me into a better person. In the end, superstition becomes a way through which I can manipulate the divine.
Contrast this to the wikipedian definition of mysticism:
Mysticism is the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of dimensional realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true human perception of the world goes beyond current logical reasoning or intellectual comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.
I believe that God is fearsome precisely because he is unpredictable. I believe that we are at the whim and will of a God who is untouchable, unseeable, and often unknowable. I believe that he intends to, perhaps even delights in, tearing apart our sad and pathetic attempts to categorize and manipulate him... to move us away from superstition and towards mysticism. I believe his best and favorite tool for this is suffering.
This is made abundantly clear whenever massive tragedy strikes: a terrorist attack, a tsunami in Southeast Asia, a hurricane in New Orleans, an earthquake or forest fire in California. So-called prophets will raise themselves up and declare, "This was an act of divine justice that was meted out as punishment for these particular sins." But will they be able to tell you when the next round of justice will come, as Daniel or Jonah or the angels at Sodom & Gomorrah did? Can they explain to you the divine mechanics that determine why the innocent suffer and the wicked go free? The answer is a resounding, "No!" In Luke 13, Jesus himself said, "Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."
My friend wrote this recently in his blog:
Several months ago a colleague of mine told me about a case he was working on. Four years ago a 14 year old orphan girl in Moyamba district, Sierra Leone, was offered “love” by a young man. She rejected him. Later when she was going to collect palm wine, he ambushed her, attacked her with a cutlass and raped her. As a result of her injuries, she menstruates every month through her nose and nipples. She needs to be hospitalized every month, and recently has been going into a severe fit every time.
After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.
Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.
Perhaps the most powerful purpose behind suffering is its meaninglessness and capacity for terror. It reminds us that we are helpless and powerless despite the intensity and ferocity of our own protests. I cannot explain it. I cannot rationalize it. While doing so may bring temporary relief in the guise of sanity and purpose, in the end it strips suffering of its power and denies validation to those who have been cursed by it.
This is precisely why it is insane, appalling, and terrifying to believe that God himself suffers.
Christianity resonates so strongly with reality because at its center is the belief that Christ himself became a helpless babe in a manger, wept at the tomb of Lazarus, was tortured and beaten and maimed in such an appalling and senseless way. It is utterly incomprehensible why God himself would willingly choose to enter into such a condition, and in the moment we are struck by that paradox we come to understand what Love is. We are enabled into the presence of the divine, for there is no way in hell that we would choose such a fate for ourselves.
We would do well in our modern, evangelical Christianity to regard worldviews and systematic theology with care to avoid a pharisaaical sort of pride in their tidy and logical frameworks. I have come to believe that the most difficult thing to accept in faith is not the existence of God but the suffering of God. It does not take much to believe in whether something exists or not, but it takes everything I am to believe that God suffers because it means believing that I no longer have an excuse for exemption.
Only Christianity is bold and daring enough to demand, "Commune with suffering if you wish to commune with God; embrace death if you wish to embrace resurrection." For what is the entire process of communion about if not the consumption of flesh and blood? Again, it is utterly beyond our comprehension. It is mystical, not superstitious. Its goal is not comfort or a well-defined theology or the manipulation of means towards ends but an entire process of moments in which we are drawn out of our sane and structured and logical and just systems into an alternative reality where God definitively and absolutely demonstrates his authority.
And perhaps, just perhaps, when we are drawn into such a communion, we will be rescued from perishing.
The fortune read, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
The incident comes to mind every time I think about superstition. Curiously enough, the English word for superstition finds its roots in religious practices. According to wikipedia:
The earliest English uses of the word in the modern era refer critically to Catholic practices such as censing, rosaries, holy water and other practices that Protestants believed went beyond - or were set up above - their own interpretation of the New Testament practices of Christianity. From there the uses of the term expanded to include non-Christian religious practices, and beliefs that seemed unfounded or primitive in the light of modern knowledge.
This entry is not meant as a criticism of Catholic practices. From my own experiences with Catholicism, I see in their symbols - rosaries, genuflection, holy water - many rich reminders of the presence of the divine through mundane means. In commenting on superstition, I only mean to say that when I am superstitious, I am relying on a particular action, ritual, or incident to bless me with good fortune. I pray before an exam for good results; I prepare my heart for communion so that I am not struck dead; I read my Bible so that it will make me into a better person. In the end, superstition becomes a way through which I can manipulate the divine.
Contrast this to the wikipedian definition of mysticism:
Mysticism is the pursuit of achieving communion, identity with, or conscious awareness of ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of dimensional realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true human perception of the world goes beyond current logical reasoning or intellectual comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.
I believe that God is fearsome precisely because he is unpredictable. I believe that we are at the whim and will of a God who is untouchable, unseeable, and often unknowable. I believe that he intends to, perhaps even delights in, tearing apart our sad and pathetic attempts to categorize and manipulate him... to move us away from superstition and towards mysticism. I believe his best and favorite tool for this is suffering.
This is made abundantly clear whenever massive tragedy strikes: a terrorist attack, a tsunami in Southeast Asia, a hurricane in New Orleans, an earthquake or forest fire in California. So-called prophets will raise themselves up and declare, "This was an act of divine justice that was meted out as punishment for these particular sins." But will they be able to tell you when the next round of justice will come, as Daniel or Jonah or the angels at Sodom & Gomorrah did? Can they explain to you the divine mechanics that determine why the innocent suffer and the wicked go free? The answer is a resounding, "No!" In Luke 13, Jesus himself said, "Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish."
My friend wrote this recently in his blog:
Several months ago a colleague of mine told me about a case he was working on. Four years ago a 14 year old orphan girl in Moyamba district, Sierra Leone, was offered “love” by a young man. She rejected him. Later when she was going to collect palm wine, he ambushed her, attacked her with a cutlass and raped her. As a result of her injuries, she menstruates every month through her nose and nipples. She needs to be hospitalized every month, and recently has been going into a severe fit every time.
After the initial attack, the man said he’d take medical responsibility for her. No surprise he didn’t. Instead, a year ago he attacked and assaulted her again. She’s now confined to a safehouse and a hospital every month when she menstruates. He’s living in his town, out on bail.
Since I heard about this girl in Moyamba, I haven’t gone a day without thinking about her. It’s with me wherever I go.
Perhaps the most powerful purpose behind suffering is its meaninglessness and capacity for terror. It reminds us that we are helpless and powerless despite the intensity and ferocity of our own protests. I cannot explain it. I cannot rationalize it. While doing so may bring temporary relief in the guise of sanity and purpose, in the end it strips suffering of its power and denies validation to those who have been cursed by it.
This is precisely why it is insane, appalling, and terrifying to believe that God himself suffers.
Christianity resonates so strongly with reality because at its center is the belief that Christ himself became a helpless babe in a manger, wept at the tomb of Lazarus, was tortured and beaten and maimed in such an appalling and senseless way. It is utterly incomprehensible why God himself would willingly choose to enter into such a condition, and in the moment we are struck by that paradox we come to understand what Love is. We are enabled into the presence of the divine, for there is no way in hell that we would choose such a fate for ourselves.
We would do well in our modern, evangelical Christianity to regard worldviews and systematic theology with care to avoid a pharisaaical sort of pride in their tidy and logical frameworks. I have come to believe that the most difficult thing to accept in faith is not the existence of God but the suffering of God. It does not take much to believe in whether something exists or not, but it takes everything I am to believe that God suffers because it means believing that I no longer have an excuse for exemption.
Only Christianity is bold and daring enough to demand, "Commune with suffering if you wish to commune with God; embrace death if you wish to embrace resurrection." For what is the entire process of communion about if not the consumption of flesh and blood? Again, it is utterly beyond our comprehension. It is mystical, not superstitious. Its goal is not comfort or a well-defined theology or the manipulation of means towards ends but an entire process of moments in which we are drawn out of our sane and structured and logical and just systems into an alternative reality where God definitively and absolutely demonstrates his authority.
And perhaps, just perhaps, when we are drawn into such a communion, we will be rescued from perishing.
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Pursuit of Suffering
I watched the grainy, blocky video in silence. My friend was singing “Landslide” and I felt a certain tautness in my eyebrows and a peculiar heaviness in the corners of my mouth. By now it had become a familiar feeling, this physical expression of sorrow.
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Sonia Lee ’06, whose mellow and resonant voice was captured in that video passed away last year. For most of us at Manna Christian Fellowship, her passing became our first encounter with the death of a friend. In many ways, it challenged my most deeply held convictions about the way the world works. I came to medical school with the growing conviction that my calling was to deal with death and suffering on the professional level, but this experience - so unexpected, tragic, and terrifyingly personal - cast everything under a different pall.
Sonia had acute myeloid leukemia. The onset was rapid and completely unexpected by friends and family alike. I can still remember the dread of the moment I first found out: a string of e-mails with the titles “Urgent prayer for Sonia…” waiting quietly in my inbox. Sonia and I had been good friends during our undergraduate years but had fallen out of touch since my graduation two years prior and I had not heard much from her since then, which made the suddenness and ferocity of the disease all the more shocking. A full year in medical school did nothing to prepare me for the daily anxiety of opening my e-mail in anticipation of an update from the family on her condition. I still have all those e-mails: seventy-seven messages with headings ranging from “A positive turn for Sonia!” to “Sonia—Chemotherapy day 3” and “Emergency request for platelets.”
I received those updates nearly every day for several months, tracking her progress through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. It was a trying time for our community of mutual college friends. We prayed together, planned gifts for her together, and waited together every day for those e-mails with hope and fear.
I remember the tightness in my gut during our first medical lecture on leukemia, trying to suppress my emotional confusion as the professor raced through hundreds of slides. I remember listening to the complaints of classmates about how “overwhelming” the lecture was and nodding my agreement as I headed over to a computer cluster, dizzy and ambivalent and anxious to check my e-mail. By that week Sonia had been doing much better and was simply waiting for a bone marrow transplant donor. Her family hadn’t been able to match but, by some miracle, had been able to get her story published on the front page of a big South Korean newspaper asking people to test for matching. Her picture in that article was the only one I saw taken of her during that time and it did not show the smiling, radiant friend I had known.
The seventy-third e-mail on the subject, received only a few days later, carried the heading, “Bad News.” The seventy-seventh e-mail was entitled, “Memorial Gathering for Sonia K. Lee ‘06”.
All these events took place nearly half a year ago and yet I still find myself dwelling on them. Friends I talked to in medical school or in church – those whom I had expected to understand my struggle and accompany me through it – said that such a fixation on death and suffering was unhealthy and perhaps even pathologic: “It’s over now; she’s in a better place,” “Everything’s going to be alright,” “Life just goes on.” I couldn’t understand why words like those hurt. They were true, but I resisted them fiercely and was even irritated and angered by them. “There is no purpose behind death,” one friend simply replied, “We just say things like that to make ourselves feel better.”
On hearing that, my ambiguous sentiments and tensions revealed themselves for what they were: fear. Crippling, disabling, and terrifying fear. Speaking at graduation, Toni Morrison once said that humans react to fear by naming it, attempting to feel as if we have some understanding and therefore some control over it. We name our diseases and our disorders and our bogeymen. We name our failures and our enemies and the secret longings of our hearts. But in the end, a name is all we have. A name is not much.
I named my fear The Gravity of a Moment. For me, the death of a friend is the lost opportunity to sing in harmony, to shout at, to laugh with, to cry on each other. It is shocking in its finality and irreversibly strips my future moments of something precious, the weight of which I cannot measure. How many more moments will lose gravity and appear a little thinner and gaunt? Will I ever realize the magnitude of what has been - and will continue to be - lost?
Shortly after the death, a close friend of Sonia’s told me, “I don’t understand why people didn’t want to come to the funeral or the memorial service… maybe they didn’t feel ready, but somehow it feels like they’re just trying to move on. At the funeral, her parents told me, ‘Don’t forget her,’ but I feel like that’s what we’re doing… forgetting and moving on.” When I heard that I felt guilty because, deep down inside, I wanted to move on too but simply couldn't. I wanted to find a tidy closure and a proper perspective from which to define the experience. I didn’t want to forget, but I didn’t want the remembering to be so painful either.
Henri Nouwen once wrote:
We tend, however, to divide our past into good things to remember with gratitude and painful things to accept or forget. This way of thinking, which at first glance seems quite natural, prevents us from allowing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future. It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or comfort. It becomes a way to categorize, and in a way, control. Such an outlook becomes another attempt to avoid facing our suffering. Once we accept this division, we develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be glad about than things to be resentful about, more things to celebrate than to complain about.
Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully. And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens.
Is this possible in a society where joy and sorrow remain radically separated? Where comfort is something we not only expect, but are told to demand? Advertisements tell us that we cannot experience joy in the midst of sadness. “Buy this,” they say, “do that, go there, and you will have a moment of happiness during which you will forget your sorrow.” But is it not possible to embrace with gratitude all of our life and not just the good things we like to remember?
Suffering is and must remain an integral part of our human experience. It cannot simply be a byline in our pursuit of happiness, for if we fail to embrace suffering, we fail to embrace Christ himself. As Philip Bliss wrote, “Man of sorrows! What a name for the Son of God who came ruined sinners to reclaim.” Paul, in describing suffering as the loss of things he once considered profitable, wrote with paradoxical conviction and mysticism, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
I write about death because it represents one extreme in our human experiences with suffering and, for better or for worse, reveals the raw power of our reactions to pain. It exposes our tendencies to sentimentalize it, to avoid it, to explain it away, to do everything except embrace it. We may refuse to acknowledge suffering but in doing so we eliminate an opportunity to experience the true and piercing presence of God. If we cannot experience pain, how can we understand the comfort of healing? If we do not understand death, how can we comprehend the victory of resurrection? And so, while we ought not to idolize suffering or intentionally inflict it, we cannot ignore its centrality in our journeys toward the divine.
The last post of Sonia’s weblog is a quote from the movie, You’ve Got Mail: “Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life. Well, valuable, but small. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?” In the smallness and shortness of our mortality, do we dare to embrace every moment of it? Do I have the bravery to love each painful and pleasurable instance so bitterly intermingled in its brief course?
I cannot help but wonder if somewhere beyond the pall the gravity which I thought was lost has simply become a part of something greater, something that draws me to it a little more closely and tugs at my soul a little more sharply. Perhaps all the moments that are torn from this life are really just being transported, in the twinkling of an eye, to a place where the weight of the world becomes the weight of Glory and everything I thought I lost will be found in even greater measure than before.
If there is one reflex in my soul stronger than all the rest, it is the longing for that day.
"Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'
'Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?'"
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Sonia Lee ’06, whose mellow and resonant voice was captured in that video passed away last year. For most of us at Manna Christian Fellowship, her passing became our first encounter with the death of a friend. In many ways, it challenged my most deeply held convictions about the way the world works. I came to medical school with the growing conviction that my calling was to deal with death and suffering on the professional level, but this experience - so unexpected, tragic, and terrifyingly personal - cast everything under a different pall.
Sonia had acute myeloid leukemia. The onset was rapid and completely unexpected by friends and family alike. I can still remember the dread of the moment I first found out: a string of e-mails with the titles “Urgent prayer for Sonia…” waiting quietly in my inbox. Sonia and I had been good friends during our undergraduate years but had fallen out of touch since my graduation two years prior and I had not heard much from her since then, which made the suddenness and ferocity of the disease all the more shocking. A full year in medical school did nothing to prepare me for the daily anxiety of opening my e-mail in anticipation of an update from the family on her condition. I still have all those e-mails: seventy-seven messages with headings ranging from “A positive turn for Sonia!” to “Sonia—Chemotherapy day 3” and “Emergency request for platelets.”
I received those updates nearly every day for several months, tracking her progress through the end of the summer and into the beginning of the school year. It was a trying time for our community of mutual college friends. We prayed together, planned gifts for her together, and waited together every day for those e-mails with hope and fear.
I remember the tightness in my gut during our first medical lecture on leukemia, trying to suppress my emotional confusion as the professor raced through hundreds of slides. I remember listening to the complaints of classmates about how “overwhelming” the lecture was and nodding my agreement as I headed over to a computer cluster, dizzy and ambivalent and anxious to check my e-mail. By that week Sonia had been doing much better and was simply waiting for a bone marrow transplant donor. Her family hadn’t been able to match but, by some miracle, had been able to get her story published on the front page of a big South Korean newspaper asking people to test for matching. Her picture in that article was the only one I saw taken of her during that time and it did not show the smiling, radiant friend I had known.
The seventy-third e-mail on the subject, received only a few days later, carried the heading, “Bad News.” The seventy-seventh e-mail was entitled, “Memorial Gathering for Sonia K. Lee ‘06”.
All these events took place nearly half a year ago and yet I still find myself dwelling on them. Friends I talked to in medical school or in church – those whom I had expected to understand my struggle and accompany me through it – said that such a fixation on death and suffering was unhealthy and perhaps even pathologic: “It’s over now; she’s in a better place,” “Everything’s going to be alright,” “Life just goes on.” I couldn’t understand why words like those hurt. They were true, but I resisted them fiercely and was even irritated and angered by them. “There is no purpose behind death,” one friend simply replied, “We just say things like that to make ourselves feel better.”
On hearing that, my ambiguous sentiments and tensions revealed themselves for what they were: fear. Crippling, disabling, and terrifying fear. Speaking at graduation, Toni Morrison once said that humans react to fear by naming it, attempting to feel as if we have some understanding and therefore some control over it. We name our diseases and our disorders and our bogeymen. We name our failures and our enemies and the secret longings of our hearts. But in the end, a name is all we have. A name is not much.
I named my fear The Gravity of a Moment. For me, the death of a friend is the lost opportunity to sing in harmony, to shout at, to laugh with, to cry on each other. It is shocking in its finality and irreversibly strips my future moments of something precious, the weight of which I cannot measure. How many more moments will lose gravity and appear a little thinner and gaunt? Will I ever realize the magnitude of what has been - and will continue to be - lost?
Shortly after the death, a close friend of Sonia’s told me, “I don’t understand why people didn’t want to come to the funeral or the memorial service… maybe they didn’t feel ready, but somehow it feels like they’re just trying to move on. At the funeral, her parents told me, ‘Don’t forget her,’ but I feel like that’s what we’re doing… forgetting and moving on.” When I heard that I felt guilty because, deep down inside, I wanted to move on too but simply couldn't. I wanted to find a tidy closure and a proper perspective from which to define the experience. I didn’t want to forget, but I didn’t want the remembering to be so painful either.
Henri Nouwen once wrote:
We tend, however, to divide our past into good things to remember with gratitude and painful things to accept or forget. This way of thinking, which at first glance seems quite natural, prevents us from allowing our whole past to be the source from which we live our future. It locks us into a self-involved focus on our gain or comfort. It becomes a way to categorize, and in a way, control. Such an outlook becomes another attempt to avoid facing our suffering. Once we accept this division, we develop a mentality in which we hope to collect more good memories than bad memories, more things to be glad about than things to be resentful about, more things to celebrate than to complain about.
Gratitude in its deepest sense means to live life as a gift to be received thankfully. And true gratitude embraces all of life: the good and the bad, the joyful and the painful, the holy and the not-so-holy. We do this because we become aware of God’s life, God’s presence in the middle of all that happens.
Is this possible in a society where joy and sorrow remain radically separated? Where comfort is something we not only expect, but are told to demand? Advertisements tell us that we cannot experience joy in the midst of sadness. “Buy this,” they say, “do that, go there, and you will have a moment of happiness during which you will forget your sorrow.” But is it not possible to embrace with gratitude all of our life and not just the good things we like to remember?
Suffering is and must remain an integral part of our human experience. It cannot simply be a byline in our pursuit of happiness, for if we fail to embrace suffering, we fail to embrace Christ himself. As Philip Bliss wrote, “Man of sorrows! What a name for the Son of God who came ruined sinners to reclaim.” Paul, in describing suffering as the loss of things he once considered profitable, wrote with paradoxical conviction and mysticism, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
I write about death because it represents one extreme in our human experiences with suffering and, for better or for worse, reveals the raw power of our reactions to pain. It exposes our tendencies to sentimentalize it, to avoid it, to explain it away, to do everything except embrace it. We may refuse to acknowledge suffering but in doing so we eliminate an opportunity to experience the true and piercing presence of God. If we cannot experience pain, how can we understand the comfort of healing? If we do not understand death, how can we comprehend the victory of resurrection? And so, while we ought not to idolize suffering or intentionally inflict it, we cannot ignore its centrality in our journeys toward the divine.
The last post of Sonia’s weblog is a quote from the movie, You’ve Got Mail: “Sometimes I wonder about my life. I lead a small life. Well, valuable, but small. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave?” In the smallness and shortness of our mortality, do we dare to embrace every moment of it? Do I have the bravery to love each painful and pleasurable instance so bitterly intermingled in its brief course?
I cannot help but wonder if somewhere beyond the pall the gravity which I thought was lost has simply become a part of something greater, something that draws me to it a little more closely and tugs at my soul a little more sharply. Perhaps all the moments that are torn from this life are really just being transported, in the twinkling of an eye, to a place where the weight of the world becomes the weight of Glory and everything I thought I lost will be found in even greater measure than before.
If there is one reflex in my soul stronger than all the rest, it is the longing for that day.
"Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory.'
'Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?'"
Friday, February 15, 2008
Inspiration
The title and inspiration for this blog comes from Hemingway's short story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." In it, two waiters are waiting for a drunk old man to finish his liquor before closing up for the evening. The succinct prose is worth repeating here:
While the old waiter speaks of the cafe as a sanctuary for others, it serves as a place of rest and contemplation for his own self. Whether or not he achieves such peace is not a point or a goal so much as a myth: a situation in which the belief and illusion of truth is more important than the fact itself.
This blog is such a place for me.
"I am one of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."
"I want to go home and into bed."
"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the cafe."
"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."
"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."
...
He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.
While the old waiter speaks of the cafe as a sanctuary for others, it serves as a place of rest and contemplation for his own self. Whether or not he achieves such peace is not a point or a goal so much as a myth: a situation in which the belief and illusion of truth is more important than the fact itself.
This blog is such a place for me.
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