Note: I wrote this last year during the first couple weeks of July.
“Good will conquer Evil and the truth will
set me free. And I know some day I will find
the key.”
~ Bruce Springsteen
“All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
So you live day to day and enjoy what you have and
do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you
and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to
day as in a war.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best
day and night to make you everybody else, means to fight
the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and
never stop fighting.”
~ E.E. Cummings
“And when the promise was broken,I cashed
in a few of my dreams…”
~ Bruce Springsteen
“This place that is my home I
cannot stay…”
~ Bruce Springsteen
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß
man schweigen"
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
I have been thinking about the above lines from Hemingway and Springsteen lately as I consider the options that I have before me now and as I ponder which path to go down. Inside me and as I conjure up strength to write I think of Wittgensen as I do not know what to speak and I think I should just remain silent as it is difficult to summon any clarity or vision in the midst of turmoil and confusion and indeed each day now while I am awake does feel, “…as in a war.” A friend of mine who has encountered and has been living with much emotional pain and trauma commented recently to me that, “It is amazing what you can accomplish when you are operating on auto-pilot.” This is so true and describes my means of getting through each day for the past four weeks. What frightens me about auto-pilot is that it may transform my heart into an, “…unaffected heart… (which) beats dispassionately…” (Manning, Abba’s Child, 152) and the heart struck reality that my life has been and may always be one of, “Years wasted in vain regrets, energies dissipated in haphazard relationships and projects, emotions blunted, passive before whatever experiences the day brings, they are like snoring sleepers who resent having their peace disturbed. Their existential mistrust of God, the world, and even themselves underlies their inability to make a passionate commitment to anyone or anything” (152). I think to myself – is this me, is this where I have landed?
I feel compelled to do nothing! I have come to the conclusion that there is no right answer to the questions that are so damn relentless in my mind. I have before me many possibilities and in the midst of the possibilities I ask, “How will I pass through this?” There are so many emotions welling up inside of me and I realize in some limited way that, “…emotions are our most direct reaction to our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Whether positive or negative, feelings put us in touch with our true selves. They are neither good nor bad: They are simply the truth of what is going on within us. What we do with our feelings will determine whether we live lives of honesty or deceit” (152). If this is true then I should be getting really close to my true self but I do not know what to do with him because he is a stranger to me.
I no longer believe that God ever intended or desired for me to be “perfect” in some abstract sense or even in a practical sense for that matter. He intended and desires me to accept his love and live in his love as well as I can from day to day, moment to moment, according to his grace. What else is there to do? Live in the presence of all my failures and successes and accept that Abba loves me the same in both circumstances and he actually expects much more failure from me than I expect out of myself (Brennan Manning). Rich Mullens wrote, “…We have a love that's not as patient as Yours was, still we do love now and then…” (Mullens, Lyrics from Hard To Get, Jesus Album) and this is how I feel most of the time that my love is caught between the “now and then”.
I no longer believe that forgiveness is something that just magically happens, it is a process trapped in time and willingness; neither of which I have much of right now. The thing about forgiveness is that, it is what Jesus asks me to do in no uncertain terms. Forgiveness is inextricable linked to loving as Jesus loved, these two things – love and forgiveness are essential to living in faith and in many ways are what distinguish disciples from the “world”. Brennan Manning bluntly puts it this way:
"The summons to live as forgiven and forgiving children is radically inclusive. It is addressed not only to the wife whose husband forgot their wedding anniversary but also to parents whose child was slaughtered by a drunken driver, to the victims of slanderous accusations and to the poor living in filthy boxes who see the rich drive by in a Mercedes, to the sexually molested and to the spouses shamed by the unfaithfulness of their partner, to believers who have been terrorized with blasphemous images of an unbiblical deity and to the mother in El Salvador whose daughter’s body was returned to her horribly butchered, to elderly couples who lost all their savings because their bankers were thieves and to the woman whose alcoholic husband squandered their inheritance, to those who are objects of ridicule, discrimination, and prejudice.
The demands of forgiveness are so daunting that they seem humanly impossible. The exigencies of forgiveness are simply beyond the capacity of ungraced human will. Only reckless confidence in a Source greater than ourselves can empower us to forgive the wounds inflicted by others. In boundary moments such as these there is only one place to go – Calvary" (Manning, 67-78).
So, I am back to the thought that there is no right or easy answers, so what path am I willing to go down. I often think of the movie The English Patient and as he lies dying on his bed in a small room somewhere in Italy from all the burns he has suffered, his only reprieve from the pain (both physical and psychological) comes from the injections of morphine. Through his mind runs all the thoughts and memories of his life, he knows that he is dying so his life runs again through the prism of his imagination – I ponder this and think – what will my thoughts go to or be about as I lay dying someday? How will the path that I choose at this juncture of my life be relived or thought of as I lay dying? I have been also thinking about what Frederick Buechner wrote, “Listen to your life…all moments are key moments and life itself is grace”
(Taken from http: //www.judithhougen.com/bio.html. 07/04/09).
This brings some comfort because perhaps God is really in the midst of all the pain that I am feeling and this experience is truly filled with “key moments?” Rich Mullens wrote, “We can't see what's ahead, and we cannot get free of what we've left behind, I'm reeling from these voices that keep screaming in my ears, all the words of shame and doubt, blame and regret. I can't see how You're leading me unless You've led me here. Where I'm lost enough to let myself be led, and so You've been here all along I guess. It's just Your ways and You are just plain hard to get” (Mullins, Lyric from Hard To Get). These words are so true and honest and get at where I am at but I keep asking myself if Jesus really has “been here all along?” At some level I believe that he has and is but I keep telling him, “I believe help my unbelief” – so then I ask, will he take the “mustard seed” of my faith and do something with it? I pray he does because I have no idea what to do now or if he does take my faith what life will look like in the midst of the messiness of living. Paul wrote that God, “… is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…”(Ephesians 3:20 TNIV) but what do you do you do when your imagination is laid waste and your ability to ask is weighted down with doubt?
Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms that, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” I find it interesting that Hemingway wrote that “the world breaks everyone” and that not “everyone” but “many are strong at the broken places.” I hope that as I now feel part of the “everyone” that someday I will be among the “many.” The theologian from New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen wrote, “…things will knock you down you don’t even see coming and send you crawling like a baby back home…” (Springsteen, Lyric from One Step Up, Tunnel of Love) – it is amazing to me how adept Springsteen is at capturing the universal human condition of pain, suffering and loss in his lyrics. Springsteen wrote about music that, “The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.” To me, many of his lyrics are reminiscent of the laments in the Psalms. Springsteen sings, “When the promise is broken you go on living, but it steals something from down in your soul. Like when the truth is spoken and it don't make no difference, something in your heart goes cold” (Springsteen, Lyric from The Promise, 18 Tracks). This line from his song The Promise so depicts how I feel today and I ask myself how do I move on, go forward?
Brennan Manning said, “When tragedy makes its unwelcome appearance and we are deaf to everything but the shriek of our agony, when courage flies out the window and the world seems to be a hostile, menanacing place, it is the hour of our own Gethsemane. No word, however sincere, offers any consolation. The night is bad. Our minds are numb, our hearts vacant, our nerves shattered. How will we make it through the night? The God of our lonely journey is silent. And yet it may happen in these most desperate trials of our human existence that beyond any rational explanation, we may feel a nail-scarred hand clutching ours…We make it through the night and darkness gives way to the light of morning” (Manning, 105-106). When will the morning come? When will I be able to say that I have joy when I see as Homer wrote, “Dawn in her yellow robe rise in the east out of the flowing ocean, bearing light for deathless gods and mortal men” (Homer, The Iliad, Bk.19, XIX)?
And when will I be able to feel all the truth of this:
"Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him." The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD. It is good for people to bear the yoke while they are young. Let them sit alone in silence, for the LORD has laid it on them. Let them bury their faces in the dust-- there may yet be hope. Let them offer their cheeks to one who would strike them, and let them be filled with disgrace. For people are not cast off by the Lord forever. Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to any human being" (Lamentations 3:21-33).
Paul comforts with this, “… we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Corinthians 4:7-9).
Yet, in all this I ask, “When will the morning come?”
Rich Mullins asked of Jesus,
Did You ever know loneliness
Did You ever know need
Do You remember just how long a night can get?
When You were barely holding on
And Your friends fall asleep
And don't see the blood that's running in Your sweat
Will those who mourn be left uncomforted
While You're up there just playing hard to get?
Bono, asks similar things,
Jesus, Jesus help me
I'm alone in this world
And a fucked-up world it is too.
Tell me, tell me the story
The one about eternity
And the way it's all gonna be.
Wake up, wake up dead man
Wake up, wake up dead man.
Jesus, I'm waiting here, boss
I know you're looking out for us
But maybe your hands aren't free.
Your Father, He made the world in seven
He's in charge of heaven.
Will you put a word in for me?
Wake up, wake up dead man
Wake up, wake up dead man (Bono, Lyric from Wake Up Dead Man, Pop).
So then I ask in the words of Paul, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24) Paul’s answer, “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25) But this is all an intellectual exercise, how do I experience this release in my inner being so that it is who I am, my being, my true self?
I don’t know if there is an answer other than to live in brokenness and woundedness regardless of what the world or anyone thinks or claims to think and in this state of helplessness live in the hope that a life lived in the Spirit is being cultivated. Time itself is what is needed in some peculiar way even though time does not cure all things as Rose Kennedy, wife of Joseph Patrick Kennedy (a women very much acquainted with sorrow and pain) so eloquently wrote, “It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.” As Paul said, “That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). What other answer can there be? I worship a scarred God in Jesus Christ – he is still wounded for me, the love wounds from Calvary are not gone away and this is how I know he feels my pain in such an intimate way.
Manning wrote:
"Experientially, the inner healing of the heart is seldom a sudden catharsis or an instant liberation from bitterness, anger, resentment, and hatred. More often it is a gentle growing into oneness with the Crucified who has achieved our peace through His blood on the cross. This may take considerable time because the memories are still so vivid and the hurt is still so deep. But it will happen. The crucified Christ is not merely a heroic example to the church: He is the power and wisdom of God, a living force in His present riseness, transforming our lives and enabling us to extend the hand of reconciliation to our enemies" (Manning, 68).
We all believe to some degree or another whether we acknowledge it or not what T.S. Eliot wrote to be true, “What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from….We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” (Eliot, T.S., 58). The “truth” of our existence is bore out in weakness and brokenness and Jesus promises to meet us in a place of confused intimacy with him and while we are there he says, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out, till he leads justice to victory”(Matthew 12:20).
I am now, “In the uncertain hour before the morning, near the ending of interminable night, at the recurrent end of the unending…” (Eliot, 52). But when the morning finally breaks, when the stone is angelically rolled from our symbolic grave and new life comes forth that is when Jesus will have lead “justice to victory”. But I wait in the “confusing in-betweens” when things are, “Not known, because not looked for but heard, half heard, in the stillness between the waves of the sea. A condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well when the tongues of flame are in-folded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one” (Eliot, 59). The only true safe place on this journey is with Jesus but to grasp his hand takes some faith, some trust he will clasp on to my hand and never let go. Manning writes, “Resurrection power enables us to engage in the savage confrontation with haunted emotions, to accept the pain, receive it, take it on board, however acute it may be. And in the process we discover that we are not alone, that we can stand fast in the awareness of present riseness and so become fuller, deeper, richer disciples. We know ourselves to be more than we previously imagined. In the process we not only endure but are forced to expand the boundaries of who we think we really are” (Manning, 105). All life’s journeys, especially the journeys taken into one’s “heart of darkness” to where we discover that, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure…” (Jeremiah 17:9) and where we confront the acute pain of our existence we must confront the truth that all this can only be endured with the help of the “divine power” that Paul wrote about because we all as Hemingway wrote, “live day to day as in a war” but the war is of the mind and reality is spiritual in nature. Will I trust this truth, that what is most real cannot be seen but must be believed and that, “For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5). It can only be by this “divine power” that any life can be transformed and by this power that Jesus can say, "I am making everything new" (Revelation 21:5)!
So what do I do now? Trust Abba! Accept that life is hard and rife with difficulties as I live in a fallen world and yet I am held by Abba through it all. I have to accept and agree that, “When we accept the truth of what we really are and surrender it to Jesus Christ, we are enveloped in peace, whether or not we feel ourselves to be at peace. By that I mean the peace that passes understanding is not a subjective sensation of peace; if we are in Christ, we are in peace even when we feel no peace” (Manning, 45). If I can accept this and live in this grace and peace and with “divine power” move forward to anticipating a new dawn in my life then perhaps someday I will be able to share with others the glimmer of hope that shines through the cracks of our broken lives. What else can I do?
The Paraclete comes when I call for help and he brings others who he has providentially prepared alongside me as friends and co-helpers in the time of suffering and pain and in this way the Holy Spirit is the Comforter. The Paraclete is one who is “…’called to the side of,’ with the implication that the one has called for help…. What comes through in all the passages where the Paraclete is mentioned is that he is active in helping people” (Morris, New Testament Theology, 263).
It is within this community that the Paraclete brings together people that will join him in the activity of “helping people.” Henri Nouwen asked the question, “How can wounds become a source of healing” (Nouwen, The Wounded Healer, 87)? He sees the answer in community, and I would add within the community that God brings together to help in each person’s time of need and this is different and special for each person and is what binds us together with Jesus and each other in the intimacy of the Paraclete and we come to know love and relationship in this community of intimacy. Nouwen writes, “Making one’s own wounds a source of healing, therefore, does not call for a sharing of superficial personal pains but for a constant willingness to see one’s own pain and suffering as rising from the depth of the human condition which all men share” (Nouwen, 88). What is interesting to me in Nouwen’s thoughts on community is that he puts forth the idea that it is hospitality within that community that is what, “…allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears….hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights” (Nouwen, 89).
I must say that when I first read this a week ago when I was searching too see what Nouwen had to say about finding one’s way out of brokenness and woundedness I was not ready to receive his thoughts. Even a week ago I was not at a place on my journey to accept that I could find comfort in a community. Over the last few days however I have kept going back to Nouwen’s ideas and as I contemplate them I have started to realize and appreciate the community the Paraclete has assembled for me over the past five weeks in my hour of darkness. Nouwen comments that, “…we live in a desert with many lonely travelers who are looking for a moment of peace, for a fresh drink and for a sign of encouragement so that they can continue their mysterious search for freedom” (Nouwen, 89). This describes me, “the lonely traveler” and my community has provided a “moment of peace, a fresh drink, a sign of encouragement” so I can continue on my journey. A community arises out of the awareness, “…that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope…hospitality becomes community as it creates a unity based on the shared confession of our basic brokenness and on a shared hope” (Nouwen, 93).
The Apostle Paul described community, the church, the body of Christ in this way, “The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance. You are Christ’s body- that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your ‘part’ mean anything” (I Corinthians 12:25-27 The Message). Or put another way, we feel and experience each other in some mystical, mysterious and yet very real way as we are connected to the Trinity and one another by a divine means that is making us one.
I would like to thank my community, my friends that have played such a vital, sacred and intimate role in my life over the past five weeks. Reflecting back now I have no idea how I could have kept going without them or how I will keep going without them.
Many friends have formed my community of paracletes and as Nouwen states, “A Christian community is therefore a healing community not because wounds are cured and pains are alleviated, but because wounds and pains become openings or occasions for a new vision. Mutual confession then becomes a mutual deepening of hope, and sharing weakness becomes a reminder to one and all of the coming strength….the wound, which causes us to suffer now, will be revealed to us later as the place where God intimated his new creation” (Nouwen, 94,96).
This community is what Jesus prayed for when he said, "My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:20-23).
Bibliography
Bono. Lyrics from the Pop Album.
Eliot, T.S.. Four Quartets. (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1943).
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell To Arms.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast.
Manning, Brennan. Abba’s Child. (Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress, 2002).
Morris. Leon. New Testament Theology. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990).
Mullins, Rich. Lyrics from the Jesus Album.
Nouwen, Henri, J. The Wounded Healer. (New York, NY: Image Books, Doubleday, 1979.
Springsteen, Bruce. Lyrics from Tunnel of Love and 18 Tracks Albums.
