The Childlike Hunger of Grief

(I posted this a while ago, but in rereading it, its main point resonated with me again. Hopefully, it will with you as well.) 
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When I attended the National Writer's Series at the Opera House in Traverse City, I met Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers (among many other books).  The book is a certainly a dig at the Left Behind crowd (the leftovers are people who remain after a Rapture-like event), but that's just the backdrop for a story about grief.

     When I began reading, I thought this book would perhaps be a screed against the idiocy of Christians who believe in the Rapture. By the time I was done, the precipitating event has given way to a poignant story of the effect of cataclysmic loss on a small town.

     As the evening progressed, two main thoughts struck me.

     First, Mr. Perrotta and I are very different when it comes to our view of God, faith, religion, and social issues, though he was very tactful when talking about people and beliefs with whom he disagrees. He was careful to note that he used the Rapture scenario because it was in the culture's imagination thanks to the Left Behind series, and he decided to use it as a way to explore how communities respond to such massive upheaval.

     Second, grief unites us in spite of our differences, and (I suspect) with more meaningful bonds than happiness.  Let me explain.

    He writes the following about a daughter whose mother disappeared:

"For a long time after she left, Jill found herself overwhelmed by a childlike hunger for her mother's presence. She missed everything about the woman, even the things that used to drive her crazy - her off key singing, her insistence that whole-wheat pasta tasted just as good as the regular kind, her inability to follow the story line of even the simplest TV show. ..Spasms of wild longing would strike out of nowhere...leaving her dazed and weepy...She eventually stopped crying herself to sleep, stopped writing long, desperate letters asking her mother to please come home..."

On the next page:

"These days, the only time Jill consistently missed her mother was first thing in the morning, when she was still half-asleep, unreconciled to the new day. It just didn't feel right, coming down for breakfast and not finding her at the table in her fuzzy gray robe, no one to hug her and whisper 'Hey, sleepyhead...'"

A father whose son disappeared notes an unusual event:

"One night, my son came to me in a dream. You know how sometimes you see people in dreams, and it's not really them, but somehow it is them? Well, this wasn't like that.  This was my son, clear as day..."

    I get all three of those examples.  They resonate with me.  The "childlike hunger" for my dad's presence after he died; the desire to to hug him like Vincent hugs me now; the empty loneliness in the ordinary moments of life; the dreams that are both ethereal and real.  I've been there.

     If Tom had written a clever story about laughter while rafting down a river, I would have felt connected with him to some degree, but not like I did.  Good times are good - thus the label - but hard times are cohesive in ways good times aren't.  When I talked with him in the book signing line, I discovered we both have lost fathers.  Ahh, that explains it.  In spite of very different lives, we have shared the "childlike hunger" and the ordinary moments of loss, and the dreams.  

   I was thinking on the drive home that my best friendships have been forged through the furnace of grief and hardship.  The friends who never seem far away are the ones whose lives intertwined with mine when the going was tough.  Tim, who cried with me (and I with him) when our lives hit some rough spots; Clint, who gave a lot of money, time and friendship when my Dad died;  Don, who lost a brother to cancer and allowed me into his spiritual journey in the aftermath; Ben, who helped me through a breakdown before I walked with him through his tumor.... the list goes on.

     I wonder if that's why Jesus was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3).  If we are looking for a God with whom to identify in the midst of life's struggles, we don't need a laughing Savior. We are not looking for the assurance that God understands our lives when we are at a party, or enjoying a sunrise, or enjoying a solid meal with friends.  A Jesus who was a "man of laughter, acquainted with happiness" would be good - and he certainly laughed and was happy - but if that was our primary memory of his life here, would we really turn to him when the bottom drops out?

     When we "bear each others burdens" (Galatians 6:2)  - when we weep with those who weep - we fulfill the law of Christ, which means we love God and others (Matthew 22:37).  And that's a good thing, even if it is best experienced in the midst of pain.

A God of Holy Chaos

     At my family reunion a year and a half ago, I realized that I had the (dis)ability to see life as I wanted to see it, now how it really is.  That's not the kind of person I want to be. I want to be honest about life, no matter how uncomfortable or difficult that honesty is.  

    I read an article in Christianity Today called "Good News: Jesus is Not Nice." It struck a nerve.  The overall article was about how we have tamed Jesus to fit nicely into our notion of what He was like (and perhaps what he will call us to be).  At one point the article noted:

"We can stop pretending God is nice, as if it's his job to make our lives well-adjusted or religious or even spiritual. Jesus did not say he came to give us happiness, only blessedness. He did not promise an easy life, only an abundant one. He doesn't call us to be religious or spiritual, but to love God and love others. We can save ourselves a lot of grief if we recognize that up front. This means at least two things: (1) He's not going to spare us from heartache, suffering, and chaos. (2) He's actually going to bring heartache, suffering, and chaos into our lives sometimes."

     Ah.  I need to hear this message over and over.  I find that I so quickly want my life to manageable and predictable.  I want my wife to read my mind, my kids to always make me proud, my church to hang onto my every word, and my book to instantly click with millions.  I want to eat without consequence, work out without sweating, and sleep without my cat waking me up.  I just want my stupid smart phone to sync properly.  I want my deck roof to build itself, my van tires to not go bald, and my wireless internet to work instantly.

    And I want my dad back.

    But none of these things are going to happen. In fact, if the life of Jesus is any indication, I'm not sure He wants them to happen either.  The life that I want is a life in which I never grow up.  The life I want would pamper me, not strengthen me; coddle me, not mature me. It would keep me a child, not make me a man.

     But I don't want to be Peter Pan, stuck in perpetual adolescence, treating all of life as a game when the stakes are so much higher than that.  I want to grow up.  There is an abundant life awaiting me. 

  

Redemption and Hope in a Broken World

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         Scripture provides numerous examples of followers of God trying to reconcile their belief in a perfectly good, loving, and powerful God with their circumstances:

•  Joseph, who was sold into slavery before languishing in Egyptian prisons for years in spite of God’s very personal interaction with him; 
• David, “a man after God’s own heart,” who spent years of his life on the run from a homicidal king; 
• Job, an extraordinarily godly man who lost everything; and the disciples of Christ, all of whom faced considerable persecution.

     While some religions view pain as an illusion, an obstacle to be overcome through the correction of the mind, Christianity believes that pain and suffering are very real.  As a result, followers of Christ have sought to develop a theology that provides a coherent framework for understanding this dilemma. Christians face the difficult task of embracing the reality of evil and making it compatible with the existence of God as portrayed in Scripture: all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. 

     Christians have developed different responses to explain why the goodness of God is not compromised in the face of evil, even evil that is apparently unredemptive in any fashion.  Perhaps good things such as free will more than compensate for the pain experienced during life; perhaps, as in John Hick’s appeal to mystery, there are unknown goods that make up for the suffering we see; perhaps there will be a system of rewards and punishments in place after this life that will adequately provide a framework in which one will see the justice and love of God vindicated.  

     Defenders of the Christian faith have developed these explanations, or theodicies, to better understand the ways of God.  A theodicy, rather than being a mere defense of the compatibility of God and evil, seeks to proactively show God’s reasons for allowing evil to occur.  And even though Scripture allows one to peer into and analyze the issue of pain, Scripture often seems less concerned with the defense of God’s character than with the development of individuals as they seek to handle the difficulties in life. 


     This is the religious or emotional aspect of pain, as opposed to the philosophical or apologetic: rather than question the existence of God because of the presence of pain, the religious aspect of the Scriptures helps the believer whose faith is tested by trials.

   The question moves from, “What kind of God could allow this to happen?” to “What is the proper way for me to view instances of suffering and pain?”  We often expect God to meet us on our terms; from a Scriptural perspective, we are required to meet God on his terms. 

Small, Inglorious Things

Christians often think, "It is wonderful to be a Christian, but I am such a small person, so limited in talents-or energy or psychological strength or knowledge-that what I do is not really important." The Bible, however, has quite a different emphasis: With God there are no little people… and there are no little places….

Nowhere more than in America are Christians caught in the twentieth-century syndrome of size. Size will show success. If I am consecrated, there will necessarily be large quantities of people, dollars, etc. This is not so. Not only does God not say that size and spiritual power go together, but he even reverses this (especially in the teaching of Jesus). We all tend to emphasize big works and big places, but to think in such terms is simply to hearken back to the old, unconverted, egoist, self-centered Me.

When we’re asked to do a thing, especially in the Lord’s work, it really doesn’t matter whether the thing is “important” or not.  Our real attitude toward service is probably not measured by our performance in the big, glorious situations but rather by our steadfastness in the small, inglorious ones. So Paul said, “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Only one thing is important: to be consecrated persons in God's place for us, at each moment. Those who think of themselves as little people in little places, if committed to Christ and living under his Lordship in the whole of life, may, by God's grace, change the flow of our generation.

- Francis Schaeffer

Holy Instability

First, a quote from this article in Christianity Today:

We can stop pretending God is nice, as if it's his job to make our lives well-adjusted or religious or even spiritual. Jesus did not say he came to give us happiness, only blessedness. He did not promise an easy life, only an abundant one. He doesn't call us to be religious or spiritual, but to love God and love others. We can save ourselves a lot of grief if we recognize that up front. 

This means at least two things: (1) He's not going to spare us from heartache, suffering, and chaos. (2) He's actually going to bring heartache, suffering, and chaos into our lives sometimes.

We hear about the first often, and we've been rightly told that when evil embeds itself in our lives through death or disease or destruction that the truths of the gospel remain: God is still Emmanuel, with us. He is, even in the worst circumstances, taking that worst thing, like he took the death of his Son, and turning it into something redemptive. It's only a matter of time.

But the biblical picture shows us that sometimes God doesn't merely react to the evil chaos in our lives, he sometimes creates what might be called holy chaos. Like he did to the Pharisees. And to Peter. And to Paul. And to the disciples at Pentecost. He does things in our lives that leave us confused and bewildered for a time.

In this, too, we are wise to remember that God is still Emmanuel, with us. In this case, he's not merely using chaos, he is instilling a holy chaos into our lives."

    I'm still wrapping my mind around a God who not only allows, but sometimes brings holy disruption.  It's...unsettling...but would I really want it any other way?  "Jesus: The God Who Coddles" is hardly a tagline that promotes allegiance.   

  Here's an analogy.  I go to a gym that uses instability as a training tool.  They don't use machines at all; in fact, they try to destabalize as many moves as is safely possible so as to engage as many muscles as possible.  If you're going to work out, why not do it right?  It works; the results for their clients are impressive. It's not a gym that coddles, but it's a gym that makes athletic men and women out of boys and girls.

  I want a God who destabalizes as many moves in my life as is safely possible.  If I'm going to ask Him to make me strong, why not do it right? And when, in the end, when we see how Jesus made spiritual men and women out of boys and girls, we will give Him the praise He deserves.