Awhile back I had a really good day in a Chemical Dependency group I lead. In attendance were several young second-generation gangbangers recently shed of their orange wardrobes (been released from jail). They all had been in our program for a couple of weeks and gamely tolerated their once weekly cruel and unusual punishment of mandatory participation in the Chaplin’s Spirituality Group fairly well up until this point; mostly trying, quite successfully, to keep a low profile by not making eye contact with the enemy (me) and volunteering only minimal information when asked; survival skills honed, and which no doubt served them well, in both their gang and prison lives.
My first hint of trouble came in the introduction and goal setting portion of the group (right off the bat). A really, really, big young guy dressed all in black and sporting a complex collection of ink and piercings introduced himself by shifting in his chair, slumping to an almost prone position, opening his legs wide toward me, while simultaneously crossing his arms against his chest, and stating that his goal was “to be more open.” Translation: “F’off lady!” In the monkey-see-monkey-do spirit that can saturate a group dynamic in less time than it took for the first monkey-to-do, the three other young men in the group with gang affiliations and prison time in their backgrounds soon followed suit.
Of the ten other patients in the room, after a quick mental survey, I recon about four of them of similar mindset, just not strong enough to launch an initial sortie but quite willing and happy to lend ground support, and the rest sufficiently intimidated to keep to themselves.
It’s working. Therapy is working and in those initial moments I am both terrified and grateful. Terrified, because I have no real idea of what to say and how to make the next fifty minutes of any real value to these patients who deserve my best efforts to help them come to a deeper understanding that it is only a power greater then themselves that can lead them to sanity amid the insanity of their addiction. Grateful, because something in the room has been getting to these four over the past few weeks and its making them uncomfortable enough to act it out it the group. If they do not bring their pain into the group there is no meaningful way to point them toward the Power that is more powerful than it, or themselves or their gangs or their drugs, or sex or money or power or anything else in which they put their faith.
The opening salvo is predictable; I am accused of forcing Jesus down their throats. This is a familiar and always amusing criticism, intended to put me on the defensive turning attention way from the accuser. It is amusing because I never mention Jesus, of my own accord in group and only in response to a particular patient’s stated Christian belief or in a litany of examples of a teaching which exists in all the major faith traditions. With a bit of therapeutic conversation I refocus the conversation where it belongs and start probing for what they have really brought to the group: Lives which have known mostly pain and suffering, abandonment, death, loss, abuse and victimization, guilt and shame, loneliness, grief, fear and trembling.
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth, have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1: 24), is ringing in my head, and all the while I am praying because I have no idea what Jesus has to do with any of this in their lives as they have lived them in a world light years away from mine; it begins to seem the height of hubris for me to be standing there trying to speak for Jesus to all of that… Then Elvis speaks. Yes, Elvis. There is an Elvis impersonator in the group and he loves the King enough to look quite a bit like him, even in his off time. “I guess what were trying to say is, ‘Where is my God?’”
Suddenly, Ivan Karamazov, after watching wealthy land owner set his hounds upon a boy ripping him to death before his mother’s eyes, is speaking with him: “It isn’t that I refuse to acknowledge God, but I am respectfully giving him back my ticket to a world like this. Understand me, I accept God, but I don’t accept the world God has made. I cannot resolve to accept it.” These young ex-con-addict-gangbangers have not rejected God but are rebelling against the unexpiated suffering (borrowing from Moltmann) of their lives. They are challenging not Jesus of Nazareth but a cultural Christianity that holds up on Sunday mornings with folks who would never be like them—never enter their world of seemingly endless hopelessness and pain—preaching a mind numbing gospel of repentance and goodness and blessed success, illumining their lives as worthlessness and wanting, relegating to the shadows Christ’s radical transforming message of acceptance and love.
If I would speak to them for Jesus, and that is what I’m called (and paid) to do, I had best take seriously the message of Jesus. The Kingdom of God comes closest to the suffering of the poor, to the sufferers who society rejects and judges most wanting. Jesus of Nazareth offers to them acceptance and a radical love of healing and peace and hope, not in some distant time come but here and now. For today and tomorrow and the days after that. Jesus of Nazareth expiates their suffering, but not by asking them to deny it but by joining them there and traveling with them along their way (Luke 24).
So I travel, as best I can with them, acknowledge their experience of betrayal by the Faith and speak with them, as they are able to hear, of how they might find healing for their suffering souls. It is enough that on this short journey, they might however briefly recognize Him. This is what Jesus of Nazareth has to do with them and with us all.
If I would dare to speak for Jesus to them or to any, I had best take seriously as well the suffering journey of my own life. Stand squarely in the face of it. I had best, come like Job, festering, sitting on the midden of that which is my own and pray aloud its truth in sorrow and loss, and sufferings and pains. In praying there recently in this space, I was more fortunate then Job. The blundering Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu and the ungrateful and phenomenally unsupportive Mrs. Job did not appear, thank God for that, but the blessed voices of the two in whom I recognize God’s presence; a willingness to reach out into a world which may not be their own, but which they nonetheless entered with compassion and concern.
If Elvis were to ask me now, I would answer, “There, there is my God.” I am so blessed. Amen.
