Sounds from the Deep Silence

This antique singing bowl from Tibet was an Ordination gift. One that brings great grace to my ministry with persons with serious menatal illness. When I was a little girl, a part of the baptismal liturgy used these words to consecrate the water used in the Sacrament, “Almighty God, please set apart this water from a common to a holy use such that by your good grace….”

Yesterday, in our group therapy room gathered broken hearts and minds, seeking healing’s grace.  There I played the tone and healing vibration of your beautiful bowl.  Struck once, twice, three times; the last fading slowly into the deep silence that existed before the creation of the world. With it our space and our hearts and minds were set apart from our common to God’s holy use. Words of strength, words of life and the triumphing of human hearts and minds over the forces of grief, despair and death were slowly, tenderly and tentatively shared.    Struck once, twice, three times; the last fading slowly into the deep silence that existed before the creation of the world, our space, our time, our hearts and minds called back into our common uses, renewed and healed  to  some new and holy purposes…  listening, longing for the fading, lingering tone that echoes in the deep and holy silence of the Still Small Voice that whispers to us all. Thanks be to God.  Amen.

The Truth is... Elvis Speaks the Truth

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.

The Rechem of God

Among those present: fathers of dead children, to suicide, to murder, to degenerative pediatric heart disease; men whose careers were cut short by cardiac disease and drunk drivers; a woman who had been raped and others whose history of physical and sexual abuse is unimaginable.

There is only to pray to create a safe container for the holding of these stories and the sharing of this grief before the unimaginable powers of evil. Gently then and by grace, the prayer becomes to sit among the uncompromising threads of their suffering and their sorrow. It is to wait, in silence, for the still small voice of the mercy and compassion in this place of suffering-with and their to begin to establish the frail bonds of hope beyond all reason and good sense, to call forth in them some dim faith light years removed from any sense of entitlement or justice for the continued living of their days.

No Easter sermons here; he is perhaps in a grave so deep one will never be proclaimed. Ehrman and his problem of God seems a sophist’s folly. Olstene’s, “all will be well” pails before the grim reality that it is not nor will it ever be again. Lacado proclaims that, “God is good… that faith is believing that God will do what is right.” None of this is right nor is any of it God’s doing. There is no reason for suffering such profound evils in any human life. The only hope this work can offer—to suffer with, to pray for a heart of rachamin*, to wait on grace from beyond this place, to sit quiet witness of love from the deepest depths, the rechem** of God. There is no other hope or grace, or strength for sitting in this place, the only container, by grace, the rechem of God.

* Hebrew for compassion
** Hebrew for womb

Prayer Before Stepping off into Transitional Space

The door shuts. A room full of strangers, we sit, the crevasses between us filled with the shards of lives lived in the wretched frenzy of those seeking desperately for what they do not know and cannot find. By some grace we must travel togeather along the slippery slope—Spirituality Group.

The space is filled at any cost, with whatever is on hand, those remnants of pain and suffering, echoes of loss and separation. Emptiness cannot be tolerated; one cannot feel alone. Death’s specter lurks in the corners just beyond our seeing.

What will save from the Fall into fear’s black abyss for which some secretly long.

Somewhere it will find us all, when we least expect it. In some moment we will hear the faint echo of what has been calling to us all along. It will grasp us; gather us up in its arms and carry us away from the edge of the crevasse; deliver us from the descent into darkness.

In that moment we shall be changed.

(The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. / For this corruptible must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality. I Cor. 15:52 – 53.)

The eminent psychiatrist W. D. Winnicott called it the transitional space: That place between the deeply buried graces and undeclared sufferings of our inner world and the broken and blessed ambivalence of human existence in this world. The place many say where are spiritual natures are formed.

(Surely his salvation is near those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land. Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss other. PS 85: 9-10.)

Surely, the in that moment we shall be changed.

We will know it together, in this “talking cure,” as Freud called it, something unspoken and not fully comprehended between us. The transformation will begin. Something new will be created, something pregnant with meaning that longs to be explored; something expected, yet which can only be known, as Henry Emerson Fosdick’s great Hymn bades us, “…For the living of these days.”

A lifetime of wisdom and grace and courage will be required for facing of those hours which will stretch into days.

The door is opened. Amen.