35 When Words Fail

What better entry for us to be reading right now than one that ponders what you do when words fail?

Because, frankly, I struggled mightily with the words for the sermon I'm going to preach later today following the recent spate of shootings, especially the one at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday, May 24, 2022. 

In my weekly email to the church, I confessed that it feels like we're living in a Good Friday world. We're experiencing something akin to what the disciples must have been feeling when they watched Jesus' cold, dead body being laid in the tomb. And again, as they watched him ascend into heaven "to sit at the right hand of God." (Tomorrow is Ascension Sunday.) 

As Jessica and/or Kate write, "There is hope for someday, but someday is not now" (p 200). 

Words often fail - at least, words that are spoken thoughtlessly or carelessly. 

"Perhaps it is here where we might need to learn a new way to pray" (p 200). 

They explain, "It's a way of paying attention that author Marilyn McEntyre calls 'the subtle difference between listening for and listening to.' It's an attitude of readiness without an agenda, an openness to what might come. Of breathing into a possibility of hearing and receiving something new" (p 201). 

Have you ever experienced that kind of prayer, when you listen to God speaking in an unexpected way? 

For me, it's often when I read (listen to) poetry that I hear God speaking. Especially when I listen to Padraig O Tuama's podcast, Poetry Unbound, where he reads and explores a poem that has caught his attention. The number of times what he says speaks to what's on my heart is uncanny. And providential. It's a wonderful gift to receive these kinds of words. 

When my words fail, I turn to the words of others. Especially poets. Especially the psalms. 

Sometimes that takes me out of myself and drops me in another place, kind of like the "forest bathing" Kate and Jessica talk about in "A Good Enough Step" on page 204. It seems so much easier to listen when you're surrounded by something so much more beautiful than anything humans could create. 

"God speaks in the silence of the heart. Listening is the beginning of prayer."  
-Mother Teresa

Blessed are you in your radical honesty. In the way you speak of your grief (or listen to others speak of their grief) - the long sleepless nights in an empty bed. Of the physical pain you feel - the joints that don't work like they used to, your brain fog or chronic migraines. Blessed are you who speak of your loneliness, the empty home or nest or womb. Who have the audacity to ask for the miracles you need. The healing or a new friend or a redeemed family.

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

I am grateful to Shawnee Mental Health here in Portsmouth for their post on Friday, May 17 because sometimes our words fail because they're not the right words. Here, they offer some alternatives:  

They suggest these alternatives to the question, "How are you doing?" which can be awkward and empty if asked thoughtlessly. 

Why not try ... 

1️⃣ How are you today?

2️⃣ How are you holding up?

3️⃣ I’ve been thinking about you lately. How are you doing?

4️⃣ What’s been on your mind recently?

5️⃣ Is there any type of support you need right now?

6️⃣ Are you anxious about anything? Are you feeling down at all?

A more specific question may garner a more caring interaction. 

34 The Reality-Show Gospel

What exactly is "The Reality-Show Gospel?" 

Kate and Jessica define it as the thing people say when things don't work out the way they expected or hoped, and don't know what else to say. 

And conclude that this negative thing "must bring about something better" (p 195). 

Until it doesn't.  

Until the devastating diagnosis is delivered. Until the divorce papers arrive. Until a friend is killed in a senseless accident (p 195). 

Everything happens for a reason ... until it doesn't. 

When we run out of reasons, they write, we need something else; we need each other. 

"It's so tempting to skip past the difficulty and pain and rush to find a rationale. But in the long pause, there is wisdom. Sometimes a reason isn't readily apparent, or perhaps it's not ours to assign. Job's friends got it right when they offered him the gift of their presence, but not the weight of their reasons" (p 197). 

It's OK to want more than empty cliches when you are hurting. And it's OK to give more than empty cliches to someone when they are hurting. 

Instead, give the gift of presence. (Or receive that gift, as the case may be.) It's part of the "cost of caring" (which we talked about yesterday). 

Blessed are you when you realize you are way out of your depth and you have no idea what to say. Blessed are you, confronted with suffering you can't imagine, but you don't say it. You do not say you can't imagine their pain, because you do want to imagine. YOu want to be there with them, in your heart and mind, imagining what they are feeling and what they might need. (p 198) 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

I love the practice they suggest on page 199 about "What Not to Say to a Friend in Need" and how to practice NOT saying those things for real. 

Empathy and actions - that's what you need to have on hand to give in these situations. Not empty cliches that ring hollow and may even make things worse. 

33 The Cost of Caring

Welp - it was bound to happen eventually: I missed my deadline for these daily posts. (And if I told you about the week I've had, you'd understand. But I'll spare you the gory details!)  

Instead, I'll just say that I did realize before the deadline that I didn't have a post ready to go, and I wondered if I should just throw something together in order to adhere to the letter of the law I set when I adopted this daily discipline. 

Then I decided it would be better to stick to the spirit of the law and miss the deadline while (hopefully) creating a "good enough" post a day late as a compromise. 

### 

"The Cost of Caring" 

I've often wondered what would happen if a church's fall stewardship campaign slogan was, "Give until it hurts. Then give a little more." (p 189) 

What would the response be? 

A variation on that, once shared with me by a pastor-friend used to solicit funds for a beloved yearly conference, is, "Don't give until it hurts; give until it helps." 

The same, but different. 

The title of this entry is "The Cost of Sharing," and it's a testament to the conflicted relationship with pain we have these days: "Part of the confusion here lies in our understanding of the purpose of pain" (P 190).  

Kate and Jessica note that several kinds of pain should be avoided: abusive relationships, self-harm, brokenness, dysfunction, and pathologies of every kind. "That kind of pain is not part of God's desire for us and violates the deepest, truest things about us: that we are deeply worthy of all good things. Full stop" (p 190). 

But some virtues are developed that require sacrifice, which involves pain. "When we want to grow, there might need to be some pruning. Some hacking at deadening habits and beliefs. Some watering and readjusting so we might grow toward the light" (p 190). 

Kate writes about her friend Christie who is a nurse: "She explained the brutality this way: the way you know you are doing your job correctly is that it costs you a part of your own soul. Even with the best self-care practices, the job of any caring professional - be it a nurse or doctor or social worker or teacher or chaplain - comes at a steep price. It costs you to care. Caring, she said, is an occupational hazard" (pp 190-191). 

What will good things cost us? 

Hope costs us the satisfaction of cynicism. 
Love costs us selfishness. 
Charity costs us greed. 

These words hit a little differently now after this week's shooting at the elementary school in Texas. I wish caring wasn't an occupational hazard for me as a pastor - even caring for people I don't know and will never meet. 

It's tempting to look away from the pain, to save myself the pain of seeing the grief of so many families. It is "beautiful, terrible work" to see another person's humanity, even from a distance. This sentence that ends this entry reminds me of the chapter, "The Bad Thing" we talked about here. 

But I am reminded of the image they mentioned there: "Seeing pain up close [your pain or someone else's] can give you an incredible experience of awe. It's like seeing a garment turned inside out and all the rough seams are showing. You see someone's absolute humanity shine through all the pain, and that vulnerability makes them more - not less - beloved" (pp 93-94). 

Blessed are you who listen to long, winding stories from lonely hearts instead of rushing off to more interesting friends. You picked boredom or loving strangers instead of the warmth of being known. That was your time and you're never going to get it back. (p 192) 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

How are you handling the pain of the last few days - whether from stories you see on TV or tragedies that are unfolding in your life and the lives of those whom you know and love? Can you look it in the face? Are you ignoring it? Are you "doomscrolling" or getting too obsessed with the pain? 

What does a healthy relationship with pain look like? What pain is pruning, and what pain is damaging? 

And, just so you don't think I blindly buy in to everything Kate and Jessica write, at the end of the "A Good Enough Step" on page 194, when they write, "Somehow, we are more blessed when we give than when we receive," my soul shouted, "No!" 

Well, maybe not shouted exactly, but definitely disagreed. 

I know this chapter is advocating caring ("giving") despite the cost, but in my 2021 Christmas Eve sermon, I explained my experience of "excruciating humility" resulting from the onset of seizures. It is excruciating and humbling to have to ask for help ... to receive, instead of to give. 

But isn't that the foundation of our relationship with God -- receiving, not giving? We didn't do anything to deserve the Incarnation, to deserve salvation. That's the whole point actually.

Yes, I'd much rather give than receive ... but sometimes it's better to receive than to give. (Just saying!) 

32 Gondola Prayers

Gosh, I think my favorite line of this chapter is this one:  

"We are praying to the God whose very sweetness has broken through to us" (p 185). 

I'm not sure that's a sentence that resonates with every believer in God. If the God you pray to is often angry and needs to be appeased by your prayers, this idea of sweetness probably feels foreign to you.

But if the God you pray to is a refuge or a peacemaker, loving like a father and/or a mother, then you know exactly what Kate and Jessica are talking about here when it comes to prayer. 

Prayer, which is ultimately a mystery.
Prayer, which sometimes God answers.
And sometimes doesn't. 
And sometimes we can't see or don't understand the answers. 
And sometimes answers in a way we didn't want or didn't expect. 

"In prayer," they write on page 186, "we are brought into the presence of God, whose eternal reality translated for us. We sense we were created because we are loved. Just that. We are not a means, but an end. And we are more whole, more alive, with a wellness that we didn't create through some transactional effort on our part." 

"The mystery of prayer is that we may never understand exactly how it works, just that it draws us into intimacy with a God who hears" (p 186). 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

Waiting is a necessary part of prayer. "To pray means we have to yield up space and time, and some of our darling preoccupations. For one hot minute there is a self-emptying that mirrors God's own" (p 186). 

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. Simone Weil (p 188) 

Look at your life: is there maybe a void now that you could yield up to God in a time of prayer? 

31 Bottling Magic

Stop for a second and think about this: when did you give and receive the most love today? 

Or, if you're reading this first thing in the morning, when did you give and receive the most love yesterday? 

Take a few moments to really think about when you felt most alive, most full of joy, most yourself? 

What was that moment like? Did it feel like time stopped or slowed down? Was it simple? Was it sweet? Was it bittersweet? Who was there? Was it something you said/did or something they said/did? 

Once the moment passed, how did you feel in its aftermath - joyful? tired? sad? 

Did you even notice how wonderful that moment was as it unfolded or is it only now that you're looking at it in the rearview mirror that you see it for what it was? 

And just how tempted are/were you to try to hold on to that moment? To create it again, this time to capture it like magic in a bottle so that you'd never have to get it go? 

"When something is that good, the temptation," Kate and/or Jessica write, "is to keep it, hold it, bottle it, preserve it, and, if we're the entrepreneurial type, maybe even sell it. But often, those precious moments are fleeting. They are precious exactly because they are few and far between" (p 179). 

I'm not entirely sure I agree with that -- that precious moments are actually that few and far between. Frankly, I think they happen all the time but we're not often paying attention or actively looking for them. 

But I agree with the point that when these beautiful little moments happen -- even if it is in the wake of something terrible -- "we want to instrumentalize (remember that word from this post?) the moment. We want to stay there. When something is good, we want to build a fortress - move in and live there forever" (p 180), much like Peter wanted to build the three houses up on the mountain in the wake of Jesus' Transfiguration. (Here's that story in Eugene Peterson's "The Message" version of the Bible because I love it!) 

Can we make this moment last longer? (p 181) 

Nope. 

But we can "learn to see the signs, to feel the moments swell around us. We begin to see those brief periods as delicate, precious .... We can become more beautiful, more transcendent, as we learn to carry them with us, changed by the things we might never see again" (p 181). 

Blessed are we who recognize that spark, that glimmer of transcendence that feels ... otherworldly. Like points of light that converge to reveal a reality we can scarcely believe, yet somehow we remember in the depths of our souls. The sunrise that no picture can capture. The moment of clarity we can't exactly describe. It is a magic suffused with delight and goodness and beauty and joy. And we know it was You, oh God" (p 182) 

Pastor Allison 

I'm curious: 

Have you read the "A Good Enough Step" on page 183? It talks about making an Ebenezer. (Remember this line from the beloved hymn -- "Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by thine help I come"?) 

Why don't you try it? The next time you're outside, find a rock. Think the last time you felt the transcendence of God - write a word on the rock to remind you of that experience or attach a note to the rock, then put it somewhere you'll see it. 

"No, we can't bottle these moments, but we can be changed by them" (p 183). 

BONUS: Sometimes these moments of transcendence are intermingled with immanence. Sometimes you can only see something beautiful after something terrible. And sometimes it's the other way around. If you feel particularly drawn to this chapter, you may want to check out this additional reflection.