John Mark Hicks

When a cyclone kills over 130,000 in Myanmar and an earthquake snuffs out the lives of 80,000 more in China, I have little interest in defending or justifying God.

When my son (Joshua Mark Hicks) dies of a genetic disorder after watching him slowly degenerate over ten years and I learn of the tragic death of a friend’s son (John Robert Dobbs)–both dying on the same date, May 21–I have little interest in defending or justifying God.

How could I possibly defend any of that? I suppose I could remove God from responsibility by disconnecting him from his creation but I would then still have a God who decided to be a Deist. That’s no comfort–it renders God malevolent or at least disinterested. I would prefer to say God is involved and he decides to permit (even cause–though I would have no way of knowing which is the case in any particular event) suffering. I would prefer to hold God responsible for the world he created and how the world proceeds.

I’m tired of defending him. Does God really need my feeble, finite, and fallible arguments in his defense? Perhaps some need to hear a defense–maybe it would help, but I also know it is woefully inadequate at many levels.  God does not need my defense as much as God needs to encounter people in their existential crises. My arguments will not make the difference; only God’s presence will.

I know the theodices and I have attempted them myself (see my old “rational” attempt which is on my General Articles page; I have also uploaded the companion piece on the Providence of God).  A free-will theodicy does not help me with earthquakes, genetics and cyclones; it certainly does not explain why God does not answer the prayers of his people with compassionate protection from such. A soul-making theodicy does not explain the quantity and quality of suffering in the world; suffering sometimes breaks souls rather than making them.  There are other theodicies and combinations, but I find them all existentially inadequate (which is an academic understatement!) and rationally unsatisfying.

My theodic rationalizations have all shipwrecked on the rocks of experience in a hurting and painful world. My theodic mode of encounter with God in the midst of suffering is now protest.

Does God have a good reason for the pervasive and seemingly gratutious nature of suffering in the world? I hope he does–I even believe he does, but I don’t know what the reasons are nor do I know anyone who does. My hope is not the conclusion of a well-reasoned, solid inductive/deductive argument but is rather the desparate cry of the sufferer who trusts that the Creator has good intentions and purposes for his creation.

Lament is not exactly a theodicy, but it is my response to suffering. It contains my complaint that God is not doing more (Psalm 74:11), my questions about “how long?” (Psalm 13:1), my demand to have my “Why?” questions answered (Psalm 44:24), and my disillusionment with God’s handling of the world (Job 21, 23-24). It is what I feel; it is my only “rational” response to suffering.

I realize that I am a lowly creature whose limitations should relativize my protest (as when God came to Job).  But, as with Job and the Psalmists, I continue to lament–I continue because I have divine permission to do so! Of all “people,” I must be honest with God, right? I recognize that my feeble laments cannot grasp the transcendent glory of the one who created the world and I realize that were God to speak he would say to me something of what he said to Job.  But until he speaks….until he comforts…until he transforms the world, I will continue to speak, lament and protest.

But that response is itself insufficient.  I protest, but I must also act. 

As one who believes the story of Jesus, I trust that God intends to redeem, heal and renew his world. As a disciple of Jesus, I am committed to imitate his compassion for the hurting, participate in the healing, and sacrifice for redemption. I am, however, at this point an impatient disciple.

Does this mean that there are no comforting “words” for the sufferer?  No, I think the story itself is a comfort; we have a story to tell but we must tell it without rationalizing or minimizing creation’s pain. We have a story to tell about God, Israel and Jesus. God loves us despite the seeming evidence to the contrary. God listens to our protests despite our anger and disillusionment. God empathizes with our suffering through the incarnation despite our sense that no one has suffered like we have. God reigns over his world despite the seeming chaos. God will defeat suffering and renew his creation despite its current tragic reality. The story carries hope in its bosom and it is with hope that we grieve.

My love-hate relationship with God continues…I love (trust) him despite my unbelief.  God, I believe-I trust; help my unbelief–heal my doubts.  Give light to my eyes in the midst of the darkness.

May God have mercy.

Since I was disconnected from the electronic world, I was unaware of the loss that the John Dobbs family has just suffered.  John Robert Dobbs died on the same day as Joshua Mark Hicks….my son in 2001, John’s son in 2008.

Here are my feelings…about God…my prayer to God.

Frankly, God, I am sick and tired of hurt and pain. Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you–to praise you or to raise my fist to your face. I am presently at a total loss as I think of my friend John. I want to yell at you but I also want you to share with John and his family what only you can share.

I am at a loss of what to say to you but I know also that I am powerless to help John. Only you have that power. Only you can be a safe refuge. Only you can surround his family with the people who will be your presence for them. God, please, comfort them.

When, God, will you comfort all of us?! When will you finally and fully demonstrate your utter rejection of our pain and hurt? When will your kingdom fully come so that your will is done on earth as it is heaven? When will you rid your creation of this pain?

I am impatient. I hate how you stand around with your hands in your pockets doing nothing to stop this hurt. I don’t want to  hear the explanations, the rationalizations, the minimizations from your creatures trying to defend you…I just want the pain to stop. When will you stop it?

But I am left with no one else to whom I can give my hurt, my lament, my pain. You are all I really have since everything and everyone else is so fragile. You alone are strength, healing and hope. There is no one else or nothing else.

So, God, I will trust you. I don’t like that that is all I really have–it angers me. It seems so intangible and the world is so painful. But I do trust you because you have loved us in your Son and by the presence of your Spirit.

And I will trust that you will lead John and his family through this dark valley, that you will be there with them and that your staff will comfort them. Please, God, relieve the pain.

Please God, send your Son. My patience is running out.

Love,

John Mark

I yearn for the fulfillment of the divine promise:

Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
    The former things will not be remembered,
         nor will they come to mind….
the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.

Never again will there be in it
    an infant who lives but a few days…
They will not toil in vain
    or bear children doomed to misfortune…

Before they call, I will answer;
    while they are still speaking I will hear.”

Isaiah 65:17, 19b, 20a, 23a, 24

After memoralizing a couple of days in my life (May 21–the date of Joshua’s death and May 22–Sheila and I would have been married thirty-one years), I feel better. It was a cathartic–a kind of cleansing–though I recognize it is a long process (and has been a long one already).  I now realize that I need to do this with some regularity and memoralize key dates as a way of remembering, integrating, and recontextualizing the pain.

On Wednesday evening Jennifer and I were blessed with the presence of some special friends at our home, including some who themselves have lost children to death. [I told them that I had checked it out with God and that it counted as Wednesday evening attendance. 🙂 ]  We grieved together through song and sharing.  I shared Madeleine L’Engle’s letter to God and my own sort of love-hate relationship with God in recent months as I confronted the tragic events of my life.

I also shared what has become a significant moment for me. In one psychodrama session my life was somatically represented for me. Four people were laid out in front of me as corpses covered in black–one represented my divorce. As I looked at my life the only words I could utter among the sobs were “it is too much.” It was my brief lament; I was overwhelmed. As I sequentially walked through my life, my only thought when I came to Joshua was “God, not again!” And this is how I have felt for some time without feeling it.

Looking life in the eye, I now (to some degree at least) recognize and experience my hurt. Alongside of that, I acknowledge and experience my blessings as well. I am blessed with a loving wife, friends, a church community that has loved me, and the list could go on for some time. Gratitude is part of my healing process. My blessings far exceed most people in the world–especially as we wealthy Americans count “blessings.” But most importantly I truly believe that God does not leave us alone in our pain though it often feels like he does–he sends blessings as moments of grace in the midst of pain. And those blessings provide a way through the pain as we embrace them. The deepest and most powerful blessing is community.

Being with people was more important than I had emotionally perceived earlier in my life. Intellectually I have talked about community for a long time and even experienced it (I thought), but somehow I got it in my heart (my emotional interior) that I could handle grief alone (otherwise, it would be quite embarrasing); somehow I can play the hero and deal with it by myself. I was so wrong and I hope never to make that mistake again. I need a sense of communal lament, communal grief and communal sharing. I need a community that will help me carry the load. In my arrogance I have recognized and recommended that for other people (even written about it!) but I have only recently come to terms with my own need to be vulnerable in community, share with my friends, grieve in their presence and receive the embrace of their comfort–and God through them.

Thank you, my friends–both virtual and otherwise–for listening to my emotional venting in the past month or so.

Yesterday, Thursday, I spent several hours with a new CD entitled The Psalms Project.  The eleven songs on the CD are musical arrangements of eleven different Psalms. This CD has special meaning to me. First, it is the work of Kip Long, worship minister of the Sycamore View Church of Christ in Memphis, Tennessee. He produced it in preparation for his ministry at the Pepperdine lectures this year. Kip is a dear friend of mine who knew Joshua from the time when we worked together at the Ross Road Church of Christ in Memphis. Second, the voices on this CD are voices that I recognize from spending almost every Sunday in 2007 with the Sycamore View church. I have a lousy musical ear but I can hear the distinct voices of my friends on that CD.

Third, and most important, the journey of the CD took me through the faith pilgrimage of the Psalms from lament to praise (see my handout for a categorization of Psalms). It begins with Psalm 19 (a Torah Psalm that orients us to the praise and glory of God displayed in nature and Torah) but then moves to two lament Psalms (3 and 13). Then it moved to a orienting wisdom Psalm about blessedness (128 ) and then back to lament with Psalm 44. The CD moves to praise with the short but poweful Psalm 117 and then to the confidence of Psalm 46 (“Be still and know that I am God”) followed by the confident joy of Psalm 121 (we look to the hills). Then the CD breaks out in praise with Psalm 118 which is about a believer who also journeyed through the discipline of hurt and pain to enter again the gates of God’s courts with thanksgiving and joy. Psalm 23 follows as a return to the confidence theme and the CD ends with the praise celebration of Psalm 146.

As I listened to this CD several times yesterday, I imagined myself on the journey of faith from confidence to disorientation (lament) then to praise and back to confidence. It is the up and down journey of faith, and this is what the Psalms portray for us. I experienced again my own life and was able to gain, once again, some perspective in community with Israel, the people of God. It provided again a new interpretation for my life as I journeyed with the Psalmists; it was a new experience of my life through the Psalms.  Thanks Kip and the Sycamore View Praise Team for blessing my life.

One of the songs I shared with the group on Wednesday evening has become a popular song among students at Lipscomb University. It is regularly sung at the Sancturary Event every Thursday during the school year. It was written by a former student of mine (and he wrote it before he knew me!)–Nathan Hale. I have sung it every day, several times a day, for the past month. It is particularly meaningful for me because it is based on Psalm 13 which has been an anthem Psalm for me since reading through the Psalms after Sheila’s death. Psalm 13 is my Psalm (but I will share it with you 🙂 ) Here is Nathan’s poetic rendition which is worth patient meditation as he has captured the essence of the lament. May God bless you with it as he has blessed me.

Psalm 13 by Nathan Hale

How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?
How long, O Lord, will you hide your face from me?
Long enough, long enough have I carried this load of sorrow.
Long enough, long enough have I lived with this heart full of pain.

But I want to look life in the eye.
I’m tired of falling down on my face.
I’m throwing myself into your loving arms.
And now it’s time to celebrate your rescue.

So, I will sing at the top of my lungs.
Yes, I will sing of your unfailing love.
For you have delivered me from the worst of my enemies.
So, I will sing to the Lord for he has been good to me.

Grief should be the instructor of the wise.  Sorrow is the knowledge.  Lord Byron

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart, Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes.    Carl Jung

I call to God; God will help me. At dusk, dawn, and noon I sigh deep sighs–he hears, he rescues.    Psalm 55:16-17

I am still in the midst of focusing on and processing my past traumas, particularly grieving past losses and acknowledging some recent experiences. After the Sheila’s deathin 1980, I experienced a period of disillusionment followed by lament.  Yet, as I now realize, I shortcut my lament and repressed the trauma in several ways and repeated the cycle with Joshua’s death in 2001 and with more recent grief.

Tomorrow, May 21, is the seventh anniversary of Joshua’s death. At times I have tried to face it–and thought I did, even by writing some past posts–but I realize now that I was more intent on avoiding the pain or numbing it. Escape was my primary coping mechanism and I usually escaped into my work as I consumed myself with speaking, teaching and writing. I used my workaholism as a way to avoid the pain while thinking I was coping well with the grief.

I was wrong.

I have learned, my friends, that Jesus is right. It is rather annoying to finally learn something you should have appropriated long ago. My “head” seemed to always escape into the future–planning what I will say, what I will do, what I will write, and how I will play the “hero.” The day was not sufficient to itself–I had to live in the future to avoid the present pain. I avoided the pain by investing my energies in the future rather than living through the evil (pain) of the day. Jesus’ caution is now more real to me than it has been in the past:  “Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34b).

“One day at a time” is a new mantra for me. Oh, I’ve known it, spoken it, advised it, but rarely lived it. And I don’t think I have ever known exactly what it meant in practical terms, at least in my own life. I’m only beginning to understand and live it now. 

The call of Jesus is to live in the present–to experience the present without worry about the future. The present is all I really have and if I want to look life in the eye, I must live life today. To live one day at a time is to pray for and receive our “daily” bread without living in our tomorrows with anxiety. To avoid grief is to circumvent God’s healing process by escaping it, numbing it or attempting to transcend it by some kind of heroism rather than living through the pain.

With some recent grief recovery and dedicated attention to my emotional literacy, I am better prepared to live through tomorrow’s anniversary with some intentional focus just as I am living this day–hopefully–one day at a time. Most anniversaries I would spend my throwing myself into work and avoiding all memories which would trigger emotional hurt. But tomorrow, with the help and support of friends, I have a different plan.

Tomorrow my morning will begin with some self-care by playing golf (for the first time in 20 months) with my good friend Johnny Melton–to enjoy a morning with a friend in God’s green (literally) creation. To live in God’s presence surrounded by life.  I will spend the afternoon with my wife talking, praying and visiting Joshua’s grave which I have not done in several years.  The evening I will spend with the saints in community.

Tomorrow I will also begin a 48-hour fast from the blog-o-sphere, writing and email to rest, meditate and live with my reality; to be instructed by my grief.  I thank everyone in advance for their concern, prayers and kindnesses. 

Today–and for the next several days–my repeated prayer, taken from the Februray Divine Hours (but adjusted to the singular rather than plural), will be:

Most loving Father, whose will it is for me to give thanks for all things, to fear nothing but the loss of you, and to cast all my care on you who cares for me:  Preserve me from faithless fears and worldly anxieties, that no clouds of this mortal life may hide from me the light of that love which is immortal, and which you have manifested to me in your Son Jesus Christ my Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen

May 10 is my father’s birthday, but he is no longer with us on this earth. His story is the story of many devoted ministers throughout history. He worked with small churches with little notice but was loved by those he served. This is the story of most ministers and I honor them with this post as well as my father. Below is my brief account of his life which was read at his funeral in 1994.

———————–

Mark N. Hicks was born on May 10, 1921 in Haskell County, Texas near Rochester. He died on July 2, 1994 in Memphis, Tennessee.

He grew up on the plains of west Texas as the son of a farmer, and was raised in a family which exalted God. He was born, however, with some physical disabilities — a weak heart and a cleft pallet which caused a speech impediment.

After Pearl Harbor in 1941, Mark Hicks joined the Army, rose to the rank of Sergeant and served his country in Europe during World War II. For his service in the Battle of the Bulge where he stayed his post even though surrounded by enemy forces and for his service in maintaining radar operations during battle he received the Bronze Star. He was honorably discharged in 1945.

When he returned to west Texas he took up farming. However, he wanted to serve God as a minister but was deterred by his speech disability. Nevertheless, at the encouragement of a local minister and making use of the GI Bill, Mark Hicks entered Freed-Hardeman College in the fall of 1946 in order to become a gospel preacher. He lived the rest of his 48 years as one dedicated to the task of proclaiming and sharing the gospel of God’s grace.

His dedication impressed some generous people who funded a trip to St. Louis where he met with a Dentist who prepared an artificial plate for the roof of his mouth. This device enabled him to speak clearly though with some peculiar pronunciations and paved the way for his preaching career. He used this artificial plate until his death.

On August 6, 1947 Mark Hicks married an eighteen year old Sudan, Texas farm girl by the name of Edith Lois Fox. She had spent her first college year at Abilene, but having married Mark, she enrolled at Freed-Hardeman College. Mark graduated from Freed-Hardeman College in 1948 with an Associate of Arts degree in Bible. He completed his Bachelor’s degree at Eastern New Mexico University in 1950.

He began his full-time preaching career in 1950 at Tatum, New Mexico, but he had a heart for missions and yearned to go somewhere where he was more needed. In 1951, before he knew to call it an “Exodus,” Mark Hicks led an exodus of four families (including his own) to Colonial Heights, Virginia. At that time there were fewer than ten full-time ministers of the Churches of Christ in Virginia. At Colonial Heights, through various forms of tent-making, financial support from Idalou, Texas and the help of the other exodus families, he was able to plant and water a congregation in that city. He served that congregation on three different occasions for a total of thirteen years (1951-56, 1958-65, and 1969-71). The Colonial Heights Church of Christ became a leader of Virginia Churches throughout the late 1960s and 1970s in their bus ministry, “soul talks” and soul-winning workshops.

Mark and Lois Hicks, along with the other exodus families, sacrificed much, including proximity to extended family, to invest themselves in the work in Virginia. Mark dedicated himself to building up the church in that state. Of his more than 40 active years of full-time preaching, 38 were spent in Virginia in three different cites: in the piedmont region of Colonial Heights, in the mountains of Covington where he ministered to a small struggling church of about 50, and in the metropolitan area of Alexandria near Washington, D.C. where he ministered to a mid-size and racially-integrated congregation of about 200.

In 1971 he moved to Alexandria, Virginia to work with an established congregation where he stayed for twenty years. It was a congregation that grew racially diverse. At one time, the congregation had three ministers: one white, one black, and one Korean. Ministry was not withheld from any one, but extended to everyone no matter what their ethnic background or race. When he retired from full-time ministry, he served as an elder, and eventually, as a retiree, decided to work with a small struggling congregation of about 40 in Mount Vernon, Virginia.

Throughout his years of ministry, he participated in evangelistic efforts of various kinds. In the 1960s he assisted Ivan Stewart in his “Campaigns for Christ.” In the 1970s and 80s he conducted evangelistic meetings and preacher training sessions in India seven times where a Hicks Orphan’s Home now exists along with a Preacher Training School.

In February, 1994, after the retirement of Lois Hicks from teaching, Mark moved to Memphis, Tennessee. On July 2, he suffered heart failure and the angels carried him to the bosom of Abraham.

The life of Mark N. Hicks is a witness to the perseverance of faith and the determination to serve the Lord in ministry. He did not seek fame, nor fortune. He did not seek positions at large churches, nor promote himself in gospel meetings or in the production of articles or books. He was a minister of the gospel who served people through planting and watering a new congregation, through struggling with a small church in the mountains of Virginia, and through working through the problems of integration at an urban church in a metropolitan area. His goal was not self-promotion, but proclaiming the gospel of Christ. His interest was not placed in himself, but in others who needed the gospel of grace. His life, both in its determination to minister through overcoming obstacles and in its desire to share the gospel with others, is a witness of faith — a witness to his family, his friends, and his church. Most of all, it was a life lived to the glory of God rather than the glory of Mark N. Hicks.

Now we are separated from Dad, and this saddens us; but he died in faith, and having died in faith, he has now received the promise. His faith belongs to the ages now–his faith is now part of the witnesses that surround us. His life of faith is my faith–it molded me, it made who I am, and for that I am grateful. His witness will ever shine in my life; his ministry will be carried on through my ministry. His faith is carried on in the hearts of people he touched, and his faith still bears witness in the congregations which he served. His funeral was conducted by John Mark Hicks, Richard Corum and Dan Paden on July 6 at the Ross Road Church of Christ, Memphis, Tennessee.

On November 14, 2007, my good friend and colleague at Lipscomb University Mike Matheny died after his three year struggle with a brain tumor. Mike–the same age as me, 50–is a dear friend to me. We talked often about our great loves–the Psalms and baseball.  He is a Yankee fan, I am a Cubs fan. But we are both fans of the lament Psalms, both prayed those laments, and we both taught Psalms at Lipscomb.  I miss him terribly and I imagine he stands with the saints around the throne of God in both praise (“worthy”) and lament (“how long”).

Mike’s suffering and death was a traumatic trigger for me. The last time I visited Mike it was as if I was with my son Joshua in his last days. Mike and Joshua were both in hospice, incapacitated, and nonverbal. My time with Mike was a psychological reversion to the trauma of Joshua’s death which was then a reversion to Sheila’s death.  It was as if I was at Joshua’s bedside as well as Mike’s..as if I was again being carried out of Sheila’s funeral.

In the wake of that reversion, I shut down emotionally. Even my funeral sermon at Mike’s service was relatively devoid of emotion. I did not want to feel that pain. It was a pain with which I was all too familiar and my way of dealing with it was to withdraw and numb my feelings. Not feeling the pain was, it seemed to me, better than feeling the pain.  Of course, I did not realize what I was doing or what I was doing to myself. Only in the past couple of months have I seen the effects of unresolved grief in my life and relationships.

I thought I had resolved it and even believed I was relatively healthy, but I was actually deceiving myself.  I was playing the “hero” which is a role I have been given (and willingly assumed) most of my life. The hero, of course, cannot let himself be embarrased by tears or uncontrolled grief. He must hide it with laughter and avoid intense conversations about it.  “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends, the grief remains” (Proverbs 14:13). The hero must be strong and model how to handle life’s tragedies.  But I am no hero. To the contrary, instead of living through my grief, I avoided it.  I tried to jump over my grief and leap–like superman–over tall buildings in a single bound.

I am now grateful that my leap has actually become a crash, and the crash has become a moment of divine grace.  Hitting the wall of unresolved trauma has given me the opportunity to truly experience my grief; to revisit, relive and reconstruct the meaning of my grief.  To re-enter the world of lament and truly feel what I feel has become a journey of authentic healing. And for this I am grateful and grateful for the people God has put into my life that support me, show me grace and model redemptive love.

“Though he brings grief, he also shows compassion because of the greatness of his unfailing love.”  Lamentations 3:32.

I am ready to lay aside my talk of grief for a time…I’m in danger of “oversharing” if not already past that point…but I will return to the subject again in the future…it is part of my journey, a part of me.

In the recent past I read an amazingly insightful book by Tian Dayton entitled Heartwounds: The Impact of Unresolved Trauma and Grief on Relationships. Dayton is a leader in experiential therapy or psychodrama. While her work is not explicitly Christian, it is spiritually-based. It has been extremely helpful to me as it has opened my eyes to much of my own life, especially in the aftermath of my own participation in some psychodramatic experiences based on my own life. [If you are interested in the therapeutic technique of psychodrama read Dayton’s The Drama Within: Psychodrama and Experiential Therapy.]

The power of psychodrama is that it brings body and soul into relation with unresolved trauma or grief. It is not merely cognitive, but somatic and communal. When there is unresolved trauma in our unconscious, we revert back to that trauma when we are triggered by an analogous experience. We then react to the present trigger as if we are again experiencing the original trauma. Consequently, we tend to intensify feelings which may not be appropriate to the situation, or transfer feelings from the past event to the present which is totally confusing because the present does not objectively warrant those feelings. This confuses people in relationship with us, and somestimes we withdraw emotionally in order to protect ourselves from those horrendous past feelings.

Psychodrama provides a way to re-experience the past trauma in a safe environment in order to reconfigure its meaning. Psychodrama confronts the past in a concrete somatic and spiritual experience so that we symbolically but nevertheless authentically relive the past trauma. This confrontation undermines attempts to flee (escape) from the trauma, fight the trauma with intensified feelings or freeze our feelings (a kind of numbing).  While those strategies are helpful in the initial moments of grief as they protect us, if we are stuck in any one of them then the unresolved trauma will negatively affect our sense of peace and relationships with others.

Psychodrama offers an occasion for resolving the trauma. It resolves it by reorganizing a memory.  By entering the past drama through role play, one is able to gain perspective and assign new meaning to the experience.  The drama creates a new narrative–it is a redoing of the past through undoing the past. The new narrative provides a new frame of reference for drawing meaning from the event as we reconstruct the past with new awareness, perspective and insight.

Through one psychodrama last week I was able to re-experience the grief of Sheila’s funeral on May 2, 1980. I had not grieved like that since May 2, 1980. It opened again for me the floodgates of tears which I had unconsciously held in reserve through numbing and withdrawal. Psychodrama, as a therapeutic technique, was a blessing to me. Re-entering the narrative, I was able give it new meaning and see what I had not seen previously due to the overwhelming grief.

As I reflected on the meaning and process of that experience (and it was not my only dramatic reliving), I began to more deeply appreciate the psycho-dramatic nature of the sacraments themselves. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Assembly are dramatic re-creations of divine redemptive events; they are dramatic narratives that provide a frame of reference for meaningful lives within the story of God. They are interpretative events that somatically and spiritually root us in the redemptive story.

This is not only so at an individual level as we individually participate in the sacraments–we each have our own personal experience of God through these dramatic events, but it is also a corporate or communal experience. As we gather around or beside the waters of baptism, we re-experience our own baptism and we participate with the one who is being baptized. Thus, I do not particularly like private or familial baptisms–it robs the community of the psychodramatic experience. As we gather around the table, we experience the reality of community through eating and drinking together. As we assemble before the throne of God, we participate in the reality of “heaven on earth” as we worship with the saints in a way that transcends time and space.

The sacraments are divine invitations into redemptive pyschodramas. They are no mere symbols but actual means of divine encounter whereby we somatically, pyschologically, concretely and spiritually relive the story of God’s redemption. Sacramental experiences are both cathartic (a cleansing) and rehabilitative (reconstruction); they reconstitute the present for us so that we have a renewed narrative for living with meaning in the story of God.

I assemble with the saints to experience again the sacramental drama that provides meaning for my life in the place of futility, hope in the place of despair, and communal support in the place of isolation.

Twenty-eight years ago this morning–at about 3:00am–I was awoken to the news that my wife of two years, eleven months and eight days had died during the night.

Sheila and I agreed that she would undergo corrective back surgery so that she could carry a child full term.  We had already experienced one miscarriage and would like to avoid another. We decided to have the surgery with her life-long doctor in Atlanta, Georgia. While she recuperated at her parent’s home in North Georgia I would complete my reponsibilities at Potter Orphan School and complete my M.A. at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, KY.

Ten days after her surgery, while she was recuperating at her parent’s home, a blood clot entered her heart and stopped it…on April 30, 1980.

I was devastated. Our dreams, hopes and plans for the future were gone in a single moment. It was a sudden tear in my universe that left me–seemingly–nothing. The future would be totally unlike the past; the future would be totally different than what we had planned and what I had anticipated.

In recent months I have focused my personal and spiritual energy on living through my past grief traumas; to relive them in order to better integrate them into my psyche.  A vivid memory that has recently come back to me through this process is how embarrassed I was to be practically carried out of Sheila’s funeral to the waiting cars for the drive to the burial place. Everyone saw my grief; everyone saw my “weakness.”  I felt exposed. This has had a profound affect on my subsequent grief–more than I would really care to admit.

I don’t know how many have shared that sense of embarrassment with me or if I was the only one but it was real for me.  Perhaps the embarrassment of grieving so deeply, so openly, and so despondently was perhaps rooted in my lack of experience in grieving, perhaps in the church’s lack of modeling grief, perhaps in my own personality, perhaps in my inexperience with biblical laments, perhaps in the cultural image of “big boys don’t cry,” perhaps in a faulty theology of hope (“she is in a better place, so don’t cry”), perhaps a false sense of what male strength is, perhaps….  Well, there are  many reasons and perhaps all of them with an element of truth.

I know, however, that sense of embarrassment has shaped me in unconscious ways. It has prevented, to some degree, deep grieving in other losses–at least public grief.  It has moved me toward avoiding my grief rather than fully embracing it and experiencing it. Despite my intellectual knowledge of grief, lament and tears, I had not let myself fully grieve.  I wanted to avoid the embarrassment as well as the pain. I did not want to live through that grief again; I did not want to feel it since I knew how awful it felt.

I am grateful that in the last fifteen years or so the church has increasingly acknowledged the function, role and need of lament within the community of faith.  As lament is taught, modeled and experienced, the kind of embarrassment that I felt on May 2, 1980 is less likely and the opportunities to fully experience grief are enlarged. When the community laments, we grievers do not feel so alone. I think I am over that embarrassement now–partly because I am grieving, partly because I have immersed myself in the biblical laments in the past ten years, partly because I have sat with others in their grief–but it is an image that lingers in my mind in subtle ways. I think embarrassment is part of my past now rather than my present but it is also part of my history. That, too, I must integrate into my psyche by the power of God’s Spirit.

Psalm 6, though primarily about physical healing, is a text I read through the lens of psychological healing.  I hear myself in that prayer; I hear the yearnings of my own heart. The New Living Translation provides a vivid translation.

 2  Have compassion on me, Lord, for I am weak.
       Heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
 3  I am sick at heart.
       How long, O Lord, until you restore me?

 4  Return, O Lord, and rescue me.
        Save me because of your unfailing love.

 6  I am worn out from sobbing.
        All night I flood my bed with weeping,
        drenching it with my tears.
 7a My vision is blurred by grief;

 8  Go away, all you who do evil,
       for the Lord has heard my weeping.

Tears are wonderful healers; they are divine healers.  Tears release emotional stress; biochemically, tears of grief release chemicals that have built up during emotional stress.  These tears have a different chemical composition than other kinds of tears. Grief tears release physiological, pyschological and spiritual toxicity.  They are God’s gift to humanity to process the hurt of a painful world.

Psalm 6 is my lament–a reminder that tears are healthy.  They are not an embarrassement though I have often held back the tears because I feared embarrasment.  Instead, tears are part of healing.  Those who live through the tears will reap the joy of healing (a paraphrase of Psalm 126:6).

I’ve had a good cry today.  I feel better.  I feel some of the healing that God intends for tears to bring us.  Thanks for listening.

Give sorrow words; grief that does not speak

Whispers to the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.

Shakespeare, Macbeth

Some of the Psalm lines I quoted in my previous post were from Psalm 84.  I had read this Psalm many times in the past, but this past week it has made an indelible impression on my heart.  I don’t know why it did this time–perhaps this past week’s focus on grief, perhaps the recent book on assembly Bobby Valentine, Johnny Melton and I authored, perhaps it was my past experiences in assembly, or perhaps it was just the right time for God’s Spirit to speak to my heart through this text. I don’t know–but the experience of this text this past week was powerful for me.

The Psalm speaks of the yearning for home–“a place in his courts to rest” (from the song, not the Psalm but it is the idea). The sparrow has a home and so does the swallow–a place of safety where she may hatch her young. It is a nest of peace, tranquility, companionship and joy.

There is such a place for believers near the altar of God–near the mercy, compassion and grace of God. To dwell in the house of God is to fill the emptiness of our souls; to experience the joy of presence rather than the grief of loss. It is the dwelling place of God himself, and our hearts and flesh cry out for that presence.

Our present reality, however, is that our pilgrimage takes us through the “Valley of Baca” or the Valley of Weeping. Our journey does not take us around pain and grief but through them. I think I have often sought to transcend the pain rather than experience it. I have sometimes excelled at the art of jumping to a different place like in the movie “Jumper”–to transport myself to another moment, to escape to a different reality–instead of sitting in my feelings, experiencing the pain and moving through the grief.

The divine promise in this Psalm is that those who set their heart to experience the presence of God will find blessing and strength. As they move through the dry (ironic, huh?) Valley of Weeping in the summer, God will provide autumn rains that create pools of water to refresh them. The pilgrims will move from strength to strength despite their pain, grief and times of weakness.

I connect with this Psalm at many levels. At one level, while the Valley of Weeping has been and still is a dark and painful place for me, there are also times of refreshment–springs of water–which comfort me through encountering God in those dark places. God seeks us even in the darkness and perhaps particularly in the pain. His presence is felt in those moments which turn lament into praise.

At another level, while I have discovered those moments in private meditation, more often than not I have found them in the courts of praise among God’s people. To dwell in the court of the Lord for the Psalmist is more about the public assembly of God’s people in the temple courts where God met his people–it was home for the Psalmist or at least the home he wanted.

I can remember many different times when I felt transformed–moved from lament to praise–through worshipping God with the assembled saints. I remember a moment in the late summer of 2001 after Joshua’s death and my divorce that during the assembly I felt a divine comfort and whereas my heart was previously burdened I was able to release that lament to praise. It is not a permanent release–I still carry much of that burden, as I have discovered–but it was nevertheless an authentic, meaningful experience which still soothes my heart.

At bottom, grief needs both public (assembly) and private (meditation) encounters with God. It needs a safe place, both in the assembly and in communion with God, to bare its soul and to feel its pain. It needs both community and the inner world of the heart–both authentically living in the presence of the living God.

The heart that cries for the living God and journeys toward him will know the joy of living in the courts of God–a place of rest, peace and safety. This is the blessedness of relationship with God.

I am still on my journey–I have not yet arrived, and I know I have many fellow-travelers who are walking the same road with me.

“Blessed are those whose strength is in [God], who have set their hearts on pilgrimage [to the courts of God].”  Psalm 84:5

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have spent the last week in a setting that helped me to relive, move through and more deeply heal some of the trauma of my life. The deaths of Sheila, Joshua and my marriage have left me with some deep scars.

Only within the past eighteen months have I realized how deeply they still pain me and affect my self-image, my relationship with God and my relationship with others. Recognizing the need for some focused healing, I sought out a means of living through my grief again through some experiential and spiritual therapy. It was painfully but wonderfully meaningful.

I added to that experience my own discipline throughout the week of reading twenty five Psalms a day with the explicit purpose of experiencing the text anew and letting it speak for me. As I read through the Psalms I wrote down in a journal any line that expressed something in my heart. I used the Psalms to surface my feelings, my pain, my anger, and my sin. It was a cathartic exercise.

I decided to read the Psalms in the order they appear in the canon, that is, 1 through 150. I partly moved in this direction since I knew the first three books of the Psalms were largely lament while the last two books of the Psalms were largely praise. I wanted to experience the Psalms as a move through lament to praise, if indeed my heart could feel its way through them in that way.

I know this this is not a historical-critical approach to the Psalms nor the exegetical method that I would recommend or teach. However, it is a form of spiritual reading as I sought to let the Psalms identify with my own experience and allow them to speak for me out of my own pain and hurt. Below are some lines that were particularly meaningful. In future posts, I will focus on some themes or particulars that shaped my healing experience through reading the Psalms. I used the New Living Translation for my reading and quote it below. I have probably provided too many for blog readers…but I have many more written down. 🙂

“I am sick at heart.
How long, O Lord, until you restore me?”
Psalm 6:3

“My problems go from bad to worse.
Oh, save me from them all!
Feel my pain and see my trouble.”
Psalm 25:17-18a

“I am dying from grief;
My years are shortened by sadness.
Misery has drained my strength;
I am wsting away from within.”
Psalm 31:10

“My days are filled with grief…
My groans come from an anguished heart…
Do not stand at a distance, my God.”
Psalm 38:6b, 8b, 21b

“Hear my prayer, O Lord!
Listen to my cries for help!
Don’t ignore my tears…
Spare me so I can smile again.”
Psalm 39:12-13a

“You keep track of all my sorrows,
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.
Psalm 56:8

“My eyes are swollen with weeping,
waiting for my God to help me…
I am suffering and in pain.
Rescue me, O God, by your saving power.”
Psalm 69:3b,29

“My life is an example to many…
Don’t abandon me when my strength is failing…
O God, you have taught me from my earliest childhood,
and I have constantly told others about the wonderful things you do.
You have allowed me to suffer much hardshp,
but you will restore me to life again.”
Psalm 71:7a, 9b, 17, 20ab

“My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak,
but God remains my strength of heart;
he is mine forever.”
Psalm 73:26

“I cry out to the Lord without holding back.
Oh, that God would listen to me!…
There can be no joy for me until he acts.”
Psalm 77:1, 2b.

“Happy are those who are strong in the Lord…
When they walk through the Valley of Weeping,
it will become a place of refreshing springs,
where pools of blessing collect after the rains.”
Psalm 84:5a, 6

“But even the best of these years are filled with pain and trouble.
Satisfy [me] in the morning with your unfailing love,
so [I] may sing for joy to the end of [my life].”
Psalm 90:10c, 14

“Unless the Lord helped me,
I would soon have died…
When doubts filled my mind,
your comfort gave me renewed hope and cheer.”
Psalm 94:17a, 18

“Don’t turn away from me in my time of distress.
My heart is sick, withered like grass.
My tears run down into my drink.”
Psalm 102:2ab, 4a, 9b

“My heart is full of pain.
Help me, O Lord my God!
Save me because of your unfailing love.”
Psalm 109:22b, 26

“Now I can rest again,
for the Lord has been so good to me.
He has saved me from death,
my eyes from tears.”
Psalm 116:7-8ab.

“I weep with grief,
encourage me by your word.
Your promise revives me;
it comforts me in all my troubles.
The suffering you sent was good for me,
for it taught me to pay attention to your principles.
Now let yoru unfailing love comfort me,
just as you promised me, your servant.
I have suffered much, O Lord;
restore my life again, just as you promised.
Do not let my hope be crushed. ”
Psalm 119:28, 50, 71, 76, 107, 116b

“I took my troubles to the Lord;
I cried out to him, and he answered my prayer.”
Psalm 120:1

“Those who plant in tears
will harvest with shouts of joy.
They weep as they go to plan their seed,
but they sing as they return with the harvest.”
Psalm 126:5-6

“The Lord will work out his plans for my life–
for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever.
Don’t abandon me, for you made me.”
Psalm 138:8

“I pour out my complaints before him
and I tell him all my troubles.
For I am overwhelmed,
and you alone know the way I should turn.”
Psalm 142:2-3a

“For the glory of your name, O Lord, save me.
In your righteousness, bring me out of this distress.”
Psalm 143:11

“The Lord lifts the burdens of those bent beneath their loads.”
Psalm 146:8b

“He heals the brokenhearted,
binding up their wounds.”
Psalm 147:3

“Sing to the Lord a new song,
sing his praises in the assembly of the faithful.
For the Lord delights in his people.”
Psalm 149:1, 4a

“Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord!
Praise the Lord!”
Psalm 150:6