Thoughts

I’ve been thinking lately a lot about the importance of lament and mourning. The simple act of actually allowing ourselves to feel our grief and sadness, and responding to it by lamenting what isn’t right, and mourning what we’ve lost.

Someone on a podcast I was listening to the other day casually mentioned that they “shed some tears” after a difficult conversation, and that phrase grabbed me: we “shed” tears.

On a superficial level, of course, we are simply describing a biological event: “to pour forth in drops,” as the dictionary puts it. But we also use this word to describe how a caterpillar “sheds” old skin it doesn’t need anymore, or how a tree “sheds” leaves in the fall to prepare for winter and new life in the spring, or how a duck’s feathers “shed” water so it doesn’t get wet when it swims.

Apparently the etmyology of the word comes from the Old English sceadan, which means “to divide, separate, part company” (among other things).

I wonder what else we shed when we shed tears. We all feel better after a “good cry,” so I wonder if shedding tears also sheds us of the toxicity (emotional and physical, I’d imagine) of ignoring or suppressing our grief.

When we shed tears, we allow old, useless things to fall away, making room for new life to spring up.

Yesterday my wife Deb forwarded me Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation email. He was reflecting on Moses asking God to “show his glory” (Exodus 33:18), and how God responded in an unusual way: “I shall place you in the cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I shall take my hand away, and you will see my backside, but my face will not be seen” (33:22–23).

Rohr then brings his own experience of prostate cancer into the light of this passage:

My best spiritual knowing almost always occurs after the fact, in the remembering—not seen “until God has passed by.” I realized that in the moments of diagnosis, doctor’s warnings, waiting, delays, and the surgery itself, I was as fragile, scared, and insecure as anybody would be. If I could stay with the full narrative all the way into and through, only afterward could I invariably see, trust, and enjoy the wonderful works of God.

… It is largely after the fact that faith is formed—and gloriously transmuted into hope for the future. Only after the fact can you see that you were being held and led during the fact. During the fact, you do not enjoy or trust your own strength at all, in fact, quite the opposite. You just cry out in various ways. Then God, for some wonderful reason, is able to fill the gap.

This rings true in my life. But then I got to thinking about all we are learning now about trauma. Trauma is held in the body, and it actually keeps people stuck in the past. Whenever the trauma is triggered, the body believes it is actually still experiencing the traumatic event.

It seems to me, then, that trauma can block spiritual transformation, because it doesn’t allow a person to look back on an experience. The traumatized don’t have an “after the fact” unless their trauma is processed and healed, because they’re living in an eternal “now” of being hurt.

Heal the trauma and then you can look back on the event and see how God was holding you the whole time. If you don’t heal the trauma, you’re stuck in the confusion and fear of “during the event.”

“He was unable to do many miracles there because of their disbelief.” – Matthew 13:58

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That sentence is so remarkable. We often think of miracles as simple, unilateral expressions of God’s power: it happens because God decided it should happen and he overrules every other will involved and makes a miracle happen.

But that’s not the witness of the Gospels. Jesus so often tells people their faith has healed them. He can’t do miracles when there is a lack of faith. And sometimes it seems like Jesus isn’t even aware of the miracle until it happens (the woman with the issue of blood, for example).

A lot of harmful theologies have been built on this premise, so don’t hear what I’m not saying, please. But some kind of faith does seem necessary for God to do his work among us.

God’s will and power are made manifest in our midst when faith is present. In other words, God refuses to work unilaterally, overpowering us with what’s best for us. Instead, God insists on mutuality. God invites us to trust him, and then responds to our little mustard seeds of faith by bringing his presence and power to bear on our lives.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but I think about stand-up comedy. Is a comedian funny if no one in the room laughs at the jokes? Comedy doesn’t work like that. A comedian cannot be unilaterally funny. For comedy to work, there must be a mutual participation by both comedian and audience in the set. If there’s no back-and-forth between comedian and audience, there’s no communion, no resonance, no comedy.

That’s why you’ll often hear comedians end their sets by saying something like “You’ve been a great audience tonight!” instead of “I’ve been a great comedian tonight!” There is a recognition that the audience has brought something to the table, not just the comedian.

I think this is why Jesus so often tells people “Your faith has healed you.” rather than “God’s power has healed you.” Jesus honors their faith-filled participation in their own healing.

God saves saves the world, then, through the trembling faith of his people. And faith isn’t a flex. It isn’t something we can get more of by trying harder, squeezing our spiritual muscles to eek a bit more faith out.

No, faith is more of a letting go than a clenching up. Faith isn’t striving, it’s consenting to God’s invitation to trust. And as we consent to God, God consents to us (!), and we are drawn into the very life of God.

And then we hear God’s gracious, smiling benediction: “Go in peace, your faith has saved you.”

“The whole of our nature is present in Christ, insofar as he is human.” – St. Cyril of Jerusalem

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What could it mean that Christ receives the Spirit at his baptism? I love St. Cyril’s explanation of this event:

The only begotten Son receives the Spirit, but not for his own advantage, for the Spirit is his, and is given in him and through him… He receives it to renew our nature in its entirety and to make it whole again, for in becoming human, he took our entire nature to himself.

So Christ receives the Spirit at his baptism because this is what the Father will do for all of us as his adopted children. Christ undergoes all that we undergo, because he has joined himself to us in our human nature.

And this is because salvation is more than just an abstract mark on a heavenly ledger sheet. The gift of the Spirit is salvation! It is the abiding presence of God in our midst, now touching our human nature in a way God could not until God became human and bore our sin in the body of Christ, and conquered the principalities and powers on the cross.

And so after his resurrection, Jesus breathes on his disciples (very sacramental of him, by the way!) and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And they do! And we do as well, because Christ did. Praise be to God for his most precious gift.