We Were Made for This

“For God alone my soul in silence waits.” –Psalm 62

I seek solitude. It seems I can’t get enough of it.  How do I go on?  Why am I being so dramatic? No one close to me has died.  And yet I cannot escape the truth that something in my core has been assaulted by love.  When I reflect on this summer I find I am in a state of unlearning more than learning.  I am having to recognize that what I was taught about life and meaning are in error, they do not stand up to suffering and death.  How can I explain?

I remember I was talking to an atheist woman who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  It was bad, and it would take her life very soon; she had just received the diagnosis.  We talked awhile, and in the end she said that I probably had no words of comfort for her because she has no faith.  I told her she was right, but I did say something to the effect of, “if you ever get a time where you are afraid or panic, just remember we were made for this.  We were made to live, to have joy, to suffer and to die.  It is who we are as humans.”  “We were made for this.”  In all honesty it was something I heard a classmate say when he was talking about his wife having a baby, but I extended the metaphor.  We were made to live, to have joy, to suffer, and to die.

Talking to a young woman at my church this week, she likened such a cycle to her garden.  She said, “you plan, you toil, you care, you watch it all grow, you pick the fruit…but in the end it all dies.”  How profound! Of course what I am talking about is not new, it is found in the Gospels, and more explicitly in Ecclesiastes.  “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” this is wisdom that the ego hates.  Even when the ego accepts death of the body it insists on immortality of the soul, it insists on glory.  But what is immortality and what is glory? 

Is glory or immortality leaving a permanent imprint on human history?  Is it having a legacy?  “Vanity! Vanity! All is Vanity!”  No, this is not what awaits us…it awaits no one.  Even the most famous of our past have little day-to-day impact on our lives.  No it is a vanity; ego in the face of death leads one to madness.  But that is precisely what I am unlearning: how to be mad. I am having to let go (unwillingly I might add) of the illusion that my life will have some transcendent impact on the cosmos; it won’t.  I have to let go the illusion that I am indispensable part of God’s plan; I am very expendable.  I am having to let go the illusion that I can fix the world; nope.  And the worst one: I am having to let go the illusion God will miraculously care for everyone on Earth in a material, “practical” way; that doesn’t happen either.

I…we are all rather fragile, small and insignificant creatures.  Our days are spent in toil and struggle in the effort to bring about some meaning, some glory, some justification for our existence; but there is none.  Do I despair?  Perhaps.  But I am attempting to come to that place where we all will be one day…that place, that point where we come to understand our entire delicate existence is completely dependent on something other than ourselves.  To be at that place is to be at a place of absolute surrender; and yet only there can we experience our identity as it is; our true identity.  But this can be more terrifying than death.

Who are we if we cannot justify our own existence?  And then what justifies our existence?

Love and only love…perhaps.

Epilogue to the Theodicy Series: After Hospital Chaplaincy

“I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind…your terrors have destroyed me…darkness is my only companion” – Psalm 88

It was not my intention to write a series on Theodicy this spring before my chaplaincy internship this summer at a local hospital.  But, in retrospect it was a wonderful practice before entering the rooms of suffering, angst, and despair.  It prompted me to identify my theology, and this summer I practiced it, and I am still in the process of doing theological reflection from what I have experienced. 

This summer was difficult.  Chaplaincy was difficult for me; seeing people suffer all the time was difficult for me.  It was difficult for a few reasons: 1) I am an empathetic person, so it is easy for me to feel with another person, whether suffering or joyous, 2) Theologically, it was a time to really reflect on the darkness where God is present.  We believe as Christians, that God is Love, God is present everywhere, and while there are worse places of suffering than a suburban hospital, the hospital did provide a doorway into the raw, real experience of grief, loss and abandonment that is a part of our world…and so this summer I had to bear the tension between the reality of a very broken world, and the belief that God is present in this suffering and pain, and that ultimately there is hope. 

I have always known hope to be persistent, this summer I actually experienced places where hope had been defeated. I was invited to these dark places.  I remember being with a man who had tried to commit suicide six times, who was non-verbal at the point of my visit.  When I told him I was a chaplain, he desperately wanted to hold my hand, draw it close to him and just lay there with my hand in his.  I was there for 10 minutes in silence, holding a man’s hand who wanted to die, did he want hope too?  That I don’t know, but above all he wanted connection and release from his soul pain.  Another tough encounter was an elderly woman with dementia, who outlived her entire family (her son had died two months prior); she had no one.  Her cancer had invaded her spine making her a paraplegic, she was alone, wasting away, lost in her memories because what this reality offered her was intolerable.  Another elderly woman was alone because she was abandoned.  Her family, along with all her money to care for her, was nowhere to be found.  In silence she waited for the state to provide a place to call home, a place to die eventually alone in her pain.

From these experiences to experiences with bloodied victims in the trauma bay, to addicts whose bodies were failing because of their disease, to being told about sexual abuse, domestic violence, and elderly abuse, I understood what it meant to be frail and limited.  I could not fix anyone.  I witnessed unquenchable suffering and pain; and though I have studied it, I have read about it, I have seen it from afar, the experience is much different from the theory, and I admit it caught me off guard (I have heard the same of the experience of dying).  “Oh this is what it is, this is what it is like” was a thought that I had many times in patient’s rooms either while they were talking to me about how many months they had to live, or how they didn't know how they would continue on with their lives with this new diagnosis.

How are we all so unprepared for it?  We know suffering and death happens, but it always happens to them, and when it strikes us how woefully disarmed we are!  I have seen people cope with suffering in a variety of ways. I spoke with fundamentalist Christians who justified it as a test from God, or explained a family members’ death away by saying that they must have committed some sin they did not ask forgiveness for.  I have been with atheists, who love spiritual care, who are honest about their regrets, the pains of the past, the fears of the future…they seemed capable of holding the “whole” of what was happening.  I know they were holding it because they were the ones who were crumbling.  And who wouldn’t crumble?  Persons of faith may be able to stand back up, but to never crumble?

At the end of this internship, we had a graduation and I got a certificate.  I could not help but think to myself “How American Church?”  I went to those in despair, to those in pain, to those who are sick, to those who are abandoned and I get a certificate.  I am giving away my certificate to the Church board who sent me to the Chaplaincy Internship; they can have it.  Because what I am left with is something that has altered my being, my understanding of ministry, my understanding of God, and my understanding of our humanity.  I am left cut open.

I leave with Psalm 88.  It needs no exegesis, no biblical scholarship, it is prayer, plain and simple.  And a prayer that I have been praying a lot. And a prayer I hear in the souls of those who suffer:

O Lord, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.

Let my prayer enter into your presence; incline your ear to my lamentation.

For I am full of trouble; my life is at the brink of the grave.

I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I have become like one who has no strength;

Lost among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave,

Whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.

You have laid me in the depths of the Pit, in dark places, in the abyss.

Your anger weighs upon me heavily, and all your great waves overwhelm me.

You have put my friends far from me; you have made me to be abhorred by them; I am in prison and cannot get free.

My sight has failed me because of trouble; Lord, I have called upon you daily; I have stretched out my hands to you.

Do you work wonders for the dead?  Will those who have died stand up and give you thanks?

Will your loving-kindness be declared in the grave?  Your faithfulness in the land of destruction?

Will your wonders be known in the dark? Or your righteousness in the country where all is forgotten?

But as for me, O Lord, I cry to you for help; in the morning my prayers comes before you.

Lord, why have you rejected me? Why have you hidden your face from me?

Ever since my youth, I have been wretched and at the point of death; I have borne your terrors with a troubled mind.

Your blazing anger has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me.

They surround me all day long like a flood; they encompass me on every side.

My friend and my neighbor you have put away from me, and darkness is my only companion.