Cry for Hope

The following is a reflection I shared at Commons last Sunday.

I must give credit to Walter Thiessen, a professor at St. Stephen’s University, for the thoughts he shared with me on the topic of lamenting.  He showed me how to bring my darkness to God and hope for rescue.

Text: John 11:1-44

Randy used an example of chiaroscuro painting, a sixteenth century Italian style that literally means light and dark, as the background for this week’s power point. How fitting, as the story we just read illuminates the contrast between light and dark, life and death, suffering and redemption, lamenting and hope.

As I read this story, this is what I noticed.   Lazarus, a good friend of Jesus whom he loved, is sick and yet it takes Jesus two days to leave the place he is in and head to Judea.  Why is this?  He seems so confident that Lazarus won’t die.  In fact, he declares that it is not a fatal illness.  Still, there is this hint of what is to come – an occasion to show God’s glory by glorifying God’s son.  It seems the purpose in waiting is connected to the opportunity to teach the disciples something important.  However, by the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus had already been dead for four days, long enough to be buried.  Martha confronts Jesus with a mixture of anger and faith – she accuses Jesus, saying he could have prevented Lazarus’s death, but also proclaims her faith in Him.  Mary also confronts Jesus with the words, “if only you had been here.”  How many of us have felt similar abandonment?  Jesus’ response is surprising, not only does he well up with anger, he also breaks down in tears.  Other mourners join in the accusations that Jesus could have prevented his friend’s death – their anger mixed with faith.  When Jesus tells them to move the stone, Martha responds with disbelief despite her earlier proclamation of faith in His words.

Why was Jesus filled with anger? And then tears?  Perhaps his anger came from the same source as our own when faced with the grief of those we care about – this is not right, not how it should be, not how it was meant to be, not how it will be.  Jesus saw brokenness in his dear friends and knew it needed to be expressed.

In contemporary societies, we often thinking of lamenting as a response to death (and fittingly so) but to the Jewish community of the first century, lamenting was a more familiar practice, a necessary part of one’s devotion and religion.  Throughout the Old Testament – in the Psalms, Job and the writings of Jeremiah – we see examples of people bringing their pleas before God, expressing their suffering and despair, their doubt and fear, even their anger.

I grew up in a church context that seemed to view the expression of doubt as the opposite of faith.  It seemed that true faith left little room for expressing grief or disappointment to God.  When I was in grade six my brother became severely ill, and I remember so clearly the pressure to ‘believe’ that he would be okay.  It felt like there was little room for expressing anger or fear or sadness about my brother’s illness.

It wasn’t until I reached university that I began hearing people around me talk about our need to lament.  When I went through a period of insomnia, fueled by anxiety, a friend offered me a prayer to read before bed each night. It read,

This night and every night
seems infinite with questions,
and sleep as elusive as answers.

Pain and longing are always present,
dulled only a little by the distractions of day.
I am weary; I am angry.
I am confused.

Circle me, Lord.
Keep despair and disillusion without.
Bring a glimmer of hope within.

Circle me, Lord.
Keep nightmare without.
Bring moments of rest within.

Circle me, Lord.
Keep bitterness without.
Bring a sense of Your presence within.

This prayer was a turning point in how I understood my emotions and my relation to God.  I was afraid to express anger to God for fear of it being seen as doubt or rebellion.  Someone had finally told me it was okay to say I was confused, angry, scared.  It was the first time I saw this confession not as a lack of faith, but as a plea for rescue.  It was the beginning of a long journey of learning to identify and express painful emotions to God.

To lament is to express our grief, both for ourselves, and for our communities.  Through lamenting we bring our complaints to God, in the same way as the Old Testament writers did, even as Jesus did, and we confess that things are not as they should be.

The truth is we are all broken.  At times downtrodden, lonely, mourning. We try to cover it up, to have the appearance of having it all together. Society hands us every kind of mask so that we can hide what exists on the inside. We long for something, someone to offer us hope. And Christ not only acknowledges that brokenness, he blesses it.

We hunger and thirst for righteousness. We feel the ache within us when we see the brokenness that we have caused in another’s life, when we see injustices in our world. We are spiritually hungry for something to fulfill us. We chase elusive dreams of wealth, power, entertainment and pleasure – something to satisfy that empty ache, because inside we all know that something is not right – when tsunamis and earthquakes decimate our global neighbours, when children starve in one part of the world and obesity rates soar in another, when a woman is murdered in downtown Hamilton.

Jesus offers us a place for that ache. He validates it. He suggests that it is necessary, even healthy to mourn. This is why there is a heartfelt need for healthy ways to lament. God asks for us to express that ache, not to cover it up. Not to drown it out or push it aside. To say life gets messy and sometimes we don’t know the way forward. To express our doubts and uncertainties, rather than negate the mystery of faith.

A lament is not whining.  It is not the muttering and grumbling we see from the Israelites as they wandered the dessert.  To lament is to name our suffering, to give voice to the brokenness in our lives and to ask God for redemption.  We name the desolation of winter, while hoping for the coming of spring.

By lamenting we give form to our experience of suffering.  We realize that we are not alone.  Pain isolates us from one another and creates barriers of distrust, but lamenting reminds us that we are all broken.  And in our brokenness, God draws near.  Throughout the scriptures we see God responding to expressions of pain and longing, just as Jesus responded to the mourning of Mary and Martha.

Even in expressing our doubt to God, we act in faith.  We voice that this is not how things should be, not how the world was created, not what we believe based on God’s promises.  Lamenting leads us to hope in Christ.

The story of Lazarus is a clear foreshadowing of the crucifixion.  Christ sets for us an example in his pain, humiliation, and abandonment.  He expresses his suffering to God with the haunting words “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  But the story does not end there.  There is Resurrection.

To lament is not just to express our anguish.  It is to ask for redemption, to hope and believe that God will make all our brokenness whole.

This is not the kind of naive hope that sees a silver lining in every cloud or a rainbow after every storm. Sometimes storms come through our lives and they decimate us.  Some injustice is too evil to have a silver lining.

Tim Huff describes this type of hope as “anything but shiny and bright. Unpolished. Crushed. Twisted and bent, but somewhere in the wrinkles, hope continues to hum.  It continues to breathe. Often shallow breaths at best; even the faintest final breath, whispering one more note in the music of the soul.”

Hope that sometimes sounds more like lament.

In a postmodern society, where the basis of social norms, language, even truth, are constantly being challenged by theories of relativity and social construction, it becomes so hard to find any lasting sense of hope.

I know what it feels like to lack purpose.  To feel like everything I am striving for amounts to nothing.  To feel hellish unrest driven by anger and despair at all the world’s (and my own) brokenness.  And to feel like there isn’t anything real, substantial or true to hold on to in the face of this brokenness.

The only thought I keep coming back to is hope.  If we are so bogged down by complacency, so familiar with routine that we can walk through our days with our eyes closed, meaning and purpose become pretty elusive.  If all we can see around us is drudgery and endless unsolvable problems, it is as if we are pushing a rock up a hill but never able to reach the top.

But if, by some miracle, hope fills our imagination and enables us to see the possibility of stumbling upon something beautiful, even in littered and abandoned back alleys, our purpose becomes more clear.  This potential leads us forward, despite our shortcomings, our failings, our disappointments.  We stumble forward with the hope of finding something deeply meaningful and I think if we are willing to search it out, it will always be there to be found.

How do we cultivate such hope? Through lament.  Through mourning the brokenness of our lives and our world.   Lamenting expresses the pain of our lives, but it also confesses that we are capable of stumbling towards love.

“The world is wide and full of beauty and agony” (Joel Mason).  We all know this.  We all experience joy and pain, sometimes in the same breath.  It is only when you are able to see one that you can see the other.  If it weren’t for beauty, I would not be disturbed by agony.  If I didn’t believe justice, peace, and hope were possible for humanity, I would not be grieved by their absence.  And the reverse must also be true, if it were not for the pain we experience, how could we experience beauty.

Kahlil Gibran, an early twentieth century poet, wrote:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.  And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.  And how else can it be?  The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.  Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?  And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?  When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.  When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.  Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”  But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Deep inside, we understand this.  In the end, we are broken.  But this is what makes us beautiful.  This is what gives us hope.

So how do we lament?  There are infinite ways.  For some of us, we may best feel and express our lamentations through music, or written words.  The words of others – poets, saints, or scripture – can lend voice when we cannot find our own.  But words are not the only acts of lament.  Perhaps we lament through breaking bread, or washing the feet of another.  Through observing nature, through tears, through silence.  The point is only this – to feel and to express to God, in whatever way, the hurt of suffering.  To give it voice.  And to believe He listens.

To close, I thought it would be fitting to give us an opportunity to practice lamenting.  Here we have an opportunity to grieve the brokenness of our world, our relationships, and our inner selves.  And to remind ourselves that we hope in the God who can and is and will rescue and make everything new.  We are going to do this by reading Psalm 13, one of the many examples of lamenting psalms.  Then we will listen to a song that expresses the brokenness of our contemporary society, and we will close with a community prayer that we’ll read together.

Psalm 13

¹ How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
² How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

³ Look on me and answer, LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
⁴ and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

⁵ But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
⁶ I will sing the LORD’s praise,
for he has been good to me.

Song: For You and Me by Flyer and Mason

Community Lament

There are a few people who will lead us through this prayer, and in each place where you see bold writing, we will read out loud together.

In the silences that are given throughout the prayer there is an opportunity for us to remember and name the places of our brokenness individually and as a community.  For the first space, I encourage you to speak out examples of violence or lack of peace, whether it be people you care about in violent situations, or places of violence in our world.  In the second space, we will name the brokenness in our bodies and creation.  Finally, we will spend a moment in silence in the third space to express to God the places that we feel fear, loss and rage in our own lives.

Community Lament
written by Walter Thiessen

O God, we look around us today
We see a world that is broken and people in pain
How can you look on, Lord of compassion?
Does your heart break with our hearts?

Or do you see only the hardness of our hearts?
Do you see us turning from you and from each other?
There is so much darkness all around us.
There is so much darkness yet inside us.

Hurting and lost, we lash out against each other;
There is violence near and far.

Lord, remember us, do you see…
[here time is given to name places
and situations of violence near and far]

All creation groans and strains
Our bodies falter and suffer

Lord, remember us, do you see…
[here time is given to name people
and parts of creation that are ill]

Our souls cannot bear all the loss
Fear and rage overwhelm us

Lord, remember us, do you hear our silent cry?
[here a time of silence is given
to listen to our souls]

What we feel between us is not your peace
What we see around us is not your justice
What we place our trust in is not your love
This is not how things should be
This is not how things will be

You are present in all this mess
You will not leave us alone or unfinished
Transform us, Lord Who washes our feet
Heal our land, Lord Who forgives all
Re-create our world, Lord of Glory.

We wait for you. We wait.

Amen

glimpse

I want to tell this story well. All I have is an imperfect offering.

I watch leaves change.  I watch as dogs walk their people, and garbage trucks come and go and the clouds drift and the sky lightens, and darkens, and lightens again.

“The whole world is moving, and I’m standing still.”

Here, in this small moment.  One deep breath.

And then…

In solidarity with LGBTQ Ugandans

So here’s the situation.

For a few years now, the Ugandan Parliament has been talking about an anti-gay bill that would result in severe punishments for those who practice homosexuality in the country.  People would be able to report openly gay individuals, who could serve life in prison or even face the death penalty.  Already in the country, women who are caught engaging in “homosexual activity” face corrective rape.

I’m sure you’ve seen the online petitions that are being created to try to stop this bill.  They were effective once before in having the bill tabled.  The current Parliament closes on Friday, May 13 and a select group of MPs are now trying to have the bill pushed through tomorrow, before Parliament closes.

I will be brutally honest.  When I first started reading all about this, I was hesitant to speak up or sign petitions.  If LGBTQ people in Uganda live in an intolerant society, maybe they should just live their lives quietly and not get themselves in trouble.  It sucks that there is such intolerance and hatred in the world, but why make yourself a target by coming out or getting caught.  In my mind these people might be better off choosing a lifetime of solitude, or worse, a sham of a relationship with the opposite gender.

Here’s where I realize my ignorance.  Human rights are not given by the state, they are innate in every individual.  Just because a government or society does not recognize a person’s right to love whomever they choose, does NOT mean they do not have that right.  This is obvious when we think about the right to life of those who are victims of genocide.  We don’t just say “they should willing die since their country won’t give them that right.”

The same is true about gay individuals.

What’s more, and the realization of this broke me, only fifty years ago the exact same argument could have been used to tell gay men and women in the United States to live quietly.  Before the Stonewall Riots in 1969, a man or woman caught in homosexual behaviour would be subject to police brutality, fines, even imprisonment.  A person who wanted to acknowledge their love for another person of the same gender lived in constant fear of harassment and hate crimes (and sadly, in some communities this has yet to change).

And let’s be clear about something.  Sure, conservative people are shocked and offended by sexual intimacy between two people of the same gender, and the gay community has been labeled as promiscuous.  But when we say “homosexual behaviour” what do we mean?  A couple could be arrested for holding hands.  For saying “I love you”.  For sharing their life with the person they care about.

Here’s the thing – if it were not for those brave men and women who stood up and claimed their right, even at the cost of their freedom, their safety, even their lives – I would not have the freedom I have now.  I take it for granted that I can walk down the street holding Kathryn’s hand with little fear of physical injury.  I take it for granted that I can post pictures of myself and her on facebook without fearing rejection from my friends and family.  I am free to be myself because people who were not free spoke up for MY right.

How can I not do the same for those in Uganda now?

Please sign this petition.  Please do it right now because tomorrow it could be too late.

out.

It’s been kind of a big month for us, Kathryn and I.  No, wedding bells will not be chiming anytime soon.  But we did take our first trip together, to the sunny and bustling metropolis of St. Stephen, NB.  Okay, it’s sunny but not really bustling and really not a metropolis.  I had booked my flights early in the year with the intention of returning to my university to welcome some dear friends into the alumni community at graduation.  As I anticipated the trip I realized how great this opportunity would be if Kathryn could come along.  Not only would she get to experience the beauty of New Brunswick that I fell in love with, she would also meet some of the people closest to my heart – friends that stood beside me as I wrestled to understand the intersection of my faith and sexuality, and the community that became my home for four years.  Besides which, its impossible to grasp how tiny St. Stephen’s University really is unless one visits.

I was more than excited, as I always am, to visit St. Stephen (and this time with Kathryn!) but as the date got closer I began to get nervous.  Everyone who knows me well in St. Stephen knew by then that I am gay and most were aware that I am dating someone, but I had not actually seen any of those people face to face since my initial coming out in October.  How would they respond?  On top of this, the community is centered on a Christian worldview, granted a liberal worldview in many ways, but Christian none the less.  Would the nature of my relationship clash with anyone’s values or beliefs?  Will I offend anyone by bringing Kathryn?  Will I be judged?

Despite the overwhelming acceptance I have experienced as I’ve come out, these fears still nag in my heart.  Having been submersed as a child in a culture that viewed homosexuality as sinful, its hard for me to grasp that many of the people around me really don’t have an issue with my sexuality, and in fact celebrate it with me.  I assume everyone sees it as wrong and against God’s intended design for my life.  My natural instinct after years of being buried in self-hatred is to approach new situations where my sexuality may be exposed with armor, even weaponry.  Or worse, guilt and shame.

Still, the reassurance of my closest friends gave me peace that regardless of what others may think about me, this trip would be worth whatever risks I felt like we were taking.  And it was truly great.  We celebrated with friends, we explored New Brunswick’s beautiful nature, and we ate really good meals with really great people.  We even got to do a photo shoot with the lovely Shannon May on the shores of Fundy Bay.  Neither Kathryn or I feel particularly comfortable in front of a camera but I trusted that if anyone could take a good picture of us, it would be Shannon.

Once we returned from St. Stephen, the long wait to see our pictures began.  In reality it was only about two weeks but we were (somewhat obsessively) checking facebook on a regular basis to see if the pictures had been posted.  I was really excited to see how they turned out, whether Shannon was able to capture the very first thing that drew me to Kathryn – her smile and her eyes.  And yet, the moment I first saw them posted last night, my stomach dropped.

This is it.  We are really out.  Not only are we holding hands and grinning at each other in some of the pictures, there is actually a picture of us kissing!  Yes, we had given Shannon permission to post this on her company’s facebook page and her blog, but seeing it there and realizing that everyone else could see it too gave a whole new reality to being out as a gay couple.

I am learning to respond to this rise of fear and shame in new ways.  Rather than turning away from that which frightens me, I embrace it.  I choose to own my story, my identity.  And I remember that in this, I am not alone.  Kathryn’s love and the acceptance of my friends and family gives me courage to be authentic and vulnerable.

So in a rather silly way, we chose to embrace this new step in coming out by posting our relationship status on facebook.  Big deal, right?  Please believe me, I do not generally think facebook relationship statuses are all that important, but what was meaningful in this step was the owning of our story.  To take a situation that caused us both fear and shame and say instead that we are proud of our love for one another.  We are free to be who we are, regardless of the opinions of others.

The reality is that as a gay person, I will always be coming out.  I keep tricking myself into believing that I am finally completely out, but there really is no such thing.  In a hetero-dominated society, it will always be assumed that I am straight until I say (vocally or otherwise) that I am not.  Whether its a new coworker, or an old acquaintance, extended relatives or people I am meeting for the first time, I will always have to consider whether I should reveal the gender of the person I love.  When I am in public with Kathryn we must constantly weigh the choice to hold hands or behave in ways that “give us away”.  It can be as as simple as a look or a phrase.  We will always be coming out.

Of course, it will get easier with time.  We will learn that more and more people are gay-positive and really don’t care whether we hold hands or not.  We will learn to cope with those that do care and want to share their opinions with us in friendly or less than friendly ways.  We will increasingly discover that what matters most is that we follow our hearts and be true to ourselves.  That we own our story and free ourselves from shame and fear.

(Footnote: As a bonus, all of this happens to coincide with the launch of http://areyouqueer.ca, an initiative of the Hamilton LGBTQ Wellness Center, the City’s LGBTQ Advisory Committee and the Hamilton Positive Space Collaborative.  The website exists to increase visibility of Hamilton’s LGBTQ community leading up to International Day Against Homophobia on May 17th.)

blessed.

I spoke at the Commons last week.  I was given the task of reflecting on Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount.  We began by reading Matthew 5 aloud and then watched a video from Peter Rollin’s Insurrection Tour, which was used to launch a discussion on faith and certainty. After the discussion time, I shared the following reflection.

Message: “Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.”

Set the Stage: Jesus has just come out of the wilderness after forty days of fasting, he has called his first disciples and began healing and preaching. Large crowds are beginning to following him.

New Prophet: Matthew sets the scene of the Beatitudes on a hillside or mountain, echoes of Moses and Mt. Sinai ring in his first century Jewish readers ears. Matthew is paralleling this new prophet to the ones of old. Jesus was not the first to speak to great crowds. In Jewish tradition, Rabbis would gather their disciples to teach and to interpret the law, just as Moses had done. By setting the scene on a hillside, Matthew is suggesting that Jesus has the authority to interpret God’s laws for His people.

Reimagine: What were those crowds thinking as they gathered? What were the first disciples thinking when they abandoned their fishing nets to follow a stranger? Perhaps the crowds gathered for the same reason we gather here on Sundays. Seeking community, and a connection with something greater than themselves. Longing for hope and healing. Embracing the mystery of this new prophet and healer, the one they will call Messiah.

Politics: Would this Jesus bring with him the power and authority prophesied in scripture? Would he free the Jews from Roman oppression? Some of the Jews believed the coming Messiah would bring political freedom, a revolution (possibly even violent) that would return the Jewish people to the prosperity and glory they experienced during King David’s reign.

The Shocking Opener: Rather than teaching a message of revolution against the Roman empire, rather than interpreting the Law as other rabbis had in the past, Jesus shocks the audience. His introductory words, what we call the Beatitudes, are a deliberate reversal of standard first century Jewish values. Politics, culture and religion in His time were based on wealth, influence and power. Instead Jesus points to the meek, the broken, the dirty and downtrodden, the poor and hungry and lonely and lost. The reality of how jolting these words would have been to their first listeners is lost on us, because most of us have heard them time and time again.

The Unblessable: Jesus calls blessed those thought by his contemporaries to be unblessable, those whose status, circumstances or physical condition would suggest to others that God had not favoured them. God comes to those who are marginalized by society, those who are pushed to the sidelines, to the city limits, away from places of influence and power. Rather than proclaiming a political revolution against the Romans, he blesses the peacemakers and the oppressed.

Shock Today: What would shock us today? Do we too live in a time when politics, culture and religion are based on wealth, influence and power? What values do we as a society, and as the Church, hold today that, if Jesus walked into the room, would be flipped over? What would His words be to a culture that values self-sufficiency, individualism, and saving money for the future? To a culture that pays the highest salaries to celebrities and sports stars? To a culture that creates suburbs of homogeneity, surrounding ourselves with people who think and act and speak exactly like us because it makes us feel safer?

Impossible Standard: It is easy to read these scriptures and see nothing but a list of rules, a standard of impossible living. “Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly father is perfect.” How many of us have felt anger rise within us? Made a promise we haven’t kept? Found it difficult to love an enemy? Jesus says he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. All 613 Jewish laws laid out in the Torah. Why does God expect so gosh darn much of us, so much more than we are capable of? How are we to live by these standards? How can any of us hope for salvation?

Shift: I think the answer is in a shift of perspective. Growing up I assumed that God was watching me with his checklist of rules and every time I made a mistake he would mark it off and it would be added to the sum total of the sins that I had to repent for. My faith was driven by guilt and fear. Yet this doesn’t seem to line up with the message of the gospel, that God is love and that Jesus came not to condemn us but to save us.

Good Life: Rather than seeing this passage as a demand that I follow a list of rules, I see it as the possibility for a good life, a plan for a life that will bring me the things I most desire: love, hope, peace. My life is actually more enjoyable when I can find the grace to forgive someone who has wronged me, when I can love someone who challenges me, when I give something without expecting something in return. It is in embracing wholehearted living that I find the community, peace and hope that I long for.

Dr. Ellen Clark-King puts it this way:

“The beauty lies in the new picture that is being drawn of what it means to be human, of what a human being choosing life looks like. We are being told that what matters about us is not just what we do, but who we are. It’s not enough just to avoid killing, we must also avoid a habit of mind that dismisses others as of no consequence. It is not enough that we avoid adultery, we must also avoid a habit of mind that objectifies the object of our desire. It is not enough to swear truly, we must become people whose every word is trustworthy and true. We are to become more beautiful, more like God, in our inner habits of mind so that our actions become naturally more gentle, wise and loving.”

Purity: The influential religious people of Jesus’ day appeared pure on the surface, pure in action, but Jesus asks us to be pure in heart. He calls us to more than following rules or behaving in socially and religiously acceptable ways. It puts Jesus at the center of everything. Living as He lived. Not by following rules, or good ethics, but embodying His spirit. It is in Christ that we find life in this moment, right now.  The prophet Micah sums it up with this: “What does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Fail: Of course, this is not easy. We fail. Dr. Ellen Clark-King continues, “day after day in big ways and small we fail. It matters because our failures are often a source of pain to others, and all human pain matters to God. In fact acknowledging and accepting our failure is a crucial part of our Christian journey – as well as a crucial part of our growth into mature human beings. The path to life abundant, the choice for blessing rather than curse, lies in our willingness to open out human fallibility to the transformative grace of God. We can use these commandments as a rod to beat ourselves with, in which case we will be choosing death not life. Or we can use them as a key to unlock the darker places of our hearts and to let God’s light shine in with forgiveness and hope. There is life in these hard words of scripture, the transformative life of God’s Spirit breathing into our places of failure and enabling us to love more deeply.”

Broken: The truth is we are all broken. Cracked. At times downtrodden, lonely, mourning. We try to cover it up, to have the appearance of having it all together. Society hands us every kind of mask so that we can hide what exists on the inside. We long for something, someone to offer us hope. And Christ not only acknowledges that brokenness, he blesses it.

Ache: We hunger and thirst for righteousness. I love this line. Not because I always make the right decisions, not because I always live righteously. I feel the ache within me when I see the brokenness that I have caused in another’s life. When I see injustices in our world. We are spiritually hungry for something to fulfill us. We chase elusive dreams of wealth, power, entertainment and pleasure – something to satisfy that empty ache, because inside we all know that something is not right – when tsunamis and earthquakes decimate our global neighbours, when children starve in one part of the world and obesity rates soar in another, when a woman is murdered in downtown Hamilton.

Lament: Jesus offers us a place for that ache. Validates it. Suggests that it is necessary, even healthy to mourn. This is why there is a heartfelt need for healthy ways to lament. We see examples throughout scripture, in the writings of Jeremiah, Job and the Psalms. God asks for us to express that ache. Not cover it up. Not drown it out or push it aside. To say life gets messy and sometimes we don’t know the way forward. To express our doubts and uncertainties, rather than negate the mystery of faith. It is in hungering and thirsting, in acknowledging our brokenness, and embracing mystery, that we let in the light.

Concluding Questions: Where in my life do I need to challenge the religious, cultural and political values of my society? How do I identify my enemies and love them? Who are the marginalized in my life, who do I push to the sidelines because their differences make me uncomfortable or afraid? How do we create a community that embraces mystery, even nurturing it? And, ultimately, how do we pursue a relationship with God without immediate answers to the questions that drive our doubt?

words.

My heart aches. My mind circles around simple words. Perceptions of people. And what they do to our spirits.

My girlfriend and I were called “fucking lesbians” as we walked down the street last week. That was a first.

We were on our way home from a candlelight memorial. A woman was murdered in downtown Hamilton. Her body was discovered under a pile of rubble and garbage. She was regularly degraded and insulted by those around her because of her addiction and mental health issues. Treated in life and death like a piece of trash.

On my way home, I watched as others watched a person in a wheelchair get on the bus. Watched them judge her appearance, her scent, her speech. Saw fear, disgust, shame in their eyes. Felt it rise in my own. I thought, if I could just look past her disability, her appearance, maybe I would see something more. Maybe I would notice her smile towards the infant in a stroller across from her, the child enraptured by this stranger’s beautiful face.

These moments pile up in my mind like dirty laundry. Distinct instances that all seem to be made of the same thread.

We all do these things, in different ways. Maybe we refer to the ‘crazies’ downtown. Or we meet someone with an intellectual disability on the bus and later joke about how uncomfortable it made us feel.  Or we pity the woman in the wheel chair. Or we say “that’s so retarded.” I have done all of these things.

I know how seemingly harmless and innocent words perpetuate negative stereotypes. I know how we isolate those who are different from us. Perhaps because of our ignorance, perhaps because of our fear.

Jean Vanier describes this fear as an unwillingness to accept our own humanity – our vulnerability, our eventual death. We fear people who have severe disabilities because they challenge us to face our own brokenness, our need for one another.

I also know how words can free us. Authenticity in another is contagious. Being with someone who accepts themselves in gift and weakness empowers me. I know that being around people who sing unabashedly, embracing their own imperfect voices for the sheer joy of melody and celebration, frees me to do the same.

On Friday I listened as Robert Pio Hajjar, founder of Ideal Way – an organization that advocates for people with Down Syndrome and other intellectual disabilities, shared his journey. ”Yes, I have a disability. But I ask you to see my ability.”

We are not very good at treating people like people. I disable you when I judge you. I am discrediting your capacity to be human when all I can see is your limitations.  And in doing so, I am discrediting my own.

I want to move away from fear or pity for those who are different than me, to a place of celebration. I want to embrace your humanity. I want to, like the infant in the stroller, look past your vulnerability and find the beauty in your smile. Past limitations to see possibilities. I refuse to disable people with my words and actions.

By embracing your weakness, I accept my own. I find my humanity reflected in yours.

vday

Guy: “As a sign of my tender love for you, darling, I bought you flowers grown in an impoverished country by an exploited workforce who’ve been paid starvation wages and exposed to sterility inducing pesticides…”

Girl: “Oh sweetheart, you shouldn’t have.”

I pretend to be a cynic when it comes to this heart-shaped holiday in the middle of winter, but the truth is I’m a sucker for romance.  If you want to see me gush, give me a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan chick flick and be sure to pass the tissues.  I blame this weakness on my mother and the films she exposed me to in my formative adolescent years.  Please don’t judge.

One of the guys I live with has his birthday on Valentines Day.  We’ve had red and pink decorations taped all over the walls since the Christmas tree came down in mid-January.  Brian is the kind of guy who knows how to live a moment deeply.  His enthusiasm for things is contagious.  So we’ve been building up to the big V-day for what feels like forever.  It’s given me some time to reflect on what the day should mean to me.  Like Christmas, I am saddened by the over-commercialization of the holiday, but I think there is something important in celebrating love.  Do we need a day on the calendar to remind us to do this?  Is Valentine’s Day just for couples?  Love certainly isn’t.

Of course, the love that grows between a couple is unlike the love that grows between a mother and a daughter, or two friends, or siblings.  We toss the L word around like a frisbee.  I could say “I love sushi” and “I love you” in the same breath.  The word carries different weights depending on context.  I think one of the easiest mistakes for young couples to make is confusing the love of a moment with being “in love.”  It’s so easy for those three words to slip off the tongue when what one really means is “I love how you make me feel.”

Somewhere along the path I picked up a fear of the vulnerability that accompanies love.  The process of seeing and being seen triggers a flight instinct in me. It’s not so much the ‘love’ part that scares me as the possibility of that love not lasting and the risk inherent in trusting another human being. Brene Brown writes,

Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it is also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. We try to numb vulnerability. But you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t numb vulnerability, grief, shame, fear, and disappointment, without numbing joy, gratitude, happiness. ‎But there is another way. To let ourselves be seen. To love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee. To practice gratitude and joy. To believe that you are enough. Yes, you are imperfect. You are wired for struggle. But you are worthy of love and belonging.

About a month ago I wrote a post entitled “Love is.”  My high-school English teacher would call that a sentence fragment.  Or maybe not – ‘love’ being the subject, and ‘is’ being the verb. Love is. Love exists. I am sure of it. So why can’t I say what it is? I googled “how do you know when you’re in love” for research purposes.  Thankfully there are more than 627,000,000 websites to answer my question.  I haven’t yet seen “How Do You Know” (the newest rom-com trying to answer that question), but something tells me Hollywood doesn’t have the answer I’m looking for either.

Is it enough that love exists, without needing to quantify and define it? If centuries of philosophers and poets and painters haven’t been able to exhaust the subject, what makes me think I, with my very limited experience, will be able to do so?  Still, I feel this compulsive need to try to label and categorize and box my experience, in order to take away the risk of it all, to take away the uncertainty and mystery of the ‘falling’ part.  I’ve been sky-diving before, I should be okay with free-fall.  The trouble is not knowing where I am, or rather we are, going to land.

When I began writing, I hoped it would lead me through the process of identifying, facing and overcoming this fear of love.  Of course, it’s not that easy.  A friend just posted this quote on her facebook page:

“…their whole purpose was to remove all mystery, as if mystery were the enemy and certainty were what we were looking for.”

All I can do is surrender to the mystery.  I still can’t say I know what love is, or how far she and I will fall.  I am left with only a choice – to consciously, in each moment, embrace this something that is growing between us, especially in those moments when my flight instinct kicks in.  In each moment, I choose to let go of the control I think I need and embrace the one I love whole-heartedly, in vulnerability.  To see her and be seen.