If some silly think like a job, or a family, or
Netflix kept you from lapping up the sweet wellspring of wisdom that was parts
I and II, I’ve been trying to make the case that art—writing a novel, directing
a movie or singing a song—is more helpful and truer to the biblical methods of
dealing with pain than, say, writing a fundamentalist Handbook of Christian Apologetics.
In many ways, these are opposite strategies. The
handbook is written to help us distance ourselves from our pain and look at it
analytically. Art pulls us in deeper so we can experience the pain at a more
conscious level.
A handbook writer starts out with the intellectual
assumptions that God must be a certain way, that pain exists, and that the one
needs to be justified in light of the other.
A painter just expresses his pain and assumes that
God will provide the defense—that is, of course, if God is God. A musician
that’s worth even half the liver in her belly doesn’t talk about God.
She talks to God. Poets feel no pressure to speak reasonably in their
moment of need. In fact, they’re liable to air all kinds of short-sided,
irrational, even unfair grievances because they're only responsible for what’s
honest, not what’s true.
Here’s an analogy from our bodies (if you’re
medically trained, don’t correct any inaccuracies or it won’t work). I
understand there are certain types of back injuries where our body’s first
impulse is to engage the muscles around the injury to protect us from feeling
the pain fully. But eventually this becomes counterproductive as the tightening
and inflammation becomes the source of a more enduring pain long after the
original injury would have healed. What we really need to do at that
point is learn to relax those muscles so that we can really feel the pain and
let the healing process work more directly.
I say the artist's method is more true to the Bible
because, anywhere other than a handbook writer’s desk, the Bible pretty
obviously isn’t a collection of logical assertions about God but of family
myths, and petty songs of tribal vengeance, and morally questionable parables,
and seemingly off topic sidebars, and poems. Lots of poems.
And just as good art isn’t a random hodge-podge of
colors or sounds but a creative use of the rules and boundaries of a particular
medium, the Hebrew culture that generated our Bible developed structures and
forms for their poems that helped them deal with their pain more effectively.
For instance, the poems of the book of
Lamentations, written shortly after everything the Israelites knew was
demolished, killed or shipped off to exile, are written in acrostic. With the
first word of each line corresponding to one of 22 letters in the Hebrew
alphabet, the lamenter was free to make whatever raw and sometimes venomous
grievance he or she would like to make toward God. But just as the alphabet
comes to an end, so too must the lament.
We’ve all known the mourner who refuses to go on
whatever other love and blessings are poured into her. Or the former jock who
insists on not showing gratitude for his stable job and beautiful family at
present because sometime in the past he “could’a been a contender.” We can be
just as narcissistic about using our pain to gather attention around ourselves
as we can about hoarding blessings. The lamenter isn’t encouraged to deny her
pain, but she isn't allowed to identify with it indefinitely, either. This
structure provided a lamenter a means of addressing her pain without becoming
unhealthily co-dependent on it.
The Psalms of lament often end with a line of
praise and thanksgiving that always looks a little out of place in an otherwise
ugly string of complaints and accusations (E.g. Ps. 13:5-6). These lines
are more than just token happy endings. They provide a way for the Psalmist to
acknowledge, “However raw my feelings are right now, I will still acknowledge
that this lament takes place within a relationship that is more enduring than
my current emotional state. So I will end with a word of praise even when I
don’t feel like it, because I know there will be other times when I do feel
like it.”
This kind of directness is only possible if,
beneath the pain of the moment, the poet has a deeper trust in the integrity of
the relationship surrounding the words.
My wife has committed to me for better or worse. I
wear evidence of that commitment around my finger and keep paperwork for it
safely filed away. So around her, I might spout out all kinds of hair-brained
nonsense in a moment of frustration, nonsense that I might think to filter out
in the context of a lesser relationship. The more secure our relationship, the
more she is able to suspend any judgment on my temporary irrationality or any
fear that this might be a permanent threat to our relationship.
It goes both ways, of course. I have a
responsibility not to let frustration and accusation become my normal modes of
relating to her, and surely I’ll need to become the more mature and rational
one at some other point when she is having a moment.
The covenant secured relationship that we’ve made
becomes the kind of container for unedited speech that a shaky, superficial
relationship can never be.
So people are arguably at their most faithful when
they're comfortably expressing their frustration and doubt to God.
For all this, you’ll notice that the handbook
writer will usually sell more books than the poet. Logically Why-ing away pain
will always be a sexier alternative to engaging it head on.
But you’ll notice that at the end of the day, when
the handbook writer has dried his final sheet and closesd up his ink well, when
all arguments have been exhausted, questions settled, the victim stripped of
any reason to gripe, no one actually comes away from the ordeal with the
responsibility to actually do something about the pain.
The fundamentalist handbook writer is similar to
the atheist. He either believes that (1) God does not exist or that (2) God is
not capable of doing stuff. Otherwise, he would not feel such enormous pressure
to make God's case.
By way of contrast, the Psalmist, by not providing
any explanation or justification, has put the ball in God’s court to actually do
something about the pain. At the end of a work of art, no questions have
been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s actually incumbent upon God to
come through on the back end.
The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.
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