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Ben Palpant

That I May Know the Weight of Your Hand

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My eldest daughter once asked me why God placed her in these days rather than placing her in a more magical historical age like the medieval age of chivalry or the age of elves. I understand her love for enchantment and her longing for change. Like me, she feels so very regular and her pain seems so normal, so inconsequential, but she has forgotten that every great legend starts with a quite regular kid…or hobbit. She might be a ring-bearer. On the other hand, she might live her life in relative obscurity but give birth to the ring-bearer. What she has not realized or has failed to see is that God has placed her smack in the middle of a legend and even if her life amounts to nothing earth-shattering, her routine faithfulness is changing the world. That perspective changes the kind of mental calculations we perform, especially where suffering is involved.

Where pure reason or emotion cannot make the mental calculations, the imagination helps us enter the suffering. It helps us sit down in the pain within our soul and to listen to God. It helps us to participate in and enter—insofar as we are able—the mystery of God. Profound stories, strong songs, vivid pictures, thoughtful poems, and purposeful lives are conduits for the imagination to travel along as it moves toward God. The journey is long and the road wanders, but the soul’s pilgrimage back to God must pass through suffering and eventually death itself. The imagination is a shepherd’s staff that guides us through the valley of vision because “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me” (Psalm 23).

 

A healthy imagination gives us the opportunity to see our suffering as God sees it: not as amusement, nor as an empty vessel that we fill with meaning. Our suffering is already filled with meaning and we need a strong imagination to see it rightly. It is one thing to know how God sees, it is another thing entirely to see along the same line of sight. Since God first imagined us and all of the events in detail that make up our days and lives, our suffering has been transformed. Our suffering is hallowed, sanctified, transfigured. This sanctification of suffering was so with Abraham when he was about to sacrifice his only son, and it is so for us.

God is the telos of this story. Every event and every character in the story is driving toward a resolution in God. Perhaps pain is not only the megaphone of God, but the means by which, through which, he draws us to himself. It is a door, like delight, like bread and wine, through which we might travel toward God—a God who did not stay in his holy heavens but became one of us and suffered our pain with us and for us. He entered his own story—the Storyteller became a character. Christ’s agony has made suffering not only a badge of honor for his followers, but it has also given greater meaning to our suffering. By suffering we enter into Christ’s and, thereby, know our Savior more intimately. Such knowledge does not remove the bewilderment, nor does it banish the darkness, but it trains the imagination to see with God’s eyes. Suffering does not save, but it is a sign of our identity in Christ. It is a seal of ownership upon our lives. It signifies “God: made this day by my hand.”

I sometimes tell my students, “Be careful what you tell people when you call them to Christ. Be sure they know what is in store for them. Martyrdom takes many forms, and Christianity is a cross-centered religion for a reason.”

Suffering takes many forms. Grief is non-linear. Pain is hard to measure. The process from pain to resolution is messy. God did not give us suffering so that we might only look beyond it to some happy vale of future delight. He gave us suffering as a gift, just as he has given us happiness as a gift. Pain is a megaphone. Pain is a gift, “for God made my heart weak, and the Almighty terrifies me; because I was not cut off from the presence of darkness, and he did not hide deep darkness from my face” (Job 23:16-17). That is why Augustine wrote such a passionate description of how suffering caused imaginative healing at the compassionate hand of The Great Physician: “…for you have compassion on our dust and ashes. It was pleasing in your sight to reform my deformity, and by inward stings you disturbed me so that I was impatient until you were made clear to my inward sight. By the secret hand of your healing my swelling was lessened, the disordered and darkened eyesight of my mind was from day to day made whole by the stinging salve of wholesome grief” (Augustine).

Make yourself clear to my inward sight, O God.

Consume my imagination in the fire, the glory, of your face.

A friend of mine was, by all American standards, successful. He was a rich and important businessman. Then he crashed a snow mobile with his son. His son has suffered, but the father could not walk nor could he talk for a very long time. He can talk now, with a significant slur in his words, and he can walk, but slowly. We spoke the other day—slowly, but together.

“I miss those days of convalescence,” he said. “I don’t miss the suffering, but I miss the very real sense of God’s presence in my life. I try to hold on to that memory. I try to remember what it was like, but it is hard now that I have my life back.” His tongue forms the words with difficulty.

“I think I understand,” I say to him. “I wish I could give that presence as a gift to my children and to those around me, but I’m afraid I can’t. They must pass through pain.”

He pauses. “Yes. You don’t wish the circumstances upon them, but you wish they could taste the presence of God that wonderfully.”

Suffering is a gift. Suffering is a thrust, a nudge, away from my swollen self-intoxication, and it sends me stumbling into the presence of God where Joy is found: the vibrant life is found only in the lap of God because only there do we realize “that joy is the sweetness of contact with the love of God, that affliction is the wound of this same contact when it is painful, and that only the contact matters, not the manner of it” (Simone Weil).

 

“If you wish me to be in darkness, I shall bless you. And if you wish me to be in light, again I shall bless you. If you stoop down to comfort me, I shall bless you, and if you wish me to be afflicted, I shall bless you forever” (Thomas A Kempis).

 

“No one is ever holy without suffering” (Evelyn Waugh).

 

My daughter cannot sleep. Her stomach is cramping. It has been doing this for a few months. She is the same one who, at the age of three, could not breathe, so we took her to the hospital, the same one who kept accidentally falling out of her dinner seat as a kid and we laughed because she did it every day.

She can breathe tonight, but still…

Perhaps I shall tell her about barking dogs at night. I shall tell her about hawks at dusk. She laughs louder, more readily, than the rest. And then I shall tell her about wings, warm and strong.

Sit in the suffering, my skittish dove.

Attend to the voice of God.

He is not silent.

Better yet, he is painting you—these are the dark paint strokes of a masterpiece.

 

“Beneath the shadow of Your wings I sing my joy and praise. Your right hand is my strong support through troubled nights and days” (Psalm 63, Psalter Hymnal).

 

We are bewildered pilgrims who carry the accumulated pain of life upon our backs. Some of us stoop lower than others. Sink the tap root into the soft loam of suffering and find God. He is life for the soul, strength for this pilgrim way.

 

“Since I still don’t know enough about pain,

this terrible darkness makes me small.

If it’s you, though–

press down hard on me, break in

that I may know the weight of your hand,

and you, the fullness of my cry.”

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Rushing Straight Into the Dark

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I was still working through significant health problems at the age of thirty-four and did not know that it would be a year of death and a year of resurrection. I could not move my legs. I could not move my hands. My body trembled and nobody knew why. I was strong enough to attend a banquet one night, but felt the onset of tremors—wave upon wave. Afterward, I made it to the car, but I couldn’t pick up the keys. My fingers wouldn’t work. I fumbled to pick up the cell phone and push one number: speed-dial home. When my wife answered, I tried to speak, but my head was shaking too much and my words got scrambled on my tongue. They would not come out except in lurches and I felt like I was learning to drive a stick shift in my mouth.

“Trouble,” I said, but it took me some time to say it.

“I in,” I said, but it took even more time.

My wife called my parents for help. When my mom and dad drove up, they found me sitting helpless in the driver’s seat of our van and sitting in an empty parking lot. I They helped me into the driver’s side and dad drove me home while mom followed with their car. I was a child again. I thought like a child. I spoke like a child. I felt an overwhelming urge to lie down with my head in his lap like I used to do when I was a child. Dad helped me into bed. My dad and mom drove home to stay awake, stare into the night, and pray.

I was curled up in a fetal position on the bed. My wife holding me like a child and whispering into my ear. I was awake. And then I was in a dream, but I was awake and there was an immense desert spreading out from beneath my feet. I felt a boundless chasm-like immeasurability stretching out on every side of me. I knew it was not real: I could still hear and feel my wife next to me, but I could not climb out of the vision and into what we would call reality.

In my dream, I felt myself pulled by each hand in two opposing directions. I looked to my right and there was my wife holding onto my hand with both of hers (though she was still holding my body and whispering to me in reality). Behind her, my dear children pulled on her. Behind them and, likewise, pulling, were my parents and siblings and the line seemed to grow to include my peers and my students and church family and basketball team. Off in the distance was a great and towering city that I knew was filled with people whom I loved. All of those lovely people pulling me with all their meager strength.

My other hand was also pulled. I felt another hand holding mine with a dynamic force so magnetically overwhelming that I knew my surrender to that presence was only a matter of when, never a matter of if. I knew with unparalleled certainty that my wife and family’s grip would fail and that the city of loved ones in its entirety would fall away. The feeling of inevitability terrified me. I turned my head to see who, or what, pulled with such uncontestable vitality and I saw God, or I knew that I had seen Him. I saw neither face nor body, but it was as though I had seen both. It was a mystery that swallowed me.

All my terror and perplexity of soul were not eased by the glorious vision of divinity. They were amplified. I was devoured by the pervasive, comprehensive, and incomprehensible, and in that moment, I was the happiest I have ever been in my life. I felt terrified, brittle, like a china mug still falling to the ground and I felt happy, like I would burst. Both at the same time.

Behold, I felt George MacDonald’s cry echo in my soul: “My harvest withers. Health, my means to live—All things seem rushing straight into the dark. But the dark is still God.” In that moment I knew what it was to worship the wellspring of all my joys with fear and trembling. In that moment, I knew what it was to simultaneously fear God and call Him “Abba.” I knew with Orual in Till We Have Faces that “I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one…and he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming.”

I knew, also, that what I had all along called reality was not comprehensive enough. It lacked dimensionality and a clarity which that vision presented. That dream of God pulling me gave new color to my present life. I was an invalid, fetal-positioned and trembling, but my desires, my imagination, were scampering along highlands of lush greens. I was panting as a deer longing for water and I knew where that water was found. It is found in the desert, in the bewilderment, in the terror, in the suffering and in the presence of God for he did not leave me in the suffering alone. This is the Joy inexpressible! So I will not be dragged into the wilderness, but will go willingly because God spoke saying, “now listen, I will woo her (Israel), I will go with her into the wilderness” (The Book of Hosea chapter 2).

God was not testing my faith in order to find out its quality (C.S. Lewis). It is I who had not measured its buoyancy. It is I who knew not its durability nor the power of its wing.

 

Was the dream a spasm of the brain, a hemorrhage in the imagination? No. It was the imagination drawn to the lip of the horizon that separates us from the eternal enchantment of the Trinity and dangled there for a moment: great suffering and great joy. Things difficult to communicate. I knew in some small degree, but first-hand, the terror and exultation of Mary and of Moses before the presence of the Angel of the Lord. I knew, first-hand, what it was to believe with my heart, mind, soul, and strength what hitherto felt like a meager intellectual and emotional exercise. I realized more vividly than before that while our emotions, senses, and minds are vehicles for encountering God, our imaginations are a powerful vehicle God uses to draw us to himself.

We pant as a deer for water and the water is found in the desert, in the bewilderment, in the terror of suffering: in the presence of God. The path toward God is filled with suffering for “in the long journey out of the self, there are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places. Where the shale slides dangerously and the back wheels hang almost over the edge at the sudden veering, the moment of turning” (Theodore Roethke).

The Christian life is a continuous stream of “moments of turning” because it is a vocation of worship, a pilgrimage toward holiness. True worship is an expression of both joy and terror in the presence of God’s holiness. Suffering, like singing and eating and laughing, is a form of worship: we worship well or we worship poorly. Suffering is simultaneously our unmaking and our remaking.

A Day of Trouble and Treading Down

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We will have them over soon, the couple who have been married only three years and had six miscarriages. They have one little boy. We will have them over, but what will I say? I understand? I don’t understand. I’m praying for you? Sometimes I pray, but not usually for them. Hang in there? Trite and meaningless. We will probably play some games and laugh and eat and drink and then they will say goodbye. Maybe we shall be quiet. The Spirit will lead. Maybe we will laugh until our sides hurt. She might wear black. She does that sometimes. Maybe we will pray for them before they go. Maybe it will be good to laugh and eat and drink and say goodbye like normal people do. But what is normal? Six miscarriages? No, indeed, but “on my heart hath fallen confusion, till I know not what I am, nor whence I am” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur).

We are the epiphany of God—six miscarriages.

We are imagined by God—six miscarriages.

We are the story of God, Evangel—six miscarriages.

God authors our lives. We are his characters and the story in which we find ourselves has divine meaning. Every event drives the plot forward toward its telos: resolution. Six miscarriages are not the resolution. They are the in-between. They are the mines of Moria and Gandalf gone, fallen from the bridge of Khazad-dum while the fellowship weeps and weeps. They are Christ’s disciples huddled together in a darkened room, for they are scared and bewildered with all their hopes swallowed up by a tomb. They are Isaiah crying out, “’Look away from me, I will weep bitterly; do not labor to comfort me because of the plundering of the daughter of my people.’ For it is a day of trouble and treading down and perplexity by the Lord God of hosts In the Valley of Vision—Breaking down the walls and of crying to the mountain” (The book of Isaiah, chapter 22).

The Christian world is colored by God’s story. In other words, it is colored by the murder of a brother, the rape of a sister, the betrayal of a friend, the pounding of nails into flesh and bone, and the darkening of the sky. It is a world of what-ifs, and could-have-beens, peopled by has-beens and might-have-beens. It is a world soaked in fear and drenched by the blood of a million martyrs without even beginning to recount the nearly two thousand years of church history since the destruction of Jerusalem. It is a dark history with pain oozing into all its hidden corners.

At the center of Christianity is a death. Christianity is perhaps the most morbid religion of the world: perpetually meditating upon death with little crosses around their necks, Christian disciples sing their way to martyrdom. Anticipating death and calling it gain, Christians are evangelists of the grotesque. Such meditations are a beautiful thing to those with a strong imagination, however, because they know that a resurrection can only happen if there is a death. As Walter Wangerin Jr. wrote, “I know no resurrection except that first there’s been a death. And as a writer, I cannot speak genuinely or deeply of resurrection except I speak the same of death and the sin that engendered death. That I can speak accurately of death without despairing is hardly melancholic. It is liberty—and victory.”

If there is only death, then there is no hope. If resurrection follows death, then hope springs eternal. The hope of the Gospel rests directly upon our ability to imagine and, therefore, believe the possibility of resurrection. The world was once like a wall, white and clean, until sin glued black wallpaper across its surface. The glue has set, to be sure, but it has not changed the reality of a white wall behind. Truth-telling stories, therefore, have moments in which the author scratches a portion of the black paper off and provides a “fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (J.R.R. Tolkien, emphasis mine).

A Hawk at Evening

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Imagine this: 

A hawk at evening.

I was eight years old and playing in the sandbox under a growing African dusk. Dad called me to him. He crouched down and watched the trees. I burrowed beneath his chin and crouch too. In front of us was a hen. Her chicks were scattered and aimlessly pecked at the ground. One ruffled his feathers and shivered for the sheer delight of it. Mother kept pecking the ground for insects or seeds. They were chickens. That is what chickens do.

Dad pointed into the tall tree across the yard, behind the car garage. “Look,” he said.

It was dusk: “I can’t see anything,” I whispered.

“Wait and watch,” he said.

We crouched very still. I was beginning to think of the sandbox and the waning light.

He lifted my chin and I looked up into the tree. Nothing, then something, a movement like a cloak amongst the branches. With a wide spread of dark wings, a hawk materialized. It was a hawk. That is what hawks do.

I had not done the math yet, but I sensed something ominous.

Mother hen also sensed something ominous. She perked up and pandemonium broke loose. She screamed. Her babies, plump and soft-feathered, scrambled, tripped, ran one way and then turned around to run another direction.

Among the squawking and squeaking and flapping of wings, some of the chicks found their mother. Most of them did. But the hawk descended with power and intentionality and precision. He opened his talons right before my widening eyes. Talons squeezed around two little chicks that kicked and screamed. The mother hen screamed some things I am sure would make an eight year old blush, but I was too busy crying with her. I, too, wanted to rise up on wings and bring down the brute and restore the chicks to their mother, still plump and soft-feathered. Dad held me tight against his chest. The hawk was gone. Still, I could not bear to watch the grief and so I closed my eyes.

Dad made me look. He is a good father.

I saw the mother, bigger than before, her wings pulled tight to her body, but squirming, and I noticed little beaks popping out from underneath. They trembled. She tousles their feathers one at a time and in a minute they ventured out from beneath her shelter. It had been only a minute since the terror.

Dad leaned into my ears and whispered a portion of Psalm 61 to me: “You have been a shelter for me, a strong tower from the enemy. I will abide in your tabernacle forever; I will trust in the shelter of your wings.”

 

“O Lord our God, under the shadow of thy wings let us hope—defend us and support us. Thou wilt bear us up when we are little and even down to our gray hairs wilt carry us. For our stability, when it is in thee, is stability indeed; but when it is in ourselves, then it is all unstable” (Augustine, Confessions).

Pain has a context. It is framed by the Master Storyteller. We are imagined: before we materialized on this whirling globe in all our three dimensionality, before the nurse pricked our heals and we cried out, before we threw a snowball and squealed with delight, God imagined all of it. The death of grubs and the death of the chicks that ate them are also sprung from his imagination. Such trouble is part of his story but “the mystery of God eclipses the darkness and the struggle. We realize that suffering calls our lives into question, not God’s” (Eugene Peterson). We are a part of his story. We are, as Alexander Schmemann said, the epiphany of God.

We are, like Tumnus, like Lucy, like Puddleglum, like Edmund, characters whose life events have a purpose for us and for the story. This author loves his characters and the story in which they find themselves. Every character has a purpose, a reason for being. Every event drives the plot forward toward its telos, its resolution. Because every event has purpose in the author’s larger design, every event has meaning—even the bark of a dog, even the death of a baby chick.

He knows the falling of a sparrow.

He knows the number of hairs on your head.

 

Pain does not make the imagination shrivel. People shrivel, but the imagination is always perceiving and conceiving. Now, pain might very well reorient the imagination and paint a whole different story than was previously conceived, but the goal in our lives is to see the pain as the author sees the pain. As every decent author knows, each event of a story has purpose. If a character trips over a toy and mashes his nose into the front doorknob, there is a reason. If a character loses her child in a car accident, it is because the author has written it into the story for a purpose yet unknown to the character.

If pain has purpose because every detail of our lives was already imagined by God, then aligning our imagination to God’s imagination, our view to God’s view of circumstances and trials, is foundational to the soul’s spiritual pilgrimage home—a journey that takes many turns. “Grief is like a long valley,” C.S. Lewis once wrote in A Grief Observed, “a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” Let us prepare ourselves for such bends in the road of our pilgrimage. While we are in grief, let us remain a moment. Let us call grief what it is and not hide from it. Yes, we are raw. Yes, we are in the dark belly of a whale. Who can be Jesus’ little sunbeam at such a time? And would Jesus want such a thing? One of the most godly men to grace the pages of Scripture spoke profoundly to our human state when he said, “For God has made my heart weak, and the Almighty terrifies me; because I was not cut off from the presence of darkness, and he did not hide deep darkness from my face” (Job 24:16-17).

This pain is a deep darkness before my eyes, but I don’t know how to talk about pain. I can’t even write about it without approaching it with sidelong glances or describing it as through a prism, from different and differing angles. I can see it and think about it, but a vocabulary of pain escapes me. How might we develop a grammar of grief, a vocabulary of pain?

Sink the tap root deep into the loam.

Sink it like Tolstoy.

Follow it like Augustine.

Waking in The Dark

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I was seven years old or so and falling asleep in the thick, tropical air was proving difficult. I stared at the ceiling and listened to my little brother’s breathing in the bunk beneath. His quiet breaths soothed my mind and I rode their rhythm over the edge of wakefulness into the land of dreams. While I dreamt, a dog crept beneath my outside window. When all was quiet, drowsed by the thick air, he gathered up his lungs and barked as loudly as he could. I am convinced to this day that the dog removed the panes of glass in the window in order to lean in and bark directly into my ear. I have never heard a Mastiff bark, but I am sure the dog outside my window was the largest dog that ever chased its tail.

The bark woke me with such a start that I remember only two sensations: hopelessness and terror. The sudden clap in my brain was so great, it paralyzed all reason. I remember nothing but the bark. I do not even remember being comforted, though I am sure my parents tried. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. But the bark was in my brain, and I was disoriented. I cried out in terror and then I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. For many days thereafter, my world was darkened by the bark of the dog outside my window.

I am older now. I am wiser and more rational. But my shoulders lock up as I recall this episode in my life because I am still afraid. The bark still reverberates in my mind and I know that it was a foreshadow of things to come—other barks—thicker air that chokes the lungs, darker paralyzations, other sudden thunder claps that leave me trying to gather myself like Humpty-Dumpty—a futile task with or without all the king’s men.

That bark was a hint of worse barks to come. I have faced some of those barks since: a little painted coffin on the kitchen floor made for family friends who lost their little girl; a demolished car sputtering and smoking on the side of the road after I turned prematurely in front of oncoming traffic and saw my sister’s face sprayed with glass as a 4×4 pickup smashed into her passenger door; Julie, one of my many mothers who have “adopted” me over the years, snatched by heaven long before the rest of us were ready. And as I walk the corridors of memory, I see my little girl—three years old— unable to breathe. I remember the powerlessness of watching my daughter gasp for oxygen. Though she opened wide and tried and tried, air would not come. I remember her on the hospital bed. She looked smallish and lost, hooked up to innumerable tubes.

There are too many barks in the darkness to list.

There are many more to come.

 

“Pain is the megaphone of God” (C.S. Lewis).

I can hear you now, O God.

 

“The pedagogy of God is pain” (John Piper).

God, teach me. Speak into this bewilderment. Unravel the barking in my brain.

 

At thirty-three my body stopped working. One month prior I was varsity boy’s basketball head coach, I was head deacon at church, I was a full time teacher, and I was father of four. Then I had a migraine attack that burned so hot, I burrowed my head into the snow on the back porch. My five year old son found me and called for help. I was disoriented, broken, for several days after. I tried to go back to work, but I was living with crossed wires, and each attempt to return left me more broken than I was before. Within a few short weeks, I could not stand for long, I could hardly feed myself, and I could not read. Well, I could read, but anything more than a Dr. Seuss book was too heavy to lift and too difficult to understand. My mind was bewildered and I tripped over simple words, simple concepts. I wept. I wept a lot. I would sit outside in a chair and let the snow fall around me. Sometimes I screamed at God in my head. Sometimes I only whispered repeatedly the three words I could understand at a time: “God help me. God help me. God help me.”

I was not always angry, but “…sorrow was within me like a convulsion” (Augustine, Confessions). Then I lost the migraines, but I developed a tremor in my limbs and in my head. Early on, I thought my neck might snap for loss of control because of the tremors’ viciousness. The tremors would haunt me through the night and I would awake with them. Slowly, they have eased, but even now, years later, my body does not work sometimes—like today—or rather, it works in a way I cannot predict. Specialists cannot explain this trembling of my head upon its shoulders. It was curiosity for a time, then a fear, now an annoyance to those who love me—like a tickle in the throat. Doctors cannot tell me how or why or when. They guess. They do not know. It is not chronic at least. That is some comfort, perhaps. Everything has changed and my life is now calibrated to this different, unnamed thing. My life plays to the beat of a new metronome.

Still, I am fatigued by the tremors that have no name and I feel embarrassed by the questions behind people’s eyes. Some people, friends and strangers, are brave and ask, and I am unable to provide satisfying answers. Most pretend nothing has changed and I pretend with them. I like control. I like to get things done. But sometimes I cannot move my hands, sometimes even my legs, but my head will nod or shake depending on the moment. If I focus all my energies upon it, I can hold the tremors back for a time like a boy with his finger in the dyke. I hold a brief conversation with someone to whom I would rather not show such strange behavior as head tremors, but the dyke will break, the tremors will storm the fortress of my ego, and I will be worse for wear.

Why all this trouble? The heralds cry “Peace, peace”. But there is no peace. I see pain in scores of lives all around me: our friends have been married for three years and suffered six miscarriages. Other friends have been married twenty-five years, but now one of them has a new lover. Still others were married fifty-three years until death came knocking.

Who shall navigate the Marianas Trench with a flashlight?

Let us try, always remembering that “…in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls” (Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 42), for “though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright” (Moby Dick, chapter 42).

The dilemma that keeps gnawing like a belligerent dog at the back door of our mind is this: “A generous God is fine when things are running smoothly. But what when they are not and darkness is invading? What when trusted patterns have broken down, or we feel too far gone to bother even trying? We dwell at outer limits, and some events in life—loss, failure, stress, sin—remind us of the threat of chaos” (Iain Matthew, The Impact of God).

Shalom.

John of the Cross knew about suffering, about being swallowed. He called it the dark night of the soul in which he shared in the sign of Jonah who, likewise, was swallowed. Iain Matthew, in his book The Impact of God, describes John’s suffering this way: “It was as if the anesthetic which normal life provides had worn off, his inner self had been scraped bare, and he now ached in a way he never had before for a God who was utterly beyond him.”

Such scrapings leave us blackened, compact, hard, like coal. Rembrandt knew how to play with blackness. He was a master painter just like God. Who shall say unto the painter, “What is all this darkness, all this trouble, all this pain?” “Calculated brush strokes,” says the painter. “Look! Behold the light cometh. There, at the other side of the canvas, a face lit,” says the painter.

His mercies are new every morning.

Great is Thy faithfulness.

 

“The imagination was Jesus’ main target.”

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I ran across this article, Can You Imagine? Why imagination is crucial to the Christian life, a few weeks ago and found it helpful as an introduction to the Christian imagination. To those of us still trying to wrap our minds around this topic, Brandon J. O’brien offers a clear and compelling case for reclaiming the imagination as a central part of the Christian walk. Here’s a taste:

“Jesus calls us to an even more demanding act of imagination. He stood in the line of the prophets, but he radicalized their message. ‘The day is coming,’ they had said. He changed the tense. He says, ‘The day has come.’ The world the prophets had envisioned is no longer a future reality. It is happening here and now. Jesus invites his followers to imagine that the kingdom of God is at hand, and with it have come all those promised reversals. If I may be so bold, it appears that the imagination was Jesus’ main target.”

A Quote from Sinclair Ferguson

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All good preaching involves the use of the imagination. No great preacher has ever lacked imagination. perhaps we might go so far as to say it is simply an exhortation to love the Lord our God with all of our…mind…and our neighbor as ourselves.

Scripture itself suggests that there are many different kinds of imagination—hence the different genres in which the word of God is expressed (poetry, historical narrative, dialogue, monologue, history, vision, and so on). No two biblical authors had identical imaginations. It is doubtful if Ezekiel could have written Proverbs, for example! 

What do we mean by “imagination”? Our dictionaries give a series of definitions. Common to them all seems to be the ability to “think outside of oneself,” “to be able to see or conceive the same thing in a different way.” In some definitions the ideas of the ability to contrive, exercising resourcefulness, the mind’s creative power, are among the nuanced meanings of the word.

Imagination in preaching means being able to understand the truth well enough to translate or transpose it into another kind of language or musical key in order to present the same truth in a way that enables others to see it, understand its significance, feel its power—to do so in a way that gets under the skin, breaks through the barriers, grips the mind, will, and affections so that they not only understand the word used but feel their truth and power.

Luther did this by the sheer dramatic forcefulness of his speech. Whitefield did it by his use of dramatic expression (overdid it, in the view of some). Calvin—perhaps surprisingly—did it too by the extraordinarily earthed-in-Geneva-life language in which he expressed himself. So an overwhelming Luther-personality, a dramatic preacher with Whitefieldian gifts of story-telling and voice (didn’t David Garrick say he’d give anything to be able to say “Mesopotamia” the way George Whitefield did?), a deeply scholarly, retiring, reluctant preacher—all did it, albeit in very different ways. They saw and heard the word of God as it might enter the world of their hearers and convert and edify them. 

What is the secret here? It is, surely, learning to preach the word to yourself, from its context into your context, to make concrete in the realities of our lives the truth that came historically to others’ lives. This is why the old masters used to speak about sermons going from their lips with power only when they had first come to their own hearts with power.

Find the full article here at The Gospel Coalition

The Power of Converging Stories

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We are stimulated most by pictures and stories because we are imaginative beings; it is these that drive us and compel us to action. People are three-dimensional pictures, living stories, that evoke all sorts of emotions in us without saying a word. Our pity, disgust, awe, admiration, or any number of other emotions are provoked simply by seeing other people. Needless to say, even greater emotions are provoked by not only seeing people, but living with them, speaking with them, playing with them, and eating with them. That power lies not always in whether they agree with us in particular matters, nor whether they respond emotionally in the same way or to the same things as we do. Their power lies in the convergence of another story with our own and with the provocation of our imagination at a pictorial and story level. When we see someone else at a certain point in their story, whether happy or sad, a host of emotional engagements follow.

Two very essential parts of our makeup, community and imagination, are unified in relationship. We were made for story and we were made for community, and people to people relationships are the points at which these two essential traits conjoin. Here at the crux of our lives we find our desires moved, our longings redirected, and our vision colored by what our friends think. Why do I like that band? Why do I laugh at those jokes? Why do I sense euphoria or despair depending on whether that team wins or loses? The answer is simple, I usually like what my companions like. Quite honestly, many of my desires are not a matter of conscious, rational debate, but a matter of what people around me like or dislike; hence, the immeasurable power of converging stories.

God wired us to be moved by converging stories. My desires that evening in France were swayed and shaped by my companion; particularly by the singular and daring story of himself that he offered to my imagination. This propensity to be moved by the desires of those whose stories converge with our own was already there in the Garden of Eden. Eve was compelled by the snake’s swagger and the conceived story he offered her. Adam, for his part, was also compelled by Eve’s desire that he join her. Others hold great sway over us and this power is far too complex to address adequately in one chapter. It is worth addressing, however, the way in which the imagination is impacted by other people and why God uses people to speak into our lives.

Converging stories need not have a negative transformative impact on our own stories. The growing attention brought to servant leadership of late reflects a growing realization that converging stories also have tremendous positive power to transform not only individuals, but entire cultures. The face of western civilization, for example, is often shaped by the convergence of only a few stories into one location for the purpose of serving a greater story than their own. The Brethren of the Common Life were one such group. Although their order is remembered by very few, their impact on the west was immeasurable. Founded in the 14th century Netherlands by Gerard Groote, the brethren lived together in community, dedicated to a life of simplicity in the service of Jesus Christ. They took no vows and they asked for no alms; instead, they spent their days pursuing the inner life, working with their hands (I Thess. 4:11 and 12) so they might have their daily bread.

Gerard Groote was an educator before his conversion and so it was natural for him to make education of youth part of the order’s duties. Education at the time was terribly poor, so the brethren did whatever it took to hire the best school masters and train young men in the classics and in Scripture. The story of Gerard Groote and his small band of brothers is a powerful testimony to community, piety, and vision grounded in Christ. Some of their pupils moved the mountains and landmarks of western culture: Thomas a Kempis, Pope Adrian VI, Martin Luther, and Erasmus are among those whose life and thought was the fruit of Groote’s vision. He knew the power of converging stories. He knew the incredible need for servant leaders to raise up a generation of new servant leaders.

Servant leaders like Groote are living echoes of Christ, but their guiding principles are not limited to leadership. Every Christian’s mission is to further Christ’s mission. Christ’s mission was dedicated to converging stories. He spoke into the imagination, freeing people from their constricted worlds, and giving them God. The Gospels spill over with these encounters.

The man lowered through the ceiling in Luke, chapter 5, was living quite literally in a constricted world of self. He would have gone to Jesus, but he couldn’t. He was paralyzed. His friends were desperate. When they heard of this healer named Jesus, they knew that if they could just get him close enough, just nearby, then Jesus would do the rest. They tried to fight through the crowds of people and into the house by normal means, but the crowd wouldn’t give. Necessity is the mother of invention and the guys found a way. They climbed to the roof, jimmied a pulley system, and lowered him through the tiling. Their faith in Jesus, their imaginative capacity to see possibilities, resulted in a persistence that caught Christ’s attention. Imagine their surprise, then, when instead of healing their friend, Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven you.”

When Jesus heard the Pharisees whispering behind their hands about blasphemy and how only God can forgive sins, he said, “Is it easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk?’

“Here,” said Jesus, “let me show you that the Son of Man has the right on earth to forgive sins.” He turned to the paralyzed man and said, “Stand up, take your bed in your arms, and go home.” The man didn’t need to be asked twice. He got up, picked up the mat and went home praising God. This story portrays the convergence of Christ’s story with not only the paralyzed man, but the Pharisees and the man’s dedicated friends. We forget his friends, but I’m sure their faith, their imagination, was never the same.

In Luke chapter 18, we find a different young man constricted not by self, but by his possessions. The idea of eternal life sounded good and so he asked Jesus, “What must I do to win eternal life?”

“You know the commandments: Do not commit adultery; do not murder; do not steal; do not give false evidence; honor your father and mother.”

This was good news for the young man and he said, “I have kept all these since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked straight at the young man. His heart warmed to the lad and so he said, “There is still one thing lacking: sell everything you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have riches in heaven; and come, follow me.”

This was bad news for the young man and his heart sank. When eternal satisfaction was offered, he preferred temporary relief. He preferred his constriction of possessions to the expansion offered by Christ. The cost was too great. When Christ spoke into his life, he cut right to the sin that acted as a barrier between his imagination and God: his pleasure.

The woman at the well, narrated in John chapter 4, was constricted not by self, nor by possessions, but by her sexual sin. One day, Jesus was weary and so he sat by Jacob’s well. When a woman came to draw water, he asked her for a drink. When she hesitated, he told her that if she knew who he was, she would ask him for a drink and he would give her living water.

“If you drink of this water, you will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water that I shall give him will never suffer thirst any more. The water that I shall give him will be an inner spring always welling up for eternal life.”

Her imagination is mired in practicality and self-indulgence, so she cannot see far enough to understand. She would like to make her life easier by not having to walk all that way to the well so she could spend her time doing…other things. When Christ spoke into her life, he cut right to the sin that acted as a barrier between her imagination and God: her sexual license. The passage in the book of John shows a woman whose constrictions are expanding. This expansion is usually a painful process demanding self-denial. It is unmaking usually prompted by someone else.

C.S. Lewis provides another example of unmaking prompted by the encounter with someone else in That Hideous Strength.

Jane looked; and instantly her world was unmade.1

Jane Studdock was a level-headed, strong-willed, scholarly woman. Se was married to Mark, a college professor, and they were a modern pair. Their view of maleness and femaleness was modern, their view of marriage was modern, their view of mind and heart and imagination were all quite modern: refined, egalitarian, and dispassionate. In fact, just before she entered the Fisher-King’s2 room, she had told herself, “Be careful. Don’t get let in for anything. All these long passages and low voices will make a fool of you, if you don’t look out.”

But now she was unmade; her carefully crafted categories, her presuppositions, the entire life’s weaving she so fiercely guarded, and her conceived story were all unraveling in her mind. All the light in the room seemed to run towards the gold hair and the gold beard of the wounded man who sat on the sofa with a bandaged foot. At that moment, when her eyes first rested on his face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. It was, of course, only for a flash. Next moment she was once more the ordinary social Jane, flushed and confused to find that she had been staring rudely at a total stranger. But her world was unmade; she knew that. Anything might happen now.

She had meant to say, “Good morning, Mr. Fisher-King,” in an easy tone that would have counteracted the absurdity of her behavior on first entering the room; instead, she had said “Yes, sir,” with a soft and chastened voice when he asked her to forgive his not rising from the sofa. How could she have thought him young? Or old either? It came over her, with a sensation of quick fear, that this face was of no age at all. She had (or so she had believed) disliked bearded faces except for old men with white hair. But that was because she had long since forgotten the imagined Arthur of her childhood—and the imagined Solomon—for the first time in all those years she tasted the word King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power.

“And now,” thought Jane, “it’s coming—it’s coming—it’s coming now.” All the most intolerable questions he might ask, all the most extravagant things he might make her do, flashed through her mind in a fatuous medley.

“Don’t send me back,” she said, “I am all alone at home, with terrible dreams. It isn’t as if Mark and I saw much of one another at the best of times. I am so unhappy.”

“Are you unhappy, now?” asked the man. A dozen affirmatives died on Jane’s lips as she looked up in answer to his question. Then suddenly, in a kind of deep calm, like the stillness at the center of a whirlpool, she saw the truth, and ceased at last to think how her words might make him think of her, and answered, “No.”

Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the man the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even of pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problems was in fact involving her in new ones.

“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”

The man said nothing.

“What would you say about a case like that?”

“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said Mr. Fisher-King. “You do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”

We are often guarded, distrusting, and discontent just like Jane. We need people who will speak truth into our lives and tell us that we have lost love because we never attempted obedience. Like the man lowered through the ceiling, we are paralyzed, unable to heal ourselves and we need others to liberate us. Like the young man, we are constricted by our temporary comforts, preferring temporary relief to true satisfaction, and so we need someone to point us toward a better good life. Like the woman at the well, we wallow in our sin and cannot see living water even when it’s sitting right in front of our eyes. We need someone who will lead us to that living water and bid us drink.

Mr. Fisher-King moved Jane’s desires and he lead her into a deeper place of self-understanding. Like Jane, I need others to speak the truth into my life. People dedicated to the power of converging stories give us a taste of Christ’s direct, attentive, interaction with people and they have four particular qualities that reflect Christ: first, they move our desires; second, they lead us into deeper places of self-understanding; third, they lead us into deeper relationship with God; and fourth, they accomplish these three because they see us as God sees us.

I have been fortunate to have many people who lived out these principles when my story converged with theirs. I am most thankful for them because they spoke into my imagination and, therefore, moved me away from The Pinocchio Syndrome. They also saw me as God sees me. They saw with the eyes of faith. This ability to see beyond what is strictly before the eyes in regards to people is one of the most important gifts of a servant leader and anyone who wishes to imitate Christ.

A friend of mine works at a homeless shelter. He is a living volume of fantastic stories. One of my favorites goes something like this: it was his birthday and he was in a hurry to get home and celebrate with his family. He grabbed his keys, grabbed his coat, and headed out to his car. What should meet his eyes but a bum leaning against his back tire. Poor timing!

“Sir, you’ll need to move,” Bill said. I’m sure he spoke kindly and professionally, but the guy appeared deaf. Stooping down, Bill said it again, “Sir, I need you to move.” Still, the man was unmoved.

“If you’d like food or shelter, you can go inside and talk to the folks inside the mission. They can help you.”

The man looked up. Sunglasses, long matted hair, and a mopy sort of hat. “I’m coming home with you,” the man said quietly.

Bill was surprised. “I’m sorry, that won’t be possible.”

“I’m coming home with you,” the man said. He rose up from his sitting position.

Bill smelled hostility, but tried to stay calm. “Sir, I’m sorry…”

“I’m sorry too,” the man spoke with a raised voice and took his hat off in anger. “I’m coming home with you!”

Bill tried to stay unmoved. “I can’t let you do that, sir.”

The man stepped toward him and ripped his sunglasses off. “Yes, you will let me,” yelled the man.

“No, I won’t,” Bill replied.

The man took another step forward and said, “I’m coming home with you!” and promptly ripped off his wig. Standing before Bill was his younger brother who flew in from Colorado as a surprise gift for his older brother.

You can imagine Bill’s astonishment. It took him a moment to do the math before he realized that this transformed homeless man was actually flesh and blood. The tension and conflict suddenly vanished and relief struck home. Even after his brother removed the hat, Bill did not see him for who he was. Even after the sunglasses were removed, Bill did not recognize who stood before him. Even a moment after his brother stood clearly before his eyes, Bill had difficulty seeing the reality of things.

Because of various social and geographical obstructions, Bill couldn’t see beyond the veil. It beautifully illustrates the fact that we rarely see others as God sees them.Our imaginations strain to see beyond the veil. We are myopic in our relationships and forget that every encounter, no matter how passive, is an eternal encounter. Every relationship is the convergence of eternal souls and divine parables. How easily we pass over them, dismissively forgetting the actuality of things. How easily we forget that “there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory).

The gifts that God gives servant leaders are primarily imaginative in nature: they are often characterized by the ability to see what is not actually before their eyes and to hear what is not actually spoken. Their empathy, attentiveness, foresight, and ability to see possibility where others see only failure set them apart from other leaders who know only how to manipulate and maneuver. Servant leaders are persuasive precisely because they listen, build bridges over relational chasms, and conceptualize possibilities. We would do well to imitate them as they imitate Christ. We too can be healers and none of these activities require that we be perpetually solemn. These people lead us into deeper places because they have tasted those depths themselves and are, therefore, filled with a deeper Joy. Although there is no flippancy or presumption, there is a certain playfulness in those who are dedicated to the convergence of stories. They prompt painful change because they take our story seriously, but they do it with a certain merriment.

1excerpted from That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis

2Here Lewis avails himself of the Fisher-King legends found in the Grail stories of Arthur and his knights. The Fisher-King here is a Christ-figure, like that of Arthur, given charge “over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). Both of whom are called “to fight not with the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds” (II Corinthians 10:4).