If some silly thing 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 closed 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. No
questions have been answered and no grievances settled, so it’s incumbent solely upon God to come through on the back end.
The Psalmist doesn’t seek answers for pain but healing.
