Pray About and Continue to Clutch Tightly?

This past Monday was Christmas, a season that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In some parts of the world it is not celebrated at all; in many Asian countries, it has only recently been introduced as a primarily secular holiday complete with Santa Claus and sales ploys. In the Holy Lands, Hanukkah and Eid-ul-Fitr are religious Holidays that share a status equal to that of Christmas (see Religious Festivals—Sikh, Hindu and Muslim for an assortment of holidays from other traditions). Particularly in the Western world, however, if Christmas means much of anything to a lot of world-weary people, it means a huge hassle that has been grossly over-commercialized. For some, the hassle is worth it, because it means time spent with friends and family and an opportunity to express affections with tangible and non-tangible expressions, but for a great many more the payoff is slight and depression rates soar because the expectation is high and the loss felt acute. It is not without reason that a good many people lament the loss of meaning associated with this particular commemorative event, for to the Christian, nothing less than the greatest miracle of the universe is celebrated on this day. But perhaps its loss points to a greater truth on several levels, the more mundane and lesser addressed of which we will here speak.

There are many metaphors for life. Certainly life has many seasons. It does not particularly matter what our lot in life happens to be, each of us has our share of trials that shape us. One person’s spiritual formation happens in the midst of a busy family with diapers and dishes and PTO/PTA meetings, another’s in the midst of a foreign country with a different culture and a life of service. One person lives life in relative solitude, another requires photo ID at a major corporation, yet another assembles clocks or sermons or both. One life cannot be compared to another except in passing and to limited degree; each life has its own share of heartache and triumphs and trials and is neither to be coveted nor lamented apart from its context. We tend to think, sometimes, that one life is better than another in one way or another: this life is easier, that more conducive to spiritual growth. In the end, however, each life is equally conducive to spiritual growth: each life has its trials and its triumphs. Once everything is factored in—including the unseen providence and grace of God—it may be fairly said that the grass is rarely if ever greener on the other side of the fence. There is always a trade-off: something gained and something lost. Yet there are times in which life can cast a bleak shadow; occasions that bring great joy can also bring great sorrow as well.

Of all the words of Shakespeare, some of the most widely quoted are those Macbeth utters in Act 5, Scene 5 of the eponymous play:

There are several possible ways to interpret these words. In a more benign understanding, most of us experience undue suffering simply because we allow “tomorrow”—for all intents and purposes a fiction, a thing that only might happen and rarely as we anticipate—creep in from day to day. There is a virtuous side to looking to the ’morrow, of course; we have said before that faith, hope, and charity are transformative virtues. That is, faith, hope, and charity see things as God sees things: not as they presently are, but as they can and ultimately some day will be. Yet for many of us letting “tomorrow” creep in from day to day means letting those things that exist only in our imaginations get the better of us, causing us untold anxiety, stress, and strain, for we worry about things that never happen and find ourselves reluctant and seemingly unable to release control of things over which we have no real control. The illusion of tomorrow creates a majority of our heartache today.

These reflections aside, the character MacBeth appears to have something even darker in mind: each of us is speeding to our death, which is seen here as the certain and final termination of a meaningless life. And what of our yesterdays? They have resulted in nothing but the perpetuation of life, which ultimately only leads to death and thus signify nothing. This “gift” we give our children is highly suspect: if life is no more than being born to die, let’s hasten the departure: “Out, out brief candle!” The next lines in particular have been widely cited as an eloquent summary of anything from the philosophical basis of 20th-century existentialism to the clinical depression of a person contemplating suicide. Life is not only “a walking shadow” and “a poor player” who “struts and frets” for the short duration of the show, but life is ultimately pointless, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Most people feel this way about life at some point or another, even if only as a passing dark mood. Others struggle with such feelings all their lives. There are certainly times in which life seems to be not only pointless but cruel.

Yet what gives life its cruelty? It is interesting to notice that the very same thing that would give life its meaning is also the thing that when perceived to be lacking, contributes to its pain. That is why, of course, during the Holiday season so many people are lonely and depressed, because what do such times signify? Fun, laughter, fellowship, family, festivities: when these things are lacking, particularly if they have at another point in life been present, the loss can be acute. These times of year can be incredibly painful reminders of the joy we once had or long to find. And do you notice something else interesting about such longings—or such happiness? it is invariably centered around people and the relationships they share with each other. What gives life its greatest meaning, then, is answered both by our depression and loneliness as well as our joy and contentment. In fact, relationships are what is central to true meaning in life from top to bottom. Isn’t it interesting that when questioned, our Lord answered that the greatest two commandments were to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and minds, and to love our neighbor as ourselves? There could perhaps be great wisdom in such commandments: wisdom to which our pain and our joy alike testify.

It is truly a good thing that we love God because He first loved us, for the first commandment is an area in which we invariably fall short: not one of us loves God to the level of perfection; if he did not love us unconditionally, we would not know what love of God was. What is more, very, very often when we are feeling most unhappy and miserable, an examination of our lives reveals that we are not trusting God implicitly. Of course we will have times of grieving, of feeling down, sick, drained, tired, depressed, and lonely. Yet I have discovered that the vast majority of the time, the old Gospel hymn What a Friend We Have in Jesus tells the unflinching truth: “Oh, what peace we often forfeit, / Oh, what needless pain we bear, / All because we do not carry / Everything to God in prayer!”

A friend of mine recently had a breakthrough in his spiritual life and one point in particular seemed to surface in his description: to large degree, the God we see is the God we get. Put another way, what we believe to be true about God has a direct impact on how we either relate or fail to relate to him. Yet this factor is not entirely true, for if we can thrust aside our own misgivings for just a moment, he rewards even our most feeble attempts at prayer. We cannot long willingly invite his presence into our lives without beginning to learn new and wonderful things about his character and the depth of his love for us. Indeed, given that God is a God of infinite love and mercy, we are often enabled by grace to experience and understand his goodness in spite of ourselves. Nevertheless, fully trusting ourselves to God is a lifetime struggle, and there are still countless times that our belief about him holds us back, in part because we “do not carry everything to God in prayer.”

A good many of us would claim that we really do believe that God is all-loving, all-wise, all-powerful and has our best intentions in mind at all times as well as the best interests of others. On one level, we probably do believe, for those things are in fact true about God and he is God enough to keep it all straight. But there seems to be a certain schizoid element going on beneath our surface. That schizoid tendency might not say that we are liars exactly, but it certainly suggests that there can be a wide berth between what we ideally know to be true about God and how much control and trust we are actually willing to surrender to him at any given moment. Certainly I see this tendency in myself.

Sometimes I find it disheartening to realize just how little I actually trust God. In fact, my disillusion runs so deep at times that I just want to turn my back on him and run, run, run, run, run as far, far away as I possibly can, wishing to wash my hands of all “religious things” entirely and simply lead a “normal life” without my personal demons screaming at me at every turn. For that matter, there are things in the Christian world I do well to run from, for the voices there, (as everywhere else in this human world of ours), can ring inauthentic, in part because we all fear admitting our failures. But what I really wish at times is not so much to forget my spiritual roots, as simply to forget. There are many times I am haunted, running away, seeking rest, wishing to put aside everything if only for a few hours. I run from God in part because I do not trust God: he asks of me the very things I feel I cannot possibly give, poking and prodding me in all the areas I am most tender and vulnerable. I can be as pious as anyone, but that means nothing at all when it is just me and God in the dark together.

God seems sometimes to have a habit of asking me for those things I cannot possibly let go: to him or anyone else. Sometimes he frightens me and reminds me of deep wounds and painful things I would prefer not to think about: things I would much prefer to forget. Sometimes I get so exhausted that I just do not have the will to fight. Sometimes, I manage to hand him what he asks for a few moments at least, sometimes even for a day or two. But most of the time whenever I am fighting God, I get no rest. And I get angry at God for my own inability to surrender myself to him, for the schizoid part of myself also knows the only true rest will come by surrendering to him these very things over which I really have no control anyway. I know that he asks surrender of me because that is the only way I will be free. But consider: surrender means surrender, it does not mean pray about and continue to clutch tightly. It means allowing for the possibility—indeed the probability—that this one thing that means the world to me now will not be given back: ever. Can you see why I tremble in the night at times, in fear both of God and of surrender? I do not want to turn my back on him; I do not want to give him what he wants: how great is my misery! The next morning, bleary-eyed and restless, I feel self-loathing; I grow sick of being self-absorbed and despondent.

Many and long are the hours that I lie awake at night at times tossing and turning, wrestling with the demons that only come out after dark or in the quiet shadows of the day. It seems like I have to reach utter desperation before my prayers get truly honest; I have to get truly honest before I can get any true peace of mind. Praying silently in my mind rarely seems to effect the kind of release I so desperately seek. During these times, I alternate between running as far, far away as I possibly can (in whatever way I can) and crying out to God when there is just nowhere else to run. These prayers sometimes resemble that of Robert Duvall’s character Sonny in the movie The Apostle: Sonny is an evangelical pastor whose fervor for God is matched only by his self-centeredness that comes out in part by the mistreatment of his longsuffering wife; she in turn eventually runs off with the youth pastor. Sonny, left to face his own (largely unrecognized) guilt as much as the immediacy of his wife’s actions, cries out to God:

I would like to believe my own prayers are slightly more focused and aware of my own wrongdoings, even if they are often no less troubled or angry. (What I would like to believe and what is really the case, however, are not always the same things.) I suppose there is a great release involved in letting one’s troubled emotions spill out to the only true source of sustenance in the universe. But the thing that never fails to amaze me is just how God responds to these kinds of prayers. Often, when I finally reach that point where I can run no longer, I cry out to God until I fall asleep exhausted and wake up with a renewed perspective and sense of purpose. I am not always completely content—rarely does a single evening’s tussles take it all out of my system—but I am amazed at the clarity of mind and graciousness of God in spite of it all. So then, my actions clearly demonstrate that I do not trust God as I ought (and therefore cannot love him as I ought either). My actions also show, however, that I am at least smart enough to realize there is only one true place of release and comfort in the universe, even if it means handing the same thing back to God hundreds and hundreds of times before I am finally able to let it go for good. (As Hannah Whitall Smith says so well, that in itself seems to be the key to the vital Christian life; quoting another lady named Hannah: “Most people . . . take their burdens to Him, but they bring them away with them again, and are just as worried and unhappy as ever. But I take mine, and I leave them with Him, and come away and forget them. If the worry comes back, I take it to Him again; and I do this over and over, until at last I just forget I have any worries, and am at perfect rest.”)

The other great commandment is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. We mentioned that there were only two ways life has any real purpose or meaning—summarized in the two great commandmnets—and both of those are relational. Our lives are given purpose and definition to the depth of our relationships and are accordingly lacking the same by their absence. Given that in our modern world, people are more isolated than ever, this factor can present an obstacle (but also a stepping stone).

Sometimes this tendency toward isolation is attributed to the Internet or technology in general, and while technology in general may have played (and continue to play) a historic part, I wonder if the Internet is more of a cause or a symptom. Given all the buzz associated with “Web 2.0”—the term given to the new tricks made possible with novel recombinations of old technologies (perhaps most especially AJAX)—and my love of computer scripting, I am especially aware of both the dangers and possibilities of the virtual world. I found it interesting to read this opening sentence in It’s All About Us, the short 25 December 2006 Time writeup celebrating these new trends: “If Web 1.0 was organized around pages, Web 2.0 is organized around people.” The point was that “amateurs are filling up the vacuum created by everything the old media chose to ignore” as the subtitle reminds us: that is, the point is that real people are not a threat to professional news gatherers and high-quality information, but are merely entering into an extension of their everyday worlds. Still, while the programmer in me celebrates the amazing world of technological Web gadgets that admittedly leave me feeling giddy at times, like the kid in the candy store with his pockets stuffed full of spendable change, I also recognize Web 2.0 and its centering around people for what it tragically often is: a poor replacement lonely people use to fulfill (and not merely supplement) real relational needs. In short, the tragedy is that for whatever reason in the Western world, the number of close relationships we share is diminishing. As Father Chris Metropulus writes:

But of course, there are different degrees of loneliness as well, and the Holidays can be particularly overwhelming. As Abitha Gibson, whose husband is a soldier serving in Iraq, writes:

There is, at least, one benefit that loneliness can bring, and that is a much greater appreciation for just how valuable human contact really is and how empty life is without it. We have said that there are many metaphors for life, from its having seasons to it being a poor player strutting about for an hour on stage. There are two more we can add to the list. Life is a paradox. And life is a crucible. I remember just one year ago, I was poised on the brink of graduate school for a doctoral program in philosophy. Much of my worth and value was wrapped up in my mind, and I thought quite highly of myself because of it. The blow was quite crushing when my aspirations were thwarted: now what would I do with my life? And my sense of self-worth took a severe beating as well. Frankly, I remember very little of my final semester except bits and pieces of an off-subject course in which I could just not seem to arouse my interest: I mainly just felt numb. I graduated, I remember that. And then there was the summer that never ended, the first summer off college in five years. It was the summer of my undoing. I do not think there was a summer where I felt more alone or where I felt more hollow inside. Life is a crucible and I learned a great deal that summer, spent like many aimlessly wandering the sidewalks but with a greater level of loss and lack of direction this time. I also prayed a lot more: I had to. I nearly lost my faith altogether.

Somewhere in the course of events, I was offered the chance to pursue a graduate program in English, or, more to my choosing, literature and perhaps composition and rhetoric: I have not fully decided. I was also offered the chance to teach college. The chance to teach college interested me and always has, though the graduate degree in English was mainly just a stopgap, albeit an essentially permanent one: what else would I do and where else would I go? But I said to myself that teaching would save me. I said my students would keep me grounded in reality and would help me cope with the disillusion I so often feel with the academy. And to great degree, I think I was correct. My students are largely untainted by the academic life, and brought in a range of refreshing and real-world perspectives.

The instructor who introduced himself to his students that first day was not the same man with his eyes set on a PhD program in philosophy earlier that year. He thought of himself far less remarkable than he did then, he had more humility overall, and his level of loneliness left him far more grateful for a sea of human faces: any human faces at all other than his own staring back at him, dejected, in the mirror. I suspect, though only God knows for certain, he was a far better teacher because of it. He was perhaps sadder and perhaps wiser, though he did not think himself wise nor did sadness cross his mind in so many words: in the classroom his focus was much more on his students, though apart from them, he seemed to have little life of his own. Whatever else we might say, his perspective had changed.

However, the sense of loss and tragedy continues to some degree. Aside from the teaching, the semester was another he sleep-walked through: something inside of him had died and school held little meaning. But life is a crucible. And life is a paradox. And I suspect that though many would seek to cure such things with self-help books and other means, they nevertheless serve a valuable purpose that otherwise would be lost. The crucible is what builds character: the crucible can save us from ourselves like nothing else can, though we be burned in the flames. We cannot face ourselves until we learn to face ourselves: there is no way through to the other side except by going through to the other side. And life has many seasons. This season of hibernation, ice, and snow is not the final word. There will be other seasons—many more seasons. Yet eventually all outwardness tends toward death and decay; our bodies will not make it out alive; the seasons will go on long after we lie dead, buried, and forgotten.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

One can understand how cruel of a joke life seems at times; Macbeth’s lines carry power not only because they represent existentialism and clinical depression but more to the point because they represent the way life presents itself to us in certain seasons. Losing those we love, particularly when we have no relationship with God to bolster us, can leave us feeling that life is the tale of a madman: sick, twisted, filled with sound, fury, and all such raucous utterings, and mercifully (if perversely) terminated by death and the blessed forgetfulness such seems to promise, the last bitter laugh falling on deaf ears. Conversely, if we allow it, we will make it out more fully alive than we could ever have imagined. We will have reached an end to ourselves both literally and metaphorically, and that end, I am convinced, is the true beginning of living, at least if our faith has any substance at all. Life is a paradox, because we must first die to ourselves: a slow, painful death. When we die to ourselves, the value of others and of God begins to be seen in its proper light and we began to value others more. We begin to value others more and become far more aware of their pains and sorrows in ways we were blinded to before. And when we begin to value others more, their pain becomes our pain because in truth, we are all brothers and sisters in this life. And when their pain becomes our pain, we begin for the first time to experience joy and all the other fruits of the Spirit, something we can never fully experience while turned morbidly inward. Indeed, as one of the greatest paradoxes of all, sometimes we must turn inward and implode upon ourselves before we can turn fully outward and explode in radiance and joy: no matter what our life circumstances, we must eventually come to an end of ourselves and die, for it is only in dying that we can begin to truly live. The jewel of greatest price will be paid for with nothing short of our very lives.

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