The Dregs…

Deeds Not Words!  This was a battle cry of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Great Britain at the start of the twentieth century.  I was a bit surprised to see this used with relation to the women’s movement because it sounded so much like a slogan that the author of the New Testament book, James (”Faith without works is dead.”), may have used.  Or St. Francis of Assisi (”Preach the gospel everywhere… if you have to, use words.” my paraphrase).  But the Women’s Suffrage Movement was all about action, not just talk.

Like the more recent Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s, the women involved in the women’s voting movements in Great Britain and the U.S. were often willing to participate in civil disobedience to drive home their point.  While I’m not sure this was what James or St. Francis had foremost in their minds, it shows the suffragettes’ wholehearted belief that actions, not speeches, would win the day with lawmakers and that the empty promises of prevailing powers would not make their dreams a reality.

James teaches that we must be willing to turn our standard cultural behaviors upside down in order to prove our faith as genuine and spread the kingdom of Christ.  Some Christians interpret this as living a life separate from the world, but they end up replicating the popular culture (and most of the time very badly – think Thomas Kinkade) in a whitewashed tomb kind of way.  It’s still dead and stinky, but it looks great to them.  So now they smell to high heaven, but they’re separate, gosh darnit.

But when I read James, I find things not like, “Go forth and create unto thyself thine own line of sacred jewelry and tv shows for witnessing” or “Make certain unto thyself that thou dost teach only the Baptist doctrine to all peoples to make them like thy sacred separate self” but things like this: ”Give up your seat to someone who doesn’t look very important” or “Feed people with empty stomachs.”  Most of the examples James gives are practical in nature and not so hard to do.  That is, if you live in the real world.  Granted, the bit about bridling your tongue is not so easy at times, but helping the fatherless and the widow is not difficult.  These people are all around us in the single parent families that exist in profusion in our culture and are unavoidable unless we live in a subculture that spurns such contact and thinks of it as contamination with the world. Simply offering to babysit or change the oil in their cars is a partial fulfillment of helping the widow and orphan and a furtherance of Kingdom relationships. Or how about inviting those with no family to join your own for holiday celebrations?

I’m tired of insinuations that my deeds and the deeds of my church are empty of true Christian faith, that we don’t say all the right and approved words.  The reason I (and, indeed, we) help the financially, emotionally, and spiritually impoverished people of Springfield is that I have a deep and abiding love for Christ, who has given all he possessed for me and has lived out the supreme example of the only kind of life worth having.  He is the one who has shown that living a real life among real people is the only way to bring in the Kingdom of God more fully. I can do no better than that.

And to those of you who are critical of my deeds and the deeds of my church, I say this: The reconciliation Christ brought about by his sacrifice is a full and complete reconciliation encompassing the realms of man and God, man and man, man and self, and man and creation. Anything else is not finished. And it is this that we strive to bring in the relationships we form with the people of Springfield. For it is not reconciliation if relationship is absent.

So go ahead and declare your doctrine, but keep in mind that words by themselves are hollow. As for me, I cannot carry on faith in Christ without action: the life-giving, God-ordained relationships we are building one by one, enacted in word and deed for the glory of God and his son, Jesus Christ.

I don’t know why, but these days I am still somewhat surprised when people say stupid and insensitive things to others who are suffering a loss. I should be accustomed to hearing them by now because of their frequency, but I’m not. And if I wish to be honest, I’ve said them myself in years past, so I cannot leave myself entirely out of this picture of insensitivity toward others. But I would like to think that I am being painted out of it, with only a fuzzy bit of my right side left in view.

It’s the people that say, “God has a purpose in all this. You watch! He will bring about something even better than what would have been without your loss.” that irritate me. But remembering that years ago I might have said the very same thing causes me to squirm and admit that sometimes I was a first-rate donkey’s rear end in need of a good bit of cleaning and polishing. Ultimately, whether I knew it or not, I was simply trying to comfort myself in THEIR times of need.

It happens to everyone: we’re faced with someone close who loses a person they love to a painful divorce, emotional or mental illness, debilitating disease, or death. Times like these allow our own existential crises to rise from the shadows whether we are aware of them or not. On a conscious level, we probably don’t realize just how threatening these events are to us even though they are not our own losses. But at a subconscious level, we understand that they could happen to us, and we try to find a way of handling the anguish of our possible future losses without feeling the full weight of pain. The result is that we often work out our crises in less than helpful ways with our suffering friends.

Maybe I understand suffering better now that I have grieved with a friend, a 44-year-old heart transplant patient who can no longer speak or use his right arm because of a crippling stroke. Perhaps my sensitivity to suffering is more complete because of the grief I have watched my parents endure while being wrongfully sued by a Christian business partner and left with little of the family’s hard work of two generations to show for it. Or possibly it is because in the last few years I have walked beside friends who have been emotionally torn apart by the tongues of others and many who have formed a core belief (because of early upbringing) that if they are not perfect, they are not worthy of any human’s love, and most of all God’s.

There is no purpose in such suffering that I can accept from a good God. What kind of god plans the death or suffering of his created beings? And yet, Christians are so often tempted to expound upon God’s Mysterious Plan (that HE knows and WE don’t) in order to comfort themselves rather than comforting those that mourn. These comments end finally in both a dishonesty with self and a stifling of others’ grief. But to admit that there is no acceptable purpose in the deaths of my friend’s four babies or the serious harassment of another friend allows me to be fully present to them (some might say, a la Carl Rogers or Victor Frankl, albeit authors of different counseling theories) and to grieve with them instead of ensuring that I am not faced with the fullness of their sadness and loss. It is the working out of Paul’s advice on love in Romans: “…mourn with those who mourn.” It is living in community. It is, I believe, the tangible, physical expression of the mourning of God who is not physically present with us outside of those he resides with.

It is a difficult thing, this “mourning with those who mourn.” It is painful, and I feel myself wanting to fall back on old expressions such as, “Every cloud has a silver lining.” or “It could be worse.” But there is little companionship in such clichés and no help for grieving hearts. Sometimes it is a good thing to protect ourselves temporarily from sadness, but not at the cost of those we love and not at the cost of our own integrity.

The first part of Romans 12:15 says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice” before it tells us to grieve with the grieving. Even though the rejoicing bit is mentioned first, I wonder if the two actions aren’t dependent upon each other. Perhaps it is hardly possible to truly rejoice with someone until you’ve mourned with her, until you have understood the depth of her pain and been affected by it. And maybe it is rarely feasible to grieve deeply with someone till you have partied with him and laughed with him out of sheer joy. The deepest felt human connections occur within both realms, joy and anguish. But such joinings usually transpire over time and when we are able to acknowledge our own humanity, hopes, and fears.

If I put myself in my friend’s shoes, I would be angry with remarks that God had a purpose in my baby’s death, and truly, I feel a sadness that such insensitive comments were offered. But I also know that in their own way, these folks care about her even though they are frightened by and attempting to shield themselves from the pain of life. What we need – indeed, what all of Christendom needs – is people within the church to teach us how to care for those caught up in grief and how to acknowledge our own existential discomfort with others’ pain. We need to be reassured that it is more honest and a lot more meaningful if we simply say, “I’m sorry” and then close our mouths and open our hearts to the hurting people around us.

I recently read a treatise written by a brilliant young student about themes of incest in poetry and literature. Having reviewed many of the reactions to such literature, she boldly linked the Judeo-Christian values of patriarchy and absolute obedience to the perpetration of incest and the unwillingness to address the crime. As one who works in a helping field, I read it with eagerness and could assent to much of her writing from a psychological and sociological position. These values, when distorted and used by those who dearly desire power, do indeed allow abuses such as incest to be perpetrated and remain unaddressed. And as this student pointed out, violations go undiscovered or unchallenged because of a belief in the legitimate rule of the male perpetrator and that one must be obedient to male leadership. The false belief that “Good Christian people don’t do those kind of things” doesn’t help the victims (and perpetrators) of such crimes either. Cindy’s paper ends with a call for people to reaffirm the virtues commended in biblical scripture that pertain to caring for the weak and the needy. For truly victims of incest are those that need to be cared for and defended.

In April I was taking a crisis intervention course, and as part of an assignment I rode along with a police officer in a nearby city for a four hour period to observe people in crisis. I never expected to see what I did. I had pictured going with an officer to the scene of domestic abuse with woman and children in crisis, possibly needing medical intervention, and I’m not sure what else I expected, but I never expected what I saw.

It was a child porn bust. The suspect had tried to purchase a “little girl’s” (read police officer posing as a little girl) panties via the internet and delivered through the postal service. Police officers arrived at his door, and I watched from a distance as they used a padded battering ram to beat in the suspect’s door because he didn’t answer quickly enough. After a safe period of time, the officer I was with was able to determine that the situation was secure, and I was allowed to walk around the suspect’s house, not 15 feet away from the suspect.

As a former social worker, I have seen some pretty rough environments, and volunteering with the urban poor has made me privy to some even worse conditions than I saw as a social worker. But this place was the worst I had ever seen. I can’t say that I was shocked because I really think I’ve come to a place in my life where nothing can really shock me anymore. But it was bad.

When I walked into the house, the stench nearly knocked me backward. One of the officers on the site had gone outside to vomit minutes before. I was glad that I had seen and smelled disgusting houses before, otherwise it might have been me wasting groceries in the side yard. In the middle of the living room (although you could scarcely call it a living room with so much decay and filth present) was a mouse, squished flat and lying in bear-rug fashion, probably near petrification. There were cats everywhere and what looked to be a five pound bag of cat litter spilled in the doorway between the “living” room and the kitchen, not to mention enough animal excrement to fertilize a backyard garden. There were unspeakable quantities of trash everywhere, and it appeared that the water was turned off inside because the suspect and his brother were urinating in empty milk jugs and using dirty, stagnant water that had been left in a sink for a long time, by the looks of it. (We later found out that the water had not been turned off!) In the kitchen there was no refrigerator, so they subsisted on boxed and canned goods. In the backyard, trash lay everywhere, and a dog stood quietly in one part of the yard looking as though he were severely dehydrated. But, as if mocking the rest of the house and yard, there stood a state-of-the-art computer and a picture of a serene, glorified, but emasculated-looking Jesus in the downstairs bedroom.

How does a human being made in the image of God get to the place where such squalor becomes normal? How does one come to a belief that says, “I’m not worth anything more than this”? Is such extreme outer filth and chaos a reflection of the human being’s innermost feelings of worthlessness and turmoil?

There was turmoil inside my soul. I wanted to hate this man, who had probably ruined, or contributed to the ruin, of the lives of at least a few young children. After all, porn is so often associated with the behaviors. Yes, I was angry at this man and, at first, excited that the cops were going to put this guy away. I hoped they found enough evidence on his computer to put him away for a long time.

But yet, there was another part of me that found myself pitying this man who sat handcuffed on his own filthy sofa, head down, silent, and slumped as much as was possible with his hands forced behind his back. Somewhere, sometime, the image of God in this man had become even more perverted than it becomes in most human beings. Or perhaps he had so little hope that he no longer had the capability of seeing and uncovering the invaluable and eternal Image. Even more possible, perhaps he didn’t really know that he possessed it. Life must have taught him that he was not valuable or worthwhile. How else could anyone possibly explain the absolute filth?

And I suspect that it is much the same for both the victims and perpetrators of incest. For one, the Image slowly becomes distorted over time and covered over with emotional, psychic, and spiritual trash as the crime is perpetrated again and again on the victim. For the other, the perpetrator, the Image already distorted (possibly by having been a victim of incest himself) slips farther and farther into the hidden places of a tortured self where the only possible view of self includes the lowest and most profane stuff of life. One, the victim, the other, the offender, but both unable to get out from under the garbage heap to see the eternal image of God inscribed upon their souls. If they could but glimpse it, perhaps there would be hope for a life beyond the squalor and inner death.

For me, the experience remains thus: I understand why it was of the utmost importance that God remind us in scripture that we were made in His image, an image, eternal and valuable beyond our comprehension.