I sit on the back porch staring at a tall head of overgrown St. Augustine grass. It's especially green for early April, a sign that mother nature has been plenty gracious with rain coverage in South Texas this year. The birds are happy too, frolicking from one tree to another, with an occasional scurry between two up in the tree, potentially mating or fighting a contender for the mate. Squirrels make their appearance as well, ravishing branches for meaty acorns, which on numerous occasions get swiped from a bird overhead. The ruckus usually spreads out across the yard beckoning my four-legged mutt to break up the disturbance. It seems a bit unusual, in the grim time we find ourselves, to be experiencing a vibrant array of color, activity and vivaciousness. It's a reminder to me that life is never one way. It is not a time of doom, it is not a time of hope. It's a time to be present, and experience the paradoxical mystery of life. Today, I read an article in TIME Magazine by one of my favorite thinkers- N.T. Wright. It's called "Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To." Since the pandemic started spreading across America, conversations about where God is in all of this have pointed me to messages of either blind hope or erroneous speculations, neither of these approaches felt right. Wright points out a different way of looking at this global epidemic- a time to lament in the reality of human struggle.
"No doubt the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation. But supposing it doesn’t? Supposing real human wisdom doesn’t mean being able to string together some dodgy speculations and say, “So that’s all right then?” What if, after all, there are moments such as T. S. Eliot recognized in the early 1940s, when the only advice is to wait without hope, because we’d be hoping for the wrong thing?" Wait without hope. The surface of Christianity would define faith the opposite- wait clinging to hope. But we find ourselves in a time where we we can't see what's in front of us, and even if we could- we can't count on it. Wright points out the Psalms, where crying out in languish, without a hope, was the way of experiencing God in times of darkness. Jesus himself, lamented in agony, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22) "The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible." Contrary to common Christian sentiment- Wright says it is not the job of Christians to be able to rationalize the dark times, instead it is our place to hold our hearts as small shrines for the God who groans for the hurting people in the world. Because the God who groans himself, would likely be lamenting for the suffering if he were living through these times. "God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit."
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AuthorKatie Elizabeth: Writer, Wonderer, Wanderer. ArchivesCategories |