Maybe it’s the pounding. The beat that comes down hard and pulsing, like the Incredible Hulk is the one putting “one foot in front of the other one” and the repercussions are thundering shocks through the earth and leaving monster-sized craters in my gut. The pounding certainly doesn’t detract from the message, that’s for sure.
I close my eyes and hunker over. It’s too heavy to feel it all, but I’m feeling it all anyway and wondering what I’d look like if I could watch myself move. Like a tribal dancer? Like a boxer? Maybe more like a machine? Like a robot.
I remember when I had that ligament injury from basketball in high school and I had to wear that black brace that I velcroed tightly around my atrophied leg, so that it could become an extension of me. And I remember how the tall one used to tease me mercilessly as I walked into Chemistry class. He would make robot noises, the buzzing and whirring coming from his mouth synchronized flawlessly with my every step. One foot and then the other, buzzzz, whirrrrr, metal, gears, electric surges. Meanwhile everyone would laugh. Everyone except for me.
The song by Fun continues, reverberating ’till those two lines that take my breath away. The lines that hound and haunt me. The lines that say, “But I will die for my own sins, thanks a lot. We’ll rise up ourselves, thanks for nothing at all.”
“Why do they haunt you,” someone asked me. “Because they come from a self-assuredly dark and lost place?”
“No. Because I think they’ve been my words before,” I replied. And probably because they’re still my words now, so rebelliously terse, like a middle finger flashed and held with pursed lips and pinched piercing eyes.
When I hear the previous lyrics about the ongoings of an internal church that keeps people locked up in boxes, why, I feel my own Hulk-anger flare and like an over-exerted machine the smoke bellows out my ears. “Maybe I should learn to shut my mouth.” I’m certainly not making a good name for myself with ear spouting smoke flares warning people to stay away, but I can’t help but say out loud that the way of the church is just not working out like I’ve been promised. And no amount of paying homage is making my life clean up.
“But it’s not fair that he is going to get bicycling gloves, and I’m not,” one of my daughters whines.
“If you wait around for life to get fair before you enjoy it or before you take care of yourself, then you’ll wait around your whole life,” My husband responds.
“And you’ll be bitter,” I add, re-tasting my own bitterness as a sour film in the back of my mouth, a reminder of what it felt like to wait on God to clean up the messes of my life. Who told us life should be clean?
I remember when my husband had that stint between jobs where he drove a Red Bull van and carried cases of the energy drink into bars and strip clubs and gas stations, and as he drove from one stop to another he would yell at God for not doing his part. For abandoning us. For letting all these messes remain. “After all, after all I thought we were all your children.”
“I have R-rated conversations with God, Mandy. Those Red Bull van walls have heard it all. I don’t hold back.”
My friend recently said about her own f-words of anger with God, “I felt freedom to be mad at Him because I began to realize He didn’t need me not to be.”
Suddenly it feels very apropos to thunder my own shocks of “I will die for my own sins, thanks a lot. We’ll rise up ourselves, thanks for nothing at all.” And the adrenaline that flows along with it, might just be enough to keep me from a fear-induced paralysis.
But something has shifted in me. Most days, I’m surprisingly no longer angry with God. My screams of thanks for nothing at all are directed to that mirage of a God that I was promised in my desert days by a Christian belief system that told me A Healer was always available if I just said a little prayer. My prayer language has dried up and the ground is cracking, and when I sit across the dining room table from my friend who still sheds tears for her boy that died even though they faithfully drove him one night to that man that was supposed to have the gift to heal all, why the terse middle finger just has to have its way. And somehow I think God is on that side of the church walls too. The outside. The side of messes and mournings and middle fingers.
I’m like Dietrich Bonhoffer for an instant, and I am saying “Even if means I go to hell, I’ve got to take things into my own hands. I can’t just wait around for you to take care of me anymore. I have to find a way to enjoy my life in the midst of this mess.” Maybe this is more entirely what it means to sacrifice yourself for yourself?
I think the saying it, the dismissing God as the fixer and recognizing myself as the container for Divine Possibility sparks something. All my whirring and buzzing and smoke bellowing and finally there is a spark, a tiny spark like the tiny speck on Horton’s flower, that jumps the wire and ignites action, and suddenly I don’t have to feel so guilty anymore or so puny or so paralyzed or so bitter. I can muscle my way through putting one foot in front of the other one.
“I don’t need a new love, or a new life, just a better place to die.”
Don’t let me die amongst the whitewashed box walls of painted over unmet promises, let me die in a messy field of my own making, so at least I know that when I’ve died it was with my arms open wide, my heart feeling it all, and my humanity doing all it could to not thwart my divinity.
Maybe we all need that mirage of a god to throw stones at with the dark and mysterious power of the God that lives within.
this is the clearest and most refreshing portrait of a faith journey i’ve ever read on a faith-based site. this. THIS is faith.
love to you. <3
Thanks for calling this faith.
You say well all the things I cannot bring to words. Thank you.
<3
your last night is the best i’ve read in a long time.
we’ve forgotten how to lament, and we suffocate in the distance between now and not-yet. i’m grateful for this room to breathe.
I’m glad your lungs found air here.
wow. I am moved. thank you.
This is stunning, M. Well done.
beautiful Mandy!!
There is so little room for lament these days – and this punches through. Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?
Love that phrase “punches through.”
Also, I was stunned for a minute by your word lament, because though the story deals with some heavy stuff, in many ways I felt more strength than sorrow in getting it out.
Honestly, I don’t know what the world’s definition of lament is – but for me, it is something that has power. It’s not about sorrow so much as crying out for justice and for the fulfillment of promises. In the process, we expose ourselves and admit that we are weak. Therein lies the strength.
Ah, thank you. That clarifies.
The fancy-pants word these days is discipleship, a word that sells books and curriculum and other assorted games…but the word is discipleshit, and you nailed it.
This comment actually cleared up a lot for me personally. For that I’m grateful.
“Maybe this is more entirely what it means to sacrifice yourself for yourself?”
I love this thought – so rich and layered and difficult and redemptive.
This whole post feels like grace to me, thank you.
xo
When that line came out it stunned me. I wanted to peel away the layers myself, because it felt so backwards from what I’ve learned and yet so full of hope. I’m glad it resonated with you too. And so glad it reads like grace. <3
Thank you for this. I sometimes feel so out of place with my struggles. My husband is mission/ connections pastor at a growing church. I should have it a little more together right? But I don’t…and quite honestly, I don’t think I want to. My world has been shaken…there is no going back to a quaint little churchy, fits nicely in my beautiful little box world. It doesn’t exist. I watched the second Batman movie last week with my husband. I had a deep spiritual revelation at the end of that movie when Batman is telling the Commissioner that Gotham needs a hero with a face and so he will take the fall of all the bad that had happened…because he can. He can take it. As I was trying to go to sleep that night, I realized that my last few years of heartbreaking, soul searching that God had, in my dark night, He had become my Dark Knight. When I told him I didn’t want to believe in him anymore…I was done, I was too tired, He sent someone I had never met with a message to my husband that the enemy is trying to steal my courage to believe and that He has not abandoned me. I cried and cried and yet still a year after that fully questioned the diety of Jesus as I explored why buddhist and hindus seem to have so much peace….months later, I was reading to my kids the story of Jesus and on the Mount of Transfiguration. When I read the words “This is my son….Listen to Him.” I felt the rush of the Holy Spirit come into the room. I had my truth…fully outside of all I had been taught growing up in church…My life experience does not seem to line up with all I have been taught. My mother struggles with progressive, debilitating disease, Her husband left her for another woman in the church and the whole church tried to cover it up…She lost her husband, he closest “cell group” friends, and her church in that divorce. They embraced the affair and we were left to pick up the pieces of a broken family alone. There are so many other experiences that have affected my trust in the church but God won’t let go of my heart. I have come to Him and blamed Him, accused Him, questioned Him, cursed Him, beat His chest with my fists, screamed in His face all the while tears streaming from a heart that has been broken. And when I am to tired to fight anymore, I slump to the ground. He still does not say much but I feel him scoop me up and hold me close, I feel His breath on my face and His heart beating so close to mine and I get it. He knows. He knows the brokenness and the pain of this world….oh my god, how He knows. He took my blame, my anger, my questions, my frustrations because He can. He can take my broken heart. He can because He knows….on a level I never could because I would die under the weight of that knowing. But, still, something feels special about beginning to know God in this way. I guess that is why I can never go back to a perfectly wrapped boxed churchy faith. The box may be pretty but it is empty on the inside.
I relate to so much of what you shared here, Jeni. Thank you for your words.
It was refreshing to stumble across your raw and honest story in the comments. I love the word picture you described as I think of my own story of faith and questioning – and all of our stories for that matter – of the hardships we face and a God who lives outside the box, who won’t let us go and who feels our tears, carries our dead weight when we’re weak and accepts the blows when we’re angry. He truly is worth following. I’ve never known a love like His love.
Jeni,
Thank you for sharing your heart. My husband and I have long since left the church because it is Him we are following, not some pastor or denomination. We could not go back. We tried lots of times and He would not let us. Our Spirit would not let us. I encourage you to follow Him, listen to Him. We get together with the Body and it is who He brings together on any given day. We have 3 grown daughters and on the first day of the week our Body is us, them, their husbands and our grandchildren. We share Him. We share His Word and we share our stories of how He has transformed us and how He continues to mold us. We follow His commands as best we can and as He gives revelation. “A man can only receive what he has been given from heaven. (John 3:27) We also meet with His body in another town on Shabbat. (No we are not Jewish, nor do we want to be. We are His people following His words. This one happens to be the 4th commandment of the 10.) I love you. I love that you are loving Him.
May HASHEM bless you and safeguard you.
May HASHEM illuminate His countenance for you and be gracious to you.
May HASHEM lift His countenance to you and establish peace for you.
the LORD make
Hit the submit before I was ready. Scratch the last line.
The blessing is from Numbers 6: 24-26.
“something feels special about beginning to know God in this way.” thankful for this line and for your vulnerability in your comment.
This helped me wrestle and make some sense of all the things that song made me feel.
Forever grateful for the introduction to Fun.
well damn, mandy! this rang like a bell in my heart. i thank you for this beautiful and affirming post. You have taken the jumble of thoughts and feeeeeeeeelings (trust me, it is spelled that way) in my brain and put them in type. i loved this. thank you, sister.
I feel like the first couple stanzas of Rilke’s Bell Tower poem is an appropriate response:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
I think it can be deceptive the way we often call our faith questions and understandings a “struggle.” As if we’re fighting against what’s right and true, when isn’t this journey leading to the Truth of who and what God actually is… isn’t THIS is right and true?
Heart piercing words, here, my friend. I know I’m not the only one who appreciates the depth of your soul baring.
If this is a struggle, I am enjoying it immensely. Not sure if that makes me dark or twisted, but it’s relieving to finally get to say what you’ve meant to say all along.
This explains so much. Dang! Tucking your words into my soul because I believe they will be instrumental for healing.
i think you’re more healed than you realize. you are on a beautiful journey yourself. you are right where you need to be.
Alice Sebold is an author who was brutally attacked in college. In talking about her recovery, she said “you save yourself or you remain unsaved”.
I think a huge part of the pain in my own spiritual life was the realization that “Footprints God” was not going to show up. Whatever God is or isn’t, there are no apologies or magic fixes.
Maybe “But I will die for my own sins, thanks a lot. We’ll rise up ourselves, thanks for nothing at all” are words of rebellion, but to me they sound like words of healing.
Exactly. <3
I am having those angry conversations lately myself. I’m grateful God loves me, no matter how I feel about Him or His choices at any given moment.
Love you Amanda!
<3
<3 <3 <3
Holy freaking crap, this is awesome.
BRB, reading again.
Someone said it in the comments already, but the word “lament” fits well here.
It’s true what Pascal said, “God made man in His own image, and man returned the favor.”
God, save us from who we *think* You are!
I’m really okay with the unfolding of faith. Of not getting things “right.” I don’t feel a lament for my failure to see God properly or even for my desire to throw stones at these mirages. I feel enlivened and empowered from within. The lament is an undertone, but it is not the driving force. The driving force is freedom to take power within and make something of this life despite the lament.
Thank you for putting it in those words, Mandy.
I don’t always know how to understand God aside from my perfectionism — that learning to be okay if I don’t get things “right.” Your last line above really opened that up to me. And I wonder if that is the heart of true freedom, to find or make beauty in the midst of the ugly? or the imperfect?
Your interaction here is much appreciated, friend.
maybe that god who expects perfectionism is one we could hurl a few stones at together.
This. is. beautiful.
My parched heart is lapping it up like it’s cool, fresh water. Thank you.
I’m glad it’s water.
If you opened a church, I would go again.
nuff said.
OK, one more thing…your images are riveting.
Each mirage is familiar.
Your first line made me smile, although i can’t imagine what a messy canvas church would look like, other than incredibly messy. maybe we already have one. actually i think we do. i just hope we can all convene in person some day.
And thanks for taking in the images along with the written piece.
Oh yes, Mandy. Yes. There has to be room for us to respond with honesty and passion to the ugly, hard stuff. And there has to be room for us to partner with God in the way in which were designed to do – not as puppets spouting trite snippets of doggerel, but as fully orbed human persons created in the image of a Divine Being who is Mystery and Power and Inscrutability as well as Comfort and Presence and Tenderness. We don’t get it because we can’t get it. Somedays, we just have to throw those stones at the god of the mirage and lean into the Mystery within. Wonderful words, Mandy. Thanks so much.
“Somedays, we just have to throw those stones at the god of the mirage and lean into the Mystery within.”
Diana, what you have written is dripping with the goodness of “I get it.” It’s the perfect summary of the essence of what this post is about. Yes, yes, yes.
Grateful.
I think you are onto something,( The fullness of the God essence dwelt bodily in Christ and we are in Christ) but I can’t help sense the deep frustration of God’s seeming lack of “coming through” is a subtle accusation against his nature of goodness/love, like he owes us something because we are Christians, or Americans or even his children, which IMO is an uncomfortable and precarious place to find yourself and I have been there. I love the honesty though and I think God does too, I am pretty sure he is sick of pretenders. Circumstances in this life can completely suck, but that will never change his ultimate mercy or goodness.
I don’t think the Fun lyrics are meant to be a subtle accusation. And I wasn’t attempting to be subtle either. The accusation is real, and raw and loud and messy. But it’s been in allowing myself to scream the “lament” (to use a term others have used in their comments) that I have found a way to move on in spite of life or God not being “fair.” I feel quite confident I am meant to put one shaky leg in front of the other one and trust the intuition in my chest. My God has become so close and personal there are times I feel we completely merge into one and no language is even needed for us to converse. And often God is standing there with me saying, this view you had of me isn’t going to work anymore, so who do you say I am now? And this God challenges me to trust the underpinnings of divinity in my own voice, and the power of what I can call forth despite of all I cannot control. My stone throwing never feels anymore like reason for God’s condemnations, but rather a mysterious invitation to redefine and expand my view of God.
I don’t think the Fun lyrics are meant to be a subtle accusation. And I wasn’t attempting to be subtle either. The accusation is real, and raw and loud and messy. But it’s been in allowing myself to scream the “lament” (to use a term others have used in their comments) that I have found a way to move on in spite of life or God not being “fair.” I feel quite confident I am meant to put one shaky leg in front of the other one and trust the intuition in my chest. My God has become so close and personal there are times I feel we completely merge into one and no language is even needed for us to converse. And often God is standing there with me saying, this view you had of me isn’t going to work anymore, so who do you say I am now? And this God challenges me to trust the underpinnings of divinity in my own voice, and the power of what I can call forth despite of all I cannot control. My stone throwing never feels anymore like reason for God’s condemnations, but rather a mysterious invitation to redefine and expand my view of God.