Grieving in Faith before God

8 March 2009
Carolyn L Roberts
Psalm 22.1-3, 19-31

When I am driving on my own in entirely new territory with a car to turn in to the rental and a plane to catch, and my cell phone rings–not once, twice, or even three times, but four(!); when I seriously miss an exit, or take a wrong turn so that the exit I do take puts me in unfamiliar territory, my anxiety level tends to rise. Add darkness and exhaustion, and I am convinced I have found another level of Dante’s Inferno. I’m especially convinced when driving at freeway speeds. Fortunately, this doesn’t happen often, but the result is predictable: I beseech God not to abandon me in my hour of need. God has answered my cries and given me GPS.

Most of us have experienced some level of abandonment, some point at which our experience flies in the face of our culture’s primary message of success. The dominant message, fully internalized, is that any competent driver knows how to navigate from current position X to desired position Y. Fortunately, those specific experiences are of a relatively short duration, and do not happen frequently. But when other, more profound experiences, remind us that we are not fully in control of our current situation, when the moves we make provide only marginal corrective, we can enter a period of disorientation that makes us question the reliability of life...and therefore the reliability of God. I’ve talked with people who saw that in the Great Depression, and know from contemporary headlines that there are some today who feel that same sense of disorientation and abandonment. Others experience it in the face of personal trauma–the untimely death of a loved one, rape, suicide, marital infidelity. In her book on the psalms, Denise Hopkins writes, “Despite the illusion of success, we experience repeated challenges to the order and reliability of life that shake our confidence in the One who keeps order. These challenges move us out of orientation into disorientation.”[1,79]

I hope many of you have made an opportunity to see Defiance, the true story of three brothers who refuse to be rounded up with other Jewish citizens in what is now Belarus, as the Nazis made their deadly expansion east through Russia. For roughly three years, the brothers lived in the woods while World War II raged around them. During that time, they come to take responsibility for other Jews who throw in their lot with the brothers, on the slim chance that they might survive–as opposed to the almost-certain death they face at the hands of the Nazis. At one point, after the group has again buried beloved members of the community, one of the rabbis beseeches God. He observes that his people have tried to keep the commandments and uphold their end of the covenant, only to find themselves hunted and slaughtered. “Please, God,” the Rabbi cries out, “please, choose another people.”

It’s as honest and as sobering a lament as any person of faith can utter. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.” The psalmist may be more poetic, but the experience of being abandoned even by God causes the speaker to cry out in anguish from the depths of pain and despair.

Look at what the movie’s brief scene captures. The rabbi lifts up Israel’s covenantal relationship with God, the covenant established with Noah, with Abraham and Sarah, with Moses and Aaron and Miriam. The covenant fleshed out by prophets who call upon Israel to care for the widow, the orphan, the stranger; the covenant relationship which calls the people Israel to live justly and walk humbly with their God. It is a relationship that suggests a quid pro quo, something for something: we Jews will do our best to remain true to you as our God, to keep your commandments, and in turn, you, God will watch over us and keep us safe. Certainly, this is the Hebrews’ experience of the Exodus, in which God hears the cries of the oppressed, and partners with Moses to bring the Hebrew people from out of slavery. But the other side of the coin reveals the Exile, where Israel’s temple is completely and utterly destroyed, where all of the nation’s religious and political leaders, its skilled tradespeople and teachers and lawyers, all of them, are forced from their homeland to live in Babylon. And if the biblical story of devastation and displacement is the Exile, its modern measure is the Holocaust.

From both realities–and countless others in between and since–the cry of the rabbi and the cry of the psalmist ring true. They speak of disorientation and loss, of abandonment and fear at such intense levels, we wonder that words can be found to give the feelings voice. It’s all put out there: the psalmist knows, deep within her soul that the question which begins the psalm is a question that knows no answer–why. Why? It’s the perennial question of the two-year old: why. Even as one answer is given, the question resurfaces, until sheer exhaustion or boredom or lack of patience forces an uncomfortable silence. Ultimately, as the current saying goes, it is what it is: why?

I don’t pretend to have final answers; no answer is adequate to match the feelings of extreme anguish. But I believe it is an even deeper expression of faith to give them voice. Whether the voice is that of the psalmist or rabbi or our own, that expression is directed to God, who alone is bigger than our greatest fear or most dehumanizing moral outrage. God alone is big enough to provide re-orientation when all the moorings of our orientation have been stripped away and we are like deer in the headlights of dis-orientation. Perhaps that is why most laments–including Jesus’ own cry of anguish from the cross–today’s psalm 22, ultimately ends with a hymn of praise. Thanks be to God.

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