As
we continue in this season of Lent with Barbara Brown Taylor’s book: Learning to Walk in the Dark, this next area
that we are exploring deals with our emotions.
As I read through this chapter, I, of course, immediately thought of the
children’s movie: Inside Out. For those that have not seen this movie, it
actually deals with topics that I feel are a bit too mature for children, a bit
too deep, a bit too hard, because it really deals with sadness and depression
and loss and grief. Those aren’t really
topics that we take our children to a movie to see. Right, we want fun and happiness. Which is pretty much what this movie wrestles
with.
This movie takes place inside the
head of a young girl named Ryleigh.
There are a handful of characters:
Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.
As Ryleigh deals with her life experiences, these various characters
interact with her causing her emotions.
Well, young Ryleigh’s family moves and suddenly the main character Joy
finds herself being replaced by Sadness.
Joy is going to have nothing to do with this. She does everything she can to keep Sadness
in control. Long story short, Joy
finally learns that sometimes there is a place for Sadness and when we try and
keep our true emotions hidden we can spiral out of control.
As Barbara Brown Taylor unpacks how
we deal with our emotions, she shares that during the day, we do our best to
keep busy, to keep distracted, and we don’t have to deal with the deeper
feelings within us. She then shares that
during the night, during the time she calls Lunar Spirituality, those feelings
can emerge and keep us awake at night.
I’ve been there, up during the night, tossing and turning and worrying
about this and that. We proclaim it when
we know someone has done something wrong and we say: I just don’t know how he can sleep at
night. Right, night seems to be the time
we acknowledge dealing with the hard stuff.
Sometimes it can emerge as a bad dream.
What is going on with us in the
night? When all is quiet and the busyness
of the day has silenced then we get real with ourselves or with the issues of
life. And we wrestle, we wrestle with
the world in which we live, we wrestle with the decisions we make and the
relationships in which we are involved and perhaps, perhaps we even wrestle
with God. Wrestling with God.
We even have a Biblical story of
Jacob wrestling in the night, and the question is, with whom does he
wrestle? Is he wrestling with God? In this story, Jacob is about to encounter
his brother Esau. Although he has come
with gifts to appease his brother, He should have a lot of anxiety since he
tricked his brother out of his birth right.
His brother just might be coming to kill him. I think if I knew I was about to face a life
or death fight, I might be up all night wrestling with fear.
As Jacob wrestles, he is injured, he
is struck in the hip joint, but the fight continues, and as the day begins to
dawn, the one with whom he wrestles instructs him to let go, but Jacob will not
let go, until he is offered a blessing.
And so the dialogue between the two continues and it is here that Jacob
is given a new name, he is to be called Israel.
And Jacob knows that in this encounter, he has wrestled with God, he has
seen God face to face and has lived.
Jacob is never the same, he leaves the encounter limping, but he also
leaves blessed, he leaves knowing that he has been with God. If only we can take our middle of the night
tossing and turning and listen to what God just might be saying to us as we
fight being awake and finding sleep.
How many feelings do we suppress
during the day? A few weeks ago, right
after the school shooting in FL our local middle school in Parsippany went on
lock-down. I had my girl scout meeting
after school, and a mom came a little late to pick up her daughter. She was distraught, since she has an older
child in the middle school. She was
trying so hard to keep it together, and I told her it was okay, she was in a
safe place, and that she could release her emotions. Why is it that we feel we need permission to
cry? Why is it that we try so hard to
keep it together all the time? And do we
stop to think about what it might be doing to our own spiritual self?
Back before Thanksgiving, my cat got
really sick and I knew it was her time.
She has been my companion for seventeen years, and so saying good bye
was so hard. I came home and spent the
day crying, and what I found was that I cried not just for her, but for all of
the other griefs of this life that I have kept hidden away. I cried for Sandy Hook, I cried for the war
torn areas of our world, I cried for people recovering from natural disasters,
for all those places that I knew I should be upset about but just could not cry
for, I found the release I needed. And
afterwards, I felt so cleansed. I wish I
could have a cry like that every few months.
Not just once in seventeen years.
My spirit felt lighter, I felt stronger, I felt less angry, it really
was amazing. And yet, we have learned to
hold so many of our emotions in. Perhaps
we can learn a lot from Jacob as we wrestles with God in the middle of the
night, wresting but also finding God’s blessing within the fight. The thing is, when we wrestle with God, we
might just emerge changed.
I partnered this passage with that
of Jesus in the Temple overturning the tables of the money changers as a comparison
of what can be called righteous anger.
So many people picture Jesus as this peaceful man, holding lambs and
being calm. But here we have a story of
anger, of rage, as he sees how corrupted the religious institution has
become. This is not what God wants of
the people, and yet, people have created their own practices based on greed,
manipulating people as they come to the Temple to worship.
Perhaps Jesus had wrestled
throughout the night before he entered the Temple and turned over the tables,
or perhaps the very sight of the corruption in this holy place caused him just
to act. Perhaps some of the wrestling we
do at night that keeps us awake should also call us into holy and righteous
anger. Do we wrestle with issues around
hunger or homelessness, do we wrestle with issues of violence and war? Do we wrestle with issues concerning our
environment, protected land, and endangered animals? Do we see the world as God’s sacred
Temple? Do we see each other as God’s
holy children? Or are we torn into too
many directions that we just feel immobilized, frozen, unable to react at
all? I know from conversations, people
want to make a difference in this world and in our local community. So let us wrestle with God and let us come
forth as force to be reckoned with as we seek through God’s calling to feed the
hungry and house the homeless and care for our planet as we name our feelings
and emotions and concerns and passions for change within ourselves and the
world in which we dwell. Amen.
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