In Our Abandonment
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
In the wake of the election, many of my friends have been smitten with great sadness; as am I on some days. What follows here is a reflection on what to do with our sadness that marks our disappointment and frustration. On the Saturday following the election, we had a funeral at our church, celebrating the life of Diana, one of the great, well-beloved saints in our congregation. The concluding hymn we sang at her service was, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (UMC Hymnal 139). In the hymn, two phrases caught my attention:
In verse 3:
Ponder anew what the almighty can do,
Who with his love doth befriend thee.
In verse 4:
Then to thy need God a mother doth speed,
spreading the wings of grace o’er thee.
The two images jumped out at me:
God as friend
God as mother.
I thought about our post-election sadness and disappointment; this prompted me to consider sadness and disappointment in the presence of God as our mother and God as our friend. That is, our faith lets us share our sadness and disappointment and then relinquish them to our ever-attentive mother and friend. Consequently, I arrived at this rather obvious formulation:
Grief shared may turn to energy;
Grief unattended will predictably turn to despair or to violence.
The good news entrusted to the church is that the God of the Gospel is indeed given to us as an attentive receptive mother, as an attentive, receptive friend. When we have had a mother who is “good enough,” we never run out of resolve to submit our words and hopes to her. So it is with God as a “good enough” mother who wills us freedom, wellbeing, and joy.
In a long-running practice, the church has again and again found Jesus to be our best friend. In the Fourth Gospel, he calls his disciples “friends:”
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father (John 15:13-15).
We do not often reflect, however, that the calculus also runs in the other direction, that Jesus is also our friend. He shared his great friendship with Lazarus, for he did what a friend does; he restored Lazarus to life (John 11:43-44). Thus the church has long sung,
What friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
Have we trials and temptations? Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged, take it to the Lord in prayer.
Are we weak and heavy ladened, cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge, take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee, take it to the Lord in prayer!
In his arms he’ll take and shield thee; thou wilt find a solace there
(UMC Hymnal 526).
The hymn affirms that Jesus, as our friend, will help us bear inescapable burdens of sin and grief, and give us solace in our every weakness. We have long known, alongside the wisdom teachers that,
A friend loves at all times (Proverbs 17:17).
The parallel line of the proverb, moreover, affirms that
Kinfolk are born to share adversity.
The good news is that the affirming, healing, transforming friendship of Jesus is operative “at all times,” in every season and in every circumstance…no exceptions. Just a bit further on in the UMC hymnal, we dare to sing of Jesus as the reliable source of our life. In our singing, we affirm that Jesus is a safe refuge, that Jesus’ righteous hand will save, that Jesus’ grace will be all-sufficient. Finally we conclude by reiterating his promise:
I’ll never, no, never, no, never forsake (“How Firm Foundation,” UMC Hymnal 529).
The church has found (and is glad to sing) of the utterly reliable friendship of Jesus.
When we probe more carefully how the friendship with Jesus is mediated to us, we can find in the tradition a variety of hopes and affirmations. For some with a mystical bent, Jesus as friend is a direct and immediate encounter in healing, emancipatory ways. For some, it is worship—and more precisely the Eucharist--that is the frame for engagement with the friendship of Jesus. Thus I can remember from my childhood that on communion Sunday, we regularly sang,
Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;
here would I touch and handle things use;
here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,
and all my weariness upon thee lean.
(UMC Hymnal 623).
While I sang that with great expectation, in the end along with many others of “low church” propensity, I found the presence of Jesus in the midst of his body, the church. That is, it is in the company of the faithful that we practice the hands-on specificity of grace that heals and transforms. Thus, referring back to Diana’s funeral service, one of the most laden instances is when almost everyone is present, but it is not yet time for the service to begin. We sit together in silence. Of course we look around to see who is coming or going. But mostly we sit together silently. We have a chance to ponder the deceased. We have an opportunity to give thanks. We have an occasion to ponder our own mortality and the fact that our own death is readily on the horizon. And we have a chance to consider together the good promises of the God of life beyond our fragility. We are there quietly together in our scattered versions of faith. I like to think that in that moment we do celebrate the ties that bind us together in one body:
Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love;
the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above
(“Blest Be the Tie that Binds,” UMC Hymnal 557, verse 1)
In the quiet, we do entertain all sorts of prayers. But this meeting of the faithful is also an opportunity to share:
Before the Father’s throne we pour our ardent prayers;
Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, our comforts and our cares (verse 2).
To be sure, we are guarded in this. But the context evokes our thoughts and hopes about death, about new life and healing, about our keeping and giving, about our risking and playing it safe. This is a public act in the church:
If one member suffers, all suffer with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it (I Corinthians 12:26).
And so we dare to sing:
We share each other’s woe, our mutual burdens bear;
And often for each other flows the sympathizing tear (verse 3).
The meeting of the faithful may function to process together our needs and our losses, our joys and our gifts. That strange process lets something important happen among us. Our lives are repositioned. Our hurts gain some ease from having been voiced out loud and heard. Our goodness takes on energy as we find companions for support. We do all of that in our vulnerability while the busy, hustling world all around us is too preoccupied in its work and will not linger over these human realities that go most often unacknowledged. But we know better. We know so much better that we must pause from our rush to control. We must pause long enough for candor and truth-telling. We must linger long enough to receive and to engage the lives of our neighbors with whom we are bound in affirmation. The amazement of such seasons of patient, candid truth-telling over time is that we come to the deep awareness that we are not alone in the world, that we have not been abandoned, that we do not need to carry the burdens of our lives alone. We have good companions alongside us if we will connect to them. We may indeed be dazzled by how such a company stands with us in our common vulnerability. We do not need to fake it in this company. We find that in our capacity for patient honesty, our disagreements fade before our common condition and our common destiny.
We sat together at Diana’s funeral in our common grief. In that shared inhaling and exhaling in the quiet, we could ponder anew, yet again, how profound are the promises of the gospel; and even in our grief, we variously arrived at fresh waves of hope. It is like that when we grieve, even when we grieve our political disappointment together. In that shared process our losses are resituated, our disappointments are given fresh context, and there may well up among us a new sense of wellbeing, energy, purpose, and resolve that we could not, each of us, muster for ourselves. Grief expressed honestly and in common opens new opportunities for new life resolutions.
We discover that our loss, grief, and disappointment are not the last word or the final act. The last phrase of our hymn is, “And hope to meet again.” In context, of course, the phrase concerns life beyond death as is the ending of many of our hymns. If, however, we recast the phrase, we may take it as we hope to meet again in acts of neighbor love, in commitment to political engagement, and in readiness with energy for neighborly justice. With such a hope we need not take flight from the world. It can be, rather, turning toward the world with resolve to make a difference.
The great transformative alternative on offer in our regular public worship is the shared conviction that we are not alone. We are not abandoned. We are not left to our own inadequate resources. It is in that deep conviction that the congregation meets yet again; we know in such a meeting that we are not simply receptors of that goodness from God. We are at the same time vehicles whereby that same transformative grace is extended to others in their abandonment, in their need, in their suffering, even in a society that mostly does not notice or care or linger with us. I do not know anything about Jim Huckle’s political commitments; I only know that he is among the most generous and gentle persons among us. For that reason, I am sure he would in general echo and reperform such a role of caring solidarity.
We have prayed to “Our father” forever. But here in Diane’s hymn, we get this wondrous alternative image, God as mother:
Then to thy need God as a mother doth speed,
spreading the wings of grace o’er thee (verse 4).
This imagery is an echo of the grief of Jesus over recalcitrant Jerusalem:
How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing (Luke 13:34).
Perhaps in our vulnerability, we might on such an occasion as this be willing to be gathered into protective embrace, not alone, not bereft, not abandoned. We are not abandoned in the face of death and certainly not abandoned amid the unpredictable vagaries of political turns. In both instances of death and of political disappointment, we may take heart and move on with resolve and passion for what matters most in our shared life.
