The Witness: Lent as Trans-Seasonal Ecclesiology

Lent as Trans-Seasonal Ecclesiology
By William Blaine-Wallace
Monday, February 7, 2005

Jesus wept. (John 11:35)

Several days ago, I attended a conference, which hosted a few of the foundational voices in family therapy. I particularly was drawn to the work of Tom Andersen, a Norwegian psychiatrist.

Tom is Scandinavian to the bone -- a man of few words, very slow to get them out, an enormous heart for and presence with frozen spirits. Bergman would be proud.

Tom showed a brief video clip of his work. Six women representing three generations of one family and a therapist had arranged for Tom to come sit with them for a session. The therapist tells Tom before the session that her work with the family is stuck, that there has been no movement over the last couple of sessions.

Tom enters the counseling room amidst a cacophony of chatter and sits among the women. The racket increases, particularly the giggles of the youngest, the 13 year-old granddaughter of the quietest woman in the room, the grandmother, who is seated to Tom's right.

Tom sits still and silent among the clamor for what seems like a long time. Then Tom says, almost in a whisper, "There is much noise." The decibels increase, especially the sniggers of the adolescent.

Tom waits for a while longer and then softly says, "I wonder, if noise could speak, what would noise have to say to us?"

Being mute is more than deadly silence. Sometimes it is noise. Always it is an incomprehensible wailing. . . We are caught in the embrace of the more obtuse diminishments that leave incomprehensible wailing unattached, like the clamor of six women not yet connected to the cancer of their matriarch.

In a few moments, the grandmother speaks: "Noise would say that we need to speak." A nervous laughter escapes the grandchild. The grandmother continues: "There is much to talk about that is hard to talk about but needs to be talked about." Air is let out of noise like a pinpricked balloon. An uncomfortable silence remains.

Tom, looking up and down the semi-circle of women, says, "Is this too hard to bring to words now? What do think? Shall we talk or not?"

The grandmother responds, "We must talk about my cancer. We can't avoid it any longer. Yes, it is very hard for me. I've been independent for as long as I can remember, able to be strong for others. Now, I am going to be dependent. I don't know how. We must talk."

The air of relation gushes into the room like steam surging into a sauna.

Sorrow over the losses of everyday life has a way of rendering us mute. Being mute is more than deadly silence. Sometimes it is noise. Always it is an incomprehensible wailing.

Sometimes there is a wailing wall, which we find ourselves at the foot of in times of big and blatant loss, like the death of a child. More often there is no wall. We are caught in the embrace of the more obtuse diminishments that leave incomprehensible wailing unattached, like the clamor of six women not yet connected to the cancer of their matriarch.

Unattached wailing whips around like the haywired robotics of a drivenness to despair manifested in day-in and day-out busyness and boredom. Suits and dresses. Affairs and addictions. Unattached wailing thrashes around like a broken fan belt under the hood of an SUV cruising at 85 miles down the interstate toward another day of gerbil activity in an office park. The only match for such lashing is the rage behind the Land Cruiser's steering wheel. Unattached wailing flogs around in the absurd and out of context rantings of the homeless ones, long separated from reality.

Who is there to say to us, "If your slumping shoulders wrote you a letter, what would be in it? Or, What would be the last will and testimony of your 60-hour work week?"

When the whipping and lashing and flogging of unattached wailing goes unheard, we, like the six yet-to-be-heard women, become stuck. When I excavate the whipping and lashing and flogging of my unheard stuckness, what I usually discover is a noisy numbness not unlike the spirit of the subway on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon during rush hour. Life is fogged in. You'd never know by the agility with which I'm doing the day. And, I am not alone.

Our national numbness is epidemic. We "veg out" in front of "Survivor" and "American Idol" while Washington makes illegitimate war and maneuvers coffins illusively through Delaware. Now, Washington has her hand in the cookie jar of our future, eying SSI checks that my grandmother both counted on and was proud of after decades of standing in front of a cotton loom in Saffie Mill. And we are mostly curious about The Super Bowl; if not the game, the commercials.

Who has the presence of heart to hear our wailing to voice -- both attached and unattached wailing? To whom do we dare speak? Who is our Tom Andersen?

For instance, who is there to say to us, at the death of a friend, the loss of a job, the abandonment by a partner, "If your tears could speak what would they say?" Is it your priest? A kindly acquaintance in the string section? The companion with whom we walk around the reservoir three days a week? A friend at coffee hour?

Harder questions: Who is there to say to us, "If your slumping shoulders wrote you a letter, what would be in it? Or, What would be the last will and testimony of your 60-hour work week? Or, If your rage could write a song, what would the lyrics be? Or, If your numbness thawed out, what would it say about life in the freezer?" Would it be your therapist? Your journal? Your prayer shawl?

My questions are formed from a particular orientation to the sacred. My questions privilege a holiness that silently hears our inarticulate wailing, attached and unattached, in all its manifestations.

Holiness hears our inarticulate wailing towards a voice of lamentation. Lamentation is wailing that has found a song to sing, and someone to sing it with -- what Dorothee Soelle called the language of the psalms:

I call upon thee, O Lord, make haste to me. Give ear to my voice, when I call to thee! Let my prayer be counted as incense before thee, and the lifting of my hands as an evening sacrifice. A choir of lamentation makes a joyful noise unto the Lord.

Listen to The Blind Boys of Alabama before they hit the big time. Shared suffering is doxologic.

The regnant dominion keeps trying to hum the citizenry to sleep, fearing that the strangely joyous lament of the aggrieved community of the marginalized will be heard. The outsiders' strident hope for the future threatens the insiders' obsessive concern for the immediate, for which they have margined the future.

Doxology, cries of joy birthed from the tears of shared suffering, is Eucharistic -- body broken among us for us. Eucharist is dangerous to the powers and principalities who count on a dissonant, numbed constituency singing sanguine praise songs to a cocksure God. On the other hand, "We Shall Overcome," a sacramental song sung down Broad Avenue in Albany, Ga., and across The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., unsettled a nation that realigned in a somewhat better place.

Yesterday, I received an email about a campaign to get Eyes On The Prize, the most celebrated history of the civil rights movement, back on air after ten years in the archives. The documentary is imprisoned by copyright restrictions, which, on the surface seem bureaucratic, but, when scratched, smelled of what Walter Brueggemann calls Royal Consciousness, economics of affluence, politics of oppression and religion of immanence (The Prophetic Imagination, Fortress Press, 2001, p. 30). Civil rights leader Lawrence Guyot said the restrictions are analogous to the books of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X being banned. And, he continued, "If people had stuck to the law, black people wouldn't have the right to use restaurants and hotels."

If not by fine print and legalese, the regnant dominion drowns out Eyes On The Prize by reciting bedtime stories of its official doctrine, optimism, to the sleepy middle majority, lulled into dreams of gated communities by the prose of a prosperous present. The regnant dominion keeps trying to hum the citizenry to sleep, fearing that the strangely joyous lament of the aggrieved community of the marginalized will be heard. The outsiders' strident hope for the future threatens the insiders' obsessive concern for the immediate, for which they have margined the future. Evidence the Bush administration's willingness to hand down to our children an almost unimaginable debt and an increasingly pillaged environment in the service of the moment.

In spite of what church has become in America, pathos co-opted by patriotism, the Judeo-Christian witness is rooted in grief. The ministry of Jesus, and of those who came before him -- Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Micah -- thickened the stories of incomprehensible wailing of the abandoned into songs of lamentation among the dispossessed, creating joy dangerous to the prosperity of temple and town.

The gospel is grief work gone public.

I'm reminded of Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. The congregation begins services with Psalms of Lament, what they call "the public processing of pain." They take their processed pain to the streets, holding prayer vigils at the site of each violent death in Durham (Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, p. 122).

During Lent, may we dare to bring our attached and unattached wailing into the community of faith, where, together, we may be heard to lamentation, from which may flow a contagious and dangerous joy? And, when the 40 days are over, might we consider our trail of tears to have been more than a time out? Might we determine the walk to be an ecclesiology to awaken, an epistemology to inform, a hermeneutic to reform a dying institution?

The Rev. William Blaine-Wallace is rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Boston, Mass. He may be reached by email at bb-w@emmanuel-boston.org.