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2010-02-01 issue:

Hearts broken and exalted

Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

by Sara Dick

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This time of year, when I look out my kitchen window on a quiet evening, I do not feel happy. Outside I see leafless trees in profile against a frigid sunset. I see last summer's flowers covered in snow and lit by a gray, midday sky. These scenes are empty of conventional beauty, the plants and sky fasting from the summer sun's intense glow.

A month out from the gaiety of Christmas and New Year celebrations, I find this desolate landscape a welcome sight as I prepare for Lent. Fasting and repenting and remembering one's mortality fit well with the deathly beauty of winter. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

We are dust-things—earthlings—created in God's own image and bound to die. As Christians, we die at least twice: once when we are baptized, again when our bodies give out, and maybe a million times in between, when we have to release our hold on this life to make room for the new life we receive through God’s great mercy and power.

Some Christians fast during Lent, giving up certain foods or television or cars to make room for God. When we fast, we rid ourselves of the distracting foliage of our usual well-watered and sun-drenched lives. We resist the world’s push to fill ourselves with something—anything—that will ease our emptiness. We repent, admitting to God and to others our pain and our regrets. We pray with the psalmist:
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
—Psalm 51:10
Lent is, by most North American standards, a disaster. Sign up to be sad? Agree to abstain from the best life has to offer? Plead for forgiveness and purification? No way! We’d rather be happy, happy, happy. In fact, happiness is all the rage. Books, radio, television, magazines—they all tout happiness’s merits and tell you how to achieve it.

So is something wrong with me for preferring, at times, the gloomy but real view out my kitchen window over my lush, tulip-filled computer screen? Should Christians ditch Lent and try to be happier instead? After all, the same psalmist goes on:
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
—Psalm 51:12

But the psalmist does not plead for joy untethered from pain and sorrow. Just ask someone with diabetes if feeling no pain is a good idea. "Nope," they'll tell you. "If I can't feel pain, I'll lose my feet." If they don’t notice the blisters and bruises of everyday life, those pains go unattended and infection can result. So, too, with our world’s blisters and bruises: If we ignore grief, heartache, injustice and hunger, those needs go unattended and evil runs amok.

In his book Against Happiness, Eric Wilson writes, "With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo." Pain and sorrow are often how we learn from our errors or recognize our sins. These "unhappy" feelings can be the key to our world’s and our personal healing, as so many have found through the 12-Step program.

We'll fare better to choose the fast for justice of Isaiah (58:6-9) and the weeping for repentance of Joel (2:16-17). We are all God’s ministers, called to fast and weep for people who are hungry, lonely, homeless, grief-stricken—including for ourselves. And that’s way down on the happiness scale.

Author C. S. Lewis describes one moment in his conversion to Christianity as his heart being "at once broken and exalted." Psalm 51 also reveals a heart “at once broken and exalted”—a heart that wishes to teach God’s ways and declare God's praise.

Maybe to accept sorrow is to make room for joy. Like C. S. Lewis and the Psalmist, we may be surprised by joy when we immerse ourselves in the real world, a world that includes suffering, rather than attempting to force joy out of its hiding places.

A Christmas gift from a fourth-grader in my church helps me see it plainly: it's a handmade necklace with red ropey letters spelling "joy" affixed to a cross.

Sara Dick is associate pastor at Shalom Mennonite Church in Newton, Kan.

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