Spikenard and Tears

It's 5 in the morning and I’m sitting here with spikenard slowly rolling down my forehead. I remember when I was young the first time that I saw snow falling from the sky. It was in Atlanta at my grandma and grandpa’s house. It was just a touch past my bedtime and I was probably wearing my Esmeralda pj’s I so often donned in those days (if you haven’t seen the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I highly recommend. Esmeralda was always my favorite Disney princess even though she was a gypsy). This memory is a new-every-morning mercy of God to me. Let me explain

After months of nightmares and sleep paralysis almost every single night, I am weary. After a night of fitful sleep, I awoke from what I can utterly verify as the worst nightmare and sleep paralysis that I’ve ever had. I don’t know if it’s a side-effect of all the medication I take or the illness of bipolarity itself, but every few months I will have a month or two with seemingly unremitting nightmares and sleep paralysis. As the end of the time of nightmares draws near my soul is always at a very low point.

As a recovering Pentecostal, I was on defcon 5 this morning: play the live Kim Walker-Smith, pray in tongues, get out the anointing oil. I always keep some essential and anointing oils by my bed. I sobbed as I worshiped god and walked to my bedside table. Spikenard. I love the smell because it takes me right back to my grandparents’ (aforementioned) beige Impala that smelled like cigarettes and perfume. It smelled like my grandmother and if you’ve ever met her you’d know why my memories are so fond. Well, that’s what spikenard smells like to me. I poured too much (as always) and rubbed it on my forehead and cheeks. I then sat down in my arm chair to worship some more. (Worship is our weapon in times of distress-simply proclaiming the worthiness and holiness of Jesus. I’ll preach that till the day I die.) I worshiped through my violent wailing. It wasn’t just about the dream and sleep paralysis, it was the culmination of months of them tormenting me. I couldn’t bear it any longer.

Then, I decided to do some research on spikenard. It comes from the Himalayas of Nepal, China, and India making it a very costly commodity in ancient Israel. It was used as perfume, incense, and herbal medicine and was considered luxurious in the ancient Near East and Rome. On a happy side-note, I found out that the flowers that produce spikenard are pink and bell-shaped; pink is my favorite color J It was offered on the altar of incense in the Tabernacle and the first and second temples. Dante mentions it in his classic Inferno: “He tastes, but tears of frankincense alone/And odorous amomum: swaths of nard and myrrh his funeral shroud.” As referenced in the gospels, one pound of spikenard was worth about 300 denarii with one denarius being the wage of one day’s work. One way to carry this unguent was in a sealed alabaster container. “Ancients considered alabaster to be the best materiel in which to store their ointments (BLB).” To get the oil, you had to break the seal, and, once broken, it could not be sealed again.

Enter a woman named Mary, she is described as a sinner and an immoral person. Some commentators postulate that she was a harlot, although that cannot be confirmed scripturally (but I do think it’s true). Jesus was reclining at the table in the house of a Pharisee named Simon (he truly did not discriminate). Verse 37 of Luke 7 reads, “…and when she [Mary] learned that he was reclining at the table in the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster vial of perfume.” This act alone was bold due to the classist nature of the contextual society. Verse 38 says, “and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and kept wiping them with the hair of her head, and kissing his feet and anointing them with the perfume.” What messy, unashamed worship. Normally, for dignities sake, a woman of this time and place would keep her hair up and bound. But our weeping Mary throws etiquette to the wind. One commentator even wrote that unbound hair was a sign of mourning; perhaps another unknowing prescient symbol of what was to come in a matter of days. The rest of Luke chapter 7 goes on to denote a little lesson that Jesus teaches his pharisaical host. He/she that is forgiven much, loves much.

When I am most angry at God for the trials in my life (most recently Bipolar I disorder and a struggle with alcohol use to numb my crippling anxiety) I want to worship him like this Mary of history: messy, unabashed, emotionally, physically, bravely. And this morning I got the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. It wasn’t pretty-it took everything in me to sing, with a quivering voice between sobs, “Your name is glorious/we lift you up higher, higher/come see what God has done/and lift him up higher, higher¹”-but it was real and will be memorialized in my little Eternity Scrapbook forever.

Before I go on, I want to mention another weeping Mary. This time Mary Magdalene in the garden in which Jesus’ tomb rested. She had brought spices to ceremonially embalm the deceased Christ. Among those spices would likely have been our topical oil: spikenard. However, upon arriving at the tomb, she couldn’t find the body to embalm and was quite distraught. Weeping or wept in relation to her is mentioned four times in four verses. Mary’s worship was different. Both the spikenard Mary and Mary Magdalene’s weeping is described by the same Greek word klaio which denotes mourning, wailing sobbing, demonstrative emotion. We don’t know exactly why spikenard Mary was weeping, but a good guess would be the overwhelming feeling of being shown compassion and given forgiveness when you don’t deserve it. Mary Magdalene was weeping because 1) her savior/leader/compassionate friend was dead 2) because his body was missing and she couldn’t honor him with an important ceremonial rite. However, what was the same about both their weeping was that it was costly. The first Mary we discussed wasted 300 denarii of spikenard on Jesus to publicly worship him and unknowingly and prophetically pre-embalm him before his death. The second Mary’s devotion was costly in a deep psychical sense, taking the spikenard and other spices to do a job that she would probably rather not do in the midst of her severe grief.

A day has passed since I wrote this post but as I kneeled on the floor of my bedroom and worshipped Jesus through my tears with spikenard rolling down my face, I felt a deep connection with these two weeping Mary’s. Costly worship is treading in deep waters and I want to go deeper still.

To end this post, I’d like to point out something that has always captivated me. Supposing the risen Jesus to be the gardener in the garden, Mary asked Jesus if he knew where Jesus was. And then he said it; he said her name. “’Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Jewish-Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means teacher) (John 20:16 NASB).” Mary’s visceral mourning instantly ceased the moment her Friend said her name and I'm willing to bet she threw down her costly spikenard and other spices when she heard. I pray today that wherever you are at, whether you are mourning or joyful or somewhere in the mundane in-between, that you hear the Lord Jesus say your name and are arrested. And maybe use a little spikenard to remind yourself that true worship, the best kind of worship is extravagant.

Of Love and Grief

We all love love: storge, philia, eros, agape. It’s easy. It’s as if we were made to love. So the average person-save for the occasional misanthropic Ebenezer Scrooge and those too profoundly traumatized to love-find loving-in all its forms-as easy as breathing.

But what about the twin of love: grief. Well, we face it when we have to but we sure as HELL do not want to. I’m not suggesting we become masochists and become obsessed with this most profound of sufferings. I am just suggesting we take a look at its geminate bond with the nature of love.

Love and grief are intertwined, two sides of the same coin. I have yet to find another analogy that is suitable for their relationship, so these will have to do.

You can only love fully if you have fully opened yourself up to grief. Because no matter what happens during our earthly tenure, someone we love is going to pass away leaving us with all the love and all the grief, being somehow expected to go on.

I’d like to suggest that love AND grief are the two most profound emotions we can experience. They are the states in which we feel most fully alive because they are our closest touch of divinity. They are the deepest realities in which we can find ourselves on planet earth.

God is love. So that’s an easy one to reckon as a godlike because it literally is godlike to love with charity and self-sacrifice. We are literally being like God (whether we believe in a god or not-and, for reference, I am speaking of the Christian God by virtue of the fact that I am a Christian).

Now, on to grief. It’s quite scary to write about this topic. I don’t really know why. Grief is essential to human existence during our time on earth. In heaven, there will be no more tears, Rev. 21:4, (not to say no more grief necessarily) but grief would definitely look different in heaven. Here’s the etymology of grief: 1175-1225; Middle English greven, grieven < Old French grever < Latin gravare “to burden”, derivative of gravis  heavy, grave.

Most of us are convinced that we couldn’t bear to live without some type of love (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, people), but I’m convinced that during our time on earth, we must have grief, too. We must feel the immense loss of life to sin and the malevolence of death, because we wouldn’t know the value of love and even life without it. I am also convinced that we cannot know true love without the potential for loss of it, whether by severance or death. We wouldn’t value our loved ones were it not for the potential and reality that we will lose them (if only temporarily, for those who believe in heaven). You can ask my friends, I always say that, “to live is to suffer.” Well, I also think that to live is to grieve. Grieving is an experience that we only get earthside so we must pay attention. To grieve (at some point) is to be fully alive.

Henri Nouwen in his book Making All Things New: An Invitation to a Spiritual Life, writes:

“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as clear-cut pure joy, but even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness… Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is a loneliness… And in all forms of light, there is knowledge of surrounding darkness… But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Not only does grief apply to the death of a human, it applies to the death of hopes, dreams, and humanity/human dignity all over the world. We need to “feel the night” as Strahan writes in a song. We need to groan with the rest of creation at the state of the lonely, heartbroken, beaten, abused, etc., inhabitants of this planet. It is essential for us to grieve for us to then feel hope. As a good friend once said after I was crying because a brief encounter with a man hurt my feelings, “We’re going to listen to ‘Praying’ [by Kesha], you’re going to cry and then we’re going to move on.” And on a grander scale that moving on means acting to effect change, to bring heaven down to earth.

My favorite poem of all time is by a Syrian man named Nizar Qabbani. It’s called Madrasat Al’Hubb, or School of Love. Here are my favorite lines from it: “Your love taught me how to grieve, and for centuries I needed a woman to make me grieve, I needed a woman to make me cry on her shoulders like a bird, I needed a woman to collect my pieces like broken glass…I have never known that the human tear is humane, and that the human without tears is just a memory!”

Grieving makes us human. And it then gives us the capacity to hope and the agency to effect change in love.

Love is not possible without grief and grief is not possible without love.

On Healing

So these are just some thoughts on healing, or what it means to be in the midst of healing; mentally, physically, or spiritually. I am NOT a medical professional. And if you are in physical pain, I would implore you to see a physician. If you are in psychological pain, I would implore you to seek professional care (www.nami.org/ is a great place to start).

My stomach scar is aching this morning. Not bad, just a dull pain. And I’ve been nauseas and not eating. It’s making me think about my path to healing: physically from cancer/the Whipple, and psychologically from the bipolar and psychosis. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order:

a) It’s okay to throw a fit in Christ: I remember in the ICU when I had to do the breathing technique to make sure I didn’t get pneumonia. My abdominal nerves had been severed so huffing out a big breath hurt like the dickens. I remember having a major attitude with God, then feeling so much guilt for being a “bad Christian” and not taking my suffering with a hallmark smile. But in recent years I’ve realized that we HAVE to be able to be us in Christ-fits and all-or it’s not a real relationship. That doesn’t mean I disrespect him, but I can throw a fit when I don’t understand and the tears are streaming down my face and I don’t want to be in pain anymore. I doubt Christ threw fits during his earthly tenure, but he did plead for his cup of suffering to pass. “In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting for God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered” Hebrews 2:10.

b) It’s okay to utterly depend on people; they are God’s grace to you. I remember in the ICU I hadn’t been bathed in days since the wound and tubes in my stomach covered a majority of the surface area of abdomen. A nurse brought in a bucket of soapy water and a washcloth and I thought, “oh HELL no.” I am too young for a sponge bath. But, lo and behold, my mom carefully cleaned around my wounds and made me feel 100x better to have been clean. I couldn’t do it myself; I needed her. God’s grace to me. I remember having nightmares and sleep paralysis and anxiety so bad recently that I needed my dad to sit next to my bed at 4am and talk to me until I fell asleep. He had work the next morning, No complaints. God’s grace to me. In both instances, shame had to fly out the window, because I needed to be carried; I couldn’t go on on my own. “Carry each other’s burdens, and in doing you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

c) It’s okay to not be fine. When we’ve experienced trauma (which we all have to an extent), we can’t pretend we’re okay when were not because then we won’t get the proper care and resources we need. And eventually we become numb to being in chronic pain as Diane Langberg writes, “It is very common for trauma victims to say, ‘I am fine’ when in fact they do not even know what ‘fine’ feels like.” Let a trusted someone know that you are not okay. “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). There is hope that one day you will be “fine” whatever that means. There is hope. And maybe one day again you won’t be “fine.” There is still hope.

d) It’s okay to do nothing. I couldn’t move for days after surgery, I had to be rolled over for them to check the catheter in my back which caused excruciating pain. As I lay in my hospital bed, my only job was to endure until my body slowly healed itself. In later years, I remember spending days barely leaving my room because my depression and psychosis (hearing voices) got so bad that I couldn’t function in the outside world. So I lied down and waited for my mind to be healed. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God’ (Ephesians 2:8). Anna’s paraphrase: “For by grace your mind will be healed and whole in Christ through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Healing is a gift of God.

e) It’s okay to celebrate little victories! In fact, it’s what is going to get you though the valley. I have been in and out of school, jobs, and volunteer work since the cancer and the bipolar diagnosis. For a driven, independent woman, this is embarrassing and hard to bear to say the least. I love Arabic (well, all languages really) but I am actively learning Arabic. It makes my heart sing. But sometimes I get discouraged because the one thing I can do within the safe confines of my room also happens to be an attempt at acquiring one of the most difficult languages in the world. But this week I memorized most of Psalm 23 in Arabic and recited it for my tutor’s(friend’s) Lebanese family and his mom started crying. It was a special moment that I will never forget. And it was just what I needed to celebrate my progress and keep moving forward towards my goal of being a translator even with bipolar/psychosis. “Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6).

f) It’s okay to be mad at God, and it’s okay to question him. It’s healthy. It’s why he made us beings with free will instead of deterministic automatons. I promise the rub with God will take you deeper into reality than you ever thought possible. You have permission to wrestle with God. “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (Proverbs 25:2). (And FYI 1 Peter 2:9 says your are a kingdom of priests).

g) It’s okay to let yourself feel the pain-to completely break down and cry and be overwhelmed by incredible sorrow and agony. I had an incision across most of my abdomen which made even breathing deeply almost too much bear. I also had three tubes (one feeding, two drainage) coming out of my stomach. One day I had some friends over when I suddenly felt a pit in my stomach. I knew that my nightmare was coming true. When you have no ab muscles/severed nerves, the last thing you want to do is throw up. I ran to the downstairs bathroom where everyone could hear me screaming in pain and blood came out of my tube holes. It was horrific and second only on the pain scale to the night right after my surgery. It got so uncomfortable and violent that my friends had to leave. But I remember in a moment I paused and thought about God. I let myself fully feel the pain with god. I will not lie and say he took away the pain; he didn’t. But I knew he was there. Later on, I remember when I was undiagnosed and unmedicated for bipolar/psychosis, I was having the most severe depressive episode of my life. It was Fourth of July in 2014 and all my friends were out celebrating, but I sat on the couch at the Portico (younglife community house) and stared straight forward for hours until my father called, awakening from my reverie. He drove straight over and I assured him I wasn’t suicidal. I finally thought that sleep would grant me a reprieve but I lay there for hours in the same state. I allowed myself to feel the agony of nothingness and though I would wish it on no one, I’m glad I did because I now know that when someone is depressed, you’re just supposed to sit next to them. That’s all you do. Don’t talk. Just sit. Then help them find a psychiatrist, some medication, and a therapist, if possible. Strahan has a song called “Feel the Night” with lyrics that read, “So I will feel the night/For the coming of the Lord/I’ll await the light/That I have seen before.” Feel the night, because others are feeling it, too. You might be the only one who knows what they’re suffering. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by god. For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also is our comfort is abundant through Christ’ (2 Corinthians 1:3-5).

h) It’s okay to belly laugh. I can genuinely say that I never belly-laughed until I was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 18. I don’t know; it wasn’t that I was unhappy; I had a very happy upbringing (thanks to awesome parents and family). I just had never really experienced profound joy. Like life-or-death joy. That joy is different. Now, I could be in the middle of a depressive episode and hear someone say balls (yes, I am immature) and I will laugh like I’ve never heard a joke before. Recently a little 10 mos, old blew her nose into a tissue at thanksgiving and then proceeded to offer the tissue to every adult in the room requiring them to do the same (and you better believe we sure as heck did to hear her satisfied, little giggle). I lost it at how profoundly simple and happy the moment was. Now laughter pours out of my life like a vivacious fountain of delight. A few years earlier while at church, I asked God what “joy” is. I immediately remembered a scene from one of my long nights in the hospital. My stomach was in so much pain at around 2am but I had maxed out on my allotted pain meds. I tried to charm my nurse into giving me some more. He said no, but a sly smile crept on his face. He came back a few minutes late with a warm towel to lie across my stomach. It was perfect and I smiled. Joy is the smile on a hospital bed. When Nehemiah had returned to rebuild the wall, he had the Levitical priest read the Law to the congregated people. Upon hearing what they had missed out on for so many years, they wept and lamented. “Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength” (Nehemiah 8:10). Proverbs 31 speaks about a godly person smiling at the future (qtd. Proverbs 31:25). I never understood that until I actually suffered something. I have not suffered much in this life, but I can now bravely laugh at the times to come without fear of pain or sorrow.

If you read this far (or know me at all), you can tell that a huge part of my in-process healing journey has to do with God. I love him. That has taken many tears and nights face down on the floor to concede. But he really is the love of my life, my best friend and advocate, and my Savior. I’m no expert on God or suffering, but these are just a few thoughts from someone on the journey with you. Much love, y’all. Anna Jo