The Sanctity Of Tears

This year I learned of an ancient Hebrew practice that I've been mulling over ever since.

Just before and during the time of the Roman occupation of the Jerusalem and the surrounding vicinity, women mourned in a sacred way. When a loved one died, they collected their tears in a bottle to lay in the grave of the deceased as a last act of honor. Tears were holy.

I can think of two other places in Scripture that mention tears: a) Psalm 56:8: "You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?" b) the 

"woman of the streets" highlighted for her reverent faith in Luke 7. She washed Jesus' feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair all the while kissing them.

Tears are holy.

I've cried a lot over my broken dreams and broken body the past seven years, but most of the time with an utterance of hatred toward God on my lips. These tears were not holy so they couldn't perform what they were designed to do: dignify and honor my grief and that which I was grieving.

Recently, I've nestled into the mystery that is God; I made a conscientious decision to dare to accept it and see what happened. And life has become lovelier.

If you read my last post, you know I've been crying a lot lately but these times, instead of being burdensome, they were my very source of relief; I haven't cried cursing God; I've cried in his lap.

But there still remains the questions: Why do there have to be tears in the first place?

This brings me 'round to the whole mystery-of-God thing. Reading On Job by founding liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez, has brought great insight into this relational reality. God is a self-disclosing, loving Mystery and it is the honor of kings to search him out (Prov. 25:2). I dare you, in the midst of your grief, to practice this theology for a week and see what happens. In the introduction, "Jose Maria Arguedas poses the question, 'Is not what we know far less than the great hope that we feel?' p. xi"

This Irrational Season

This time is very strange for me. I cannot currently regulate my emotions (Bipolar I Disorder), and while usually I have a cocktail of psychoactive drugs that lessen the sometimes crippling effects of this deficiency, I asked my doctor if we could lessen the amount of medicines that I'm on. We compromised and he cut the dosage of my Effexor in half (I was at the highest dose possible). The day I began my new regimen, I cried a lot...for no reason. As the days wore on (I believe I'm on day five but nothing appears quite calculable in this irrational season), it only got worse. My two worst symptoms? Mood swings and lethargy. Unfortunate is the man or woman that has crossed me, unfortunate am I if I think of anything remotely sad, and unfortunate is the person who tries to have a conversation with me because I may very well fall asleep.

Right now, I don't live by time; I live by pathos. I can only determine space by what I am feeling. Quite irrational indeed.

In my moments of coherence, I ask the Lord why he has afflicted me with a disorder that has prevented so much in my life. I don't ever get an answer, but I figure the squeaky wheel gets the oil, right?

But perhaps there is a reason for this irrational season, for this season of feeling completely bonkers out of control. There is a passage in The Heavenly Life that reads: "Sorrow reveals unknown depths of the soul, and unknown capacities for suffering and service... Sorrow is God's tool to plow the depths of the soul, that it may yield a richer harvest... God never uses anyone to a great degree until he breaks the person completely... It takes sorrow to expand and deepen the soul." Hope, yet!

Maybe my five years of Arabic study have not been for naught! Maybe, through this irrational season, God is preparing me for some form of service among the Arab peoples: a service which I've dreamt of for six years. Maybe this irrational season is no waste at all!

Cancer and the Incarnation

I didn't do anything different today. I was just praying for someone who has cancer. And then the tears started. Having long been jaded that god is willing to perform miracles, I sobbed, "Lord, I have a mustard seed of faith; please, please perform a miracle and heal him."

Then later I replayed my Georgia mama's final, laborious, horrible breath (due to cancer). I hadn't witnessed it but was told about it in great detail and can barely bear to imagine it.

I am coming to terms with mystery, particularly divine mystery. You know the answer I got from my prayer earlier today? Nada. Zilch. Nothing. Like trying to move the Great Wall of China.

I googled the etymology of "mystery" and it surprisingly had a lot of religious influence as being some thing hidden my god.

I used to hate god for being mysterious, but now I think he might be doing the hiding for our own good. I'm slowly warming up to the idea that god might actually, in fact be good.

I don't understand, but in the spirit of exhaustion and Advent, I listened to a local church's Christmas album, well, one song in particular, that seemed to budge the Great Wall of China.

Here is the link to Earth & Stone by Alex Priore sung by TJ Lents:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah09d1ED6Cw

I don't understand much about the harder parts of existence on planet earth, but the Christmas story, the Incarnation seems to meet me and say, "That's okay."

In loving memory of Lynette Washington 

What It's Like To Have A Manic Episode

My breathing is slow and shallow. I am trying not to have a panic attack. I forgot to take my morning meds and that's a big no-no in the world of big pharma. I didn't notice it til I dropped my last friend off. This pit in my stomach. I got home and curled up into a ball under my duvet. Oh, did I mention my new necklace got a lot of compliments today? It made me feel nice, not good, but nice. Anyways, I knew it was time for the psychosis playlist (I didn't make it explicitly for psychosis but it really helps). I entitled it Slavic with Oriental Influence because that's what it mostly is with some Debussy thrown in there;). I for sure over-romanticize Trans-Siberia, but when I listen to Russian composers I can't help but imagine myself as Anastasia Romanov escaping imperial overthrow via the Trans-Siberian Railway. It helps a little. I was just with some of my very best friends talking louder and faster than usual. Now I'm just trying to move breath between the air and my lungs. I am scared. I called my friend to pray over me. I described it like feeling like Alice in Wonderland: everything was shrinking or I was getting larger or maybe both. Tears well in my eyes but I don't let them stay there long because I know if I let one fall they will never stop.

Scars

I don't know how I had gotten to that point. The only warning sign I knew for sure was that I had wanted a beer once we got home from my friend's wisdom teeth surgery at a military facility.

I had the surgery at a military facility. As I waited and waited, the sight of surgeons confidently striding about later sent me into vivid flashbacks of getting called back by my own surgeon to go over the details of my highly-invasive Whipple procedure... the one that would change everything.

I called my dad as I waited in line to pick up my friend's meds at the pharmacy across the road. He said I sounded nervous, anxious. "Huh? I'm fine!" I chirped. Little did I know that with each passing set of fatigues, I was coming closer and closer to an encounter with my PTSD.

My dictionary app defines a scar, firstly, as: a mark left by a healed wound, sore, or burn. But it defines it, secondly, as: a lasting aftereffect of trouble, esp. a lasting psychological injury resulting from suffering or trauma. Bingo.

That night, as I spiraled into a drunken stupor to escape the pain, I did remember my scar hurting in the waiting room. A counselor once told me that our bodies hold memories, too. Maybe my body knew this was a bad situation before my brain.

I hadn't gotten drunk in months. I had my drinking firmly under control (praise God). But this, this was too much.

Physical scars fade, but they can still hurt. What if it's the same with emotional, psychological scars. We think we're better but we end up tearing open the old wound. Besides flashbacks, I get nightmares that my nine-inch scar is wide open and I feel the pain of trying to hold my stomach together.

I asked my counselor if I would ever be a fully functional, contributing member of society with all that's fucked up in me. She said she didn't know.

Tragedies, "extreme" cases

I just copied John 1:1-14 in the NIV to "High and Dry" by Radiohead. It was subconscious and coincidental that I did the exact same thing in high school calculus when my first boyfriend broke up with me.

I remember that first month of college at Virginia Tech reading the passage aloud alone in my dorm room.

And now I did it again.

This week, I went to a highly recommended counseling association and they declined me because my case was too "extreme." I froze when the sweet counselor shuffled me out of her office. I told one of my friends today and she said she probably would have cried if that had happened to her. But I guess I'm used to it? Used to being different. As a quote Enneagram Four, some would say I thrive in situations like these. But mostly it just made me sad.

Sad that I was rejected because of a past I had no control over. Sad because of the pasts, presents, and futures that have, are, and will happen to people. Tragedies, "extreme" cases.

Anxiety

"In the sickness of his agony, the will of Jesus arises

perfect at last and of itself, unsupported now, declares--

a naked consciousness of misery hung in the waste

darkness of the universe--declares for God, in defiance

of pain, of death, of apathy, of self, of negation, of 

the blackness within and around it; calls aloud upon 

the vanished God."

George Macdonald

These words always chill me. I once had an experience, while deeply, clinically depressed of laying in an empty church chapel and crying out to God that I would be able to feel anything, even pain, because the depression had left me bereft of feeling. I cried out, I cried; nothing. I felt absolutely abandoned. The difference between my hour of great grief and his is that Jesus was truly forsaken by the Living God while I had his Spirit living inside of me and just couldn't "feel" him in that moment because my brain is a little screwy.

Currently, I'm sit-laying in my bed, surrounded by a dozen books that I've already read but bring me comfort in my anxiety. On a surprising and hopeful note: I left my room to go downstairs to the kitchen right off my room to get the dinner my dad made me. It lies uneaten, but still a victory in my book.

What is not a victory is that I practically live in my bed in PJs due to my anxiety. I'm not kidding. I rarely leave my house or change into normal people clothes. Only Starbucks and alcohol/dancing/psychic escapism get me to leave, occasionally a health appointment like a PET scan, but that's it.

Tonight was one of my best friend's birthday's about 40 minutes away in Norfolk. I had tried to drive to see her earlier in the week on her actual birthday to give her her gift but touched my car door handle and immediately walked inside, defeated. 'Maybe this night will be different,' I thought. Nope. I sunk deeper into my bed beneath the books that I've read a thousand times. Beneath caffeine, klonopin, and adderall: my crutches. I stare at the beautifully wrapped gift (I am an Enneagram 4, you know ;)) and am deeply saddened by my inability to celebrate my friend. But, on a deeper level, that my mental illnesses has won the day again. I thought Bipolar I, psychosis, and PTSD were enough to keep me busy for a lifetime, but throw in anxiety and it's a strikeout.

Karl Barth writes, "We must realize that all the paths of life upon which we walk are the same...in that they all lead to the edge of the precipice, We cannot bridge this precipice but its bridging has been made manifest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Who would partake of the resurrection must first have seen this chasm, have discovered the pit. And life is not easy; on the contrary, it becomes deadly earnest and difficult whenever the word 'resurrection' resounds. Resurrection proclaims true freedom to us and lets us painfully discovery our personal chains [something I am thankful to all my health issues for] It tells us that the one and only refuge is God." Threatened By Resurrection.

In concert, but slightly less morbid, German theologian (and my favorite theologian-I would recommend his book The Crucified God) Jurgen Moltmann writes, "Is there an answer to the question why God forsook him [Christ]? Is there any answer to the agonizing questionings of disappointment and death: 'My God, Why? Why...?' A real answer to this question cannot be a theoretical answer beginning with the word 'Because.' It has to be a practical answer. An experience of this kind can only be answered by another experience, not by an explanation. A reality like this can be answered only by another reality. It is the answer of resurrection...Our disappointments, our loneliness, and our defeats do not separate us from him; they draw us more deeply into communion with him. And with the final unanswered question, 'Why, my God, why?' we join in his death cry and await with him the resurrection." Prisoner of Hope 

I may be paralyzed beyond rationality by some part of my brain going wonky (maybe it's the PTSD?), but I certainly can worship, pray to, and lean on God right from the edge of the precipice-my bed. 

Anxiety for no reason is not fun and is especially frustrating due to the lack of origin to blame it on. I truly am sorry if any of this applies to you.

But I find my only hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I pray you could, too.

"Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ will come again."