Stephen V. Sprinkle, Ph.D.
Professor of Practical Theology
Brite Divinity School, and Theologian-in-Residence
The Episcopal Church of St. Thomas the Apostle
November 14, 2020
Hear the words of the Psalmist from Psalm 102:
“I have become like a pelican in the wilderness,
like an owl in desolate places.
I lie awake and I moan
like some lonely bird on a roof.”
And again, from the Letter of Paul to the Romans:
“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
Let those who have ears to hear, hear what the Spirit has to say to us in our mortal condition: The truth is that we mortal beings are in acute consciousness of loss. It is as apparent as the latest reports of mounting viral infections and fatalities—there is no reason to rehearse the statistics. We know them. We mourn those who have died, we mourn the damnable plague of systemic racism and misogyny, we mourn the seemingly intractable divisions of the fractured human family pitting us against neighbor and stranger alike that we have brought down upon our own heads. And we mourn the wounded natural world itself, rent and torn by human tooth and claw—and human greed.
We have all lost, admittedly some more than others, and we have much to lament as mortal communities standing clothed only in our ‘poor, forked humanity’ before the awful mystery of life and death.
I have been given a daunting task: to scrape and struggle for words to express what is verbally inexpressible—the griefs and losses that bring up moaning from the depths of our existence. I am a “word person,” a minister and professor whose stock in trade is words, and it frankly unsettles me to craft speech and reasons for realities too deep for words or rationality:
- Life and Love
- Anger and Pain, Absurdity and pure, naked need…and
- Solidarity with the whole emotional universe shared by all sentient creatures, human and non-human alike,
- the total groaning creation.
All I have to offer in these public acts of lamentation are words broken on the Wheel of Life, and beyond broken words, numbness…for as Walter Brueggemann has said, the harsh unfairness of life has made us into “The Numb Ones,” so numb to the barrage of old news and fake news and frightening news that we have calloused over for self preservation.
Yet, that is what public lament is ultimately about, you see—to give collective voice to the echoes in that well of numbness, meaninglessness, and raw need that yawns beneath our very feet at moments of harsh clarity like, … well… This.
It is one thing to be grieved by our own ills and pains. All of us know what loss is like to some degree or another: of a beloved pet companion, of a mate, of the touch we yearn to feel again from a mother, a father, or grandparents…from a dear friend. But it is quite another to lead a whole people and this city in lamentation within the public square, isn’t it? Where we attempt to give voice to something deeper than what we individually cope with day-by-day. For if we are to break out of the callous numbness of our existential disorder, we must discover the font of emotion where grief and hope come to wash side-by-side in the same depths.
In our clergy discussions, your clergy team has sensed something far more than what besets any one of us in this parish. We have sensed that there is at base and root a pervasive spiritual malaise, a universal disorder common to all creation that is at the core of our condition.
We clergy stand in solidarity with you. We have no esoteric knowledge, or superior morality, or acquired holiness that gives us magical answers about how to overcome this pervasive spiritual malaise that Søren Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death.” All we clergy and parish members alike can do is voice the godforsaken feeling of these times.
Like the Psalmist, we wonder and cry out aloud: “Where is God? Is God no longer gracious and compassionate? Does God no longer regard the steadfast love and loyalty we took for granted as God’s heritage toward our families and the social fabric of our nation?”:
“For my days are vanishing like smoke,
My bones burn away like a fire.
My heart is withered like the grass.
I forget to eat my bread.
I cry out—WE cry out—with all [our]strength
And my skin clings to my bones.” (Ps. 102:4-6).
Others might, but I admit that I am not capable of showing you, face-to-face, what is beneath the basement floor of broken words that might open you to move beyond your numbness and find your voice again. So, what I propose to do is leave aside for a moment the arrogance of human-centeredness. It is a prideful error to assume that only human beings understand, feel, and sigh aloud.
I want to hold up this imperfect mirror of my words to the Others who share life and mortality with us on this earth, and find perhaps from them the emotional well-spring of fellowship than can move grief to lasting change. Look with me into the mirror of the creatures we dwell alongside, who can teach us how to pray without words:
Do not elephants feel joy, do not chimpanzees feel grief and depression, and our companion dogs and cats happiness and dejection? Never mind that people disagree about the nature of emotions in nonhuman animal beings, or the appropriateness of reading our feelings into them. They KNOW sighs too deep for words, and they can teach us how to do it if we will lower our sense of superiority for a moment and listen to the Holy Spirit sighing within them.
Our forebears, the ancient Pythagoreans, long ago believed that animals experience the same range of emotions as humans (Coates 1998). Jesus preached parable after parable about the birds of the air and the flocks in his care, and current research provides compelling evidence that at least some animals besides us likely feel a full range of emotions, including fear, joy, happiness, and shame; embarrassment, resentment, jealousy, and rage; anger, love, and pleasure; compassion, respect, relief, disgust, and sadness; despair, … and grief.
I cannot look into the face of my own companion, my bulldog Henry, or into any animal being with a face, and not feel moved when they sigh deeper than my words, or seek a place in someone’s lap, moaning for the shelter that love alone can offer. For that is what I long for, too.
Added to the treasury of scripture, we have a full symphony of holy groans, and songs without words in a natural world confronted with need. The rumbling compassion of the Elephants whose calls echo through the crust of the earth across miles of distance to each other through the pads of their feet, it is so powerful.
That is why we bring forth the singers among us to put our words into primal sounds as we lament, and our prayers, like the Apostle Paul said, into sighs too deep for words. That is also the content of the lament of the animals, …and before the throne of God that is what it sounds like when doves cry:
You remember the song-
How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world that’s so cold? (So cold)
Maybe I’m just too demanding
Maybe I’m just like my father, too bold
Maybe you’re just like my mother
She’s never satisfied (she’s never satisfied)
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry
(Prince Nelson Rogers, “When Doves Cry,” Purple Rain, 1984)
Grief is painful. When we evoke it publically in lament, it need not be paralyzing. When we voice our deepest feelings together, in community like this, when we are open to the summons of God that this hard time can be the threshold of a new covenant with the world and with God, then the possibility of what Father Christopher Thomas has called “transfiguration” can take place. We see that same thing happening in the Psalms, like Psalm 77, where the cry of our souls turns us somehow from our inward self-concern, from preoccupation with how we feel godforsaken, to a decisive move outward, toward a new way out of this hell in which we live. We in actuality could summon each other in sighs too deep for words to walk a new way, to re-imagine what it means for us to follow the bare footsteps of Jesus from Golgotha past the graveyard, and into a new creation. We know the ending of this story, don’t we?
There will be no short cuts, no guarantees. The world is still unfair, and we have no puppet strings on God, for God is free and beyond our control. The hurts of this time will not magically go away, as some have forecasted so falsely. But we also know that you and I can find follow Jesus from Good Friday to Easter. For there is never a Good Friday without an Easter to follow. Our lament as Christians leads us from the self-centered “I” of our smaller discontents to the embrace of the great “Thou” of God.
The doves still cry, and our hearts still break. But then comes the singing, doesn’t it…?
Amen.
