A Theological Education

For the past year, this has been my neighborhood: the Aldi grocery store two minutes from my door, the Korean families having picnics on the grass, the Christian Reformed Church headquarters at the intersection of Kalamazoo and 28th Street. I live with one of my best friends, who currently attends Calvin Seminary, the institution that shapes and makes ministers of the Christian Reformed Church. We joke that I am an "honorary" seminarian because I live in seminary housing, paying cheap rent and listening to my friend's papers on atonement theory and pastoral care. But coming here has been a continuation of my own theological education. I have only professed Reformed faith for a few years of my life, but living here has been a continual kind of homecoming, a reminder of where I've been and where I've wanted to be, which is a place like this: An apartment with a workable kitchen. A bedroom I painted apple green. And friends who have become my family, helping me make a life of my own.

***

I did not grow up in the church. I became a Christian when I was sixteen, and was the first in my family to do so. My conversion came in the midst of a long family crisis; my family suffers from alcoholism, and when I became a Christian, my mother was dating a violent alcoholic. I attended a charismatic church with a large youth group. They had me give my testimony. They clapped and cheered. They laid hands on me and prayed. I had a sense of belonging there that was new to me, intense and immediate and promising. They told me that I was going to break the chains of addiction in my family. That my prayers for my family were righteous.

It was euphoric. In the midst of chaos, I was given purpose: save my family. Witness for Jesus. Channel the Holy Spirit.   I had been powerless before, watching my mother get beaten, or drunk. Watching my family suffer.   I locked myself in my bedroom and prayed for each of my family members by name for hours. I walked with confidence. I had been powerless before, watching my mother get beaten, or drunk. Watching my family suffer. But now I had God on my side. Now things were going to change.

I read a devotional book which had a special section for people who dealt with alcoholics. It included the testimony of a woman who started thanking God for her husband's alcoholism. She pointed out her own weaknesses, her self-righteousness, her pride. She confessed. As she prayed, her husband starting going to AA. Their lives were renewed. "And for this woman," the book's author claimed, "praise helped to change both her and her situation."

So I did the exact same thing. I thanked God for my mother's drinking. I thanked God for how it revealed my anger, my cynicism, and my disbelief that she would get better. That we would get better. After I prayed this, I found my mother sitting on the front porch by herself, weeping and rocking her body back and forth, drunk from a whole day spent at the bar. I took it as a sign. I helped her into the house, made her dinner, put her to bed. She wept in my arms. The next morning, she got up, showered, put on her earrings. I asked her what she was doing. "Going out," she said, which meant the bar. My eyes blurred, and my chest tightened. I asked the Holy Spirit to give me the words to say. To help me be thankful. I turned to my mother.

"God must be so angry with you," I said, "because he's given you so many chances, and you just throw them away." The words were a shock. I did not expect them. My mother glared at me and walked out the door. And I sat at the kitchen table and stared out the window, asking for forgiveness.

***

When I explained this situation to some of my Christian friends, they nodded with sympathy. Told me to keep praying. But the sense of anger remained: Why did my mother keep drinking? Why was my family life a wreck, and why did I feel so guilty all the time? Why didn't God do anything? I assumed that once I believed in Jesus, all my family's problems would go away. I assumed that redemption was immediate and instant, that everything would fall into line as soon as I welcomed Jesus into my heart, as soon as I said yes. I thought that God owed me this: a family made right. Life that was abundant and everlasting. But when I moved to Trinity Christian College, my assumptions met with a different truth: God was the one to welcome me. God was working for my good. God was making me family.

***

It wasn't until I went to college that I understood the scope of how much I was affected by my family's history, how deeply the pain was rooted. How much healing was truly necessary. I took the right steps: I went to counseling, tried out an Al-Anon meeting, cried in the arms of my friends. It was intensive, and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. What was surprising about it was that I had no sense of pride or accomplishment; at my old church, people congratulated me when I told stories about my family. They told me how strong I was, how I was empowered by the Spirit. How I was a witness to the power of the Gospel. And, truth be told, I loved every second of it. It was affirmation, a recognition of something good within the mess of so much badness. It fed my sense of self-righteousness, the sense that God owed me for the suffering I had endured. If there was anything true about the book I read on prayer, it was that I, like the praying wife, knew the sin of pride.

But that wasn't the only thing to blame--my family's history was something to mourn, something to grieve over, and the therapy and tears brought me into a kind of sorrow I had never experienced. Something that had been building and deepening within me my whole life, but that I never had eyes to see.

***

Lament, as Nicholas Wolterstorff describes it in Lament for a Son, is the work of recognizing suffering, being present in suffering as it is present to us, raw and disarming and disjunctive. Wolterstorff writes that the cause of our sinfulness is made known to us, but that the cause of suffering is less distinct, less rooted in a why: "Of course some suffering is easily seen to be the result of our sin...and maybe some is chastisement. But not all. There's more to suffering than just our guilt."

To lament is, in a way, to name the wide stretch of suffering beyond our individual actions; it was not my fault that my mother continued to drink because I said a hateful word. There are those who believe that we are given trials to stretch us and make us more usable, obedient Christians. But some horrors are too large to name as simple tests of faith: What of the man who loses his wife to cancer after years of treatment? The family trapped in a refugee camp? The young woman raped at a party? What lessons can we gain from the ordinary experience of tragedy?

In Wolterstorff's terms, suffering is never redemptive in this sense. It is not morally instructive. It is not a chance for God to say "I told you so." The mode of lament allows us to live in the reality of our sorrows because lament names our sorrows, and the bewilderment surrounding them, for what they are. It echoes the words of the psalmist in Psalm 88: "My eyes are dim with grief...my one true friend is darkness." Lament tells the truth: each one of us suffers, grieves, and has lived with darkness.

Redemption in suffering comes, not in trying to give it purpose, but in being present to it, and in being present, opening ourselves up to hope. Lament recognizes that things are truly wrong because things once were truly right, and what we desire is that original rightness. But what we also desire is something completely new, something that surpasses the suffering and wrongness that we have all known. Wolterstorff describes us as "aching visionaries," as people whose mourning makes them blessed, not because it teaches them some lesson about God or the world or themselves, but because the mourners "have caught a glimpse of God's new day, [and] ache with all their being for that day's coming, and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence." Those who mourn do justice to the world by not only naming its ills, but by desiring those ills to be made right. They long. They hope. And we, mourners ourselves, join this work of aching and yearning, hurting and hoping.

***

The work of family is, I think, the work of restoration: it creates the transactions of forgiveness and amends, makes a home that invites you, gives you people to whom you belong. And restoration is a slow work, not because God depends on us to fall in line, but because God knows our brokenness with an intimacy that is shocking and deep, encompassing beyond words. The Spirit hovers next to us so closely that we cannot always see the Spirit's movements, the way that hope is opened to us. In college, I attended a church where I was treated like a regular instead of a celebrity. I watched children and served coffee. I read liturgy. I made awkward small talk after the service. When I told a friend that I liked the church, he looked at me. "Have you thought of making this place your home?" He served as the attending elder for my profession of faith. He spoke to me as a brother because he was my brother, and he remains my brother in a sense that is deeper than anything I could expect, or imagine, or want. He is the sign of a transfigured desire, something reshaped for a good beyond my reckoning.

Reverend Karen Potter, writing for the Young Clergy Women's Project, introduces the image of a "friendship family," the collection of friends who love and care for Potter because she belongs to them with a line tighter than genetics, or heritage, or even personal preference. "A friendship family," she writes, "is a group of people that I will love." My friends, the ones who live by me and the ones who live far away, have loved me with an intent that is so strong, so reliable, that I don't know what to do with it. And the remarkable thing is that my friends have not replaced my family of origin, but rather have extended it: they weigh my family's problems for what they are, remind me that I am not doomed to repeat my family's history. Remind me to return my mother's phone calls. By joining themselves to me, they have remade my broken image of family. They have joined my lament. They have renewed hope.

Maybe our life as the family and people of God is a kind of theological education, something that shapes us according to the sorrows that fill our laments, something that reshapes us according to the hope that makes us desire family, and God, in the first place. Maybe this was what God was working for when I assumed that my belief would wave a magic wand, answer all my questions, make things according to my own vision. How astounding that mercy is actually true, that it actually surprises us. How wonderful that God's vision for my life imagined such redemption: The kitchen and the green walls. The family reborn. The life everlasting.