Trust in Transitions

Trust in Transitions September 30, 2016

Life transitions—graduations, departures for new homes and jobs, for field work or long mission trips or new assignments—are emotionally complex times. Celebration and loss, anticipation and apprehension mingle as you allow yourself to realize, even as new opportunities open and life seems full of promise, the likelihood is that even if you return, you will not return to what you have known. Life goes on and the waters close behind you.

Psalm 139, which I have loved since childhood, offers both comfort and challenge for times of transition. Its three key ideas all seem pertinent to those moments of going forth and leaving behind. First, God has searched us and knows every thought in our hearts and every word on our tongues—our motives and hopes and reluctances and ulterior motives. Second, God meets us wherever we end up, even in the darkest places. And third, that God’s thoughts are beyond our calculation.

When my father was dying I had a chance to sit by his bedside read him the Psalms. As I began this one, “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me,” I realized how much I did not know and would not ever know about my father, though he was a great storyteller and had woven his eventful life into stories for us from the earliest time I could remember. I realized as I watched him sink beyond speech how much in each of us remains unknown and unknowable, even to those who dwell in the close circle of family life.

We all long to be known, but will never be known to one another, even to those who love us most, the way we are to God. One of the things I value about Rembrandt’s mysterious, luminous portraits is the way the faces of his subjects emerge from darkness and are half hidden–perhaps because Holland is a dark country and there was no good lighting in the seventeenth century, but I think more likely because that is how we in fact appear to one another–half-hidden in darkness. Our lives are hidden behind our social masks and our devices of self-construction, tact, evasion, and role playing. But in a deeper sense, our lives are “hidden in Christ.” Which is to say that only he knows your whole story.

I bring this up in reflecting on transitions because in such times it is so common and natural to leave one another with admonishments to “keep in touch.” I think we all hope for the kind of friend who surprised my mother with an anniversary card one day some years ago.   She and my mother were both in their eightieth year.   It wasn’t my mother’s wedding anniversary, just some random day in June. She opened the card to find the message, written in a slightly shaky but familiar hand, “Seventy-five years ago today you first took my warty little hand and led me to Sunday School.” The woman with the warty little hand was someone I grew up calling Auntie Sue. She was a biologist and traveled all over the world studying creatures like the Amazonian three-toed sloth. My mother was a missionary and teacher who helped run a Christian school in India for fourteen years and then came home to raise her children in the wilds of Southern California. Their friendship was long and good. They were still laughing together over in-jokes and the shared drivel of daily life until a few months before Sue died. Deep friendships are immense gifts. Some of them are for a season. Some may be for seventy-five years. They all end in this life, and they end for different reasons. We must nurture and cherish them, but not cling to them unduly.

Leaving is always a lesson. We have developed elaborate ways in this culture of avoiding that lesson. Thanks to smart phones, instagram, Facetime, airlines and even the U.S. Post Office, we can harbor the delusion for quite some time that all we have to do is reach out and touch a button to touch someone. We are led to believe we can have almost unlimited access to one another any time of day or night.

But there’s a cost to the technology and the keeping in touch. Sometimes what we’re called to do is let go. Don’t get me wrong–I’m not suggesting any of us forego the late night phone call or the Christmas letter, but that we not buy in to the largely commercial idea that we can have each other whenever we want each other. We can’t. Sometimes I think one of the best uses of history is to help us imagine the conditions of human life before all our conveniences provided new ways to deceive ourselves. When people parted, it was often not to hear from one another again for months or years at a time. Not even to check in during emergencies or hear the latest news about marriages or births or deaths. The word “good-bye” is a very pale reflection of what it must have meant five hundred years ago when people said, with full acknowledgement of human uncertainty, “God be with you.”

The message to the disciples in the Gospels to leave home and go out into the world, to let the dead bury their dead, even the message to young people to leave father and mother have a certain harsh clarity to them. We will be called upon to leave things behind with due gratitude, but without nostalgic clinging or false hopes. If we’ve really consented to follow where the Spirit leads, we put our hand to the plow and do not look back. It is not finally to a particular condition of life or institution or career we are called to be faithful, but to the God who knows us and made us and is moving with us on the path.

Leaving friends is hard, partly because they know us. It’s important to have someone in our lives who knows our story. Those who know us best and longest are those from whom we can expect tolerance and forgiveness and understanding. People who don’t know you might not understand you, value you, be disposed to listen to you or agree with you. If, in the course of a transition, we find ourselves alienated and homesick, Psalm 139 can provide this consolation: “O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. . . . Thou understandest my thought . . . and art acquainted with all my ways.” The one who knows you best goes with you.

 

The second part of the Psalm offer another relevant word for such occasions: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me.” To say it as simply as possible, God is with us everywhere. But to say it that way misses something shocking, dynamic, and almost frightening in this extravagant affirmation. The Psalmist isn’t talking here exactly about being comforted by the abiding, beneficent presence of God. He’s talking about being pursued, found out, sought out, rescued, met and surprised and sometimes ambushed on one’s escape route. He’s talking about God the way Francis Thompson did in his haunting poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” where he uses the audacious image of a hound seeking out the fleeing sinner with dogged, persistence. It starts:

I fled him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after . . .

 

The one who is following is later identified as “this tremendous lover.” But the image of being pursued in this way is a little unsettling, even if it is by a lover. Sometimes love itself looks a little scary. Certainly the love of God can.

In this Psalm it is God who does the seeking. There’s a lot of language in Christian communities about seeking and finding God, about conversion as the moment I made my decision to follow Christ. But here the relationship is presented quite differently. Here the God who seeks us finds us even when we least want to be found. Surprise! He finds us even in the dark. He can make contact with us in the darkness of our worst bouts of depression or doubt. One of the interesting things I found out about the mysterious poetic figure, “the wings of the morning,” is that the word for morning in this Psalm is one whose root is related to darkness; it seems to refer specifically to the darkest moment just before dawn. To say that God meets us there is to say that he meets us in our moments of profoundest weakness, lostness, alienation, aloneness. At our most passive. At a moment when we may not be seeking him at all. There his hand leads us and his right hand holds us.

The image of being held is one of the most comforting of earliest memories. We all want to say to someone when we’re most in need of comfort, “Hold me,” and feel the weight of our sorrow released as we sink into someone’s arms. All of us have, I suspect, some flickering memory of early childhood, when we still fit into the curve of someone’s arm.

There may be a time to remember that affirmation that we are held, when we’re no longer living in the circle of love and support and friendship that a particular community has provided. When we’re doing work that leaves us confused about our purposes, or when the visible support structures aren’t there and only God’s right hand holds you. That will be the time when we may see most clearly that God’s right hand has held us all along.

Thinking about those times–when the world, to quote Arnold, which seemed “so vast, so beautiful and so new” suddenly seems to have “neither love nor joy nor peace nor certitude nor help for pain”–brings me to the third idea in this Psalm that seems fitting for times of transition: that we cannot fathom the thoughts of God.   Even to think of omnipresence leads us to a mental falling off point: “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.” To ponder what the human mind cannot conceive can either make us crazy or lead us into humility and trust. We can’t fully imagine the Trinity. We can’t quite imagine eternity. We can’t really even imagine tomorrow; the future is veiled in obscurity and our plans are always provisional. We can seek God’s purposes and they can be revealed to us as we go, but we can’t, as we say, “get a handle on them.”

Most of us are familiar with the saying, “You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.” We have to make plans, but it would be good not to confuse them with purposes. Our deepest purposes unfold along the way.   As Henry James put it, reflecting on the creative life, “We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.” I might not exactly say our doubt is our passion, but I would concur that even in the life of faith we seem, often, to work in the dark. Often it’s not even given to us to know what we’re about until we’re in the middle of it.

Since I’m fond of quoting Eliot, let me do it again. He writes, “And what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled / If at all. Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfillment.” I have come back and back to those lines as I have come back and back to this Psalm. It is good to do when I think I know my own purposes as a reminder that they’re bigger and probably different than I think. And it’s good to do when I am confused about my purposes, because it is also a reminder that not only do I not get to know, I don’t have to know what I am in the process beginning or releasing or changing. Our cooperation is called for. Our understanding is not, always. That’s an important message for those of us who like to understand things.

So let me come back to the Psalmist’s three points, which seem to me to offer what we need as our paths take sharp turns. First, we are completely known and completely loved, and when we leave one situation for the next, we’ll find that out in a whole new way. Second, no matter where we go next, God will be there, in the darkest moment, in the unlikeliest spot, holding us. Third, we haven’t the least idea, really, what’s in store for us–and that’s very good news. Because what we think we’ve prepared for may not be what it was for at all, but something much bigger, stranger, and more surprising than we could have imagined. So, in moments of transition, as we bid our good-byes, it’s good to remember what the word originally meant: God be with you. God will be. God is.

 

 


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