Saturday, July 23, 2016

My silent month


My Silent Month

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I usually post several blogs a month. I write on my latest big thoughts or experiences, or those big issues of the day. But this month writing desire evaporated like a puddle under the hot summer sun. I had nothing profound to express, no imagined keen insight; nothing but a lack of confidence that I had anything to give to the world or to my friends who might occasionally read some of the words I offer. I could feel that my writing was taking a back seat to a silent season. I could feel some of the reasons why it had to be so, even if I could not express the season of silence I was entering.

            I found myself facing events in life that I could not pretend to be able to understand or explain. I have tried to express some sort of perspective in my writing while acknowledging mystery alongside the abilities we have to understand the reality of life in which we are involved. But in the past month I found that rather than me being one who studies life; life is what is studying me. Life has taken hold of me, drained me of my self-confidence and left me in similarity with the Psalmist responding to life, or specifically to the God who gives us life and saying to Him who studies me: “Search me, O’ God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23,24 RSV)  The 139th Psalm teaches us that there is no place we can go to escape from the God who searches us, who knows us, who forms us and seeks intimacy with us. We imagine ourselves studying life, but the one who formed all living life is the one who is studying us. We are not the ones who study life, but are the ones being studied by the Living one in whom all life exists. I was being made to see who it is who is the evaluator; the keen student as well as the Creator. I was being brought to take the lower seat, not the seat of watcher observing, but of creature observed. I was experiencing life and had no wisdom to report, only an experience of a place in life where I had no real wisdom to understand or explain the life in which I was participating.

            There were issues within my family. My sister had been diagnosed with cancer. So far she has been responding well to treatment and is viewed as in remission. In the midst of this, we heard the news that my brother Paul had been found in his home, having passed away from an apparent heart attack. My brother and I had a difficult relationship. We were opposites except where we were frighteningly alike. He had been a Vietnam veteran. I am only gradually realizing how scarred this left him. For some years after the war, a loud noise or someone surprising him from behind could result in his moving into a combative stance. He experienced a marriage disaster. He never recovered from those experiences. I don’t think most of us ever learned to figure out a way of being a support to him. He could be suddenly belligerent and mercurial in temperament. He was obsessed with his failed marriage decades after it took place.

Looking back I realize that I had a harmful perspective. I viewed life as an object and me as the student of the object. I sought to understand and explain life. But wasn’t it the opposite? Wasn’t I a creature participating in life, with life and specifically the God who gave us life being the one who was evaluating me the creature? Do you realize how differently those perspectives regard friendships or relationships between brothers? The student of life seeking to understand and explain life is tempted to imagine an ideal way brothers should relate. We frame our understanding of brothers being by nature supportive of one another and we imagine our times together to be positive and enjoyable. But if I believed that I was being studied by life rather than the one studying life my perspective might be altogether different. Maybe I would not have imagined brotherhood or friendship in terms of enjoyment but rather in terms of brute sharing of realities. I did not have to enjoy being around my brother. That was sometimes an unrealistic ideal. But I should have been able to feel his pain and anguish of a man suffering brokenness. To expect brotherhood or friendship to provide a sense of enjoyment is perhaps sometimes a shallow superficiality imposed on our closest relationships.


A casual blurred photo of Paul and me at a family gathering

 

            There were other painful events intervening in my normal ways of viewing life during the past month. I like to imagine myself as someone who tries to understand the issues of our day. I have been sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement, simply because I am quite sure that often we who are white and those in our midst who are black often face different realities from the histories which impacted us to the daily ways we are perceived in life. As a white person I grew up perceiving police primarily as public servants who served and protected. If I had grown up in an African-American home that history would be less clear. I would know that law enforcement worked to return slaves to masters because the masters were owners whether kind or abusive. Law enforcement had made sure segregation was carried out with its painful results in the African-American community. If some of the worse experiences of our history were behind us, there remained a tendency of nervousness between the once separated races. I recalled my own feelings when three or four polite young black men walked into a convenient store in my white shopping area. Their behavior was exemplary but something in me made me nervous. From that day forward I realized residual racism might affect us when ideologically we have left racism behind. I have little doubt that African-Americans face some actual racism and a lot of residual racism. Of the two, the residual racism which carries unquestioned assumptions into our daily perceptions of life and culture, might form the more dangerous threat to African-Americans. Someone who never questions his assumptions might react without understanding why to a perceived threat coming from a residual unrecognized racism. If the idea were presented to him as an idea he would quickly reject it as an evil. But if it is part of an unperceived bias he might respond to that perception in a moment requiring a quick decision. I believe there are real problems in racial relations. But this month we saw violence in both directions until we realized that black lives and blue lives felt under attack and we had few answers. We only have beginnings such as a picnic in Wichita which replaced a planned Black Lives Matter march with a gathering of people involved in Black Lives Matter with the police of Wichita in a public picnic. We have lots of things to work out as people in America and they aren’t easy things to work through. Our ideals imagine we ought to be able to become instantly friends who enjoy one another’s company despite our differing perspectives, but perhaps the deeper relationships involve a sharing of felt pain more than shared joys. But if we share some joys along the way it would sure be encouraging. But we are not the ones studying life, but the ones being studied by life.

 


Black Lives Matter picnic with Wichita Police (photograph NPR)

 

So this month I have been quieter than most months. Hopefully a new perspective is making me different. I will study life that is what I do; but hopefully I will study it knowing more clearly that I am in return being studied.