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.
