Lent..a time to Mourn

Lent:  To Everything there is a Season…a time to mourn.

For over 2,000 years Christians acknowledged a season which has come to be known as Lent.  Lent is a season where we give up something we love, sacrifice for the better good, and “repent” of what we have done wrong.   Such “giving up” or repenting is suppose to prepare us for better days.  Ironically, before Lent starts, there is the biggest dirtiest party of them all, Mardi Gras.  This is actually a few days of time from Epiphany Sunday to Fat Tuesday night where you eat and party before you start your “fast.”  And boyhawdy, do some people party!  I’d love to go down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras or Venice for Carnival.  People put on masks, go to balls and dances, and eat—or as my brother would have said it, “pig out.” Of course, many have a more bawdy time filled with drinking, drugs and sex.  So by the time Ash Wednesday comes, they are certain to have something to “repent” about, and if they don’t remember it’s only because they have a hangover.

That’s what has happened to this season, it brings out the worst in us hoping for the best to come.  It is captured in the idea of “getting it out of your system.”  My grandpa said I should go try a drink of whisky with him, so that I would know how much I don’t like it, and I would thereby get it out of my mind as a “temptation.”  His hope was thereafter if somebody offered me a drink of alcohol I could honestly answer, “hate the stuff and wouldn’t have anything to do with it, thank you very much.”  It’s also the idea of “sowing your wild oats” as a youth.  Even King David speaks of “the sins of his youth,” where we do stupid things, things we look back on and say “I cannot believe I did that!”  And we can reply, “well, at least you got it out of your system.”   Strangely, for some this is true but for others they end up in a life of stupid:  addicted to what eventually destroys their humanity.

It’s interesting that the season of Lent happens every year.  It’s also honest.  We try to do good, try to succeed; too often we only succeed at doing bad.  Most of us need a New Year, a new day to try again.  I too believe the old motto, “if at first you don’t succeed, try try again.”  Sometimes what stops us from being able to “try, try again” is our feeling of being responsible for the failure, or of being overwhelmed by all that we have done wrong.  We don’t even want to give ourselves another chance, perhaps we feel we don’t deserve it, or perhaps we fear we will only fail all the more horridly.  At times we just don’t have the energy to try again.  We are tired, fallen and cannot get up.  It’s no mistake that this season of Lent is associated with the Flood of Noah and the end of his world.  Sometimes life feels like it is submerged in the flood waters in which we are drowning.  We drown in financial debt, marital dismay, emotional upset, relationship breakup, addictions, stupid choices,  social injustice… you know the list, you’ve have your own.  Everyone feels overwhelmed, some drown.

The truth is that bad builds, stupid breeds, and evil grows.  So our debts goes out of control, our relationships grow further apart, the depression worsens, and the pit we are in gets deeper.  When we were young it was owing someone one dollar, now it’s more like thousands.  When we were young it was breaking up  with our teenage crush, now it’s our wife or husband.  When we were young it was failing a test, now it is failing at our job.  It feels the same, the child feels just as “failed” as the adult.  And at times life can overwhelm us, it’s not really about the proportion of our failure, hurts or struggle—they all feel the same.   For this reason teenage suicide is all too real, as an adult you might look at that suicide say, “if only they had hung on, they would see that life gets better.” We can see and even understand their despair over the loss of their first love, hurt from “not fitting in,” or even their addictions.  We understand these because we have either seen it before or lived through it ourselves.  But for them, it’s the first time.  For others it is the millionth time, because they haven’t learned how to overcome.  For these adults it is the failure over the years that build up and drown them. 

I believe part of the problem is we live in a world where only victory is acknowledged, believed in and supported.  To win the race is better than to lose it.  To be poor is not as good as it is to be rich.  To be happy is better than to be sad.  To be successful is better than to have failed.  To be athletic and fit is better than being slow and fat.  To be holy is better than being a sinner.  To be perfect is better than being flawed.  We measure our live and train our kids to be perfect, ideal and victorious.  We preach a victorious Christ, not a poor, suffering  and crucified Christ.  We have not taught our kids or ourselves how to fail, how to suffer, how to have sorrow.  Instead we have associated these things with evil and therefore we have only taught how to shun them.  I know I do, I hate suffering and pain,  I don’t want to have to have sorrow.

That’s where the biblical narrative is helpful.  Noah lived in a time of super beings who lived selfishly and were “evil” come to earth.  The Hebrew Children had 400 years in a land where they ended up slaves followed by 40 years in wilderness desert with little food or water.  Jesus wondered in a desert for 40 days, followed by 3 years of trying to save the world for 3 years only to be killed for it.  Scripture acknowledged the fact the human life has a lot of pain and suffering.   It acknowledges the fact the humanity has a self-destructive pattern that can even be seasonal. We need to retrain ourselves and our youth.  We need to understand that failure is part of success, even as death is part of life, and that mourning is the flipside of joy.  This shouldn’t surprise us, as the Beatles sang “to everything there is a season—turn, turn, turn!”  Oh, wait, they got that from the Bible (Ecclesiastes 4). 

What can we learn?  As Christmas was the time to celebrate and to learn to acknowledge love and joy, Lent is the time to mourn, to pass through sorrows and brokenness.  Lent might seem like some pompous religious effort to drag us down, if that is true then forget it.  But if you actually do feel overwhelmed, depressed, struggling to live life well, and hurt—then Lent is for you.  Because the whole point of Lent isn’t the flood, but the Ark that saved humanity from it.  It isn’t only about Jesus being tempted, but about how he overcame temptation, and how after he was murdered, he went to Hell to be with us and help lead us out.  Lent is an acknowledgement that things go wrong, we go wrong, do wrong.  Death and despair happen, but that there is a way through the darkness of our soul, the wilderness of our suffering, the floods of despair: We can see the light, find the promised land and be sail above the flood waters.  

Welcome to Hell

They say “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”  Oh! So that’s how I got here.

Now before you jump to conclusions, I’m not talking about where I live and work in Saginaw, nor Michigan, or my orientation, or my divorce, or my salvation—though salvation is certainly part of the idea.  Saved from what?  Hell?  Yep, Hell, that’s what most of our religions strive to do,  save us from an afterlife in Hell.  In fact they work so hard on it that sometimes they bring hell on Earth just so we can get a glimpse of what we want to avoid.   They first save us, then pile on the rules, regulations and guilt until we are doubly damned, here on Earth and in Hell.  Why, who needs to go to Hell—you are already there.  In this way, those we seek to save are too often damned by the salvation we offer.   

I fear I have sent too many to hell, walked them down the road and gave them a tour.  My friends use to joke by accusing me of being the “cause of universal lamentation,” which was a quote from the story of the Philemon, the mime martyr from 308 AD.  Of course they would laugh—as would I, but there are times when I feel like I’m in Hell, a living Hell and think I’d be better off dead because of the road that I’ve walked. I can hear my Christian friends immediately speak up and say—but Jesus can save you!  Two things I have to say about that:  first off, yes, Jesus can, but more likely he’s walking beside me or waiting in Hell to help me out; and second off, others walk that path of salvation.  Now before you get mad, think about it.  If Christianity is true, it calls all people, all human beings to be part of a force on this earth that “saves” not damns.   I think it is most people’s intention to “Save”…unfortunately “the road to Hell…”

There are some significant times in my life when I felt as if I were in Hell, when I was betrayed by my best friends, when I told my kids I was getting a divorce, when Joshua was murdered, and the day I wrote this article.
It is a sad truth that I know the road to Hell, been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt. Why, as I have already suggested, I can even give you a tour! In fact, why not,  I’ll tell you one of the stories of how I got to hell—it’s probably one you already know.

Joshua showed me the way.  Oh, it’s not because he chose it, it’s all about his mom and dad—and a heavenly battle with demonic ends called divorce and custody.  You see, when parents get divorced one of the most common things they do wrong is to demonize the other parent.  My mom use to demonize my Dad (who is a great and loving man).  But she successfully convienced me that to live with my dad was to live with the devil, give in to temptation and mostly like would lead me to hell.  It took me a long time to rebel against this teaching—and I’m glad I did: but, what a terrible thing to have to rebel against.  Mom? Dad?  I have to choose between them?  One is “good” and the other is “bad”;  one “holy” and one “evil”; one the path to Heaven, the other the path to Hell.  Well, when my mom divorced my stepdad (Joshua’s Dad) she demonized his use of drugs (specifically pot and that fact that he drank wine).  My stepdad demonized my mom by making her too “holier-than-though” and accused her trying to control Joshua.  Joshua had to “choose” between the two.  His “choice” would lead him to a Mexican border where he would have his head blown off… 

I died a little the day Joshua was murdered.  I had helped raise him and Rebekah.  From birth I was his babysitter.  One year, I stayed home over 65 days of school to babysit.  I was good at it, once my mom and step dad went to Arizona for a week and left me to babysit… I was only 12 years old.  By 15,  when my step dad was kicked out during the first series of marital separations, I became a surrogate dad--while also trying to be a big brother and friend.  At 17 I moved from Washington to Arizona, and I tried to help my mom, Joshua and Rebekah from afar.  At 19 I moved to Paris, France.  My mom finally divorced my stepdad—but I was too far away to be there for my brother and sister.  I supported my mom, brother and sister with the money I earned, helped pay for their education, helped clothe and house them…but I was in France, and I too was young to be very effective.  I didn’t do enough; couldn’t do enough.  Joshua was constantly struggling between the love of his mother and the love of his father.  Wanting both, trying to live in both worlds, Joshua struggled with how to live in their worlds.  The judgments made by each “side” created a living hell.   So he made choices, and it is too easy to say they were “bad ones,” but who knows what you would have chosen for the love a parent? Or were his choices the a result of a war waged in the name of Love—perhaps you’d no longer believe in Love or anyone who claims a relationship to it.    Perhaps you too would recoil from the world, not make a choice “between” and live as an island to yourself. 

I tried to step in, to save my brother.  I had good intentions.  After I came back from Paris, I married and moved to the United States.  I saw that Joshua was struggling, he had lost the soccer scholarship to a great college and dropped out after getting “high” with his dad.  His dad always told him that going to college was his mom’s idea, an idea for the High and Mighty.  Joshua was told that he was being controlled by his mom, sister and big brother. He was told that we were tying to make him become to “holier-than-thou” and he needed to “be-himself” or in other words. I think Joshua understood that to mean “use pot, don’t go to school” was to be the true Joshua…   So Joshua dropped out of school—well, he had to, he wouldn’t have passed the drug test.  This began the worst of Joshua’s trips between his mom and dad.  He would try to clean up, and then fall back into it.   I tried to participate in his life.  I took him to Hawaii on tour with me, tried to love him as best I could and include him in my life—but my life was too foreign, I had lived in a wide world he couldn’t relate to, I took him to fancy restaurants and exotic beaches, all he wanted was hamburgers and to play basket ball.  Our worlds were far apart and I didn’t know how to reach him.  I loved him, and he loved me—but I couldn’t help him.  My heart broke and he moved back to Washington.  Back in Washington, he was caught in a sting operation set up by a friend to ensnare him for selling pot too close to school grounds.  He served a house arrest.  

I tried again to “save” Joshua, I moved him to Missouri where I and my then wife Marilyn had just opened a school for Mimeistry.  I offered to help him get back into college, into church life, and clean up—a second chance.  Though he lived in my house, we didn’t have much time together, I was busy touring and teaching—building a kingdom and world which was strange to him.  He played basketball, tried to go to church a little, tried to “connect.”  He didn’t connect, he couldn’t connect to the “rules” of this very public “Christian” life, and the arguments of his mom and dad only seemed too echoed in the life I led.  He didn’t feel at home, and though he felt loved, he also felt smothered and conflicted all the more.  So he moved out.

Joshua started a series of moves, wife/girlfriends--kids, jobs, addictions and clean-ups that would eventually lead him to live with his dad in Mexico.  There he would get involved in the drug world of my stepdad.  That world can be as laid back as my hippy stepdad where everything is beautiful and the world is a place of drugged peace and love, or it can be a world of money and guns.  Joshua met up with the guns and had his brains blown out in my stepdad’s peaceful and loving drug filled world: a world I could not save him from and one from which he couldn’t–or wouldn’t—save himself;  a world that would murder him.

Every once and I while my heart stirs with a profound love for someone, and I connect with them as if they had some profound line to past loves and losses, and I want to another chance to love and save.  That is certainly my intention.  I’m a pastor, it’s my job to love people and to help “save.”  I also am father and a friend, and I believe that there is no greater love that we can give another person, than to give our own life for another.  So I have tried to help others, some who were strangers on the street and some dear as family.  Some people come into my life and win my heart thoroughly, I can see the face of all I loved before, hear Joshua’s voice, feel my mom’s kiss or my best friend's hugs… people dead, betrayed—and even some of my betrayers. I want to be part of their life, I want to help them, I want to save them from a gun filled world, I want to redeem them—or perhaps I should say I want to redeem myself, get a chance.  But like my efforts with my brother Joshua—I too fail. The hardest truth for me is that in trying “be there” for my brother, I only drove him further into his hell.  I want to believe that I have learned my lessons, that I can be better at loving in a helpful way, that is  also my intention.

Life if full of good intentions… welcome to hell.  I could end there, but I am reminded of a simple truth.  Jesus is also there… and I can take comfort in that, for we are not alone. 

So I continue to try to love and live life in a way that leads people to happiness, and to becoming better human beings. I continue to try to help them discover who they can be in the midst of choices made in an ever graying world.  It is too easy to condemn my stepdad for his use of illegal drugs, when my mom died a holy woman who had taken too many prescribed legal drugs.  I can and will continue to stand against a world of violence and abuse, of selfishness and greed, of hurts so great that it causes people to run from the very things they need, from rules and laws that bind people to hell instead of liberating them.  I will continue to fight for the salvation and good of those I love.  I just hope I can learn to do it better!

Here I do end.  For today is one of those hellish days for me, and I must confess…it is hard sometimes and in such a time as this I realize I too need saving.