Lamentations: Trauma's Turmoil
Notes
Transcript
Lieutenant Dan
Lieutenant Dan
One of my all time favorite movies is Forrest Gump. I won’t get into all of the reasons why, but a lot of my love for it stems from the fact that it was really one of the first movies that I ever saw that dealt with real world issues. And I watched it a lot of times. The beauty of the movie is that it really covers like a ton of different human situations and conditions. In a sneaky way, it tells the stories of humans who are dealing with grief, particularly the grief associated with trauma, and how the way that they cope with that trauma manifests in their lives.
Particularly there is a dichotomy created between the main character, Forrest Gump, and his former commander from Vietnam — Lieutenant Dan. The pair, along with the rest of their platoon, find themselves under heavy enemy fire with most of the men sustaining injuries. Forrest continues running back to save his friend Bubba, and each time he goes back into the hot zone he finds another member of his platoon and carries them to safety. One of those men was Lieutenant Dan. Forrest eventually finds his friend Bubba, but he dies in Forrest’s arms.
It turns out that Lieutenant Dan loses his legs, and when we catch up with him later in the story he’s bitter and has developed a drinking problem. Meanwhile, Forrest is flourishing in life.
Now conventionally, we chalk this all up to Forrest being developmentally slow. Perhaps the general public’s conception of people with learning disabilities in the mid 90s when Forrest Gump came out was that “being slow” meant that a person didn’t understand the full gravity of situations, that they were not as deeply affected by traumatic situations. I think that today we know a little better, or at least I hope we do.
What I see now when I watch Forrest Gump is that although Forrest as a character is portrayed as developmentally challenged, he is actually modeling for us the most healthy possible way to deal with grief and trauma. His entire life was surrounded by grief. His father left when he was a child, he was picked on ruthlessly, he went to war, he lost his best friend, his mother, and eventually the love of his life, Jenny.
But the entire genius of the movie is that it is a narrated by Forrest himself, telling his story to anyone who will listen. It’s almost as if the movie itself serves as the model for how to deal with and process grief.
Talk
Talk
We are in the midst of a sermon based on the book of Lamentations, a book of prophetic poems that detail the collective grief of the nation of Israel after they were attacked, defeated, and carried off to exile by the Babylonian Empire.
These poems depict a people who are grief stricken, and they do not tend to resolve with much outward hope. Yet they do have buried within them a means of moving through and processing that grief. And that is a process of tears, talk, and time. Last week we talked about how the Bible prescribes our tears. We found out that crying over the brokenness of our world and the human losses that we experience is actually a means of being like Christ and a means of fully living into the image of God that we all bear.
This week we move into the middle phase of the grieving process — Talk. This is where a lot of the hard work gets done. Where a lot of the discomfort needs to be worked through. This talking part is the part that most people would just rather not do. We prefer to “deal with it on my own” or to not bother anyone with our feelings and our story. However, the very nature of healing for us comes from talking. Specifically, the spoken language between us and God and between us as a community.
In the 3rd chapter of Lamentations, the poet offers these words as a guidepost for healing:
Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord.
Let us lift up our hearts as well as our hands to God in heaven.
These remind me most deeply of some of the practices of the 12 step recovery program. The steps of Alcoholics Anonymous lay out a specific and practical means of getting and staying sober. And only one of the 12 is actually about alcohol — the first.
The rest of the steps are a means of having a spiritual and psychic change necessary to keep the alcoholic from returning to the drink. The drink which had become the person’s solution to dealing with trauma or grief has become the source of trauma or grief. Therefore, to live a transformed life, a new solution needs to be found and implemented. And almost all of it involves talking. Specifically, the talking that occurs between them and a person called a sponsor who’s job is to guide them through the steps of recovery.
Lamentations 3:40 says “Let us test and examine our ways”
Step 4 says: We took a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Likewise Step 6 says: We became willing to have God remove all these defects of character.
What the poet, and what the recovery program knows is that humans are well versed in self deception. We’re really good at ignoring our own realities. We can’t really see our flaws, our needs for growth, and we certainly can’t see the ways that trauma and grief have imprinted themselves onto us and into the ways that we interact with and deal with our world. Most importantly, we can’t see the ways that trauma and grief cause us to treat ourselves in ways that we wouldn’t want others to treat us. We can’t see the ways that we deny ourselves of the dignity that we deserve as persons who bear God’s image.
So we need the help of an objective outside observer. Someone who listens to our story and asks the hard questions. An assistant of sorts, or a filing system — these persons help us take all of the scattered pieces and put them in place. They help us see reality, so that we can truly take a step in a new direction with a clear path laid out ahead of us. And that path requires us to acknowledge the other dimension of talk: Prayer
Lamentations 3:41 says “Let us lift our hearts as well as our hands up to God in heaven”
Step 5 says “We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
Step 7 says “We humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings”
It’s important for us to remember that audible and real prayer is a means of moving through our pain. At its very core prayer is a reminder to ourselves that we are not responsible for healing on our lonesome. God is the one who ultimately drives our healing, but it is our responsibility to engage in the process, and a part of that means that it’s up to us to bring our pain and the the facts that we have discovered in the process of talking about our grief and trauma to God and request that healing.
Talk is Therapy
Talk is Therapy
Maybe you’re like ok well that’s great for alcoholics. But what about me? Who am I supposed to talk to?
You might not like the answer. But did you know that there are people that you can call, make an appointment, and then talk to? Yeah, even better — your health insurance might pay for it. Yeah. They’re called therapists. Everyone can benefit from seeing a therapist. I do. And not only that, but the people around you typically benefit from you seeing a therapist too.
But seriously, talking isn’t easy. Talking about our problems and our grief and our pain is really difficult. What we need more of in our society and in the church is for people to feel comfortable and find objective third parties that they can just sit and talk with. Maybe that’s a therapist or counselor. Maybe it’s in the form of a support group for those who have experienced the loss of a loved one or any other type of traumatic experience. Maybe it’s within the safety of a church small group. Maybe you just need to call Mary Weeden… she’s the most talented phone conversationalist I’ve ever experienced.
Regardless of who it is, what we all need is a place where we feel able to be fully honest about how we are feeling, about the things that have happened to us or are currently happening to us. It is in these relationships that profound healing is allowed to occur. And this is because counseling, talk therapy, whatever we choose to call it is something that models the relationship that God chose to have with creation.
In the garden, after the humans have made a poor choice and are feeling the consequences of their action — shame — God comes seeking after them, asking them, “where are you, what have you done” or better yet, what my therapist always asks me… “so whats really going on here?”
Perhaps one of my favorite names for Jesus, that we tend to only mention around the Christmas season is “Wonderful Counselor.” And I think that we often overlook what that really means, and particularly how Jesus played the role of counselor in his ministry. Remember, we are talking about a counselor as a person who we are able to be fully honest with, who we are really able to talk with to get to the root of “whats really going on.” And this was something that Jesus was deeply capable of being for people. My favorite example of this comes from John’s Gospel, and it involves a woman from the land of Samaria.
Just a bit of context: Samaritans and Jews were not friends. Samaritans were considered like half blood heretics. Good Jewish folks would not concern themselves with the likes of Samaritans. So just keep that in mind as we read John 4.
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptizing more disciples than John”
—although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized—
he left Judea and started back to Galilee.
But he had to go through Samaria.
So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?
Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
So we’ve got Jesus, and this woman who is clearly caught off guard by Jesus’s presence. Something that’s got to be understood is that the woman is alone, drawing water in the middle of the day. When it’s hottest out. This is abnormal. The women of the village would draw water in the morning. She’s likely avoiding those women.
She meets with Jesus and is clearly skeptical of him. So she qualifies him. Jesus’s words seem to assuage her skepticism. He’s offering her something, a type of healing that entices her. So John goes on...
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”
The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’;
for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”
The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.
Now what has happened here is that in very few words, this woman told Jesus the truth, at least the beginning of the truth. And Jesus’s ability to supernaturally see “what’s really going on” comes out. Suddenly, everything makes sense. The woman’s shame, the reason that she was so skeptical of Jesus, the reason that she’s drawing water at a time in the day that she would avoid the other women of the town, it all becomes clear. She is carrying the weight of the shame and grief that has come from her past. And it’s heavier than the jars of water that she carries day in the heat of the day.
A few verses later we find this resolution:
Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people,
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
They left the city and were on their way to him.
I like that she leaves the water jar. Like a sign of the baggage of her past, of her trauma left there as she goes to proclaim her experience to the people of the city, the very people she likely spent her life trying to avoid. The healing process has begun for her through the power of an honest conversation.
1 in 5
1 in 5
The department of Veterans Affairs reports that 1 in 5 veterans suffer from some form of mental distress as a result of their service. On this veterans day I want to recognize this statistic. Because we are quick to recognize the service of our veterans, but it is still difficult for us to recognize the unspoken and silent sacrifice that they have made.
Much like Lieutenant Dan, those who have seen war, who have been injured, or seen their friends injured come back carrying significant trauma and significant grief. And as a country we have been slow to recognize the toll that this takes. And we have been slow to recognize and offer the solution. And the cost has been lives. Casualties of war long after the war. Perhaps its the distance between those of us at home and the reality of war. Perhaps its the fact that we want to keep up our mental picture of the American Soldier as persons who are strong and invulnerable.
But either way, we have inadvertently done these persons a disservice. And we can do better. So veterans, we celebrate what you have given. All of what you have given. And if no one ever offered you a place to talk, to grieve, to deal with trauma… I’m so sorry.
The beautiful truth that Forrest Gump offers us is that everyone has a story of grief. Forrest has his story, Lieutenant Dan has his, and Jenny has hers. Forrest’s childhood love was the victim of child abuse. An unresolved trauma that manifests in her life in a number of different ways that defy our common sensibilities.
The fact of living in this world is that we have all experienced trauma of some sort, and our souls grieve over that trauma. We all have healing that needs to occur, and we all need to allow ourselves to step out from underneath this societal pressure to keep quiet about the yucky stuff, to save face or save the honor of those who have caused us pain. We need to courage of the woman at the well to just start getting honest. We need the willingness of Forrest Gump to just lay it all out there to strangers on a park bench (well maybe be a little more selective of who we reveal our pain to). Pain shared is pain lessened.
My hope this week is that you will find the courage to talk. That you’ll take the first step to find and surround yourself with someone who can help you walk through the mud of your pain. Someone who can put words to the hurt in your heart and allow you to see yourself as more than your pain.I hope that you will reach out to God in heaven to carry you along the rest of the journey to healing.