The F-Bomb Psalms

My shift had finally ended. I headed for the employee break room to finally, actually, literally, just sit down, and to wait for a coworker to clock out so we could talk before I headed home. The break room was maybe twenty-four feet long; a double-wide hallway for the half hour lunch breaks where the retail plantation associates could trade the high volume cement sales floor for a folding chair for thirty minutes. I fished out the entertainment section of the USA Today from the scattered newspapers and rushed lunch debris that littered the the break room table. I opened the break room door when I had entered and had purposely left it open in the interest of dissipating some of the concentration of microwaved food smells. I poked around the celebrity stories in the paper as I unearthed the blueberries and sugar syrup that hid under the yogurt I was eating. The peeled back foil cover of the yogurt cup prophesied, "Fruit On The Bottom". "No shit, Jeremiah," I thought to myself just as the break room door shut soundly. I rolled my eyes, rose from the table, and reopened the door. 

I go back to the paper and, having finished the yogurt, reach for the salt fix of what is hopefully a communal bag of chips. The break room door is again shut by someone outside the break room. I jump slightly at the unexpected sound, inhale sharply, silently, and note that neither of the two coworkers currently sharing the room with me have so much as looked up from their cell phones. "What the damn hell?", I say to myself and open the door all the way back to the wall. Sugar and salt fixes satiated and way done with the paper, I take the calculated risk to just close my eyes for a few minutes. As the present reality faded just slightly and something like light, and life and hope, and normal breathing began to fill the void of the crevice left by the small, fresh vacancy, the moment approached a kind of perfect stillness, a purity. A moment as pure as just sitting still after eight hours on your feet, as pure as a perfectly serene eye right in the center of a whirling, dream-shattering, retail storm.

When the door to the break room slammed shut with the velocity to knock dishes off the counter it also nearly broke something inside me. The fragile, porcelain mask of my undoing teetered on an upper internal shelf where it rested in rare moments of respite in the space beneath the tool shed floor. The shed floor was now a furious tangled heap of tools and weapons that had fallen from their wall hooks during the quake of the slamming door. There was no making any sense of the mess of tools and weapons that had too often been used interchangeably anyway. Try to move any single instrument: retrieve just a blanket, just the crazy glue, just a knife and you end up manipulating and moving the entire island of internal defense. You go into the shed for a pillow for the certain-to-fall mask to land softly on or for a prayer or a mantra to cling to or just to open the window so that maybe you can breathe again, but instead all of them are suddenly animated at once in what sounds so shrill and and loud, so furious inside that my breath catches in my throat and my eyes saucer and well up with tears from the intensity of whats heard inside echoing, shattering out.

In one fell swoop, one dynamic action, my mind ran off with my soul and plunged them both into a place with pain, but no pictures; of suspense behind doors, of trembling terror and trembling rage. And I'm caught right there; right in the middle. Cotton-mouthed and averting eye contact desperately needing to believe that I could hide the fear rolling off of me. I clench my jaw hard, steeling myself to hide the trembling that I feel and pray no one notices. I'm caught here: mentally repeating my name and current address frantically over and over as I struggled to swallow; a knot in my throat, my heart scared, and a belly full of anger, all being brought to a roiling boil by the power of a fear whose source I can't even name. I rise slowly from the break room table, collecting my trash, moving in wooden, rusted tin-man slowness, rigidly toward the door. I slide on my sunglasses and speed toward the exit, chanting the entire time: "name is _____, I live at ________". Weaving and dodging customers and shopping carts I exit the building, bounding for the sidewalk and the promised safety of home. I walk determinedly down the sidewalk, my jaw quivering in held tension, my fists clenched making half-moon-shaped imprints in my palms that wouldn't fade till the next day, thinking, "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" The internal pressure continued to build as I walked. It built to such a place that it felt as if - if it wasn't relieved - there would be some unpredictable kind of explosion. I began to  through tight lips parted just enough to allow any sound, growl; more vibrated out loud than anything else to release the steam threatening my throttle and to stay present enough to walk the rest of the way home safely without dissolving completely into the gaping mouthed past just at my heels. 

As I've done in each place we've lived I had created an altar space nearly upon arrival. In this new home, the artist's studio in the backyard provided the most spacious and elaborate sanctuary yet. Large windows and sliding patio doors offered abundant light and the little wood stove in the corner could transform the room into a sauna even in the winter. The warm, sunny space was alive with green plants large and small: six foot ficus trees and palms, peace lilies, and vines. The altar itself I had fashioned by covering crates with Pashmina scarves and deep crimson and brilliant gold fabrics. The entire length of the altar was lit by tea lite candles. A meditation bell, the incense bowl, and my malabeads sat near the center among the many pictures, items of remembrance and requests for prayer. The air smelled of sandalwood, saffron, and frankincense; of quietude and reverence.

As I walked on my thoughts flew like shrapnel. "How bad will this get? Oh God. No one knows me here. Focus. Oh God. Focus," I'd think and I'd study hard the letters and words on signs for something to hold on to. As I got closer to home I began to panic about what to do, where to go when I got there. My husband shouldn't be home for a few hours. He'd never seen me like this, caught in the sticky web of p.t.s.d. It happened so rarely now, but it was happening now. If he came home, I didn't want him to find me like this. Next, I think, "Well, close the curtains and lock the door and the altar room/greenhouse is the most privacy you're gonna get." That idea was received like blasphemy.

"I can NOT do This in THERE!", my mind responded to itself.

This capacity for this opposing dialogue I've come to see as possibly a good thing; without it we'd run the risk of being exclusively childlike or exclusively adult, and there's no maturity in either of those extremes. I rebelled at the thought of intentionally disturbing the serene space that I protected, where we removed our shoes and spoke in hushed tones, where if "God is in the silences" we would always be listening here.

"And so you want that a neighbor should call the police because there's a strange man, namely you, screaming in their own backyard?", the voice of reason warned.

"No! No. No. F*ck! Can you Not SEE that I am falling apart! I can NOT do this There!"

"Oh, so then where "should" you do it, if you can't take it to the altar, to God, then it's a useless altar and a lousy God. I thought that's what altars were for. God can't handle your anger?"

Well, there was a heart-opening cognitive road block.

Then one of those moments of reciprocity happened. One of those moments made possible because sometimes, frequently even, when we're not stressed out, traumatized, or gripped by fear we're listening to elders, we're reading words of grace, about grace, Brennan Manning, the Gospels, the Psalms. And, unexpectedly, those ideas, those questions, those life-affirming words wash back to us, often when we need them most. I remembered a pastor from childhood who often said "If your altar's empty then your back can't be." That makes good sense still. If our sacred spaces haven't been saturated with our despair, if our altars haven't absorbed our pain, how can our God, that we welcome there, transform us?

I arrived home, fumbled with my keys and finally, let the dogs out. I raced the length of the house and out the office door into the backyard. I opened the door to the altar space of the artist's studio. I closed and locked the door behind me and sank to my knees, heaving great choking sobs, moaning, mewing out the sounds of feelings there were no words for. I stood shaking and closed the curtains and the patio blinds. Then I returned, back to the opposite side of the studio where I had entered and, as if being sent there in no uncertain terms, I walked directly to the corner. I stood in the corner, small and wounded, scared and angry. I stood there in shame; me catering crassness and chaos here into this place of designated serenity and stillness. It began small and grew; a little cry inside me that escalated into weeping that then seamlessly became a scream. I sank to my knees again, my face buried in my hands. I stood. I paced. I assaulted the air alternately with small, self-conscious screams and the f-bomb. Pacing, sobbing, cursing, trembling, and pleading I melted all the way down, right there, at the altar.

I remember, of course, telling others what a great margin of error of forgivable shortcomings David, the sometime author of the Psalms, gives us. A good deal of thePsalms are David, completely dispairing, completely bitching and complaining to God and, I would add, David was still referred to as "a man after God's own heart". It wasn't until later that I would learn that most of the Psalms are actually what are called the Psalms of Lament. Most of the Psalter is filled with complaint, anger, protest, anxiety, doubt and despair! To look at a few lines from Psalms 88, which Walter Bruggeman refers to as "an embarrassment to conventional faith", is to to sense the anger and despair that fills every line of this psalm:

"I've had my fill of trouble. I'm camped on the edge of hell! You've dropped me into a bottomless pit!"

Then David basically gets a real bad attitude about it all and just gets real smart alecky with God:

"Are the dead a live audience for your miracles? Do ghosts ever join the choirs that praise you? Does your love make any difference in a graveyard? Is your faithful presence noticed in the corridors of hell?!!" 

"the corridors of hell?", that's some frustrated stuff right there. This moment, that the scriptures build up to for the preceding dozen verses, feels like to me, exactly that moment right before the moment when you say, "F*ck it," and just walk away. You know, THAT moment. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the only reason that keeps the f-bomb outta the Psalms is as simple as it not having been available to David. Had it been . . . well, the Psalms would be even more gritty, they'd be like the 'gansta psalms'. But the point, Bruggeman explains, is "that nothing is out of bounds, nothing is precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart . . . thus these psalms make the important connection:

everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God."

Wow. "Everything belongs, everything brought to speech, everything addressed to God."  

We can arrive as we are, leaving the same way, though, is optional; not easy, but optional.

The Psalms give us full permission, full grace to arrive wounded and hurt; to show up pissed off, resentful, foul-mouthed and faint of heart; bold, but bleeding; brave, but bedraggled; but show to up, to return over and over, as David did, over and over.

Witness the very last lines of Psalm 88 is "You made lover and neighbor alike dump me; the only friend I have left is Darkness!" But by the very first words of Psalm 89 David has returned, "rediscovered" God's faithfulness and says, "Your love, God, is my song, and I'll sing it! I'll never quit telling the story of your love"; a story of Love that includes accepting us as we are and hearing us when we call, whether we call in practiced prayer or with fits of contrition and profanity, a story of Love in which Jesus lived in this knowledge; both in humble surrender as the dove descended and the voice of the Father said, "This is my Son in whom I am well pleased", and also as He hung, surrendered on the cross and, in what felt like the darkest, most complete abandonment, asked the same Father, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" This is a cornerstone, a pillar of what compels me to even imagine being able to try and follow the Way; that this Son of God and man, *"felt human destitution to its absolute degree, the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering and that suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ's compassion makes extreme human compassion possible."

It's extreme compassion and extreme, unruly grace that invites us as we are to our belonging.

In the altar space I wept and trembled and cursed my way to exhausted surrender, finally resting,lying in front of the altar. My prayers moved from startling sounds and expletives to something resembling decent conversation and eventually, even resembling, and then becoming full on gratitude. It didn't get as bad as it might have. I made it home. I was inside and warm and still and safe, not swallowed up. I raise my head from the meditation cushion and look around. The room and everything in it seemed to shine subtly with that freshly rain-washed glow, and I thought of how often the pinnacle of my fear, the mountain of my loneliness becomes the mountain of His holiness. They turn out to not be separate, different geographical locations but instead, a transformation of our own internal landscape. Of course, I want so badly to be like the saintly looking old man with his head bowed in prayer over that meager loaf of bread in Eric Enstrom's painting, "Grace", but in real life I'm afraid that I play out more like that bitch at work that you can't stand. The one you may know in your heart must be wounded to be so scared, but their fear makes them so insufferable that you hate them anyway. And it feels good. Yeah, that's probably more me than Merton in an abbey, so it's really, really good news, this "just as I am" to the great "I Am" concept. Barriers of style, tradition, garments, head covering, names of God, language, or culture are our destructive concepts; there are no such barriers with God. 

While I don't necessarily advocate peppering our prayers with guttural growls and swearing, I do know now that God's heart and hand, Abba's shoulder and lap are just as accessible to us then, as they are when we're quiet and still and trusting and remembering that "everything belongs, everything brought, everything addressed to God."

-pdk