First, You Cry
AM Psalm 119:145-176 • PM Psalm 128, 129, 130
Prov. 6:1-19 • 1 John 5:1-12 • John 11:45-54
“God gave us crying so other folks could see when we needed help, and help us.”
I have several friends who have wondered at my having joined the Episcopal Church. These same friends have wondered at my quoting from the Bible. Or even carrying one.
“What has gotten into you?” some have asked when I’ve been on my way to Bible study at St. Paul’s or St. Martin’s. Further questions and comments follow, such as,
“Do you need the Bible to tell you to help people and not to harm them?”
“What about the way women are portrayed?”
“What about how people use the Bible to hurt people?”
And my favorite,
“But you’re a mythologist!”
All the above are fair questions, issues worth exploring.
One of the things I do find in the Bible are expressions of people in pain, in need of help. Sometimes in despair.
People, in short, like me.
My father used to say, “When you’re hurt, cry. When you’re cut, bleed.”
There is a fair amount of crying in the Bible.
There are hymns of praise and thanksgiving, such as in some of the Psalms.
But Psalms can also render people in pain. In one of today’s readings, Psalm 130, the Psalmist begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice!”. I am reminded of Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey. Sooner or later, heroes find themselves in “the belly of the whale.” Nothing is lower. Talk about depths!
Compare the beginning of another reading for today, Psalm 119: 145 – “With my whole heart I cry; Answer me, O LORD.”
Perhaps when we ask God to hear our prayer, what we are asking is that he hear our cry.
We have been taught that boys don’t cry. And more recently, that girls don’t cry. But despite what Tom Hanks has told us, I shed more than a few tears when I was a kid playing baseball. They were never tears of joy.
We want to hush that little baby by saying “don’t you cry.” My wife and I have no children of our own, but know more than a few stories of babies crying all night, driving their parents to the edge of madness. Then there are the toddlers in the grocery store who cry until they get a candy bar. Or their older siblings who cry for other things that they want—sometimes, for example, a better grade.
The Greeks attended the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides for, among other reasons, catharsis. A communal purging of emotions. “You mean,” a high school girl said to me one time, “everybody having a good cry?”
She was a smart girl.
Our tears at the death of a loved one, or at injustice, or at all the other suffering in the world are no joke. The Buddha tells us that the world is full of suffering, that such is the way it is. There are hints of this in Ecclesiastes, too. But such may be of small comfort.
Yet all is not lost. Psalm 130 tells us that God is listening to our crying, and that there is hope for redemption.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning
more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel! Hope in the LORD!
For with the LORD there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
As I wrote last year, hope in the Lord in times of distress is sometimes a tough sell. Witness (to cite only one of a myriad of examples) the people in Texas (and elsewhere) suffering last year from flooding and power outages.
But on days when I believe (as Rachel Held Evans would say), I keep hoping in God’s healing power and love. On other days, I believe that sooner or later there will come a day when, once again, I do believe that Someone hears my cry. I keep reading the Bible because that’s where I meet my people. And hear them.
Written by James Gamble
James Gamble is grateful for Tuesday night Zoom meetings of Education for Ministry.