Journals
Lift My Eyes
An Introduction to Haunted
We all have those thoughts. We all have those things in our minds that we say to ourselves. The things we silently scream at God. The words whispered into the dark. The thoughts we dare not verbalize. It is a universal human experience to have moments of parroting what is expected, not what we’ve experienced. As people of faith, it can feel unfaithful to utter words of anger and doubt. It feels like a betrayal to sit in the mire and scream. We feel wrong when we don’t see God in the moment and we doubt his presence.
We hear…
God’s got this! Who can know the mind of the Lord?
He won’t give you more than you can handle. He is walking this path before you.
He is writing your story. He is carrying you.
Do you remember the story about the footprints in the sand? Well, I call bullshit on that.
Christianity has glorified suffering. To suffer is to be like Christ, right? We encourage those in pain and remind them that they are being “refined in the fire.” They are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, but do not fear! God is there. We praise God for what he will do with the pain – the testimony it bears. We love to hear stories about people who have come out on the other side of their trials. We love to look back at the Ebenezers along the way and say Look at how the Lord has helped me! He will do it again. We love to claim stories of victory and tell them to others.
Those things are not wrong. They are actually very biblical. But something is missing.
We are overlooking a vital and necessary aspect of grief, and in doing so, we are getting it all wrong. It’s the perfectly baked cake, with salt instead of sugar. I think we are, in fact, twisting and diluting the actual truth about pain, suffering, and grief that scripture gives.
Psalm 30:5
“…weeping may stay for the night but rejoicing comes in the morning.”
Psalm 23:4
“Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.”
But what about the in-between? What if we are in the middle of the weeping and in the darkness of the valley – what about when morning hasn’t come and we are not rejoicing; the rod and staff are not comforting? Then what? When we are in the middle of the worst, unimaginable thing and someone says, “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord…” Or someone misquotes Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 and says that God won’t give us more than we can bear! (In 1 Corinthians 10:13, Paul is actually talking about standing firm in the face of temptation.) Or we are given cards quoting Psalm 42:11, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
When you are in the middle of hell on earth, quoted scripture passages are not always what you want. The urge and need to spew Christian platitudes fall flat when the rubber meets the road – when you are in the darkest of dark and you’re reaching out your hand to Jesus for healing and he says no. It’s hard to comprehend that this Christ who we hear stories of – the one that fed the thousands from a few loaves, the one who raised dead people to life – is standing here in this moment, looking at you and saying, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
"The urge and need to spew Christian platitudes fall flat when the rubber meets the road..."
This is when those Christian cliches fall flat. This is when my heresies begin to rise. It’s really easy to preach those things and spout those words when you’re not the one living in hell.
I’ll personalize this a bit more. When my child almost died, getting a text quoting Revelation 21:4, and telling me about the testimony my son will have, is not what I needed: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” But it hadn’t passed for me and I am still sick in grief.
That is the heart of Haunted – the thoughts and songs and conversations from the middle of the worst days. Those things I dared not say aloud, I have actually written down. I have said them out loud, and I have put some of them to music.
Over and over again, during this season of deep grief and suffering, I have said,
Am I allowed to think this?
People will think I’m losing it.
Crap, Am I losing it?
Do these feelings really need to be acknowledged?
Can I say that? Out loud? To another human?
Am I a heretic?
Oh God, I’m a heretic.
I am saying the inside things out loud so that you can too.
During this process, the more I talked about the grief and trauma I was experiencing, the more sighs of relief I found. The more that I had conversations about hard times and trials the more I came to understand the role that grief plays in our existence. When I started playing these songs, people were identifying with a line or phrase – this is everything I have felt but haven’t been able to put into words. The hard and scary, the questionable and heretical, the profane and the unfiltered, the screams and pleas and the giving up. The desire for hope is not found.
I know that joy comes in the morning, but I was not quite ready to leave the darkness of grief yet. I was just not in a place to lift my eyes. But now I am, and this project has helped me do that.
"I was just not in a place to lift my eyes."
So you probably won’t sing these songs in church. They won’t be on your “Spotify wrapped.” Unless I reach my fundraising goal, I will probably lose money on this project, but it feels too important to not share. I think that if we, as believers and as humans, want to see a change in the way that grief, trauma, and suffering are handled, we have to be willing to talk about it and sing songs about it, and tell stories about it.
So, let’s do it.
Many Thanks,
Frances Twomey