Wake Up and Smell the Kingdom: I Can't Even

I’m done.

I’ve had it. I just can’t even with this anymore.

I’m. Just. DONE.

You ever said that? Felt it?

I have felt that way this week; a year after Charleston, a week after Pulse.

Unable to contain my rage and despair while the news and social media fill up with the same – same!! – arguments and platitudes and thoughts and prayers and denials and accusations and Islamophobia and homophobia and racism and immigration rhetoric and all the other sad and nasty bits of the way this country and culture react to mass violence and gun crime.

Helpless, angry, lonely, and fed up.

That’s how Elijah feels. Walking away from the mess that is Israel, throwing himself into the wilderness in despair, he even says to God, “Just kill me now.”

God doesn’t, of course. God feeds him and provokes him deep into the wilderness, until he comes to the place where we know he can meet with God. And there in a cave, maybe the same place that God gave Moses the Law, God asks Elijah what’s wrong, and he complains,

“I’m done. I did everything I could, but no one will listen to me, or to God, and they’re just doing the same terrible stuff over and over and now they want to kill me.”

Help. I quit. I can’t even.

Elijah doesn’t ask God to change things, just throws his hopelessness and desperation out there.

And in response, God invites Elijah into direct experience of the presence of God.

I’ve tried to get there this week.

I’ve looked for the helpers. I’ve clung to stories of grace and love, the kind that always follow a tragedy like this, scenes and stories that demonstrate that God’s compassion and heart are here, embracing victims, embracing us, in spite of evil and violence and hate and death.

God is present.

But this time – often, honestly – not in the way I’m yearning for.

If God won’t just STOP this,

sweep away the guns, the many other tools of violence,

cast out the demons of fear and hate that are literally killing us,

come with great power and make it change,

I don’t know how to pray any more.

Like Elijah, I want my helplessness to be met by the power of God, because the more often this happens, the more often people are shot and murdered in places of sanctuary like gay clubs and churches and schools, and nothing changes, then the more despair overwhelms my hope and compassion, my ability to pray for change, or hope, or love, and my ability to act.

All I have left, like Elijah, is the angry assertion, to God and the world, that I can’t even anymore. A helpless plea that can’t even form the word, “Help!” in prayer.

And in that place, Elijah is met by the power of God.

He stands in a tornado, a wind ripping the landscape to pieces.

He’s thrown around by an earthquake, surrounded with fire.

He’s right in the midst of the power of God.

But God is not in that power.

After all that, God is in the sound of sheer silence.

God is not in the power of God, but in the utter absence of force and action and noise.

And in that sheer stillness, God asks again what’s wrong, and Elijah says the same thing.

I have done everything I can. And Israel is still an ungodly mess, unable to listen for and to God. The devastation of that broken relationship is terrible. I’m the only one left, and I’m in danger.

He says the same exact thing he said before the earthquake, wind, and fire, but with God in the stillness, perhaps the words sound different for the first time.

Perhaps sheer silence – that presence of God that is the antithesis of force and violent, dramatic power – is where the despair of “I am alone” becomes the determination of “I am the only one.”

In “Help,Thanks, Wow,” the book on prayer that many of us are reading this summer, Anne Lamott tells the story of when her mother’s Alzheimer’s had progressed to the point where she had to be separated from her beloved cat to enter a nursing home.

Lamott prayed first that her mother could simply die at home, with the cat, and be spared the pain of separation.

Then began to beg, “just don’t make me have to take the cat out of her arms. Just don’t make me have to cause and experience this pain.”
And finally, only “Help. Enter this mess.”

And she took the cat out of her mother’s arms, and said she’d be back in a week.

Did it suck? she writes. Yes.

Was my prayer – Help – answered? Was it excruciating? Yes.

Did my mother end up in a warm, gentle place with nice light and nurses and exquisite care, where her closest people could visit and comfort her…. Yes.

Is it less of a beautiful prayer experience because it involved lying? Not to me.

Perhaps sheer silence is when helplessness crystallizes into action, action we did not really want to take, but that, once taken, puts us in a place of answered prayer.

In that sheer silence, in the echo of Elijah’s helplessness: “I have done my best and I cannot fix this mess. I am alone, and in danger,” God sends Elijah right back into the work,

and Elijah goes.

Perhaps God answers our prayers in this way, more often than we would like, when we are Done: fed up, lonely, helpless, and the dramatic power of God does nothing, but God is not in the drama.

Perhaps, more often than we know, God is in the sheer silence of the absence of power, and the actions of our helplessness and despair are transformed into works of grace.

I have been bitterly helpless this week about the futility and pain of preaching a mass shooting. Again.

I am cranky and hopeless about it even now.

But perhaps, in some sheer silence, I will find that these moments, and the wringing anger of preparation, has nonetheless been grace.

Perhaps you just don’t want, ever, to have to explain gun violence, homophobia, racism, radical fear, or the blame game to your children, but you have no choice.

Perhaps – like me – you don’t want to ever have to have – or watch – another of those conversations about background checks and government overreach and mental illness and “radicalism” and terrorism and public safety and bad guys and good guys where we keep talking past each other and nothing seems to happen, but you can't avoid those conversations.

Perhaps you don’t want to give up your rights, your faith in this country’s commitment to individual liberty, by prohibiting whole classes of people from buying guns, don’t want to have to write your representatives or march or petition again. But you have to.

Perhaps the pain or the anger gets so bad you hardly even want to pray again for the victims, or have to look for the helpers. But you have to.

Perhaps, for you, it’s not about guns this week, but about cancer,

or a gratingly broken family relationship,

or climate change,

or an endless deadly tightrope in your personal finances,

or some other grinding, hopeless pain.

But perhaps, in your own places and times of helpless pain, of powerless despair, when you’re past even a prayer for help, and God had better come with power because you can’t even anything anymore….

perhaps you and I will find ourselves encountering God in the sheer silence, where the things we do in hopelessness, the actions we dread as we do them, become our answered prayers.

Perhaps when we are at our end, we too will encounter the profound silence of the whole being of God that transforms our work of despair into works of deep and abiding grace.

And when I am past praying, I will try to remember that.
Will you?