Tag Archives: Brueggemann

Comfortably Numb

I haven’t cried for at least five years. In the last decade, I can only think of two occasions when I have properly wept. And I’m increasingly thinking that this is a problem.

Many writers I really respect have a lot to say about the importance of grief and lament. To give a few quick examples…

‘Lament is a public protest against the way things are. It enables victims of evil to express anger and disappointment with God and the ways things are… lamentation is a process of spiritual catharsis, affirmation, and empowerment. As such it is a gesture of resistance in the face of evil’

John Swinton, Raging With Compassion

‘Mourning is intuition that things are not right – that more is possible. To think that more is possible is an act of political resistance in a world that wants us to believe that consumption is all there is… Hungering and thirsting for justice is nothing less than the continued longing for God to come and set things right… it is to hope that the things that cause us to mourn will not get the last word’

Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black

‘We do know from our own pain and hurt and loneliness that tears break barriers like no harshness or anger. Tears are a way of solidarity in pain when no other form of solidarity remains’

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

I’ve always found this sort of thing inspiring, but it also disturbs me. It confronts me with the possibility that my spiritual formation and my pursuit of justice are, in some important ways, being stunted by my inability to grieve healthily. If Brueggemann is right that ‘hope expressed without knowledge of and participation in grief is likely to be false hope,’ then I have an issue.

It hit home recently when I found out that a young man on my estate had died from substance abuse. I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened now in the seven years that I’ve been here. I greeted the news with sadness and anger, but not with tears. A life bearing all the beauty, potential and worth of the divine image has been cut abruptly, appallingly, meaninglessly short by an addiction that was itself a symptom of so many other layers of injustice. And my response to such evil was barely enough sadness to break the stride of my well-scheduled day.

 I can’t pinpoint exactly why I struggle to weep. I have wondered if it might just be a personality thing – perhaps I am wired in a way that predisposes me to a more stoic, internalised approach to grief and I just need to accept who I am and cut myself some slack. But I’m not convinced. First, because I’m cautious of misusing personality typologies to reduce people into neat, fixed and predictable ways of being in the world. Even if I had a learned preference that made externalising grief difficult, that doesn’t mean a) that it is healthy, b) that God made me to be that way, or c) that I can’t change or develop that.

Second, on all the personality tests I’ve done, I generally align more closely to a feeling rather than a thinking preference. I am relatively emotionally intelligent and empathetic. I just don’t cry much. In other words, the struggle with grief is an anomaly rather than part of a wider trend of emotional repression.

I’ve also wondered if toxic masculinity is to blame. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility out of hand. The culture I have been formed in has undoubtedly conditioned me to see weakness as a bad thing and crying as un-manly. By and large, though, I don’t like that sort of masculinity and I’ve never felt comfortable in ‘laddish’ spaces where that sort of group identity proliferates. So, while I am sure that I am not immune to the influence of toxic masculinity, I don’t think that it is primarily to blame for my struggle. When I’m sad, I don’t (consciously, at least) tell myself to man-up or to keep a stiff upper lip.     

I wonder if the real issue is to do with comfort. I have made various choices which could probably convince most people that I haven’t sold out to the materialist fantasy of comfort that comes through consumption and the avoidance of suffering. But I am discovering that it is very possible to be physically engaged in working for justice, and yet mentally insulated from the inevitable exposure to suffering. I have learned that numbness is an effective coping mechanism when I’m confronted with pain. It allows me to stay steady and it protects me from the scary possibility of being out of control and wrecked by sorrow. As a defence mechanism, it has served me very well. But the cost, I’m learning, is high.

Numbness may be a convenient way to avoid or minimise my own experience of pain. But it also restricts my own humanity. If Jesus is our model of human flourishing, then flourishing requires the ability to grieve and mourn healthily. And linked, my numbness reduces my capacity to love others. If I really want to give my life in service of others, then I think that requires the willingness to meet others in their grief – not to maintain the aloof safety of emotional distance.

So, what should I do? I am very much open to suggestions. I’m reading Aundi Kolber’s Try Softer at the moment, so I’m alert to the temptation I have to ‘white knuckle’ my way to a solution and try to fix this with strategy and will-power. I’m confident that there is some deep work needed here, and that trying softer is therefore going to be far better than trying harder, and progress is likely to be slow. Once again, I am staring my idol of control in the face, and as I have written about previously, I am not quite sure what it looks like to actively surrender control – in this case to actively surrender my emotions. I have tried to manufacture sadness – sitting still and willing myself to cry – with little success. It feels a fine line to tread between deliberately paying attention to the sorrow and suffering around me and going out looking for tragedy in a masochistic way.

I suppose prayer is the best place to start. I remember years ago reading Richard Foster talking about praying for the gift of tears. That seems the best way to frame what I need – not a project, but a gift. Once again, with my tried and trusted techniques unavailable to me, I have no choice but to return to the unhurried rhythm of grace.

Unsporting: giving up the consumption of sport

Photo by Torsten Dettlaff from Pexels

In Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann writes about the restless anxiety and violent competitiveness that proliferates in society. ‘The totem,’ he says, ‘of such restlessness is perhaps professional sports … The endless carnival of those sports constitutes a dramatic affirmation of power, wealth, and virility in which “victory” is accomplished by many abusive exploitations, all in pursuit of winning and being on top of the heap of the money game.’[1]

When I first read it a few years ago I mostly dismissed it. This, I thought, is probably a bit of an American thing that doesn’t really apply to me. Surely, I can enjoy a bit of professional sport and still practice sabbath, still resist the culture of restless anxiety and live into God’s alternative values of neighbourliness, justice and rest.

But something from my initial reading clearly lodged in my mind and it has come to the fore over the last few weeks. We’ve had quite a summer of sport – the football, the rugby and the Olympics have all drawn me in. I’ve had excited conversations with friends, eagerly awaited player ratings and team selections, watched analysis and read punditry – all of it on a level that I don’t remember doing before.

I’ve tried to be sensible and retain some boundaries, particularly around work, but that has simply meant that my rest and weekends this summer have largely been dominated by the consumption of ‘the endless carnival’ of professional sport. I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing in itself and there certainly have been moments that I have enjoyed. But there have increasinly been moments where I have wondered about the influence this is all having on me. If we become what we give our attention to, then how is this consumption of sport shaping me? Who is it forming me into?

My relationship with sport has always been a little complicated. Growing up, I got fairly seriously into a number of sports. But I don’t know if I’ve ever really enjoyed playing sport. I enjoyed the winning, but I’m not sure I especially enjoyed the playing in a purer sense. The angry tears that would often come if I made a mistake on a football pitch may just about be a thing of the past, but that unpleasant competitive edge has carried from playing sport as a teenager into the more vicarious world of consuming professional sport as an adult. For whatever reasons, I seem to have especially struggled this summer. When England lost the Euros and when the Lions lost the test series my sleep was affected for days. What does it say about my priorities when I don’t lose a wink of sleep over a drug overdoses on our estate, but a few jaw-droppingly wealthy men, a ball and the inevitable ability to over-promise and under-deliver can wreck my body’s rhythms?

The capacity professional sport has to affect my mood and command my attention worries me. And so does the anger that I’ve felt – whether directed at players, coaches, officials or other nations. Again, the questions come: ‘who is this forming me into?’ ‘what in me is being appealed to here?’ Surely what is being appealed to are ugly, broken, unkind parts of me that need deep work, not casual encouragement. Surely, I am not being formed into a person of love, character, depth and integrity. Instead, I am being formed into someone who is angry, tribal and distracted – abdicating from the risk and pain of engaging meaingfully in the reality of the world and instead vicariously simulating that risk and pain through the narcotic satiation of commodified sport.

So, I have a bit of a decision to make. Do I look for ways to engage with professional sport more healthily? Or do I do something a little more extreme and abstain? I’ve tried not watching matches live but find that I just end up anxiously refreshing the live updates on BBC which may only be marginally less stressful and distracting.

And so, reluctantly, I want to experiment with something more severe. If Brueggemann is right, (it’s probably time I admitted that he might be onto something) then the practice of sabbath is the appropriate resistance to the competition, consumption and distraction glorified by professional sport. So, it is time for a sabbatical – a fast – a divestment from a form of entertainment that has been a significant part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I don’t like who I become when I consume sport. It brings out the worst in me, not the best. This might not be the solution – it could be an overreaction, but in the absence of better ideas I think this is worth a try. For the rest of this year, I am committing to be deliberately inattentive to scorelines, headlines, transfer rumours and highlights.    

I will give some thought to what I do instead – old habits die hard so I am not expecting this to be easy. I expect it will be helpful to see this less as giving up something I quite like, and more as choosing something better.

‘Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighbourly engagement, rather than production and consumption, define our lives.’

Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance, 18

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2017), pp. 15-16