18  WAKING UP SAD

ONCE I WAS IN A WRITING WORKSHOP with a beautiful, strong woman. She pulled me aside the last day of the week and stood close to me. She told me that she maybe had a word from God for me. I had heard this often enough in my youth, I tried to make my face smooth and judgment free, but my shoulders tensed. The woman looked at me intently, and I tried to look back without wavering. What if, she said to me, as solemn as a prophet—what if you woke up one morning and were . . . happy? She let that sentence hang in the air for a moment, letting me understand the full impact. How would that change your life? How would that change your writing? What would happen to you if you woke up one morning and—poof!—you were no longer angry at the world?

I didn’t have a good response other than to feel the shame spread out in my throat. But I nodded my head and murmured something about how she was right; I should try to be more pleasant. But in my mind I was remembering a friend who talked often about soldiers and PTSD. “They’re the ones with the normal response,” he once said. “It’s the ones who say absolutely nothing is wrong who we should be worried about.”

This woman told me she wanted to have a prayer time for me before the week was out. I nodded my head again, but every time I saw her I managed to slip out of her path unnoticed. I did not want her beautiful hand pressing on my shoulder, I did not want her praying to God to bless me with happiness. Instead, more than anything, I wanted her—this talented, driven, complicated woman—to wake up sad herself.

One day a teacher at my daughter’s school pulled me aside and said, “If you know any parents who are undocumented, tell them to have a plan in place for their kids.” I stared at her. She was looking at the children streaming out of the classrooms, moving like a great tide toward the exit doors. She talked to me while keeping her eyes on them, a walkie-talkie on her hip. “Tell everyone you know that they need to have family members or neighbors or friends—someone, anyone—who can step in and take care of the kids if they are deported.” I looked at her, both astonished and empty. “I don’t know that many people,” I said, and I can’t believe we are truly having this conversation.

She told me, “I was in Arizona when the SB 1070 laws went down. Kids would go home from school to empty houses, both parents gone, deported. I know it happens. We have to be prepared that it could happen here.” I nodded and collected my daughter, glancing at the parents I normally smiled at. I walked home, looking at my daughter’s blonde head surrounded by a sea of black and brown. Kids ran into the street, and I yelled at them to stay to the side. Boys threw pebbles into the puddles, they took off their backpacks and flung them at each other. Children ran back to their houses and their apartments; they disappeared inside doors into circumstances that to me are blurry, a fog of unknowing.

A few months ago, when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, one of the mothers at school told me her son was worried. He kept coming to her, crying, saying “Mom, Mom, what will I do if you get deported?” She is a single mother, and she works at a fast food restaurant nearby. She comes one morning a week to volunteer at the school. “Who is telling him this?” she wants to know. “Is it the teachers?” “No,” I reply. “I think it’s just that all of the kids are talking about it, all the time.” She tells me what she told her son: that yes, Donald Trump is the president now, but he has many more important things to worry about then deporting her. She tells her son to stop worrying, that they have to have hope for the future, that they cannot live in fear. Her voice is calm and she smiles reassuringly, and I go back home feeling slightly better.

But later I thought about this conversation. This mother never told her son that it wouldn’t happen, that she wouldn’t be forced to leave. She is not a mother who lies or who makes false promises. I think about this mother, how she is trying to help start a PTA at our school, how she is always smiling at me, how she sits in the cafeteria with her son in the mornings while he eats breakfast. I know I am supposed to focus on her resilience, be inspired by her words in regards to not living in fear. But instead I lie awake at night and imagine a heat map of my neighborhood, the ugly little ranch homes and the large apartment complexes, the red showing up as fear. I imagine all the worried little children, the boys and girls who know what it is to anticipate the end of life as they know it. My heart is a sponge, and I am soaking up all that worry and fear and stress, tossing and turning until morning.

Once, I was on a train to Seattle. I was desperately excited about the chance to go to a writing retreat on an island. I was escaping all that tugged at my eyes and my brain—my children, my neighbors, the news of my country and its policies that punished everyone I held dear. I sat on a train and dreamily looked out the window. My seatmate, a man close to my age with tattoos covering his arms and creeping up his neck, took out a black bandana and put it over his eyes. He slept, quietly, while I wrote in my journal. Messy, unintelligible writing, my hand trying to keep up with my thoughts.

As I was writing in my journal, the train stopped. The voice overhead sad, “There will be an hour delay. There has been a trespassing incident.” Passengers got up and stretched. I checked the time, worried that I might miss my ride to the ferry that would take me to the island. My seatmate woke up. The party behind us, who sounded as though they were drinking even though it was only 10 in the morning, played their card games and complained about the delay. Finally, we started moving again, the slow scenery changing from beautiful to mundane to run-down, over and over again. Fields and forest, homeless camps erected in the shadow of industry, small towns with a few stoplights.

As we rolled through one such town, I noticed large black SUVs, yellow caution tape, police officers standing together in clumps. A woman standing in the middle of the tracks parallel to the ones we were on, an entire train station closed. As we slowly sailed by, I saw the woman wearing gloves clutching a semiopaque plastic bag. The bag was filled with something heavy, something wet. I started to see streaks of dark brown, of red, on the sides of the platform. I saw a torso, on the tracks. A few meters down, a leg. I gasped so loudly it startled the man next to me. “Don’t look,” I told him, covering my face in my hands. But he did, standing up in his seat and leaning over me. Other people started to murmur, craning their necks, “Oh my god, what was that?”

Minutes went by in silence. Then my seatmate shifted in his seat toward me. He exhaled loudly and asked if I was okay. I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say. He started talking, and he didn’t stop until we got to Seattle. It was the anniversary of his best friend’s death, and he was shaken up. He had a bad relationship with his dad. Life was incredibly fragile, and we had to treat it like a gift, you know? He was clean and sober these days. Working a good restaurant job now. He couldn’t believe what he had just caught a glimpse of. He took this train constantly, and this sort of thing never happened.

In my mind I willed myself to listen. How would a pastor respond? They would comfort, they would offer assurances, they would fill in the gaps of meaning-making. A good person would do this, I thought to myself. But deep down I knew I wasn’t a good person. I wanted my seatmate to stop talking to me, to stop needing me to assure him it would all be fine. I instead wanted to think about what I had seen on the tracks. I wanted to find out who it was. In my mind I crafted a narrative about a man, older and with no house and no loved ones, who saw a train coming and walked purposefully in front of it.

I nodded my head as my seatmate talked and talked and talked. The rest of the week on the island I tried to pretend that I was fine. But I couldn’t write that entire week long, surrounded by gorgeous old-growth forests and rocky Pacific Northwest beaches. I googled what happened at that tiny train station, and the police report confirmed I was right. I reread my journal, where I had been writing just before I witnessed the violence of a public suicide, the ending of a very sad story. I had been writing, just at that moment, this: “I am so tired of noticing,” I wrote. “I am so tired of not being able to shut everything down. If this is a gift from God, it often feels like a curse.”

Professor Yolanda Norton talks about how Jesus lives into the role of the prophet as laid out in the Hebrew Scriptures. Norton reveals that biblical prophets are local, they have a divine imperative to critique the powers that be, they work to energize the people, and they live in anguish with the people. For Norton all of these characteristics together are important. A prophet doesn’t just critique without energizing the people with an alternative vision for the future. The prophet doesn’t live in a state of perpetual anger but instead lives into anguish and lament with the people.

I am generally skeptical of those who call themselves prophets. But I do believe more of us ought to reclaim the role of someone who critiques the powers of the world and sits in the anguish of the broken world. Someone who refuses to capitulate to despair and instead sees hope in a new vision for the world couched in the goodness of a God who restores. Professor Norton once told a group of us gathered for a conference that one of the words for prophet in Hebrew is nabi, which means “someone who causes things to bubble up.” This definition strikes me as profoundly important. Not the loudest voice in the room, not the one screaming about problems or coming up with quick and easy solutions that cost people little and change nothing about power. Instead, a prophet is someone who helps ensure that the truth comes to light, that what is hidden in the depths of our hearts and in our social, political, economic, and theological systems comes to the surface for us to actually deal with.

Within the prophetic works of Scripture I find contradictions and proclamations that soothe my mind. I see people who tell the truth, point out injustice, grieve for the world, and hope in a better future, a future where people do not crush each other for profit but work together for flourishing. In the poets and the prophets of old I see the same desire: we cannot rest until the whole world is right. And in the meantime we will alternately fast and feast, we will be faithful to the festivals and the laments. I am okay with being sad much of the time. And yet I also recognize that a hallmark of empire is how it prefers that people operate in a constant state of despair. Depressed people are easier to control. People lose their will to fight. The imagination to believe another world is possible falls through their fingers like sand.

In the work of paying attention I can sometimes be overwhelmed by injustice. It is so systemic, so pervasive, and I have largely benefited from it. There is no easy resolution to this, and grief and lament and truth-telling are necessary components for how to move forward in a world that would prefer us to accept the status quo.

I can’t make myself wake up happy, as much as I have tried. Nor do I see it as a value worth pursuing. But despair, or sadness, doesn’t help anyone. In fact, it can be another form of self-absorption, the flip side of a savior complex—the failure complex. This is why it’s important to reclaim the discipline of lament. Lament in the Bible is not just an airing of grievances, pointing out what is sad and horrible in the world while the people in power insist all is well (although that is a part of it). It is a sign of radical hope in a God who is listening. It is people feeling close enough to God to pour forth what is in their hearts and people trusting God enough to believe that another world might be possible.

Walter Brueggemann talks about the prophet Jeremiah’s ministry of articulated grief. Part of Jeremiah’s ministry was simply to be a witness to the unbelief and destruction of his people, to name the unnamed. Why is this so powerful, the call to describe exactly how terrible reality is? Brueggemann posits it is because we live in a world where there is the ever-present danger of what he called “the royal consciousness”—the voices of the powerful telling us that everything is fine when it is not.

Scrolling through Instagram I see post after post of people happy, wealthy, and successful. Their kids are in perfect schools, their health is fixed by essential oils, their theologies are so neat and sure and fit in a loopy font overlaid over majestic mountains. It is not the fault of the people posting those pictures, exactly. We have all been trained to carefully curate our lives for various reasons. But still, their happiness for all to see on display wounds me. In it I see the threads of forgetfulness, of our human tendency to forget our responsibility to one another and of wanting to keep it that way.

Once I saw a self-care expert on Instagram asking people to think about what it would take for them to be happy. I asked myself that question and was shocked at how quickly the answer popped into my head: I will never be happy until every single person in the world is safe, happy, and flourishing. I was both pleased and miserable at my core longing. I was pleased because it spoke to a spark of the divine in me because I do believe that this is God’s dream for the world. I think this is what shalom is, what the kingdom of God makes possible. But I was also miserable because until the kingdom comes in full, until we are in the new creation, this isn’t a reality. There will always be suffering, so how am I to live in the meantime? I cannot choose, I cannot blandly accept the cruelties of the world, nor can I save it with my outsider tears. I do what I’ve always done: I will hurtle through life, ricocheting between misery and delight, between sorrow and joy. I will be a cup filled to the brim with despair and hope, constantly spilling onto everyone around me.

Sometimes in order to accept something for ourselves, we need to see it through a different lens. I am perhaps fine with accepting that I will always wake up sad. But what if I asked it in another way? Do I want my neighbors to wake up sad? Do I want my own children to grow up with happiness as the main value of their lives? It’s an interesting question, one that reframes my mind. I do desperately wish for my daughter to learn to love her neighbors, especially the neighbors God was and is obsessed with: the poor, the oppressed, the vulnerable. But deeper than this wish is something more primal, a desire for my daughter to know she is loved.

What good is anything else she can do in the world if inside of her heart she feels a lack, if she is trying to prove something, if she is trying to save the world herself or atone for her own sins or bully people into needing her? If she doesn’t grow up feeling loved by God, then the rest of her life will be oriented around extracting and exploiting that love from others.

I feel a great heavy weight of duty coupled with the joy of living with my neighbors in mind. I will never wake up to a neighborhood where every soul in every house and apartment is at peace. I will never see true shalom in my life, which hollows out a part of my soul. But do I have the eyes to see the tiniest flashes of shalom? The glimpses that make me believe another world is possible—that even now it is coming and will be brought by a God who loves and sees and delights more than I can ever understand? I wake up sad, I kiss the cheeks of my children, and I drink the coffee my husband makes for me every morning. I savor the coffee as long as I can, stretching out the simplest pleasures before me. I cannot save the whole world, I cannot heal it with my own two hands. But I can live in it, I can speak the truth about where it is broken, and where it is being repaired. I can gather the courage from my friends who have experienced exile, and I can try to imitate them as best as I can. I can try to be brave enough to keep noticing, even when it breaks my heart at every turn.