bleeding out loud

Pure

Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” I’ve never appreciated the statement knowing full well what’s inside my own heart, and what, I suspect, is inside all of our hearts. It strikes me as the kind of statement no one ever believes is about themselves. It must be about someone else-someone whose heart isn’t so full of anger or lust or selfishness. And so because no one believes it is about them, then it really seems to be a statement about no one at all, unless, of course, purity means something entirely different. The word pure comes from the Greek word katharos, which is where we get the word cathartic; intense emotional releases that leave us feeling reborn, renewed, or revitalized. It’s why people talk about how good it was to have had “a good cry” or a “good laugh.” Purity is more of a process than a quality.

Hypocrite

In ancient Greek, a hypocrite was someone who pretended to be other than what he or she really was. It was a phrase used for actors. They played a role for the crowd. Jesus borrowed the phrase regularly to describe the religious elites of his day. “Woe to you…you hypocrites…you clean the outside of the cup but the inside is full of greed and self-indulgence…you are like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.” If the gap between our well-kept exteriors and our impoverished interiors is any measure of hypocrisy, then all of us fit the bill. It seems to me that one of the great challenges of being fully human is simply learning to be who we have been all along, to be at home in our own skin. Those who’ve learned to stop living in obedience to the perception of others, whose exteriors and interiors are divided no more have tasted something of heaven here.

Every now and then, without fail, someone asks me about the name of this blog. “Bleeding out loud? That’s kind of dark don’t you think?” So here’s the story behind it.

Last year I went to see Over the Rhine at Calvin College. Talk about soul. Everything about their music communicated a kind of depth and richness that people only come to through suffering. Their opening song set the pace. “I don’t wanna waste your time with music you don’t need. Why would I autograph a book that you won’t even read? I’ve got a different scar for every song and blood left still to bleed. So I don’t wanna waste your time with music you don’t need.”

It’s a bit like the writing advice given by Red Smith. “Writing is really quite simple-all you have to do is sit down at your typewriter and open a vein.” Frederick Buechner seems to have caught onto this saying, “I wish I had told my writing students to give some thought to what they wanted their books to make happen inside the people who read them…for my money anyway, the only books worth reading are books written in blood.”

And of course the metaphor resonates because of our own experience with grief and loss. I recall lying awake in bed after Rich’s funeral with an acute sense of God’s presence and the simultaneous and overwhelming absence of His comfort. Neither Trisha or I were asleep. We just laid there, awake for hours in the dark to the sound of sniffles and breath, which, in that moment, struck me as the sound of souls hemorrhaging, having been torn in two by sadness. Then I happened across the story from the book of Genesis where God confronts Cain for having killed his brother Abel. “Listen,” says God. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”

Lament, I came to understand, is the faithful process of expressing loss and complaint, a kind of bleeding out loud. Except that lament seems to be lost in our culture. And why wouldn’t it be? The idea of lingering in your sadness is depressing. Except that in doing so, Trisha and I have stumbled onto one of the strangest paradoxes, that our wounds can become portals through which God breathes new life into the world if only we steward them well. This is basically the paradox of Jesus’ being killed by Roman crucifixion.

Being crucified was what happened to people who crossed Rome. It was a very painful, very public, and very shameful way to die. Yet it was through the cross that Christ came to be resurrected. Suddenly what was a symbol of imperial power became an imaginative symbol for new life. I think for anyone who tries their hand at the way of Jesus, this paradox rings true. The very things that ought to ruin us can instead become sources of profound hope not only for ourselves but for the world. And that, Frederick Buechner, is what I want to make happen in the people who read or hear the words I write or speak, that they will come alive in others in even a fraction of the way they have come alive in me.