Pastors Feel Angst Too

This has been a weird week. Eugene Peterson, a guy I admire, passed away. I am still recovering from a recent loss to my church, my family, and myself. And things just aren’t as beautiful in my world as I would like them to be.

I suppose if I were to describe my heart lately, “melancholy” might be a good word, but then again, I suspect “angst” might be a better word.  Siri just defined “Angst” for me as – “a feeling of anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one, about the human condition or the state of the world in general.”

I think I like that definition. Maybe dread is better than anxiety for what I feel. Since I was feeling a little uncomfortable I thought I would just rest my mind for a little bit in a social media loop. I ended up in a clickhole slideshow about famous people’s last tweets before they died. Needless to say, that didn’t help at all. All I ended up doing was looking at my last tweet and thinking “Gee, yea, that sounds fantastic.”

Anyway, as I was saying, Eugene Peterson passed away this week. Full disclosure: my personal background has always led me to distrust the denomination he was a part of.  Of course, that only creates more angst because I hate myself for feeling that way. Especially since the late Reverend Peterson is a guy I have often looked to as a hero. I mean, I didn’t know him but I have learned a lot from his books. And I feel certain that I can say with confidence that I wish I trusted and loved Jesus as much as that guy!

Just a couple weeks ago we lost a member of our congregation that both my wife and I were particularly close to over the last several years. And to be completely honest, this woman’s life, faith, hope, and even her death were all uncomfortably familiar to the way my mother left us nearly 20 years ago.

It all has just given me a general unease concerning the human condition.

Maybe you can relate. Maybe you have had days, weeks, or seasons in your life when you felt deep down the brokenness of our world.

Sometimes this brokenness strikes us hard in the form of unspeakable tragedy. But far too often this brokenness just sits in our souls like a moldy wet rag.

That’s how I feel this week.

In times like this I tend to turn to poetry and art. I find that those forms of art that search and grasp for some sort of unnamed beauty are good places to rest my rag weary soul.

I chose to head over to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eugene Peterson’s favorite poet, in honor of him. I found something hauntingly fitting.

He wrote a poem not too long before his premature death called “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

Now, I know that’s a crazy long title and it may be difficult for readers most familiar with the literary genre of meme. But I will paste it below in case you’d like to read it. Stick with me because this poem is like meds for the rag weary heart. Hopkins spoke to me today more than a hundred years removed and I want to show you how.

Heraclitus was an early Greek Philosopher. Older than Socrates. He suggested that all of the world was basically in a series of destruction and re-creation ruled by fire. That’s somewhat oversimplifying it, but it’s a good way to understand where we are going.

Reading some of what he wrote you might think he was arguing that madness and chaos are the structure of life.

Well, let’s take an honest look around! There is an election happening right now (which probably also has contributed significantly to my angst). As I write, my phone is beeping with news of pipe bombs being sent to people involved in politics. I know people who are dying far too young. There are child molesters and rapists walking among us every day whose victims are terrified to speak up. Who could argue that madness and chaos are the structure of life?

I am firmly convinced that the western world is edging away from a Christian worldview and into nihilism. I would argue that the increase in mass shootings in our culture is evidence of encroaching nihilism.

And by the way, nihilism is an absolutely appropriate response to a world where madness and chaos are the basic order of life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins offers us an alternative to nihilism.

But first, he admits this reality “Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!”

We are but a blip. We come and go. We will not be remembered long.

Can I take a moment and add that I suspect this is the reason the west is slipping away from Christianity? For too long the church has acted like the world is made out of candy and cherry blossoms. We need to take a lesson and model Hopkins in admitting that the world is messed up. That it isn’t fair that we are a blip. That it sucks that we won’t be remembered for long.

But Hopkins does not leave us there in the pit of despair. Neither does the story of Scripture.

He goes on later to say “But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection, A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.”

Enough!

I think that exclamation point might possibly be the greatest single mark in 19th century literature. Yes, there is angst deep in my soul. Yes, life will not always be the way I wish it was. Certainly, we will have days where we feel deeply the meaninglessness of it all. We may even be tempted to adopt a worldview bordering on nihilism.

Enough! The resurrection.

If there is a resurrection past, if a God/man named Jesus who actually walked out of the grave… well then, that has implications. The greatest implication is that there is hope.  There is hope because if indeed there is a resurrection past then  there is a resurrection future.  This is not all there is.

Does this make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside? One might argue that it should.  But I say not necessarily.  We still live here and now.  I believe this is true and yet my soul remains rag weary.

I don’t believe that “positive and encouraging” is always sanctifying. And with that I just decided what I will write about next week.

Have a good week. And don’t worry about me. I will preach “Enough!” To myself today.

—

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows | flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs | they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, | wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long | lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous | ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; | in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed | dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks | treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, | joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

– Gerard Manley Hopkins