On Stumbling
Ancient Testimony ~ Psalm 121
January 27, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

I feel like Obi-Wan Kenobi: I sense a disturbance in the force.

The life forces have stumbled.  For those of you who are new to Judson or don’t know us all yet, know this: this week a dear, long-term member of ours, Mary Ellen Baldwin, jumped to her death out of a window.  Another dear, long-term friend of ours, Wendell Cordtz, had what may be a massive stroke.  The doctors are using the big words.  He has not yet woken up.  No one will know much for a few more days.  The stroke happened on Wednesday.  He is 55.  A friend of mine, Fern, took her own life on Tuesday.  And our sanctuary family, the Montrevils, have been in and out of family court, facing very severe difficulties caused by their extended family.  There is nothing worse for a person already in deportation procedures than to be arrested.  We believe the charges will be dismissed.

The forces are disturbed―both the outer forces and the inner forces, creating a tsunami of emotions.  And for those of you who know none of these people, what I know is you will have your own memories or experiences of depression and high blood pressure to add to the mix.  None of us is exempt.

The Psalms are often the place we go when there is a disturbance in the cosmic gravity.  In fact, I had already chosen Psalm 121 for this day because I believed in my heart that it might be the day Mary Ellen would return to church.  You will note it is a Psalm of deep assurance: God keeps you and will not let you fall.  God guards you and will guard your going in and your coming out, a phrase too often used as a benediction, as though we did not go in and come out every day, become more interior or less interior every month.  Sometimes we rise, says the moon, and sometimes we wane.  I had written 121 out for Mary Ellen because while she was fighting for her life, she also had a stress fracture in her foot.  She was deeply afraid of stumbling, and the 121 Psalm is all about feet.  I could never have known that this Psalm would appear in this bulletin but without her here.

Another Psalm begs today to be coupled with this one:  

Blessed are the man and woman who have grown beyond their greed and have put an end to their hatred and no longer nourish illusions. 
But they delight in the way things are and keep their hearts open, day and night. 
They are like trees planted near flowing waters, which bear fruit when they are ready.  Their leaves will not fall or whither.  Everything they do will succeed.

That is Psalm 1, translated by Stephen Mitchell.  I love his promise that once again we will delight in the way things are.  And we will.

The Psalms are just assurance.  I mean, the Psalms are assurance.  I don’t really know if assurance is enough, but it’s always a good place to start.  In The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary, by Robert Alter (and reviewed by Walter Brueggeman in the current Christian Century), Alter wonders if the Psalms are really liturgy, which is what we usually think.  He thinks they may be more like the blues, and that we may want to use them more like we use the blues.  Listen to an old tacky blues song and see what you think.  It uses the usual repetition, as we also hear in the Psalms:

Woke up in the morning
Woke up in the morning
And had myself a beer.
And had myself a beer.

Over and over again, we hear these repetitions, almost as though we would never get it the first time, so we have to hear it twice.  Listen:

God will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.
The one who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. 
The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

I would love this promise even better if Mary Ellen had found a way to stumble before she jumped.  But the assurance is not so much a guarantee as a promise.  Mary Ellen all but memorized this Psalm, but it was not enough to keep her going.  Those are the facts we face when singing the blues or saying the Psalms.

Another place we can go in times like this is to the accumulated learning of experts about trauma and loss.  Ironically, our member Carol Kroker was scheduled to speak to the Community Ministers on Friday about “Critical Incidents.”  As a trauma therapist, she knows about what happens to people when there is a disturbance in the force.

Like the Psalms, she recommends “Holding the Space,” creating a canopy over people, the way a mother holds a child.  Reconsider the Psalm from this perspective.  It creates a larger universe which holds us.  She also recommends that we become round, forgo opinions and fix-its and sharp questions, and say nothing piercing.  She says, “Stay round.”  Listen deeply because the listening is the healing.  Have you ever been really listened to?  Then you know what I mean.  Have you ever really desperately needed to be listened to and not just heard?  Then you also know what I mean.  She also talked about the normal reaction to crisis being that we have a sense of spinning, that we can’t make decisions, that we move our feet in circles instead of putting one in front of the other.  Spinning and stumbling are our normal responses to crises.

The spinning is what struck me.  I couldn’t help but think of the Himalayan Buddhist spinning wheels.  Pilgrims spin large prayer wheels, or mani wheels, and believe that when they spin they spread spiritual blessings.  The spinning itself creates blessings.  For example, I don’t know when Peter Gaitens, our administrative assistant, ever gave me a sermon illustration before.  He is an expert on James Baldwin.  This week he handed me a sermon given by one of Baldwin’s preacher characters after a parishioner jumped off the George Washington Bridge.  The preacher tells his people,

You know a lot of people say that a man who takes his own life oughtn’t to be buried in holy ground. I don’t know nothing about that.  All I know, God made every bit of ground I ever walked on and everything God made is holy.  And don’t none of us know what goes on in the heart of someone, don’t many of us know what’s going on in our own hearts for the matter of that, and so can’t none of us say why he did what he did… And I tell you something else, don’t none of you forget it: I know a lot of people done took their own lives and they’re walking up and down the streets today and some of them is preaching the gospel and some is sitting in the seats of the mighty.  Now you remember that.  If the world wasn’t so full of dead folks maybe those of us that’s trying to live wouldn’t have to suffer so bad.¹

Peter also gave me a good line from Michael Cunningham’s Flesh and Blood, which says, “It’s hard to live. It’s hard to keep walking around and change into new outfits all the time and not just collapse.”

And now for my quick theory of depression and suicide: it can be helped.  Many people have figured out how to walk around and not collapse.  Not everyone does.  It is very hard to be severely depressed. It’s like you’re down here and the world is up here and it hurts terribly.  Many people who could be helped are not helped.  If they could have done something besides kill themselves, they would have.  My 59-year-old friend who killed herself was a brilliant writer, a beautiful, funny, healthy woman.  Her other good friend eulogized her this way: “Fern, I don’t understand, I can’t forgive you, I do understand, I do forgive you, in that order.” 

Back to what the experts tell us.  Blame is a wonderful opportunity at times like this.  The fact that it is useless doesn’t really matter. It is our attempt to reestablish control over the uncontrollable.   I was stuck in Cleveland for 48 hours this week because the airplanes refused to fly.  The snowstorm caused the kind of havoc that only frequent fliers truly appreciate. While there I watched local news incessantly. I watched the blame thing happen.  A guy had run his jeep off the road on the major highway, causing a blockage for miles.  The radio news guys started yelling at him from their heated office: “You jerk, don’t you know how to drive, now look at what you have done, where did you get your license, you idiot.”  What a helpful response to a road accident.  Next story: two cops have picked up a man for the internet crime of sexually engaging a teenage girl who turned out to be an undercover cop.  While they drag him through the cameras―he is white, seventy at the minimum, and looks like a corpse already―the cops say, what do you prefer to be called, a pervert, ha ha, or a sex criminal, ha ha.  While I can understand the frustration of being stuck in traffic, air or ground, and I can understand the need to blame people who try to have sexual relationships with teenagers on-line―and while I can understand how possible it would have been to keep Mary Ellen alive and here with us―I cannot understand how blaming ourselves or others helps anyone.  It is just a way to make believe we are in control, which we are not.

I don’t imagine that either the Psalms or the experts will help all of you.  Some things, as my mother loved to say, can’t be helped.  We had a really funny time in the Community Ministry meeting after Carol gave us her excellent presentation.  We got into this notion of help and fixing and how unlikely it was that fixing would really help.  One man was irritated in a certain masculine way and shouted out that he didn’t see why we had to put down people who tried to fix things.  Like the Psalms do.  They provide only assurance, no technical assistance.  Only listening, no thirty days to thin thighs.  No stumbling; shade, no sun.  Anyway, he said, “Look, when a woman hands you a toaster, she is not saying could you please just listen to this toaster and understand it. No, she is saying, ‘Fix it.’”. He is right, granting the sexism all the way around.

Which is what leads me to my third point and then I am done.  If the Psalms assurance and the listening that the experts recommend―that real listening, to yourself and to others―if these don’t help, then I leave you here, as Al Carmines would say: mind the gap.  Mind the gap.  Mind the gap between what you think is going on in a person and what is really going on.  Don’t trust first, second, or even third impressions.  Probe.  Be like Obi-Wan and hear the disruptions in the force.  Find a way to pay attention to them, not to the make-up and the expert haircut.  Become one who, in the first Psalm’s words, no longer needs illusions. 

Whenever I mind the gaps in my life―the places where things go wrong and I can’t fix them but I wish I could have―I really do want fixes.  I keep thinking there should be a self-walking dog.  Or at least that New York City pets should have their own keys to the apartment.  That alone would save me decades of worry and phone calls and trouble.  Barring that, I want a God who is dispensed from a dispensary, like those medical marijuana machines they have in California.  You plug in your card and your number and you get the dope.  A God made in this simple way would be of great use to many people as we mind the gap.  As long as there was no gap, we wouldn’t have to be bothered by God or gods.  We would not need assurance that we wouldn’t stumble because we wouldn’t stumble.  We wouldn’t be afraid of spinning forever because we weren’t spinning at all.  All of our blessings would be bought and paid for and prescribed by authorities that knew we legitimately needed to go from low and pain to high and pain-free.  As long as we watched the gap, we wouldn’t be asking dumb questions of the hills, like who the hell is going to help me?  Earth alone would be our bother and heaven would be left to the time when we needed it.  The very language of “keeper,” as in zookeeper, would not be so pleasant to us, and we would know how, on our very own, to get in out of the sun and to find the shade.

Instead, there are gaps.  Many of us stumble.  There is great need for this bluesy blessing of Psalm 121.  Our going-outs and coming-ins are guarded.  We may dare take another step.  We won’t fall down. 

Let me end with the remarkable Hebrew fix-it that goes with this Psalm.  It is a device, like a prayer wheel, to help us ritualize the days.  It is the mezuzah.  You may know it from friends’ doorways.  It is a small, usually clay, usually artistically wrought, touch stone that Jews use to guard their going out and their coming in.  I believe in mezuzahs with all my heart, because the truth of the matter is you don’t know what is going to happen when you leave home in the morning or come back in at night.  You just don’t know.  When you touch the mezuzah on the way out, you acknowledge your keeper.  You understand that you live in a zoo and that you are a zoo animal.  You are not offended but comforted by this fact.  When you touch the mezuzah on the way in, you have the sense to give thanks for not stumbling.  And then you hope you can find the light switch and that the cat doesn’t trip you.  The not-automatically-walked dog will be your next problem.

Anyway, Carol thought that reestablishing whatever routine we had is a good thing to do when Critical Incidents occur.  I agree, spiritually.

You get the point.  There is a disturbance in the field.  Let the Psalms assure you, listen to the experts, and listen, just listen, to each other.  And if you have to do something, get yourself a mezuzah and touch it, now and then.  Amen.

¹James Baldwin, Another Country (New York: Dial, 1962)