When my daughter's fourth grade class began reading Jeanne Duprau's book, The City of Ember, I decided to read along. I found the premise of the book intriguing, a City of fading light isolated by a vast sea of darkness. Resources running low, fear running high, and two young children, a twelve-year-old girl named Lina and a twelve-year-old boy named Doon, stepping forward as the embodiment of a hope beyond the boundaries of all the City calls home.
Early on into the book we discover the gravity of the City's situation when an elder of the City comes to Clary's greenhouse while Lina is visiting. The Elder is hysterical after trekking past the limits of the City's light. Everything is darkness. There is no hope. The City is doomed. Concerned the visit has upset Lina, Clary apologizes for what Lina has just witnessed, but Lina, filled with a potent dose of naivete and hope, claims this moment as the commissioning of her life's purpose. She will save the City, “All it would take," Duprau writes, "was the courage to walk away from Ember and into the darkness, and then keep going.”
This morning we are invited into one of the darkest places in biblical literature, haunted by Jesus’ only articulate word from the cross, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsake me?" A recitation of the first line in Psalm 22, a lament of a suffering righteous person who call out for divine vindication. As Bishop Willmon writes in his book, Thank God It's Friday: Encountering the Seven Last Words from the Cross, “The Fourth Word couldn’t have been the first word. If it had been, I doubt we would have stayed for the other six.”
The summer after I graduated from high school it was clear to me that my parents going to get divorced, and yet the evening I came home from Thanksgiving Break after my first semester away at college to find the living room furniture gone, I assumed my family had been robbed. At some point between the time I had headed off to college and come home for fall break, my father had moved out. My curiosity quickly shifted from where the couch had gone to where my father was. That evening my mother wrote an address on a small piece of scratch paper that I stuffed in the pocket of my bulky winter jacket before heading out into the dark to find where my father had gone.
In his study of this passage, Willimon points out that Jesus, in this prayer speaks about the location of his father. Up until this point he and his father had been one and now, in the end, in the darkness, he speaks in distinction, from a distance asking, “God, where are you?” Jesus may have cried out for the presence of his father, but never did he doubt his existence. These are not Jesus' words. These are all of our words, a chorus of prayerful lament passed down from generation to generation, resources for the moments in which we reach the end of our understanding, the end of our comprehension of who God is and how God is at work in this world.
These words meet Jesus as he hits the wall of his suffering; it’s as if everything that he knew was going to happen is unfolding and it is beyond even what he had imagined. He has shed tears in the garden, forgiven those who have betrayed him, he has stood in solidarity with the suffering and maintained integrity while those in power mocked him. He has said goodbye to his mother. He had prepared and planned and in this moment, he is swallowed by the darkness unable to find his father – unable to gain his composure. Suffering surprises us. When we lean into darkness we lose grip on the light that has guided our feet and we have nothing else but the sound of our voice crying out for the reminder of the familiar.
In his book, We Drink from Our Own Wells, liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez writes, “We all have the same vocation: to rise to life with the people in its spirituality. This implies a death to the alleged spiritual ways that individualism of one or another kind create but that in fact only lead to an impasse. It also supposes a birth into new ways of being disciples of Jesus, the risen Christ.” Jesus' call is one rooted in Scripture ,inviting us to leave behind the comfort of our homegrown theologies for a theology embedded in the need of the world identified through a life of prayer and action. Henri Nouwen explains, “To drink from your own well is to live your own life in the Spirit of Jesus as you have encountered him in you concrete historical reality. This has nothing to do with abstract opinion, convictions, or ideas, but it has everything to do with the tangible, audible, and visible experience of God, and experience so real that it can become the foundation of a life project.”
This Christian life requires us to lean into darkness. Into the places in which we have lost our ability to see God’s presence and to remain through the suffering of uncertainty so that we may once again correct our vision to see the movement of the Spirit. Without this altered vision we will be unable to sustain the long and painful journey toward co-creating a just and peace-filled world. The prayer of Jesus, the cry of our hearts, is not one of shame but one of courageous commitment, an assumption that God’s presence is there, even when we are unable to identify its placement or purpose.
I showed up to my father’s door late that evening. I knocked several times but no one was answering. Just as I turned to leave I heard footsteps coming toward the door. The porch light turned on. A half-awake man answered the door. “Stephanie?” my dad said, squinting his eyes to see my figure hidden just beyond the reach of the light. “Do you want to come in?” “No,” I told him. “I just needed to make sure I knew where you were.”
We are called to leave the homes of our knowing. To venture out from the light that blinds us from the fullness of God's invitation into the fullness of the world. We step out with an acknowledgement that staying where we are, within the walls of our own knowing, is a silent but steady spiritual death. We rise with our willingness to lean into the darkness, to hold the hands of the suffering, to whisper through our presence that God is here... yes, even here, and all it takes is the courage to walk away from light of the home we once knew and into the darkness and keep going.
