Losing Your Way: A Reflection on Good Friday, Easter, and Uncertainty in Life

I am not going to lie.  I have had easier Lenten seasons.  I find myself in a place of doubt and uncertainty about what I am doing with my life and where it is heading.  What is disconcerting is not that this feeling is new, but that I still find myself in such a place after all of this time.  I find myself walking, but not actually sure if I am heading anywhere.    However, while I am not particularly confident that I will find the clarity or answers that I want anytime soon--since most existential problems are not “built” in a day, they are not deconstructed in a day either--I am at least hoping that the Good Friday and Easter stories that we have just remembered and walked through as a church will remind me of where and who God is and what my relationship is to him.  

Compared to real problems in the world like starvation, weather disasters, and revolutions, my troubles are pretty common and bourgeois, but right or wrong, this is where I find myself.  What I had hoped for my life during my 20s and early 30s is not panning out.  

I am 36 years old.  I had hoped to be married by now and yet find myself single again and recognizing that the problem is really not them but me.  And for more than ten years I had wanted to get a PhD in New Testament and teach.  I have two theological masters degrees, two bachelors degrees, and an associate’s degree thrown in for good measure.  I am not suffering from a lack of formal education.  Yet what I have is not enough.  For a variety of reasons--many being economically related--I decided not to pursue a PhD and have spent the last several years coming to terms with what this means; I have not been doing a great job of emotionally letting go of this one.  It had been Plan A and I had never made a Plan B.  I have been frozen for three years, uncertain of what to do next.  I am in that fun place that everyone over 50 warns you about, but you never quite get it till you are there: this is the time when you realize that you are not going to be all of the things you had hoped and dreamed you would be.  In “Fight Club” parlance, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile.”

This is where I look in desperation to Good Friday and Easter.  Admittedly, the fabric of these stories does not provide me with particular answers to the problems haunting me.  Nowhere do I see three easy steps to not being a mediocre boyfriend or guaranteed ways to discover a new fulfilling career path.  Instead, what they show is a picture of God’s unbounded love meeting and absorbing humanity’s unbounded fear and cruelty. From this comes a perspective, and a reminder of who and what is important.

If you want to talk about dashed expectations and dreams, from the point of view of Jesus’ disciples, Good Friday initially must have been utterly hope-shattering.  Having bought into the idea of Jesus as the messiah, they had expected he would violently throw the Romans out of Israel and that the day of the Lord would be there making them a free people again.  Instead, all of the dreams that they had left their fishing nets, homes, and families behind for vanished.  Their messiah did not overthrow the pagan Roman state, but was executed by it, and they went into hiding, cowering in fear, afraid that they would be next.  Their one way out to freedom and a life without fear was shot.  And let us not forget, poor Jesus was abandoned by his closest friends and even for a moment was forsaken by God the Father himself.

But then the most bizarre, unbelievable comeback and reorientation from disorientation of all time: the resurrection.  Despite what 20th century liberal theology has suggested, this was not a fictive metaphor for overcoming nor for the triumph of the human spirit or even of faith or hope.  Jesus was bodily raised from the dead, declared that the same would same day happen to us and creation, and said that he would always be with us.  He did not avoid, sidestep or even destroy the Roman politics that confronted him, but rather offered a proto-politic of the Kingdom of God to be lived out now in the Church and fired it up and empowered with the Holy Spirit.

After seeing the resurrected Christ, did the disciples go on to have fulfilled and successful lives that were absent of pain and doubt?  No.  They were promised suffering in ways akin to Jesus’ suffering (John 15.20; 2 Tim 3.12).  Between the post-Easter ascension and the return of Christ someday, in some paradoxical sense life got both better and harder.  In Scripture you read of people living faithfully and with more hope and love, while being ridiculed by those around them.  The apostle Paul spent plenty of time in jail and at points talked about despairing of life (2 Cor 1.8-11), and yet he found hope in his faith in Christ and the faithfulness and life of his fellow Christ followers and the new age to come.  

What I am wanting to learn and accept from this past Lenten season is that I may not get any new, vibrant dreams anytime soon; I will have to struggle for them against the backdrop of my own dysfunctions.  But in spite of this, Easter shows something very real.  Jesus was raised from the dead into a new kind of life, eternal and inseparable from God.  In our baptisms and in the Church, he is now with us and for us as we imperfectly follow him.  This is a sign that a new world and a better future is coming for people and the universe.  And until then, in my failings and whatever I do not know about myself and where my life is heading, I am not alone; God is with me even when I do not notice him.

I would also be lying if I said that faith felt like enough; it often does not.  But, while how I feel is not nothing for me, it is also not everything either (There is a life at the center of the universe making all of life and existence possible and it is not mine).  This is where a poem written in prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian that was executed by the Nazis, speaks calmly and best:

Who am I?  They often tell me
I step out from my cell
calm and cheerful and poised,
like a squire from his manor.

Who am I?  They often tell me
I speak with my guards
freely, friendly and clear,
as though I were the one in charge.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bear days of calamity
serenely, smiling and proud,
like one accustomed to victory.

Am I really what others say of me?
Or am I only what I know of myself?
Restless, yearning, sick, like a caged bird,
struggling for life breath, as if I were being strangled,
starving for colors, for flowers, for birdsong,
thirsting for kind words, human closeness
shaking with rage at power lust and pettiest insult,
tossed about, waiting fro great things to happen,
helplessly fearing for friends so far away,
too tired and empty to pray, to think, to work,
weary and ready to take my leave of it all?

Who am I?  This one or the other?
Am I this one today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once?  Before others a hypocrite
and in my own eye a pitiful, whimpering weakling?
Or is what remains in me like a defeated army,
Fleeing in disarray from victory already won?

Who am I?  They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am yours.

(Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers From Prison in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vol 8.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Pp. 459-460.)