Screaming with God

What would happen if we dropped the pretense and let it rip?

This damnable world.

It hums and circulates on systems of evil.

Think about this – there is a thriving child sex trade pumping money into economies worldwide right now. People are buying things they want and need with money they’ve made from trading children’s bodies, minds and souls like vendors at a farmer’s market.

In this damnable world, at this very moment, thirty-thousand human lives have been blown away in Palestine. This, on the cusp of innocent Israeli women, children, and babies being kidnapped, held hostage, raped, and beheaded by terrorists. It creates a moral injury within me just to type those words to make my point, to even speak of these things.

And we can’t speak of these things together, you and I, without running the risk of alienation. We can’t come together to find a way out of this and other hells because we are demanding of one another complete agreement and conformity to choosing one “side” while wholly condemning the other. We lack the eyes to see that, when language fails, violence begins, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said. We’ve been infected with the madness of inner violence and don’t even know it.

Alternatives exist. We could be endlessly creative, compassionate, and collaborative. But no. We lack resolve, hope, and empathy. We squabble and wish evil upon one another instead.

The planet is warming, starving and terrorized human beings are migrating, wildlife is suffering, our technology is controlling us, and we are putting what little trust we still have in the wrong people and the wrong things time and again like a dog returning to its vomit.

We rage against a soul-crushing capitalism of greed and then hungrily flock to stores and apps and overflowing markets to spend resources on things to which we feel deeply entitled. We want to divest of capitalism…just not today, when there are so many shiny new things on the shelves.

A freak tornado killed a two-year-old in his sleep last night at a place where wild weather never usually happens. A young woman’s life is being destroyed before it even gets good and started because of a mental illness she inherited and cannot control.

What do we do with this damnable world? How do we live here?

Recently I did something new. I watched an anime series from beginning to end with my family. For whatever reason, I’ve always had an aversion to the genre of anime, most likely because I wrongly associated animation with silliness or childishness. One of my kids’ favorites is called “Attack on Titan,” and I’d heard buzz about it from other adults, so we started there.

As it turns out, Attack on Titan (AOT, as the kids call it) articulates something about being alive on this damnable planet that live-action shows are hard-pressed to do. It keeps a precise tension on questions of what it means to be human, of right and wrong, of how powerbrokers become the narrative-drivers in our human dramas, and of the usefulness (or not) of things like faith, hope, and love in the context of evil systems and cycles from which there is no escape.

The main character, Erin Yeager, often transforms into a type of monster known as a Titan. The Titans are some of the most powerful sources of imagery in the series, depicting malformed and repulsive human-like giants who dumbly live out one mission: consume humanity. One of the most intriguing questions throughout the series surrounds who are the real monsters – Titans or humans?

When Erin transforms, he lets loose an earth-shaking primal scream that is so powerful it wouldn’t be surprising if it stopped time itself. When I first watched him scream like this, I cried. It seemed to me he was screaming on behalf of all humanity – expressing our rage and despair in the face of relentless cruelties, injustices, impossibilities, and dead-ends. Though the scream is primal and powerful, it is also utterly vulnerable and honest.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the primal scream of humanity and how, as a minister, I can make room for this completely reasonable human response in the face of suffering. I’ve often thanked God for providing us the Psalms as not only permission-granting scripture to scream out to God from the depths of our pain, but as a blueprint for doing so. An example of this is found in Psalm 44, which I’ll share in Eugene Peterson’s Message translation because it captures the pain of the psalmist so well:

“Get up, GOD! Are you going to sleep all day? Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us? Why do you bury your face in the pillow? Why pretend things are just fine with us? And here we are – flat on our faces in the dirt, held down with a boot on our necks. Get up and come to our rescue. If you love us so much, Help us!”

Then, of course, there is Jesus, our example in all things. As he faced the ultimate cruelty and injustice, and even knowing that the pain was temporary and the outcome would be glorious, he still cried out to God,

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Matthew 27:46

Primal, powerful, vulnerable, and honest.

I mentioned the primal scream to a group of people recently and one of them said, “Well, have you tried actually screaming?” I grinned sheepishly and admitted that I hadn’t.

I mean, I couldn’t literally scream at the heavens, right? What about my dignity, my maturity, my education, my social roles and responsibilities? What about my theology?

Perhaps your soul is aching with pent-up rage because of what it means to live in this damnable world. I know mine often feels the same. Rather than taking to social media to vent our frustrations into the abyss of negativity, or paying a lot of money to go to a “Rage Room,” and smash some objects while someone profits off our confusion and anger, what if we offered ourselves space to do some old fashioned, fully embodied, primal and powerful lament?

Christians have a way of trying to skip over the darkness to get to the light in a hurry. I’m guilty as charged. My podcast tagline is “finding God’s gold in every story,” for heaven’s sake. Yet there’s important work that must be done as we fully come to terms with the depth and breadth of the darkness we find ourselves living within. The psalmist didn’t skip over it, and neither did Jesus. We must face God for who God is and, whether we like it or understand it or not, God is allowing this damnable world to hum and circulate with its inescapable cycles of evil.

How does it feel to sit with that statement? Is it uncomfortable to not include a “yes, but…”? Is it difficult to not defend God or come to God’s rescue? What if we allow ourselves to stand in the room with the God who often appears to be sleeping while we suffer and scream with the psalmist and with Jesus:

Why, dear God, have you forsaken us? If you love us, help us!

What might we see in the face of a God who welcomes our screams? What might we feel in the arms of a God who holds our suffering bodies and listens to our agonized groans? What would happen to our carefully curated theologies if we allowed our stopped-up ears to hear the God who screams with us?

What might happen within us if we allowed the kind of intimacy with our Creator that doesn’t require stoic responses in the face of absurd evil, or twisted theology that calls right things wrong and wrong things right?

What if it turns out that, sometimes, the most reasonable, God-ordained thing to do is throw off all constraints and let rip a primal, powerful, vulnerable, honest and – most of all – holy scream?