“To enter a broken heart means that our hearts will be
broken as well.” - Paul Miller
It was close to a year ago that I sat at my computer writing
a reflection on the suicide of a fellow pastor named Stephen Hightower. Today,
I find myself compelled to memorialize the life of Mickey Sheally. Mickey was
one of Stephen’s mentors who took his own life while sitting in the parking lot
of his church at the close of last month. My denomination specifically, and the
Church at large, has lost two pastors in the span of a single year by way of
the evil torment of depression, human suffering and desperation. It should cause us all to stop and pause.
I first heard the news of Mickey’s death by way of a phone
call that came late in the evening. As I stood stunned in my frigid driveway,
the question that clogged my mind more than any other was not merely the
obvious question of why? But more specifically,
why the finality? Why was an answer that was so utterly
terminal, permanent and unalterable the only one he could seem to find?
If we can withhold the temptation for a moment to suggest an
over-spiritualized chastisement that pastors should find their escape in ”just
turning to Jesus,” could we not, at least, wonder why some pastors can’t seem
to find even temporary relief in a drink, in a movie, or sex with their wife? I ask this
honestly as a man who has been open about his inability to fully grasp the
depth of darkness that the suicidal endure and with the realistic expectation that the endless night which some
pastors face can’t be shaken by a couple beers or a decent flick.
In fact, could it be that perhaps
attempting to escape the pain at all is actually part of the problem?
I have been slowly working my way through the book A Loving Life by Paul Miller in which he
traces the gospel through the book of Ruth. In it he writes, “The church has
not been particularly good at hearing laments from its broken people…We’ve not
been taught that to love someone means we enter their suffering.” Dr.
Soong-Chan Rah agrees, noting that few churches include lament in their weekly
liturgy.
How
we worship reveals what we prioritize. The American church avoids lament.
Consequently the underlying narrative of suffering that requires lament is lost
in lieu of a triumphalistic, victorious narrative. We forget the necessity of
lament over suffering and pain. Absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder.
Absence makes the heart forget. The absence of lament in the liturgy of the American
church results in the loss of memory.
Could the great irony of pastoral life be that in an attempt
to meet the perceived needs of communities bent on experiencing “their best
life now” many pastors have created emotional prisons for themselves where even
they are not free to cry? In such an environment, the sermons preached and the songs
sung each week become a constant ringing in the ear of leaders who are
confronted in potent ways that they are living anything but the life abundant.
Who does a pastor tell when the gospel is not sounding so good anymore?
Might our recent
experiences with these pastoral deaths point us back to practices like
confession, lament and songs that can give voice to death as well as life, to
despair as much as hope. Might we create churches in which people gather together
as much to cry as to laugh; churches where we remind each other that sinfulness
is a prerequisite for salvation, and sacred spaces where people are not
projects but brothers and sisters; homes where prodigals and orphans find a family
and communities when, on any given Sunday, the pastor might find themselves at
the center of a group of outstretched hands praying for their sobbing hearts. Temples of lament where our tears serve as constant reminders that while we wait together for the new world, the one we live in now is only bearable when we are not asked to face it alone.
