First
Presbyterian Church of
2Samuel 18 and Mark 7
“My Bread Crumb Sins”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
Something happens to you when you
work in a psychiatric hospital. It
leaves a mark as it were. One thing that really took with me, changed me, was how aware and
thankful I am of my mental capacities.
As odd and quirky as some of my thoughts may be, I got to tell you, they
are really, really straightforward when compared to a schizophrenic delusion
full of paranoia. I never left the psych
hospital without thanking God for clarity of thought and the gift of mental
health. On each drive home from the
hospital I looked up in the sky as I drove and said, "Thank you Jesus."
Another mark left upon me was an
awareness of my feelings. Like most men,
going in I thought emotions were undeveloped thoughts. Yet, two years and many group discussions
later I did discover that I indeed had emotions and they were to be
valued. My wife would explain to me
later it was difficult for the leaders to understand my limited emotional
range. Given the level of caffeine that
sustained me during seminary, my emotional range tended to stay between happy
and kind of happy. Of
those two feelings though I am now very much aware.
Yet the greatest mark or impression,
something that is almost a kind of limp, is that I lost hope. Truly, I forgot what it means to hope; I
stopped believing things would get better.
Now don’t take this to mean that I stopped believing in God or lost
faith or became a kind of pessimist. No. I always believed. In fact my faith in God was probably the
strongest in the midst of the psych hospital, at least the clearest. I believed deeply and fiercely that God loves
and loves so much that he enters the brokenness and the darkness and the
wretched world which were the lives of so many there. I believed; I just didn’t hope anymore.
Simone Weil talks about a thirst
where you are so thirsty you forget what water is. I can remember reading that and saying to
myself, I know what that tastes like or feels
like. It’s when you just don’t hope
anymore. Again, I saw amazing moments of
grace and kindness and truth.
Schizophrenia for all its ravages does something quite profound: it
renders the soul transparent. The folks
there couldn’t be coy or obtuse. So they
just spoke the truth. Given the layers
of sophistry and useless posturing that is part of graduate study; the psych
hospital was like taking a bath. Yet, in
the midst of this blessing, I forgot hope.
Recognizing this came on
slowly. But one moment I can remember is
sitting with a patient and listening to him ramble. I had met with him for more than a year so his
delusional symbols and stories were very familiar. Part of our weekly conversation was a
game. He would try to pepper his
comments with references to books and poems and I was supposed to raise my
eyebrows when I caught them. Yet, once,
when he was deep into his story and his struggle to face his parent’s
rejection, how they just didn’t want a son with a disease, especially a mental
one, he said, “but these are just my bread crumb sins.”
These
are just my bread crumb sins. He was
so caught up he didn’t notice that I got the Bob Dylan quote. “My bread crumb sins” is a line from a song
called The Gates of Eden. As he went on
and didn’t look up I realized what he said was not meant for me. It was,
instead, a kind of fist-clenched prayer. He desperately wanted his parents to
see the foibles and flaws that mark each one us; he wanted them to see his shortcomings
instead of seeing him as a disease as some sort of moment of shame. He wanted them to see him as someone who
could be better. He wanted to be
something to be hoped for.
In the midst of this it dawned on me
that, while I was very much in tuned with this patient’s foibles and flaws, I too
had begun to look at his life from the vantage of disease and thus just let go
of hope.
Our readings today are two very
jarring views of people who seem to never stop hoping for their children. David never gives up on Absalom and the
mother confronting Jesus in
In our first story it would be easy
to cast stones at David for his indulgence.
His son Absalom caused a civil war, tried to kill his father, slept with
his stepmothers, and otherwise wreaked havoc by trying to depose David. Yet, when Joab the general heads into battle
to fight Absalom’s rebel forces, David’s only direction is don’t harm the
boy.
It’s hard to imagine what any of us
would do in David’s shoes. At first
blush we could say, I wouldn’t be as forgiving, or as
lenient. Yet, this was his son and when
faced with the option David chose hope.
Don’t harm the boy. And while we
can’t say what we would do in David’s shoes, we can say what we would hope for
in a father. Was David wrong to lament
and weep for Absalom? His general, Joab,
told him it was. But what would you want
to hear if you were Absalom?
At first glance the Syrophoenician
woman is less of a struggle. Yet, at
second glance, hers becomes the greater challenge. For this was a woman who
kept her daughter and it was absolutely at the cost of others. This was a time with no hospitals, psych
wards, or caregivers. This was a time
when the demon possessed were cast aside and left to die. That the Syrophoenician woman not only
tracked down Jesus and was ready with barbs, ready with words that belie a
depth of experience that she backed down the prophet in a public place is a
kind of tenaciousness forged in fire.
She’d been here before.
I don’t want to make the
Syrophoenician woman into a kind of heroine, just as making David a hero is a
terrible interpretation of 2 Samuel.
More than heroes though I believe they were both people who had found
the emptiness of losing hope and they didn’t want that anymore; they knew hope
was not something to be lost.
While we can’t go back in the Syrophoenician’s life, we can with David. We know he was hunted and lived as an outlaw
by a father-in-law gone mad; we know he saw his own life fall apart with
Bathsheba; and, with Absalom, we know he saw the shame of one his sons rape his
daughter Dinah only to have Absalom kill the brother. It would be too easy to look at David’s words
to Joab, don’t hurt the boy, and be caustic or to view his weeping as being
soft or indulgent. Yet, when you look
over the course of his life, what percolates to the top is no longer being
willing to live without hope.
I believe something happened like
this to the Syrophoenician woman. It
wouldn’t be out of line to think that she was disowned for keeping the
possessed child; it would have been culturally acceptable to shun her as well
as her daughter. Something in me
believes that this woman who has given her life for her child. I’ve seen this. Where parents follow behind a schizophrenic
child trying to keep them safe, keep them out of trouble, keep them in arm’s
length. To do so they give up all they
have, any trace of a normal life.
Rather than her being heroic, the
chances are good that she wrestled with losing hope; she probably spent
sometime without it. In our reading,
though, she is a woman who will not be rendered powerless by a rebuke; she will
stand before any as someone who loves her child, and she will now hope to the
end.
This last April when we were
traveling to the south of
We were in
I’ve got to tell you, if ever there
was a place to make a psych hospital look manageable, doable, it’s
Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is the thing
with feathers that perches in the soul” and "Hope doesn’t cost anything at
all." I don’t know about the
feathers part, but the cost is true. And
so is its opposite. Having no hope,
giving up on hope, that is costly.
I don’t know what I would choose if
I were David. Loving a kid who blows it
big again and again and again can wear just about anyone down. But I know what I would hope if I were
Absalom; I know how I want God to look at me.
I don’t know for sure if the Syrophoenician
woman ever lost hope before she became so tenacious. I do know, though, I never want to live
without again. I know I want to hope no
matter what.
Driving along in the car heading to
southern
I am still not sure what all that
means other than hope, just as I am not
sure if Jesus knew what he was unlocking when he said, “yes,” to this pushy
woman. In the end it was hope and hope
alone.
We can lose hope for ourselves, for
the people we love. We can become
resigned, or terribly, terribly realistic.
The patient in the psyche hospital didn’t want to be healed as such;
that was not his hope. He just wanted to
have someone hope for him. What if we
lose hope when we come to believe we cannot fix everything, or put everything
back the way it was? Yet, what if this
is not the hope people are looking for?
It is important to remember that the mother had no concern for the
“people” Jesus spoke of; it was her daughter, and her alone, that was her care.
Listen to those you love and those
who frustrate you. Listen for what they
hope. Listen to your spouse or your
friend, not to fix them, but to hope for them.
Remember when you meet the people like Absalom, what it means to be
hoped for until the end. And if you hear
a very pushy voice challenging you to hope, hold on. For even Jesus was swayed to hope. Amen.