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John 12.20-36

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.

“Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.” After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

I am a clinical psychologist. In the work I do professionally and that I strive to do personally, I rely upon a dialectic: as humans, we need to feel accepted; and we also need to change. Relatedly, we need to accept the present moment as is, and at the same time, make it better.

I have a client who has recently fallen in love. After many experiences of hurt and pain, in past relationships and broadly by way of living in a world that has made it hard for him to feel accepted, he met someone who inspires him and who makes him feel seen and valued. And he is happy. A couple of weeks ago, he and I spent our session trying to make sense of why he left this man’s house after having spent what he described as a beautiful weekend with him, and found himself sobbing in his car, unable to turn the engine on for overwhelming fear that the love he found won’t last.

And just before re-reading this verse for the second time, I had a session with another client that was centered on a series of panic attacks she has been having, triggered by anticipation of her first vaccination shot this weekend. This, after a year of unemployment and loneliness, triggered, really, by the hope of soon seeing her mother in person. Among the clients I have worked with, I have talked about and tried to remediate many such panic attacks. And also, intense episodes of anger that follow along such rigid lines of thinking, foci so singularly sharp, I don’t want to go near the edges. Or, feelings of sadness so heavy, they become like guttural cannon balls pinning my clients to their beds. Or I might confront smothering urges toward compulsions that when performed, provide so many of my clients a small moment of breathing room, before smothering them again.

A counterbalance to this tendency to become consumed, attached and hijacked by emotion, there is another tendency altogether that I often work on with my clients: the knee-jerk reflex of avoidance. I see so many of them respond to the discomfort of pain as if trying to use their whole bodies to block it out, push it away, try to make it unreal. Against the possibility of rejection, the memories of loss, feelings of insecurity, and even against the pain of compassion for others, I see people use whatever they’ve got to do this – mental strategizing, drugs and alcohol, physical hiding, blame. And at worst, the planning of life escape routes.

I initially found this verse so complicated. It seemed there were many details to the story, and it was hard to make meaning of them all. And I also felt a resistance; I had to push myself to read it again, working against a kind of forcefield blocking me from the words. Like my clients, I am attached. I am attached to so much in this life: my kids, my work, my marriage, my health, my sense of security, how I am regarded by others. I think I had a difficult time with this for the same reasons that my clients fear happiness itself, for the sake that it’s transient; I, too, panic at the thought of loss, numb myself in the face of stress, throwing up shields of excuses and denial and minimization at the first breath of pain. It seems to me that we are all so acutely aware in the recesses of our emotions, in the places we don’t want to go, that in fact, all is uncertain - has always been uncertain and will always be uncertain. We don’t want to feel the deep, almost white-hot pain that comes with acknowledging the truth - that what we have, what we love most and what we’ve worked for, what we think keeps us safe and gives us worth - we may have to surrender. What we cling to and clench our fists around, bank on and put our hearts in this life - are things that are always vulnerable to the risk of shifting, breaking, and in some cases, falling out altogether. And this hurts. It hurts in a way so visceral and frightening that we as humans do everything we can to avoid this truth. In ways sophisticated, nuanced, effective and entrenched, we avoid the pain of uncertainty. In the best of cases, we cry into our steering wheels, mourning the loss of control we otherwise like to think we have. Or we may go breathless, hearts pounding, limbs tingling. Or become mired in thoughts about how the world and others and ourselves “should” be. Or we may perform compulsions, ruminate, check, and seek reassurance where we can find it. We avoid until the lives outside of the walls we erect become unbearable to face, even as the walls start breaking. We cling and we hide. We cling and we hide.

And these efforts to control – where do they take us? Besides to the offices (or Zoom rooms) of well-meaning therapists, these efforts take us much deeper into places Jesus labels here as the darkness. Less so than bringing us somewhere, even more frightening, they take us away from where we need to be, away from what we value, away from where God might otherwise meet us. In an effort to wrap ourselves around pleasure, safety, competency, regard, anything that feels good – in an effort to restrain these things and aggressively keep them in place, we lose them. We lose our experience of them. And in an effort to shield ourselves from pain, discomfort, insecurity, fear, anything that feels bad - in an effort to hide our minds and hearts from being touched by them – we are overcome by them. We suffer. Those who love their lives will lose them and those who hate their lives in this world will live them eternally. What I finally hear in this verse is Jesus offering a different prescription: to accept it all and stay with him.

Jesus calls on us in this verse to do differently; he himself is modelling how to do differently. He is pushing us to acceptance: to opening up the knuckles we have clenched around what we value, and letting go; and at the same time, willing our hands to embrace pain and difficulty, and opening up. For it is with him, as his servants, where we may finally find the long-sought peace we all otherwise frenetically search for, as we attach to and avoid the shape-shifting illusions of what we think roots us in this world.

Having pushed through the forcefield and considered what I myself have to let go of and open up to, I find this verse especially moving right now, just before Good Friday, one year after the pandemic started and swept up with it the most glaring manifestations of human injustice and fault, certainly that I have witnessed in my own lifetime. There is so much we have all lost this year, so much that we all used to innocently rely upon. And there is so much we learned to face, so much we have to take in and accept. So much about the pained experience of our fellow humans, our fellow servants of Christ, and so much that has happened on heels of our own attachment to safety and pleasure and comfort, that we can no longer protect ourselves from. And though it hurts, it has to be. What we have lost, at best, has to make us finally more keen to see.

Jesus says that his soul is troubled. And yet he does not ask his Father to intervene. He does not ask for change. He does not try to control. He is troubled, and he accepts. This kind of acceptance takes great faith - faith in meaning, faith in purpose, faith in good, faith even in, perhaps especially in, pain. Jesus says, “it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” And we have come to our own hour for good reason, too. Jesus faces his death with acceptance of the fallen world that he is leaving, and with intent to use his death to fundamentally change it. It is my hope that the faith required of acceptance, should we practice it, is exactly what glorifies God’s name and that what comes of it is the freedom to live fully and to follow Christ’s leadership in fully embracing our need as humans to change. And so, this Easter season, I use this verse to further my own commitment to living vulnerably, honestly and with openness, faith in God as the tethers upon which I will try harder to rely. And all so that I can finally be free to see how I can do better.

John 9.1-7

As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. “When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

As a child, I believed for a long time that if I cursed, I would be struck down by lightning. It didn’t matter that none of the people on TV nor my father when he was fixing something around the house, were themselves ever struck down when they cursed. I believed still that I would be. Even if I just whispered them. And on the other hand, when I “grew up,” after I had finished graduate school, six years of New York City living in which I lived on friendly terms with roaches and searched my couch cushions for coins to do laundry, while on my first vacation with my now husband, my first job as a newly minted psychologist secured, I had my first panic attack, right as we walked into the hotel. Looking past an open-air bar of our hotel, to a sparkling ocean view, I told him, the sound of my heart in my ears and my vision blurring, “I don’t deserve this. I can’t possibly deserve this.”

Thus, my dark times. Interestingly, they came at those times when my life stretched into what I most wanted: first, shortly after I was married, and then again, shortly after the birth of my children. Times I felt so lucky, so acutely aware of my own fortune, that I could only feel afraid. In the earliest days with my first son, watching his face while I nursed him in the middle of one those nights, I remember knowing that the love I felt was devastating. I became consumed with the possibility of loss and of failure, living in an assumed dichotomy of darkness and light, where I was just waiting anxiously to be plunged into the darkness, for all of the ways I couldn’t let myself feel like I deserved to stay in the light.

And yet. Darkness is not punishment any more than light is reward. The man is not blind because of sin. Moreover, Jesus says in this passage that it is not light that makes us see; in fact, it is the man’s blindness – it is the darkness that makes him see. Darkness, in fact, like so many of us felt in so many ways this past year – is not a punishment, nor a justified response to our sins. It is, in fact, a gift; as allowed by Jesus, darkness allows for light, and is a foundation of far greater understanding.

Partly though my work as a therapist and mostly through better intuiting God’s message, I have finally come to understand that light and darkness are not dichotomies, but part of a dialectic, that they are one and the same and not to be feared, but to be embraced as a whole, two sides of the same coin. Loss implies having had something worth grieving, affliction implies having had something previously unbroken, and most importantly, perhaps, empathy and compassion imply the duty to act on part of humanity.

At the start of the pandemic, an uncle of mine lent my husband and children and I his beach house down on the Jersey shore. In the confusion and fear that marked those days, I sought solace and some sense of certainty each morning in the sunrise. I would try to run before the kids woke up and before our working hours started. And just at the end of my run back then in March, the sun would be rising behind the sea wall that lined the beach town. I would climb a set of public stairs along the seawall just as the sky started to illuminate and behold the sunrise as a kind of prayer. I wanted then to take in a message; I wanted to be told or taught or reassured of something. The sky, of course, would transform over the ocean, color extending out from the horizon, red and then brighter oranges and gold, sending glitter across the water. Light. Light assuming the earth. Every morning, with certainty. In a world and in a life where certainty is otherwise an illusion –there was this. After looking at the sunrise, I would climb the stairs down to the sidewalk to run back home; once, there was a line of three people waiting at the bottom to do the same thing; masked, they stepped aside to let me pass.

Home with my children, divorced suddenly of a frenetic and rigidly packed schedule, I was able to eat dinner with my children every night for the first time. And we had more time together – time to play charades and hide ‘n seek, walk on the beach and found sand dollars. I could feel fear of the virus quickly shedding through layers of my life as I lived it, bringing me closer to the heart of the matter.

My therapy clients, as they all showed up for me now on my computer screen, were not so lucky. In those early days at a makeshift desk, my laptop sitting on top of a puzzle box, my mind had to stretch to take in what started coming at me from the screen: jobs lost; weddings cancelled; routines shattered and emotions haywire; the effects of isolation taking hold. Clients with the virus, too sick to have sessions. Clients with the virus, panicked and alone. Clients losing loved ones, their mourning overwhelmed by all else. And clients still, of course, suffering the same pains they maybe would have, had so much of the world outside of their emotions not been shuttered, pains that were now contextualized in lives where so much else was stripped away. Divorce still happened, cancer still got diagnosed, pregnancies were lost, and abuse continued to be delivered; no tragedy nor trauma outside of the pandemic stepped aside nor paused to make way for it. Life continued to herald on, replete with rejection and heartache and stress. But now, in darkness – in a violent torrent of uncertainty.

Just after George Floyd was killed, a client being treated within my practice died by suicide. At that point, anyone paying attention could feel a cry from what the heart of humanity should be, the virus having cast a reflection on the pains suffered by so much of our human community, a reflection that seared, as when a mirror is held to the sun. The images I saw on the news, of guttural protests, fists in the air, cries too strong to be muffled by masks - I could sometimes hear in the background of my sessions, police lights flashing through clients’ windows.

I soon recognized that all of the clients who were suffering, and so much of our shared humanity who have suffered, seemed to be suffer with a different form of the same ailment: an almost raw kind of fundamental pain - not always an actual lack of felt love and support, but as raw as that sometimes; more often, it felt like a combination of reality and perception verging on the absence, an abyss, without reliable interpersonal connection and human concern to depend upon, or when the pain was a problem of learned expectations, where care was perhaps not expected, uncomfortable to receive, easy to minimize and not see nor feel, where care was not believed to be deserved, or sought in the wrong places, or repeatedly denied. The problem that kept emerging was what it feels like to be left to wonder, if by reality or by distorted ways of thinking, and most often by both -- if and how much anyone cares, if and how much behind the broken pieces, one is loved. And that kind of doubt seems to me, to be a darkness that frightens people most of all.

Jesus said that we must work the works while it is day. And with that, he heals the blind man. It is not only that darkness gives us understanding – it is also that we have to use that understanding in the light of day. We have work to do, a lot of work to do, for the sake of humanity and not of ourselves – especially in the light, when we might otherwise choose instead our own comfort, safety, conveniences or principles. The pandemic has taught us that we can no longer let one another get sick, go lonely, be ignored, marginalized or exploited.

I learned from my clients and from large shares of the world whose hearts were even more broken, that where none deserved the darkness and where all could be cast in light, the light is us. Our doing. Our capacity to save one another. We can check in with each other. We can donate. We can teach. We can write. We can protest. We can vote. And if we can’t physically embrace one another, we can understand that six feet of distance as having the same intention. Our work has revealed itself so much more honestly and clearly: it is to make choices based on love for other human beings, and the desire and responsibility to care, however we each know how to, and with whatever we each have to negotiate. More than a reckoning, this year has been a slow and at times, painful, dawning. But a dawning that feels beautiful and emerging with light like some of us have never seen, in which we can feel Jesus moving through humanity, begging us to see, and to see that through humanity we have the power to heal.