My F•••••• Darkness

WARNING: Contains socially offensive language

When all of faith leaves nothing said,

And every hope is left for dead,

The only light I beg to live

Is that which blackest night can give. Tanneron

I lived an idyllic boy’s life in a rural utopia in northwest Iowa. I never went hungry. I was never cold in the winter. The Christmas tree was never without an excessive display of gifts. My clothes were never too worn from wear. I never fretted about money, security, or the future. I never had an occasion to be afraid. In this world I was immune from worry and invincible to hardship. As I grew, I became cemented in my belief that tragedy, pain, and harm would never be a big part of my life.

That conviction crumbled at 4 p.m. on July 28, 2004. My son suffered a debilitating brain bleed leaving him profoundly disabled. Sixteen years later he still cannot walk or talk. While his optic nerves are fine he is essentially blind because his brain cannot process vision. He has no volitional movement. His inner life is unknown and unreachable. His cognition is unreadable.

I hate my fucking life! is what I told my pastor several months after the brain injury when he stopped with burgers and fries. I was fully enraged with everything in my life. I felt like my life was fatally wounded and I intended to let him know that fucking truth without regard to decorum. I offered to stand in front of the congregation and repeat that sentence in response to its interest in my wellbeing. He said he couldn’t think of better words to tell the truth. So, I told him more truth.

I told him every morning and night I said Fuck you, Jesus! It was my way of reminding God he had abandoned me. For nearly half a century I lived fully in the presumption that God would shield me and my family from harm. The Bible was bloated with verse after verse declaring God would watch over those he loved and swiftly come to help them. Of course, I was living proof that none of that religious feculence was true.

I told him my favorite part of the day was night because the flight that sleep provided was a getaway drug. If it weren’t night, then my preferred refuge was the deep darkness of the basement. There I could escape the searing pain and the crushing sorrow of losing my son. In darkness I could get as far away from God as was mentally possible.

My depression deepened rapidly month by month. In time my despair became so paralyzing that I would stare out the window for an entire day lost in thought and misery. I was barely functioning; gasping for air to stay alive but with little desire to live.

My faith imploded and the raging storm within me carried away the debris. There was nothing left of what had taken thirty-two years to build. I couldn’t recognize anything of God in my soul. I stopped reading the Bible. I stopped praying. I stopped believing the lie I had lived all my life - that God’s goodness would never leave me. I stopped pretending I knew anything at all about God.

Within a few years nothing remained of me except the shell and shadow of a dead man. In my despondency I had disconnected from the world – from my wife and children, from birthdays and holidays, from laughter, adventure, enjoyment, purpose, wonder, enthusiasm, and happiness. I would never feel joy again.

I would stop pretending I had God all figured out. I would stop promoting myself as one who had found an answer in the Bible for every question ever dared to be asked. I thought I knew what it meant to love God, to be a Christian, to live in a destiny blessed by heaven. The truth was I didn’t know much of anything.

Shut the fuck up! is what I wanted to say to every one of my Christian friends who thought the best thing I needed were trite spiritualisms. In Christ alone my hope is found. Let God’s promises shine on your problems. Never lose sight of your dreams. Let your faith be bigger than your fears. I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.

And the one I hated the most: God will never give you more than you can handle.

But I loved the one I made-up: Those fucking footprints in the sand could belong to Jesus.

I was raised by a father who rarely used profanity. He was no angel, but he was far from a trash mouth. He often reminded me that men who resorted to vulgarity were too stupid to find better words to express their feelings. As a young boy I didn’t want to appear to be stupid, so I steered clear of swearwords. In fact, as a dutiful Christian, I repressed any urge to express inflamed anger. Being enraged was something I couldn’t be.

That changed fast enough after Matt’s injury. I seized fuck like it was food and used it daily in vigorous, hyper-candid conversations with God. I really didn’t give a damn if he were bothered by it. He was aware I was full of disappointment and bleeding from betrayal. He knew I needed an explicit platform to tell him what it felt like to be dead. It was the best word I could find to express the deepest fury and discouragement and agony I’d ever known.

I wanted desperately to adulterate the Let go and Let God Kool-Aid I drank when I was a young evangelical and had no idea what the cross of Christ looked like. I knew the Apostle Paul suffered every imaginable hardship in his ministry, but for some reason that seemed the exception rather than the rule as I listened to television evangelists, faith healers, and other spiritual shysters like them. They convinced me I could calm every turbulent sea through my feeble faith alone.

Yet, it didn’t work out that way; not even close to what I had been told to expect when adversity ambushed me, leaving me to live a wretched life for which I had no preparation. I felt double-crossed and stupid. How could I have been deceived by this myopic view of the Christian life? I fell for the God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life sales pitch. No need to worry about anything as I wander through life looking for all that wonderful. God will protect you, David, and guide you to the rose garden of your dreams.

Anymore, I don’t believe in rose gardens I can’t see. I don’t believe God drags me into a raging sea so I can see the silver lining in every thunderbolt. I don’t believe Christianity is a lucky charm that guarantees good stuff and wards off bad stuff. I don’t believe God fucks with me only to teach me the truth of some fucking beatitude.

I was ashamed when I finally asked my doctor for an antidepressant. I’d gone so long without any help I couldn’t imagine how it could useful. I thought only really weak people got scripts for happy meds. Mood altering drugs, in my view, were reserved for the mentally disturbed, the schizophrenic and bipolar, for those who couldn’t manage much in their lives. I certainly didn’t consider myself untethered from reality. Yet, I also knew I couldn’t go on living defeated with thoughts of hopelessness my only companions. Now my best friends would be some pills.

Many years later things began to change for the better when I learned how to accept the inevitable and stop daydreaming about the impossible. Gradually, my anger began to abate, my depression began to ease, and God became a curiosity again. I stopped cursing at life and started to look for purpose. I stopped gasping for air. I searched for meaning in the midst of the morass. I still didn’t laugh much or chase after fun. Joy continued to be elusive, but at least I knew it existed even though it was beyond reach.

I still gag when the well-meaning pass along one of those nauseating Facebook posts that tries to remind the entire world that roses never stop blooming when God is part of your life. Though I’m inclined to say give me a fucking break when I see things like that, I restrain the urge because I know these same decent people, who have no conception of what this journey has done to me, nevertheless desire my highest good. I owe them the kindness and respect they deserve.

I pondered for a long time how best to convey the rage triggered by this trauma that in some ways continues to haunt me. I knew I could sanitize the content to make everyone more comfortable, but in the course of decontamination all the emotional intensity would evaporate. I’d be left with a sterilized testimony of pain and suffering suitable for a junior high Sunday School class but not at all reflective of the heartbreaking, gut-wrenching experience of losing my son. So, I refused to conform to customary evangelical testimonial writing standards and chose instead to break the rules, knowing that in doing so I would be either judged, misunderstood, or ignored.

I’ve come to believe that sometimes God shrouds himself in darkness so I can better understand that the faintest light of lights far ahead of me is truly the radiance of God Himself. On this journey of risk and dread through a darkness I cannot begin to describe and can barely understand and accept, I have an obligation to be honest and the right to tell the truth. My son’s injury came upon me like an aggressive assault, and in that same brutal spirit I have chosen to tell my story with dynamic words that convey a million gigawatts of feeling so that no one on earth could ever conclude that this crossing hasn’t been harrowing or that God surely has comforted me through every single day of sorrow.

I also guessed that lots of Christians who had suffered excruciatingly painful loss probably felt the same as I did, that they wanted to freely rage but were too timid to say fuck you! They needed a baseball bat and permission to violently pulverize any nonliving thing while shouting damn it God!

Instead, we the agonized are given some Kleenex, a pat on the shoulder, and someone’s favorite Bible verse that they like to read when they have a headache. Christians think these things are comforting when in fact they are condemning. The Kleenex says buck up, the pat says get up, and the verse says don’t fuck up. Yet, if we do weep, if we are immoveable from depression, and if we’re not walking in blind faith, then we’re told God is trying to teach us something about something and we’re just too stubborn to learn what it is.

This is my truth: Christians don’t give other Christians the space to be authentic. We can’t really be completely honest about our addictions, fears, doubts, and struggles. We can only share half-truths. If we spilled all the beans then we’d be known for who we really are and our Christian friends would make judgments about what they think those beans really mean. Those judgments might be half right and half wrong but they would all be painful. So, I choose to lie rather than be hurt. I choose to conceal rather than reveal. I choose to pretend rather than be vulnerable.

However, worse than making stupid judgments is choosing – wanting - to be uninterested! So few people in this world ever said David, how are you? and then were willing – wanting – to listen to me be authentic for as long as I had breath to give voice to the pain, especially if that meant saying I hate my fucking life! So many others just wanted to hear me say I’m doing OK so they could move on and check their phones. So few people were willing to listen in utter silence without any desire to respond. So many others wanted a chance to fix me or give me advice so they could feel good about the triumph of turning a lost soul back to Jesus.

God brought me to darkness so the two of us could be honest with one another. God heard every word of my daily diatribe and didn’t so much as wince or squirm. Eventually the accumulated arrogance from performing like a perfect Christian, all the while camouflaging an inner vault of sludge, and allowing others to believe my propaganda, poured out of my heart right in front of him. Strange how the corrosion of a person’s soul comes to light in the darkness of tormenting sadness.

I’ve come to believe that fuck is not some impermissible, inexcusable, linguistic debauchery, but rather a raw, unadorned expression of undefended honesty the spirit of which is woefully lacking in American Christendom. We’d all rather admit loudly that life couldn’t be better because indeed those footprints in the sand do belong to Jesus. Yet, the dominate culture sees right through the façade of faith and joy to the hands holding the weed, the liquor, the drugs, the antidepressants, and the Kleenex.

Years before, I was a fool for believing Christianity came with a bulletproof vest. Years later, I was a fool to curse God in my anger. I don’t live like a fool anymore. I understand life bends all roads, even those traveled by the naïve and arrogant like me. I’ve learned how to be honest with myself and with God.

And maybe I've learned that if I go with God then God will go with me.

Trite but true.