Messy Doubts:
Second Thoughts about Staying On Top of Things
It was a frog. I didn't see it coming, but yes, indeed, my deepest theological convictions were thrown into doubt by a frog.
You see, I'm a big believer that we human beings are healed, held together and brought into new life by the love of others. So when I first stumbled upon the original version of the Frog Prince, my mind locked up.
The first shock to my system was that wonderful Walt Disney and dear Mother Goose lied to us! They changed the story. They told us that the loveable little frog was transformed by a kiss. But it turns out that the truth is not nearly so sweet.
The original story, like most of the fairy tales of which we are so fond, was collected by two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, both linguistic professors in Germany in the early 1800's. Their love of linguistics and pride in their German heritage led them to collect the oral folklore of their people, putting the tales in writing so they wouldn't become lost. Now I don't know what was up with the German people of the early 1800's but, man, their stories were dark. Parents die, siblings get boiled and baked, dragons win, and evil witches often get away. So in a sense, Uncle Walt and Mother Goose had no choice but to change things. The stories of the Brothers Grimm are not makings of sweet dreams, but the stuff that leads to nightmares. They are meant to make you think differently about existence, not reassure you that existence is comfortable or safe.
The Frog Prince is no exception. There is no single original version, but instead a basic plotline that is followed by all the oral traditions the Grimms collected. And at least one part fits the story we know; turns out that on that fateful night, the frog was indeed seeking a kiss. He knew it was his only means of escape. He had it all carefully planned. He was in control. After all, he had just rescued the Princess's ball from the well, so he had leverage. Just one kiss. That's all he asked. And she seemed as though she could be trusted. So he hopped up into her hand.
However, it immediately became clear that things were about to go terribly wrong. Not a smile, but a sneer, curved across her mouth. The pretty face that had previously looked so innocent was replaced by a furrowed brow and an apparent mean streak. Who says promises have to be kept?! It was suddenly clear to the frog that life did little to ensure fairness. The Princess raised her arm, but missed her lips entirely. Rather the frog found himself hoisted back beyond her shoulder, as she prepared for the perfect pitch.
She was going to toss him at the wall!
"Thank God for frog feet," was the first thing that ran through his head. Nothing about a frog's body had been pleasant or desirable up to this point. The warts, the slime, the diet of flies and bugs-all of it had been miserable. But the package also included suction cups on the bottom of his feet. And man, did they suddenly seem like the most beautiful gift one could be granted. He knew he had a shot of holding on tight. So he stretched out his long legs, tightened his tendons, and "sluuurp"--he suctioned himself to her hand as tightly as he could.
Her arm began its forward swing. The bare wall and impending end was in sight. It scared him to death. But if he were to be broken and destroyed, it would not be without a fight.
But then the twist. Suddenly, in the midst of the princess' hand flying forward, the story says the frog changed his mind. There's no explanation. You don't get the inside scoop about the frog's motivation or reasoning. All the story says is that the frog decided to let go.
He released his suction cups, stopped struggling and let himself be thrown against the wall.
SPLAT!!
Pieces of frog everywhere! They fell to the floor in the most unsightly mess. Broken and bloody, there he lay.
And then with only one line of the story left, we are told, simply, that the broken pieces of the frog were transformed into a prince.
So not by love, say the Brothers Grimm, but by hitting the wall. Not by the sweetness of a kiss, but by allowing ourselves to be broken. Not by holding on, but by letting go, This is how we are transformed, this is how we are able to go on living.
And we don't like it one bit!
There's a story that's been making its way around ministers' email boxes. It's about a guy who is rock climbing and slips. But at the last minute he is able to reach over and grab a limb growing out of the mountain. Hanging in mid-air with nothing but miles of air between him and the ground below, he looks up to the heavens and cries out, "God, if you are up there, please help me!"
Suddenly, the clouds part and a voice booms out from on high. "Let go! I will catch you, my son."
The guy pauses, looks down and then back up at heaven once again and says, "Is there anyone else up there?"
I wonder how many of us this morning can relate to this guy hanging from a limb? I know I can. I've read my Buddhism. I give all the knowing nods to the importance of letting go and trusting in the graciousness of life. But when troubles hit and the option of letting go is placed before me, I look elsewhere for another way.
And that other way is almost always the way of control. Like the frog engaging his suction cups as tightly as he can, it's in my own power and my own plan that I place my greatest trust.
Which means, contrary to what I said at the start of this sermon, the power of love is not really my deepest theological commitment, power is-faith in my own power to shape and stay on top of things.
Now I'm not saying I like this. I'm not trying to advocate or justify it this morning. I'm just trying to understand myself as honestly as I can. Indeed, I'm asking us all to try to understand ourselves as honestly as we can.
We've only got a couple weeks left in our exploration of the theme of doubt, and frankly I think we will do ourselves a great disservice if we take the easy way out and avoid talking about all the secret doubts we harbor about our most treasured beliefs.
We want to believe in the power of love.
We want to trust life.
We want to believe that if we let go and place ourselves into the hands of
others and into the hands of the universe that we will be taken care of.
But deep down we doubt. Oh man do we doubt.
And so while we never say it out loud, and while we do our best not to let on that we are doing it, the real religion that guides our daily living is the religion of us staying on top of things, of us being in control.
The brilliant feminist biblical scholar Elaine Pagels notes in her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that traditional interpretations of Adam and Eve's fall from Eden frame their act of eating the forbidden apple as an act of pure disobedience. But says Pagels, that's not the only way it's been interpreted and certainly isn't the only way one can interpret it. You can also see it as an act of asserting oneself, of giving in, not the temptation to evil, so much as the temptation to be in charge. Maybe that's the real warning of the story, she says: not to watch out for our evil nature, but to beware that sometimes we human beings are willing to give up almost everything - even peace and paradise - to maintain the feeling that we are in control and that it is our choices that matter most.
Think, Pagels says, about how people will beat themselves up with guilt over the death of a loved one that they had nothing to do with. It's not uncommon for us to tell ourselves that because we had wished ill upon someone, or failed to offer support or a perfectly timed kindness, that this is somehow to blame for the other person's demise. Think about this, Pagels says - really think about it: We would rather put ourselves through the hell of guilt and regret, we would rather believe that we are responsible for the death of someone, than admit that something happened that was beyond our control.
Rachel Naomi Remen is another brilliant women who's thought a lot about our relationship to holding on to control. She's a best selling author and nationally known doctor who works with patients rebuilding their lives after significant loss. Runners who lose their legs. Preachers and lawyers who lose their voices. Musicians who lose their hands. What sustains her in this work is her belief that every ending is accompanied by a new beginning. But as she explains, she did not always have this faith.
After losing a precious ring - a ring that stood as a symbol and reminder of who she was and all she had accomplished - she was struck by how calm she was. Instead of feeling her usual sense of devastation in the face of loss, she had a new and strange feeling of curiosity about what would come next to fill the empty space. It was a major epiphany that arose from a minor event. "I realized," she writes, "that I was thirty-five and had never trusted life before. It suddenly became clear to me that I had never allowed any empty spaces in my life. Like my family, I believed that empty spaces remain empty. Life had been about hanging on to what you had and medical training had only reinforced the avoidance of loss at all costs. Anything I had ever let go of - up to that point - had claw marks all over it."
"I believed that empty spaces remain empty."
That's it isn't it? "Empty spaces remaining empty"? That - it seems to me - is what scares us so. That's what is truly behind our claw-marked lives
It's why we panic about the loss of a job or a marriage.
It's why tight budgets and the loss of financial freedom make us feel like
we can't breath.
It's why cancer diagnosis, the loss of a limb or the loss of a child leaves
us convinced that life is over.
It's not just that we doubt healing; it's also - and even more - about this frightening, deep down, fundamental doubt that Life can't be trusted to fill in the gaps.
And so heck yes, we dig our claws in deep. Don't be foolish; You're darn right, we're going to hold on tight to what we got, and resist every attempt life makes to take it away. And all those messes? Again, heck yes, steering clear of those and walling ourselves off from them is exactly what we need to do.
But here's the question: Is a claw-marked, mess-free life really a life?
That, it seems to me, is the question - in the midst of all our fighting, struggling and striving - we so easily fail to ask. And yet, it is precisely the question that our friend the frog would say saved his life.
You see, even though it isn't explicitly spelled out in the story, I like to think that the reason that mythic frog decided to let go was not so much that he suddenly was 100% sure that life is to be trusted, but that it suddenly hit him that he wasn't living.
I like to believe that in the midst of his scrambling to hold on for dear life, he suddenly felt less free, and frankly more dead, than he had ever before.
Anais Nin, the brash and gutsy French writer, has this wonderful quote: "I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."
I hear this as another way of saying, "I postpone death by letting myself be splatted against the wall."
Like our friend the frog, I think Nin sees so much more clearly than we often do that resisting loss and brokenness does not protect our lives, as much as it reduces our life to a repetitive drama of worrying about and fighting off the pain.
Again, this is where that image of the frog franticly scrambling not to be thrown is so helpful. In the midst of the scrambling, everything else fades away. It becomes all about the struggle. In a very real sense the story stops.
And we know what this is like, don't we?
Tight finances and the worry about how we will pay for everything cut us off from noticing and participating fully in those moments when our five-year-old daughter comes into tell us a story.
During that winter when our job was in jeopardy, date nights with our spouse somehow ended - and it wasn't simply because we were being careful with the budget, we just didn't feel like it, or even think about it.
He hasn't dated since the divorce; he's still too angry and focused on getting people to see how in the wrong she was. She hasn't dated since the divorce; she still believes he will come back.
Three years into his battle with cancer and he still has yet to take himself to the movies. A night on the town is just not what sick people do; he'll get to it once he's beat this thing.
The list goes on.
And in none of these cases, as well as the many others we could name, should we minimize the pain and difficulty that comes with struggle and loss. Hard times full of unclear futures can't help but drain and distract us. But what we are talking about here today is not what our struggles inevitably take out of us, but what we - unknowingly but voluntarily - give away.
Alan Watts - one of the first philosophers to popularize Asian thought in America - wrote a classic book called The Wisdom of Insecurity. And in it he said this: "In every struggle, the conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is also between ourselves and ourselves." He goes on say, "We need to help each other see that sometimes our wanting to get out of the pain is the pain."
The Russian writer, Franz Kafka put it this way, "You can hold back from the suffering of the world...but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided."
Both of them remind me of a parishioner in my previous congregation. Her name was Sandy. Her father moved in with her after her mom - his wife - died. He was in his 70's, still in relatively good health. But he had also - tragically - been recently diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer's. The first few weeks were hard. Outbursts of anger were frequent.
I was visiting on a day when one of those outbursts occurred. Sandy and I were talking in the living room when her dad came down the stairs, angry. He said he couldn't sleep. Almost as if neither Sandy nor I was there, he circled the room agitated, saying that none of this was fair. None of it was the way it was supposed to be. Sandy shouldn't be burdened with him. He felt fine. There still had to be the chance the diagnosis was wrong. He wanted her to take him back to the doctors tomorrow. A different doctor this time.
The more he talked, the more elevated he became, pacing surroundings. It felt as if he could throw or hit something at any minute.
I watched as Sandy slowly stood, walked over, put her arms on his shoulders and gently guided him into his giant lazy-boy chair. Once he was seated, she knelt down, reached up and brushed his hair back out of his eyes, and said, "It's ok Dad, you can rest. I'm here; It'll be alright. You can rest."
He looked at her softly and cried. He didn't say anything. He simply cupped her hand in both of his, leaned over, gave her a kiss and nodded yes. He just kept nodding yes.
It seems to me that this is what the story of the Frog Prince is ultimately saying to us more so than anything else.
Not that life is hard but you can survive.
Not that every loss or mess is ultimately for the best, but that "It's ok, you can rest." You don't need to struggle so. Worry so. Hang on so tightly.
Simply Trust. There is life on the other side of letting go. It's messy and not without loss, but there's also more.
Rest, let life happen and you will find that "more."
May it be so for all of us. Amen
February 18, 2007