I'm fine...

I’ve been working my way through the series Flashpoint. In my opinion, Canadian television is far more well-written and well-acted and better balanced between good and evil than American television.  So much of American film and television, these days, is filled with brilliant psychopathic bad guys doing great and sick and twisted evil, who always win, who defeat the good guys over and over and over again.  People never wear the same clothes twice.  Hair is never out of place even when tussling with a bad guy.  And sex is thrown in for good measure but for no purpose or reflective of reality all too often.

Anyway, what fascinates me about Flashpoint is that there is genuine compassion for the bad guys, who are often people who find themselves in difficult situations and make the wrong choices. The calling of the Strategic Response Unit (SRU) of the police is to keep the peace.  They do so by following the code of: Connect, Respect, and Protect. It is not that they don’t use snipers when necessary or “neutralize” the subject to protect others, but they do not judge. They uphold the law even when it is nearly impossible for them to do so. You see a lot of really broken people on the show, and the SRU guys hold out hope and compassion for them ... hope and compassion and this belief that even someone who’s murdered can, in or after prison, still start over, still make better choices, change the pattern of his/her life.  That it is never too late for a person.  That all life matters. That finding peace again is possible.

Plus, each episode ends with songs reflective lyrics that leave you contemplating the complexity and the richness of the show's plot.  In many ways, it is akin to greatness that is the series In Plain Sight.

In one of the last episodes, one of the SRU snipers on the team has been slowly falling apart because he had to shoot this beautiful, intelligent 18-year-old girl who had helped her mother finally break away from her abusive husband (the girl’s father). The mother moved and changed her name, but the father kept finding her.  Restraining orders and protective orders did not help.  He ignored them and kept tormenting the mother and daughter.  

In the episode, the father found them again and had taken the mother hostage, wanting to know why she had turned the daughter against him, unable to admit it was his abuse that had done so. The daughter ends up being near him with the SRU team as a third-party negotiator.  They sometimes use family/friends to make the connection needed to defuse and resolve standoffs because defusing and resolution is the first choice of outcome whenever possible, i.e, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later is not the standard operating procedure. 

Well, the daughter’s boyfriend had gotten her a gun as one of the ways he tried to help her feel safe.  When she saw that her father was just not going to change, that his coming after them was never going to stop, the daughter pulled out the gun, ran around the SRU officer who had been protecting her toward her father and started shooting. She was running and shaking and holding the gun with just one hand, so the first two shots missed. Everyone on the SRU team was screaming at her to stop, caught off guard by her sudden movement, and trying to catch her. But when the daughter raised her other hand to steady the gun for a better shot, most likely a kill shot, the sniper had to shoot her. The law is that they couldn’t let her murder her father, no matter how much they all would have liked to do so.  And another one of the operating protocols the team follows is that in such situations, a kill shot is taken because the risk of a shot-to-injure not ending the harm being committed is too great to take.

The SRU sniper was having flashbacks and was getting worse and worse.  Keeping his fragility from his teammates and avoiding his family—not speaking to his wife and children and sleeping in the basement—was becoming too much for him.  He had asked his best friend on the team for help and had been seeing a counselor for two months, but the episode starts with his showing up at her office at the end of the day to return the books she had given him and to announce that he was done with therapy. She gets him to stay and tell him about his day. 

There was another difficult call. This mentally disturbed man had taken a neighbor’s baby, thinking it was his daughter whom he needed to protect. They tried and tried to get through to him, but the man finally came to the realization that he was always going to be sick.  The man realized that he had this patter where he recognized he was in trouble, would take his meds, but not like how his meds made him feel and go off of them thinking he could handle the mental illness, only to find himself in trouble again.  He was holding a gun at the baby when the team saw (and recognized the meaning of) that moment.  The calm, quiet moment when the decision is made, the decision to give up and die.  In this instance, the team had to kill him to save the baby.  No one wanted to kill him.  They all ached for him, for the story of his struggles they heard from his ex-wife and their daughter, who was older than a baby, but still in need of a father who could protect her.  However, the priority of life protocol and the law are clear:  protect the innocent from the suspect; stop harm from happening.  Well, this time, the sniper couldn’t take the shot … couldn't take it again.  Couldn’t handle the agony and the complexity of the situation.  He was done with his job and done with his life and done with therapy.

The whole episode is told in flashback as he is talking with the counselor, who recognized that he hadn't actually come to quit therapy but come because he needed to speak that which he had not spoken in all his other visits. At the end, what she gets him to speak and to hear and to take in is that it’s okay (THOSE MAGICAL WORDS) for him to be both certain in the need for and to believe in the black and white nature of his job, but for his feelings about his job to not be black and white. In other words, it is okay for him to both know that stopping the daughter from killing her abusive father was the right course of action, but to be broken and distraught over having done so.

Crazy good show.

And a reminder that forgetting can be good ... after a fashion.

For me, although the third time through the series, each episode was new.

In the show, there are some long, deep friendships.  One of the best is between the sniper (who is the team leader) and the sergeant, who is the boss.  [Is that an interesting dynamic that the one who is the decision maker for strategy and tactic—although they all brainstorm and work together—is not the one who is the guide and shepherd for them all?]  Ed is the sniper.  Greg is the boss.  There is this one beautiful laconic moment between the two of them.

Greg [after a shooting]:  How are you?

Ed:  I'm fine.

Greg: You may want to do the math one day on all the I'm fines.

Greg had his own brokenness from the job, the toll of seeing people on the very worst day of their lives over and over and over again.  The toll of worrying about and caring for all the members on their team.  The grief over the members killed in the line of duty.  His own doubts about his ability to lead that nearly crippled him.  I could go on and on.  But the point is that very simple statement was a way of letting Ed know that he knew that Ed was not fine.

Seriously, when is "I'm fine." ever a true statement?  Usually, the truth is that those words are used to cover up the very opposite.  God knows this.  He does.  He knows that we are so very often not fine and so included many, many, many prayers in the Psalter to give us the words to speak about just how not fine we are.

Bonhoeffer again:

"Where do you find more miserable, more wretched, more depressing words than in the Psalms of lamentation?  There you see into the heart of all the saints as into death, even as into hell.  How sad and dark it is there in every wretched conner of the wrath of God" (Luther).

The Psalter give us ample instruction in how to come before God in a proper way, bearing the frequent suffering which this world brings upon us.  Serious illness and severe loneliness before God and men, threat, persecution, imprisonment and whatever conceivable peril there is on earth are known by the Psalms (13, 31, 35, 41, 44, 54, 56, 61, 74, 79, 86, 88, 102, 105, and others).  They do not deny it or try to deceive us about it with pious words.  They allow it to stand as a severe attack on the faith.  Occasionally they no longer focus on suffering (Psalm 88), but they all complain to God.  No individual can repeat the lamentations Psalms out of his own experience; it is the distress of the entire Christian community at all times, as only Jesus Christ has experienced it entirely alone, which is here unfolded.  Because it happens with God's will, indeed because God knows it completely and knows it better than we ourselves, only God himself can help.  But therefore also must all our questions again and again assault God himself.

There is in the Psalms no quick and easy resignation to suffering.  There is always struggle, anxiety, doubt.  God's righteousness which allows the pious to be met by misfortune but the godless to escape free, even God's good and gracious will, is undermined (Psalm 44:24).  His behavior is too difficult to grasp.  But even in the deepest hopelessness God alone remains the one addressed.  Neither is help expected from men, nor does the distressed one in self-pity lose sight of the origin and the goal of all distress, namely God.  He sets out to do battle against God for God.  The wrathful God is confronted countless times with his promise, his previous blessings, the honor of his name among men.

If I am guilty, why does God not forgive me?  If I am not guilty, why does he not bring my misery to an end and thus demonstrate my innocent to my enemies? (Psalms 38, 44, 79).  There are no theoretical answers in the Psalms to all those questions, as there are none in the New Testament.  The only real answer is Jeus Christ.  But this answer is already sought in the Paslms.  It is common to all of them that they cast every difficulty and agony on God:  "We can no longer bear it.  Take it from us and bear it yourself.  You alone can handle suffering."  That is the goal of all of the lamentation Psalms.  They pray concerning the one who took upon himself our diseases and bore our infirmities, Jesus Christ.  They proclaim Jesus Christ to be the only help in suffering, for in him God is with us.

The lamentation Psalms have to do with that complete fellowship with God which is justification and love.  But not only is Jesus Christ the goal of our prayer; he himself also accompanies us in our prayer.  He, who has suffered every want and had bought it before God, has prayed for our sake in God's name:  "Not my will, but thine be done."  For our sake he cried on the cross:  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"  Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ will not be with us, suffering with us and praying with us—Christ the only helper.

On this basis the great Psalms of trust develop.  Trust in God without Christ is empty and without certainty; it is only another form of self-trust.  But whoever knows that God has entered into our suffering in Jesus Christ himself may say with great confidence: "Thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me" (Psalms 23, 37, 63, 73, 91, 121). ~Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible, 46-49

The Psalter tells us that we are not fine.

Not in the least.

And that is okay.

Or, in other words, no matter the circumstance, no matter the condition of the mind/heart/soul, finding peace is always possible because Jesus is our peace.

Is He mine???