Untold story...

So, well, writing here around therapy days is just plain hard.
HARD.
HARD.

I would, very much, like to write about the things in my head, but I am afraid to do so, even though I have been trying to be more and more honest.

When I was looking for images to go with psalms, I came across this and tucked it away for a while.  I was thinking about posting it in the Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse group, but I am still chewing on it.  I mean, I think there are so very many stories inside, that it is not just one ... at least for me.  But I also think it puts a word to the silence that surrounds sexual abuse:  agony.

Too many people believe that not talking about what happened is better.  It isn't.  It leaves the survivor in agony, sometimes an unknown agony that drives a person in seemingly inexplicable unhealthy ways.  The agony ... it colors everything.

I guess what I could say is what fells me the deepest is the untold story that crosses paths with belief and what the Bible tells me is the truth.  The dissonance between what I am supposed to think and believe about myself and what I actually think and believe about myself is ... well ... for lack of a better word ... killing me.

SIGH.

I did want to share something I posted to Facebook.


For my Streaming Peeps: The fourth and final series of "19-2" is up on Acorn.TV. "19-2" is the English version of a Canadian cop show set in Montreal. It is brutal, as is life in a fallen world, and not for the faint of heart. It is beautifully written and exquisitely filmed. The acting is top-notch from the very first episode. And, if you are someone like me, it makes you think. Deeply.

Being a police officer means you live in the muck in this world. Trying to keep that from changing you seems almost a losing battle in the eyes of one of the main characters, Ben. How do you live a black and white life in a grey world? To me, one of the things I oft think about is how hard life must be for those who have no faith. This world will shatter you.

I thought this was one of the best last seasons that I have ever experienced. It was well-paced and well-written and did a wonderful balancing act of open-ended closure.

It is a dark show. It is, I repeat, not for the faint of heart. But it is also lovely in a way that television rarely is. It is action. It is drama. And it is a subtle exploration of the human psyche. The unique part, to me, is how "19-2" shows hidden thoughts and feelings in such a way as you almost experience them yourself.

The show could have left you feeling as if all is hopeless, given the sin all around us ... how thoroughly evil seems to flourish. But it does not.

I LOVED most how the final series answers the question: What is the point of fighting against evil (bad guys, drugs, alcohol, prostitution, abuse, murder) if there will always be more evil?

If you are not afraid to look into the abyss that is humanity, "19-2" is a STINKING BRILLIANT show. At least it is to me.

The show is hard to watch, for me.  It is so not because there is sex and not even because there is rape.  No, it is hard for me to watch because of the hidden thoughts and feelings that the cinematography reveals to the viewer.  To me, this is the first show that allows you to experience the lives of the characters.  It isn't just a story.  It is a revelation of humanity.  Now that I have the ending to the series, I would like to go back and watch it from the beginning again.

There is one person, J.M., who is destroyed by his work as a cop.  The ways in which he copes are horrifying to watch.  By the end of the third series, only one person has any ... compassion for him.  In the family that is BLUE, it is astonishing to see someone ostracized the way that he is.

But, you protest, "He is a wife beater."

Yes, he is.  He is also an incredibly broken man who was created by God just as everyone is created.  Jesus died for him.  I kept thinking that whilst I watched.

In the fourth series, no longer having a wife to beat, J.M. beats up himself.  But you do not see that, really, unless you look closely, until it is revealed in a poignant, broken moment in front of a mirror.

The story of his life is so ugly that everyone wants to turn away, though one forces herself to look.  I think that the actor portraying him was just ... I mean ... how did he go there?


Ask me what I think about the Psalter and I can go on and on and on.  But one of my most passionate responses is that the Psalter demonstrates that God understands us intimately.  He knows His created. Every word in the Psalter is perfect. And every psalm is gifted to us by God in His Word.  Even Psalm 137.


By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst of it
We hung our harps.
For there our captors demanded of us songs,
And our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

How can we sing the LORD's song
In a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
If I do not remember you,
If I do not exalt Jerusalem
Above my chief joy.

Remember, O LORD, against the sons of Edom
The day of Jerusalem,
Who said, “Raze it, raze it
To its very foundation.”
O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
Against the rock.

~Psalm 137 (NASB 1977)

Read that a few times.  Sit with the words.  Read them aloud.  Read them with passion as if they are your own words.

Go to Jeremiah 29.  OH MY GOODNESS!  Jeremiah 29:11 is trotted out in almost obscene ways.  Obscene because those words are sliced from their context and held out as a hope for good things.  Good.  Again there is that word.


For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.

Sounds good, right?  READ the verses around 11, if only 1-20:


Now these are the words of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the rest of the elders of the exile, the priests, the prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.  (This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the court officials, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem.) The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, saying, “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, ‘Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.’ For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, ‘Do not let your prophets who are in your midst and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream. For they prophesy falsely to you in My name; I have not sent them,’ declares the Lord.

“For thus says the Lord, ‘When seventy years have been completed for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill My good word to you, to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will restore your fortunes and will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will bring you back to the place from where I sent you into exile.’

“Because you have said, ‘The Lord has raised up prophets for us in Babylon’—for thus says the Lord concerning the king who sits on the throne of David, and concerning all the people who dwell in this city, your brothers who did not go with you into exile—thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Behold, I am sending upon them the sword, famine and pestilence, and I will make them like split-open figs that cannot be eaten due to rottenness. I will pursue them with the sword, with famine and with pestilence; and I will make them a terror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse and a horror and a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I have driven them, because they have not listened to My words,’ declares the Lord, ‘which I sent to them again and again by My servants the prophets; but you did not listen,’ declares the Lord. You, therefore, hear the word of the Lord, all you exiles, whom I have sent away from Jerusalem to Babylon.

Really, you should probably start reading in chapter 27 ... only maybe chapter 1.  The point is that the Lord is speaking to those in CAPTIVITY.  "But are we all not captive to our old Adam?" you ask.  Yes, we are.  Yes, I am.  It is not about that.  It is about the word "good" again.  Good was to be delivered into captivity.  God even goes so far as to tell them to build lives in captivity and to pray for their captors.  How wild is that!  I really like where He said that their welfare will be your welfare.  I do not think that I really understood what it meant to pray for your enemies until I started delving into the context of Jeremiah 29:11.  Really, I've only glimpsed it ... but glimpses can be quite powerful.

And delving into the context of Jeremiah 29 is tied to delving into the context of Psalm 137.  

I am not a biblical scholar.  I was a literary scholar, but one of my griefs these days is that I am barely that anymore, even in recesses of my mind.  However, I started reading Psalm 137 as an incredibly intimate prayer included in the Psalter that tells us that we are known by God.  I hear a petulant captive flinging his broken heart out to God. Hey, You Up There!  You want me to pray for my captors?  How about blessing those who dash their babies against the rock!  Really, it is a poignant prayer.  It isn't about killing babies.  Actually, I am not sure what a biblical scholar would tell you it is about.  For me, I say it is about God understanding that we often do not know how to pray in difficult circumstances and when we are hurt and tired and confused about our circumstances, we hurl words that are not the first to be sung by the church choir. We hurl words that are not even whispered in church.  But God hears us even so.  He loves us even so.

God loved the psalmist of 137.  Were he real, God would love, fiercely and unreservedly, J.M., whose untold story destroyed him.  I believe that God would have wanted J.M. to keep hearing His word even as the words unspoken in J.M. were destroying the people around him.  If ever there was a man in need of repentance it is J.M.  That is, probably, all most viewers would see.  But I see someone who is the epitome of those who need the Gospel all the more for their repellant and repugnant lives.

Being mired in the muck of humanity is not ... ever ... an excuse to brutalize your family.  But, in his story, in the words he couldn't speak, is the mirror he looked into during a school shooting.  What he saw there, of others and of himself, he couldn't bear.  The rest of his life was spent (unsuccessfully) avoiding that reflection.

Speaking of mirrors, looking into one is something I avoid like the plague.  It is not something that I can do for more than a few moments at a time.  It is something that, if I did for longer, would drive me to ledge and beyond.  There is nothing good in the mirror for me.

I know that is the lie.

I know the compassion and understanding of the Psalter is the truth.

But I cannot escape the lie.