In 1990, after serving as a commissioner to the General Assembly in Salt Lake City, I took a train-ride through the West. In Amtrak dining cars it is not unusual to be seated at a table with other passengers. One time I was sitting with a group which included a musician and his wife. He quickly began telling us his tale of woe.
He was an out-of-work accordion player. No one would hire him. Everyone had gone over to guitars and pianos. No one wanted an accordion player. He had no gigs. The guy was almost in tears at the rank injustice of the situation and the squalid philistinism of the population in its rejection of the wonderful accordion. Clearly the world had taken a nosedive in the sixties. The subsequent deterioration in everything good, true, and beautiful was manifest in his consistent rejection as an accordion player.
His wife compassionately rubbed his arm and looked deeply into his eyes during all this. It was clearly a relationship dynamic that was working for them. He: lost in the injustice of it all, and she: sympathetically supporting him.
Anyway, to be helpful, I asked, “Have you tried zydeco music, from the Mississippi Delta? They have lots of accordion.”
Accordion Man just shook his head. It wasn’t the same, he said. He wanted to play weddings and birthdays, not Cajun dance music.
“How about New Tango? That music uses accordion,” I offered.
He looked at me somewhat annoyed, sadly shaking his head again. Argentine music was too exotic.
I suggested one or two other forms of music I knew of that featured accordion. But I could tell he was only getting angry with me. So I stopped. The conversation went elsewhere.
But I never forgot Accordion Man. He is an example to me of how we can wallow in our failures so much that they come to define us. We cherish them and hold on to them so tightly that we close off all other opportunities and possibilities. And if we have people around us who enable, feed, and even reward this sort of thing, it can become a black hole from which we never emerge.
The writer, Carolyn Myss, remembers encountering someone at a conference. As they were trying to set up a date and time to meet again, the person looked at her calendar and said, “No, that won’t work; it’s my incest survivors’ support group meeting.” Myss refers to this as “leading with our wounds.” It has the effect of making our wounds define us in a deeply unhealthy way. In a manner slightly subtler than that of Accordion Man, this person still managed to get her personal pain and tragedy into a conversation, presumably to plant a similar seed of pity in someone else’s mind.
I think countries do this when they nurse grievances from past defeats. Like erecting statues of Confederate Generals. When anger towards an enemy from centuries before can become a sour pillar of national or regional identity. When we base our identity on wounds and losses we become mired in a consistently dark rage, resentment, bitterness, and cynicism.
Sometimes Christianity looks like it’s also a matter of leading with our wounds. In our path to fogrgiveness, we habitually confess our sinfulness, recognize our fallenness, and admit the wrongs we have done. In the classic little book, The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim, a Russian peasant wandering through the countryside seeking spiritual guidance, meets a famous elder, called a staretz, and goes to him fir spiritual direction. He wants to begin their relationship with a comprehensive confession of all his sins. So he fills sheets of paper dutifully and sorrowfully recounting a lifetime of his bad behavior. When he presents this to the staretz the holy man hands it back to him, instructing him only to confess sins that he has never before confessed and received absolution for. For to continue to dwell on things for which he had already been forgiven was to, in effect, deny the efficacy of God’s forgiveness. It was to wallow in our own sinfulness in a strangely prideful way.
Indeed. To hold on to our wounds, our failings, our wrongdoing, our pain, our grievances, and so forth, can be a denial of God’s love and redemption. To be redeemed means that we are no longer deemed as sinners, but now we are re-deemed as beloved and forgiven. Redemption means accepting who God says we are, and letting go of what we think we are. It means living into our essential nature as creatures in God’s Image and members of Jesus Christ.
We Presbyterians, even though we don’t have a tradition of personal confession to another person, do understand ourselves to have been forgiven by God in Jesus. Forgiveness literally means “letting go” of our wrongs and our wounds, recognizing that they have all somehow been healed by Jesus’ wounds. Traditions that place crucifixes front and center may lead us in this direction, if understood properly. “By his bruises we are healed,” is how Isaiah 53:7 puts it.
To identify with him in his suffering and death is also to identify with him in his emergence into resurrection life. To see our wounds in him is to see his resurrection in us. To let go of our wounds means to take on the healing and wholeness God gives us in Christ. It means to inhabit the deeper Self God has placed inside of us, where we participate in the true humanity Christ reveals in us. That true humanity is united in Christ to God. Our wounds, losses, failures, wrongs, and liabilities, because God takes them on in Christ, thus become the Way to inhabit his new life.
Because in them what we are really losing is our old, egocentric, narrow, small selves. In losing them we may find and gain our true and essential selves in Jesus Christ. This is what Jesus means when he says “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39b).
It is this finding of life and joy and blessing and goodness — the new life of resurrection and hope — which is the point. It is coming to live together in peace and justice, allowing the love of God to flow in and through us into our world.
At the end of the movie, Harold and Maude, Harold deals with his intense grief at Maude’s death by dancing away from the cliff of despair and playing the banjo she gave him. Our losses and wounds are kind of gifts. When we release them they have the power to release us from despair into life. Maybe that’s the message of the Cross.
+++++++
