My Psalm 10

Oh Defender of the Innocent,

 

Frankly, you seem distant these days--
When thugs use officials,
and officials become thugs--
Either getting a government pass
Or passing themselves as government.
They boast a compassion that is really lust,
recycling justifications,
forging corruption as a concern,
wreaking havoc, searching, seizing
under their own warrant.
Skilled in their own system
of gotcha.
Truth is mangled into a form of ill-will
by which they threaten
thinking that for now they are
their own judges.

 

Arise Lord,
Don’t forget the vulnerable,
Whose unschooled family is not present,
Who have no Father, no savvy coach—let alone a lawyer.
For them, Oh Lord,
Break over-reaching arms.
Bury the wicked in their autocracy. 

 

The Lord is King.
It’s the nation-states that will perish.
For you, God, feel the longing of the afflicted.
You encourage, listen and are deeply
present
In order that man,
Who is of the earth,
may terrify no more.

A Dear John Letter at Christmas

Someone, who has recently endured the loss of loved one, and is now going through a break up of sorts, asked me if there was any insight that might lighten his burden.  I wrote him a “Dear John letter” that hopefully speaks a better word than his ex did.

Dear John,

      I don't suppose any of us can prepare for break-ups, or death, or lessen either's impact.  Right now my family is wrestling with a newly diagnosed cancer, and nothing prepares us for such things.   The only comfort I can afford is of another sort.

       I begin by suggesting we should not try to lighten grief’s blow.   I think that's what addiction tries to do--dull the pain--and ignore what the pain is trying to say to us.  If we will let it, grief can drive us back to fundamental issues which we have often avoided.   Grief sends an unmistakable signal that all is not right with us or the world.  We need a resurrection reality to come and take over creation.  If we believe that in the resurrection God will set all things to rights--that puppies and parents and children and lovers can all be in healthy relationships, forgiven, reconciled, integrated into the life of God and all creation-- then we can grieve with hope.  And we must allow ourselves to be seized by that hope.  Then, grief, itself, becomes a kind of joy.  It’s a joy that knows all things are mysteriously going to turn out all right, painful though our losses may now be. 

        If we rather choose to believe that death has the final word about this world--if we believe that life is all a cruel joke—if our Mothers were lying to us when they tucked us in and told us that everything was going to be OK-- then I think there isn't much to live for.[i]  If there is no God of creation to keep covenant with us, why should we believe others will?  At that point usually what is left is bitterness.

      And, if this is the case, we had better attend to that bitterness, too.  Does not the fact of this bitterness stem from the deepest part of us that recoils at the process of death?  Deep down have we not been operating as if by a rumor that we might expect something else?  Don’t we all intuitively feel that death is a damned, unnatural mess which wrecks our hopes and makes a mockery of that creative love that brought us, against 13 billion years of bad odds, to awe-inspiring life? 

       Hurt, and rage--they both need to be felt-- because they point us in the same direction—to hope.  If there never was any hope, then what are we mad about? What else did we expect other than relational break-up and ultimate loss?  The eastern religions say that we have been pretending that there should be an answer to our problem of transience.  They say our desire to live, form attachments and to love deeply is what is unnatural.  It is this deep desire for ongoing distinctive relationship that must be given up.

        I think they are profoundly mistaken.   I think our hurt and our rage emerge from a legitimate, deep, and eternal place planted in each of our hearts.  The Ecclesiastical writer said, "He has also set eternity in the hearts of men." (3:11)   So, for Christians, grief is a form of joy--a joy which lets go of our loved ones in the hope that God holds the departed in his care. God holds them as he continues to hold us.  And in the end he will mysteriously hold all things on heaven and earth together.  All creation looks forward to this liberation from relational and corporeal decay.

      So, let yourself grieve, my friend. The God who is present in and with your suffering will give you strength.   Let yourself grieve this loss, and by extension, over time, you will have the courage to grieve all the other losses that are too big to even think about right now.  In time you will be able to own all your life's disappointments in the hope that they all will be swallowed up in Christ's victory.  

        Come see me.  I want to be with you.

---

[i] John Polkinghorne’s work talks of this archetypal mother-and-child communication.

A Healing Table

     The following ancestral story informed a sermon I preached at the Stone-Campbell Dialogue last year.  That sermon is about personal integration and the Eucharist, particularly for those, like Paul, who suffer from post-traumatic stress and from what is now commonly called “moral injury.” The sermon is due to be published and is on the Disciples’ website at the following link:

http://ccu.disciples.org/Portals/CCU/Kent%20Ellett%20Reflection.pdf .

     I have a wide and varied spiritual inheritance.  My Grandfather taught me about theological reflection.  My Dad taught me to channel passions toward holy ends.  But it has always been the spirituality in my Great-Uncle’s Cletis’ preaching voice that resounds in my head as I pray. One afternoon about seven years ago I shared my frustration with my own development with my Great-Uncle Cletis, and, as afternoon turned to evening, he told me about a pivotal moment in his own young life.

         I repeat the story with some trepidation, for numbers of my readers will remember my great uncle in later years with great admiration. Some will still remember his father, my Great-Grandfather, Archie, as a supportive Elder in the Church, who traveled across the county each week to listen to his son, Cletis, proclaim the wonders of Christ’s reconciling love. 

       But it was not always this way. Great-Uncle Cletis told me that he and his Dad (my great-grandfather) were estranged for years, until my Great-Great Grandfather, Sherman Williams, went over to Great-grandpa Archie’s one afternoon with the instruction, “Come and go with me.” 

       Once in the car, great-grandpa Archie asked, “Where are we going?”

      “I’ll tell you when we get there,” Grandpa Sherman replied.

       As they pulled into uncle Cletis’ yard, it was Grandpa Sherman’s Christian gravitas that got both men—Father and son, Archie and Cletis--together at the kitchen table, where, with tears in his eyes, Grandpa Sherman plead for peace.  Something mysterious happened, and the two men were able to begin an incomplete but life-long process of healing.

       I am the third and fourth generation removed from these forebears, and as a student of Exodus I am thankful that it has been the ramifications of that healing which have been visited upon me.  I cannot fathom what is at stake for a vast future at such tables.  I probably can’t offer a greater tribute to these three generations than to say that by the time I came along I never could have dreamed that such bitterness ever existed.    Yet, to know stories like these is a precious inheritance to be passed down for a thousand generations for those that fear God.  Raw stories like this one, especially when they they hit close to home, seem to plant my feet more securely.  They infuse me with some kind of subterranean confidence.  Transformation is possible even for me and my family.  None of us who come to the Lord’s Table are completely stuck.  The family is open.  So is the table.             

       People often look at those of us who are trying to lead the church as if we could not understand their difficulties.   Sometimes that is only because stories like this one get buried.  Here’s the truth: the greatest women and men that I've known have always had a story about how grace healed their own broken heart.  Any healthy Christian ministry can name dirty laundry that has been aired and that the Savior continues to wash.  This was Paul’s story.  Blasphemers, violent men, they all belong at the family table.   Sheep still hear and recognize the Shepherd’s welcoming voice.   So, as I still hear Uncle Cletis re-sounding in deep places within me, I trust that through his voice I’m hearing the Shepherd who welcomed my broken family to table generations ago.  

Fragmented Sentences

       This summer I followed the creek on the lower end of the farm where I grew up all the way to its confluence with another stream near the White River.  I did this with a new friend, and I got to share with him pieces of my childhood.  It's healing for me to hold old and new together.  At age 50 I better understand the joy of seeing an old friend at a reunion.  I know better now why older folks compulsively tell stories.  They are engaged in the monumental developmental challenge of holding diverse parts of their lives together.  It does not have to be an act of selfishness or mere sentimentality to want the church or its young people to sing songs that connect us to our collective past.  If the church can even begin talking about psychic and social integration, then perhaps we will rescue a collective past to pass on.

      This is vital right now, because Westerners live increasingly fragmented lives.  And our typical ways of speaking reinforce our dis-integration. 

      Take the sentence, “It’s nothing personal.”  This is common currency for institutionalized treatment of people based on exploitive, economic standards.  Such speech pretends that we can have healthy senses of self that are divorced from our professional or economic life.  The flip side of this kind of speaking might be the the congratulatory expression, “We have a good professional relationship.”  This praises our ability to compartmentalize—to put our emotional needs, likes, dislikes, and social lives in a holding tank-- so that we can effectively relate to others strictly as producers or consumers.   These bifurcations of the self can work economically, but the division between public and private or professional and personal, comes at considerable psychic cost.

        In such a market-driven culture where deeply personal commitments must be held in reserve, it is not uncommon to ask, “Is there nothing sacred anymore?”  We lament that fewer things (like employees) are treated with special care.  But why is something considered sacred rather than secular to begin with?  The purpose of priestly or ritual holiness in biblical times was not to marginalize everyday life, but it was to infuse all of life with with a sense of reverence by paying special care to symbolic things.  Jesus’ own criticism of the ritualism of his day must lead us to ask why secularity is not sacred. Once this dichotomy between sacred and secular hardens-- when large swaths of life are de-sacralized, then it’s no wonder we complain about increasing disrespect. 

       Personal/professional, sacred/secular—our lives are full of such divisions.  In England this Spring I was pleased to notice that people there go “on holiday” as opposed to we Americans who go on “vacation” or a “retreat" from parts of our lives.  Worse yet, the church sponsors, “spiritual retreats,” without asking why they are spiritual, and not also social, physical or medical?  I’m all for concentrated times of prayer, but I’m suspicious of a purely mystical impulse.  Is it that we are caring for our bodies and social lives so well that we need to take a retreat from them in order to give isolated care to our spirit?  Sanctification seldom works that way.         

      What do we mean by the human “spirit,” anyway?  My friends in the “Joy Fellowship” who meet in our church building come from “Charismatic” backgrounds.  They want to simply feel the presence of God, as one lady said, “all the way into my toes.”  I’m pleased that there is an integration here of bodily and spiritual experience, but I have to save my finely parsed anthropology and intellectual exegesis about the human spirit for a different audience—one that strives to integrate head and heart.       

        Sometimes it's even hard to integrate different parts of the intellect.  The modern academy is anything but holistic.  For instance, therapists and philosophers tend to speak only “within their disciplines.”  Is that only because we need intensely practiced techniques apart from theoretical foundations?  Do we really crave more specialized knowledge of Danish manuscript evidence from Kierkegaard?   I doubt it.  Yet, to write “outside one’s field” is still widely considered a breach of discipline; today's scholars still tend to keep separate things separate.  

       Do these psychological dynamics explain why art seems impractical to so many people?  Is it fair to say that contractors cannot appreciate art, or is it that art has built a ghetto for itself which ceases to be widely edifying?  In a world where ethical norms are mere social constructions, beauty and meaning are becoming matters of private interpretation which can make no claim on others.  Like Truman Capote’s famous character, Holly Golightly, more and more Americans don’t even want to impose a name on their own cat let alone demand covenantal expectations of others.

       When relationships become transitory like this, people frequently feel they have to “start from scratch.”  Expressions like this speak of being cut off from the past, beginning from the first scratch on a blank slate, or starting ex nihilo, as if at a beginning of a race.  This runs counter to all the studies which show that meaningful change has to build on past strengths in adaptive rather than utterly reactive ways.      

             When Las Vegas advertises a "get-away’” by insisting “what happens here stays here,”  Sin City is inviting us to live a fragmented life.  Under the guise of privacy, people are ushered into experiences that must be carried separately—dis-integrated and kept secret from all the other relationships that form a sense of self.  Even when activities in far away places are honorable, participating in different sub-cultures may require vastly different roles, and the healthy person has to learn how to hold these different functions of the self together. 

        That's one reason why it is good news that Christ has come to "bring all things in heaven and earth together under one head."   Human beings and the whole creation look forward to what the therapists call “integration” or the bible often calls “being whole.”  Biblical words for the sick and the lame carry with them the notion of being divided.  Healing, by contrast, is a form of being made sound, having structural and systemic integrity.  I believe something like this is what Jesus means when he speaks of being “perfect.”  Rather than thinking of perfection as a kind of flawlessness, it might be helpful to think more in terms of becoming a "well-rounded" person who knows who she is. A person pursuing Christian completion is seeking to have the parts of her life connected, serving one overarching purpose.  

      Such a vision of Christian sanctification requires that the typical polarities people experience—public/private, personal/professional, sacred/secular, spirit/body, mind/heart, aesthetic/practical, past/future etc-- have to be held in creative tension. These parts of the self need to speak kindly to one another without collapsing into one another. Kids today tell one another, "Pull yourself together.” That may not be too far from my grandparents' expectation when they began prayer with a period of centering silence with the exhortation, “Let's collect our thoughts.”
       Occasionally, people will ask me if I think it is normal if they talk to themselves.  I always tell them, “It’s not only normal;  It's vital."  We badly need to have a knowable, single self across time, space and circumstance to talk to.  Only then can we say with the Psalmist, “Be still, my soul…”

      

        

Front Porch Ecclesiology

    

    My neighbor five houses down on the other side of the street died not too long ago.  I didn't know his name.   The next neighbor down, a guy married to a lady named, Betty, now mows his yard.  Another neighbor, whose name now escapes me, told me the news. 

      Don't make excuses for me not knowing my neighbors.  I know the man's anonymity was in some ways his own choice.  I know I can't know all 6000 households in Speedway.  I know I'm one of the more outgoing people on my block.  The problem is that this isn't saying much. 

     So, I want to share something that gives me hope in the midst of my failures as a neighbor.  The reason I even got the news of the neighbor's passing was that my other nameless neighbor stopped by while I was building a front porch.   This is no secluded back deck where you have private or family parties; it's a front porch that faces the world as it goes by.  It’s a place where a guy doesn’t do anything in particular and everyone, without thinking about it, knows that it's no interruption to say, "Hello."  And so, when I'm on the porch they do. 

      My wife and I have complained for years that my neighborhood is not friendly, but now I've decided that this is because we had not built a front porch.  Michael, a veteran, walks his dog and cares for his sister-in-law.  He took some wood that was in my disastrous yard.  Tony decided that I needed his big ladder.  Mr. Zetsil, who is some kind of ex-clergyman-- I think probably an Episcopalian, or perhaps a Navy chaplain-- cusses with the practiced eloquence of a High Church sailor.  Actually, his swearing is an attempt to connect with me. He wants to see if we are mad about the same things.  Yolanda comes by daily with her dogs.  I dislike them.  She cherishes them in part because they don't yip at her, pee on her bushes, or poop in her yard.  But I don't mind that much because she actually gets my house design and likes it.  And her husband, Herman, has had cancer for years.  It looks like he's going to make it.

    More than a dozen others have commented on my porch.  Brother Ron and Bill, my church members, stopped by and sipped cold drinks with me under its shade.  I noticed the drivers-by noticing us.  Frankly, I'm amazed at the power of the porch.  It’s insignificant compared to the rest of my building project, but it is what gets most of the interest. 

    One Southern writer, still chafing at the outcome of the War Between the States, claims, "in New York every man's house is his prison, while in the South every man's porch is his home."  While my people fought for the Union, most of them came from the old part of Virginia.  And I know what the writer is saying.  Some habits, some architecture, some ways of living invite new relationships and places of meeting.

     So I'm now convinced that what the dying church in the West needs is to be converted to life on the front porch.  The word porch comes from the Latin, Porticus, which means, "a passage," or as we sometimes say, "a portal."   Like C. S. Lewis' doors to a wardrobe, the porch is a portal into another world, a place of meeting and of profound transition between what is "in" and what is "without."  A porch marks this transition with great care.  Entry may be very hospitable--even made relatively safe--but with a porch it is never totally casual.  It is a portal through which we enter another dimension, where the spiritually homeless can enter Christ's home.

    I am the door--the gate--Jesus said.  In him, so are we.  If his body is the temple--that portal through which heaven intersected the world--then we also are being built into a holy temple in the Lord.  We are the front porch where folks can actually taste the powers of the coming age.

     It should go without saying that this is not because the church has it all together. Paul taught us a “saying that deserves full acceptance:  Christ Jesus came into the world for sinners of whom we are the worst.  But for that very reason we, too, were shown mercy...”  Jesus has chosen to dwell in us not just in spite of our brokenness, but precisely and scandalously because of it. It is in this way we are the light of the world, a city on a hill, a sinful sign of the mercy to come.   In our grief and struggle we have hope.  In our anger there is a persistent forgiveness. In our sin there is reconciliation because there is a re-creative Spirit dwelling in our clay jars.

      Experiencing this mystery ensures that we realize at times how few answers we actually have.  Perhaps it is because of our vulnerability that a porch becomes inviting.  My porch first gained attention because the building addition made my property a wreck.  Jody Crum, wife of a local radio personality, came by to see what was going on.  She rang the door bell and awakened me from a nap because she felt compelled to know why, in her words, “the house was a disaster on all sides." My construction project draws people like the man left half dead on the road in Luke 10. It is our demonstrated need that is draws Samaritans into helping us, thus reuniting them with Israel.  In a profound sense, the late Robert Capon taught us, that it is the Christ figure nearly dead on the road who saves the Samaritan by inviting him into hospitable action.  So in all our brokenness we must not forget that [we] were once darkness, but now…are light in the Lord. Live as children of light. (Ephesians 5:8) 

      I want to be more of a front porch kind of guy, regularly inviting new relationship, vulnerably marking a transition between death and resurrection, darkness and light.   I can do this because Jesus forgives negligent neighbors like me.  He overcomes injustice. He gives love to the lonely and insight to the confused.  Jesus raises the dead.  And if that is so, and I of all people have been ordained to tell people so, then there must be no more excuses for doing a hundred things at church and still not knowing my neighbors’ names.

Prison Vision

        Four years ago I went to the church sanctuary in the middle of the night.  The drama of my life had become stranded, written into a corner in act three.  My prayers devolved into angry sentence fragments as I groaned for some sense that, as we say, “things would turn out.” Such endings—and trust in them--do not come cheap.    

       But they are vital.  One writer has said, "eschatology always wins" the argument.  The end has, as we say, “the last word;”  it is what makes sense of our conflicts.   

      I now marvel at the imaginative grace to envision endings when our lives have been written into tight spots.  Shakespeare in his last play, The Tempest, intimates that his entire corpus is somehow only the beginning. “What is past is prologue.” Through his character, Prospero, the greatest of playwrights vicariously says goodbye to the “Globe”—both his Globe Theater and soon the globe of the world.  His painful departure from writing may be “forgiven,” “relieved by prayer,” and seen as a kind of “prologue” to even more profound stories of forgiveness. 

        Children used to contact C. S. Lewis soliciting more Narnia stories, because they were suffering the nostalgia that all readers feel when a good book finally comes to an end.  In the last book of the series, echoing Shakespeare, Lewis speaks into our terror of full-stop endings.

          All their life…had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were Beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

       Thus, the death of Lewis’ Pevensie children marks, not the just end of their story, but another portal into a new beginning.  Yet, the grand story to come is no mere sequel.  It is about entering more deeply into the reality that spawned the first story from the beginning.  Far from cycling back over the same ground, it ascends to always greater and surprising heights. 

       Lord Tennyson’s poems end, by his request, with a piece describing human death as a kind of nautical journey. One puts out to sea, crossing the sand bar at the mouth of a port.  The ending, then, becomes a departure on a new voyage.  

       One can hear these nautical metaphors at work in Paul’s prison experiences.  Rather than seeing prison or execution as a meaningless dead end, he envisions himself on the cusp of new possibilities.  He fantasizes of “departure to be with Christ,” but he knows that continued ministry is what really matters. Yet, whatever happens—in all circumstances—whether in life or in death-- things will “turn out”—quite literally “disembark” for his deliverance. (Philippians 1:19-23) 

        Deep within the grammar of Paul’s usage is a profound reversal of the ending. The metaphor of departure gives way to the image of disembarkation into new places of ministry.  Things, like passengers, as we say, “turn out.” Those who preach Christ suppose they can stir up—literally “raise”-- trouble for Paul while he “lays himself outstretched” in prison. (1:16)  But Paul knows that his current imprisonment will “turn out” in the same way it had turned out for him and Silas in Philippi’s own jail. (Acts 16) People may try to literally “raise” trouble, but it will not be trouble that is finally raised. Christ will be magnified in Paul’s body either by life or death.  It is the body of Christ which shall be raised—disembarking the grave.  This future reality has somehow already seeped into Paul’s life and imagination. For Paul, the church’s losses mysteriously become gain in a grand reversal of ordinary narratives.  “Somehow, he mystically attains the greatest reversal—the resurrection of the dead.” (Philippians 3:11)

        That night four years ago when I was praying in the church sanctuary I found myself in that season of life where ambitions typically turn into crushing responsibilities, investments typically remain debts, parents become like children, children become strangers, supporters become critics, and the body turns to mush.   I could not think my way out of any of this profound and bitter grief.  What mattered most at that time was the blanket of protection others prayed over me and the mystical grace of being able to feel again that there is a way out.  At an imaginative level I was able to reconnect with the feeling that somehow the very ship on which I’ve been stuck will inevitably disembark to new possibilities.   Not that I have attained all this.  But I now press on with a renewed sense that Christ will carry to completion what he began in me. 

       Christ’s presence mysteriously saturated Paul’s imagination, rescuing from him from terrifying boredom and the fantasies about death that tore him and his desires in two.   He does not fall victim to shame in prison because neither he nor we need be stuck in perpetual dénouement leading to full stop, deconstructionist endings.   The exciting part of life in Christ is not over.   It never will be.

      Pain tempts us to write entirely new prison escapes, bifurcating our lives, leaving all the characters we fruitfully minister to in an unfinished novel.   Or perhaps like Virgil we can choose to end our Aeneid in rage with our swords in the enemies whom we blame for messing up our version of Roman peace.  Far better is the ending of the film adaptation of Steven King’s great jailbreak story, The Shawshank Redemption, in which the prison-keeper kills himself because the protagonist escapes.  But Paul goes further, imagining the liberation of his warden as well as himself.   He stops the Philippian jailer before he can kill himself. (Acts 16) The Philippian gate-keeper in turn becomes a convert, and Paul’s subsequent letter to his church testifies that once again prison guards have come to hear Paul’s good news that dead ends have been declared null and void. (Philippians 1:13) 

        So, we “wait on the Lord,” whenever we feel like we have been written into a corner. We “shall again see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  It’s a hard developmental task to trust in the Spirit’s help while we are in pain.   Just as hard may be learning to trust that the blanket of prayer others lay over us will "turn out" for our deliverance.  (Philippians 1:19) Yet, there probably is not any other path to the renewal of our narrative imagination.  We have to once more behold the Lord who in the end “makes everything new.” 

On the 20th Anniversary of My Dad’s Death

       

       Right now the clock says that it is exactly the 20^th anniversary of the auto accident that left me fatherless.  Over the course of the last two decades more bitterness than I want to admit has crept into me under my radar. The crash (and my responses to it) has stunted my growth.  I was robbed of my greatest coach. 

      That is not to deny that numerous blessings have come my way in the wake of my Dad's passing.  The intensity of the bereavement, itself, kept me from venturing things during my thirties which my marriage and children might not have withstood. My Mother, too, has been able to enjoy other relationships and have a rich life that she never would have had with my Dad. So, I know that “in all things God works together for good.”  
        But he did not commit negligent homicide in order to accomplish that good. I know there is a difference between what some people call God’s “desirous will” and his “permissive will.” But to speak of a “permissive will” in God that wills to let things happen which God does not properly will to happen surely borders on linguistic nonsense.  God did not want Humanity (Adam) to mess up the creative agency of the temple compound we call Eden.  His creative intent for the world is not finally thwarted by the Humanity's rebellion, but the entire biblical witness makes plain that his purposes are foolishly resisted by earthly, demonic and human agencies. 

     To say mayhem is in any way "God’s will," obscures the fact that God has ultimately promised to undo the world’s mess.  Instead of looking at moral chaos as if it were permitted or even orchestrated precisely for some limited and inscrutable good, we should celebrate that God has ultimately declared that all such chaos will not stand.  It is damnable.  It's days are numbered.          
     God created the world in freedom and in love, intending to have a free and loving relationship with the world in which he necessarily may be resisted. The scandal of the cross is precisely that the rightful Sovereign Ruler of Israel is vulnerable in this way.  Against the Lord's creative vision of lions lying down with lambs, the earth, almost from the moment God commanded that it bring forth life, has spawned organisms that depend on death and dying.  At a deep structural-elemental level (see the stoichea in Gal 4:3, Col 2:8 and 2 Peter 3:10) death has lodged itself within the world’s creative processes.  

        Yes, God “works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will,” but it has been manifest since the garden that his will is not to control everything. Reckless drivers just keep resurfacing. God’s Spirit hovers over the ancient Deep, but the breakers of the Deep surge up against the Lord’s floodgates.    And so my recommendation is that rather than trying to baptize the chaotic forces of the world, pretending that they are somehow part of God's inscrutable plan, we would be better served to develop a more vivid view of God's endgame.  For when the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to destroy death—when the messed up structural elements of the world shall “melt in fervent heat”—when God mysteriously makes all things new—"there will be no longer any [chaotic] sea." (Revelation 21;1)

      Such visions raise a lot of questions none of us can answer.  But I cling to the hope that on that day I shall somehow mysteriously “inherit the land.”  I will see Jesus.  And I will have my Dad back.  In that sense I can never be permanently cheated of anything.  Entering into this hope is the only way I've found that any subconscious bitterness can ever be named and released.