Freaky Friday

Last night was "Freaky Friday" on one of the TV channels. I watched with amusement and some fascination the "accounts" of hauntings, possessions and other supernatural phenomenon. One of the stories was about a family that discovered that the house they had just rented had once been a mortuary. The embalming room and walk-in freezer in the basement had been left virtually untouched despite the recent renovations and updates done to the rest of the house. Upon discovery, the parents were highly distressed and wondered how they could possibly raise their children in a home that had such a history. As you have already deduced the house was indeed haunted. But haunted not by a simple lost soul somehow stuck between this world and the next, as it seems happens quite a lot according to pop lore, but by a fully-personified demon. Naturally the Catholic Church officials were called in and after quite a bit of testing and collecting of evidence an exorcism was authorized and performed and the house and family freed of their possessor. I do not tell this story to pass judgment about the presence of evil and its many manifestations but rather to illustrate our feelings and assumptions about the creepiness of death and how quick we are to associate it with the profundity of evil spirits. In short, death spooks us.

This being the season of Lent, and the issue of death, or at least one particular death, is increasingly haunting the collective Christian conscious. This Sunday marks the third of the four Sundays in Lent. The dark days of Holy Week will be quick to follow: Passion Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday. But even now, we assure ourselves that death is not the end; all be will be well because this hard and sorry story has a joyful ending. We know how this story ends. The eyes of our heart avert the sight of death by starring ahead to Easter morn. Spare us, o spare us, O Lord, from Freaky Friday.

This year I am recommending the Psalms as a Lenten resource. As one prays the psalter day in and day out, the heart's eye scans the full range of human experience and emotion: praise and awe of God, joy of living, confrontation of evil, protection from enemies, reverence for creation and all that is in it, violent anger, and fear of death. Among many others, Martin Luther (1528) referred to the psalter as "the little bible," and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entitled one of his books, "Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible." Despite its long and valued history, the Psalters under-appreciation currently in the Christian church is staggering. Of course the psalms are hard to read; so much unpleasantness, so much talk of fear and anger, dying and death. This is the language of lament and yes, its a little freaky. One distressed by the psalms might wonder: Can't we just read the New Testament, Jesus and all, and forget about all this doom and gloom? Followed by: I want to read something that makes me feel good about life, not depressed. I dare say many Christians make a habit of skipping to the good parts; pancakes on Shrove Tuesday straight to Easter morning church. But in truth the function of faith is not to make one feel good. One might say, that the function of faith is to not to make us feel anything, but rather to assure us that no matter what we feel, God will walk with us through it; even how we feel about death and dying and those who have died and those we still mourn all these years later, and the certainty that one day we too will die.

Thomas Mann, wrote in The Magic Mountain, A Novel, "The only healthy and noble and indeed . . . the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life's holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion - for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view . . . Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith - or even worse." (New York: Knopt, 1995, p. 197)

The psalms breech the divide we force between life and death. They place God rightfully as mediator between the two. Only an intentional, consistent reading of the psalms will reveal this, of course. Steadily favoring one at the expense of the others or leaving off offending verses is to avert the eyes of one's heart from that which God does not avoid. In the words of the psalms that pain and haunt us because they so surely reflect the life we know, therein God finds us trembling and troubled in the face of Freaky Friday. Found and saved from fear and death.