Much of contemporary talk about spirituality is taken up with the importance–even the essentialness–of positive thinking, of accepting only the light and believing we can refuse pain and difficulty. It is easy to forget that there may be something to be said for a more existentially open view. In the weekend marking the Christian observance of the brutal death of Jesus, here are the great psychologist William James and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann:
William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, casts his lot with existential honesty:
“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work…But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes. [T]here is no doubt that healthy mindedness is inadequate…because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”
Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Message of the Psalms, sees purpose in those that are cries of anguish (emphasis in original):
It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…