Unstuck

Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1.14-15)

In Ernest Gaines’ painfully moving book, A Lesson Before Dying, he tells of a school teacher in Louisiana who has been urged by his aunt to help Jefferson, a man scheduled for execution, to face his end like a man. The teacher, Grant Wiggins, already is a black man frustrated with his work in the racially segregated town in which he lives. In his heart, he feels as if he is fighting three hundred years of the effects of slavery. He has come to believe that it will never change.

Following a Christmas program put on by the school that Grant has watched, Gaines’ describes Grant’s inner turmoil. He writes, “The children waited onstage to hear what I thought of the program. I told them that it was fine, just fine. The children left the stage to get in line for food. ‘Do you want me to bring you something, Mr. Wiggins?’ Irene asked me.”

“‘No, thanks.’ I said. ‘Something the matter, Mr. Wiggins?’ ‘No. Why?’ I said. ‘You don’t look too happy.’ ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Go on and get something to eat.’ Irene left to get in line, but she looked back at me over her shoulder. She was right. I was not happy. I had heard the same carols all my life, seen the same little play, with the same mistakes in grammar.”

His inner thoughts continue, “The minister had offered the same prayer as always, Christmas or Sunday The same people wore the same old clothes and sat in the same places. Next year it would be the same, and the year after that, the same again. Vivian said things were changing. But where were they changing? I looked back at the people around the tables, talking, eating, drinking their coffee and lemonade. But I was not with them. I stood alone.”

In those few sentences, Gaines describes the angst that the young school teacher feels as he looks both inside and outside himself. Everywhere he looks he sees listlessness and laziness, ailments of the spirit that paralyzes everyone in town. He’s stuck, the town is stuck, the world is stuck. Regardless of the fact that he has gone away to college and has returned home, everything is still the same as before and will stay the same as before. 

Grant is wrong only in one thing. He is not alone. He simply gives expression to the emotion that many others feel, not only in his town, but outside his town. He describes the feeling that many of us carry in our chests, buried beneath the mundanities of the mediocrity and the mendacity that seem to be our world today. It is as if the world has become a giant swamp of quicksand, our legs stuck, our spirits lethargic, and our hope for something better long gone, like the monarchs gone to Mexico for the winter.

In many ways, then, we have our own desert experience, comparable to the one that Rabbi Jesus experienced when he went into the wilderness for forty days, finding himself the prey of jackals and the plaything of Satan. The evangelist Mark tells it well with an economy of words when he writes, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert and he remained in the desert for forty days, tempted by Satan. He was among wild beasts.”  

As anyone in similar situations will tell you, a desert doesn’t need sand to be a soul-scorching and mind-draining experience. In fact, a good many deserts don’t have a trace of sand anywhere in sight, just a godforsaken, empty space that tests and tries the inhabitant, exploiting every weakness in mind or body, depleting soul and spirit until they are an arid wasteland.

Such deserts, wherever they are found, have the wild beasts of desperation, despair, and disappointment always snarling at our feet, eating away our energy, and devouring our dreams. After a while in these deserts, we find ourselves surviving in our sun-dried skins, picking up our feet, but going nowhere, never really taking a full breath.

A minister who led a Bible study in a prison for women tells of an experience he had one day as a young woman in the group spoke up. Leaning forward in her chair, tears dropping down her cheeks, she said, “Can I ask a question? I don’t know how to say it, but I really wanna know. How do I get unstuck? I’m so tired of making the same mistakes, going back to the same people and problems. I don’t know. I guess I just wanna know how to get ‘unstuck.’”

Admitting that he stumbled through any decent answer to the woman’s heartbreaking question, the minister, reflecting afterwards on the experience, came to this painful conclusion, “I suspect that even as I grieved for the specific ways in which this young woman was stuck, I was recognizing myself and many of my peers in her words. I suspect we all get to a certain point in life where the word stuck can easily creep into our vocation.”

He describes it in this way, “Passion for the job seems more elusive, the sizzle of a marriage wanes, faith seems more remote and inaccessible. In whatever domain of life, we settle into familiar and predictable rhythms. We realize that there are things about our lives, our communities, our world that are rather hard to change.”

Continuing, he said, “I thought of all these things as I drove home from the jail. I thought about how it’s not just individuals who get stuck, but relationships, businesses, churches, institutions, even cultures. And I prayed. For all who feel stuck and for all the ways in which we need to get unstuck to live the lives we were created for.”

He’s right, of course. We all need to get unstuck to live the lives we were created for, which may explain, as well as anything, why the Galilean Rabbi, after being stuck in the desert for forty days, walked away from the experience with this terrifying prescription for getting unstuck. “Repent,” he said, “and believe the good news.”

Again, the word repent, as used by the Rabbi, doesn’t refer to a sense of regret, but to a sense of reversal. Repent is a call to change one’s way, to go in a different direction, to try something different. It is a summons to dig out of the morass, to get out of the mud, and to move to higher ground. To repent is to see another way, another path, another life. It is to finally see the truth of something Yogi Berra once said, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’re gonna get what you always got.” Or, if we want to put it another way, we could say that if we want to get unstuck, we’re going to have to stop doing what we’ve always done. 

That prescription, offered to us by the Galilean Teacher, is the only true way out of the rut we’re in, the only real solution for the insanity of our world, the only hope for saving ourselves and the whole kit and caboodle that we call life on this planet. We have to begin to think differently, behave differently, and imagine a different world. Or, put succinctly, as the Rabbi did, we have to believe the good news.

And what is that good news? It is the belief that we are better together than apart, that we are more alike than different, that we all breathe of the same divine breath that gives life to every living creature. When we believe the good news, we see the good in others, we understand the common good, and we seek the good in everything we do.

As believers in the good news, we refuse to believe that the poor are parasites or that the immigrant is an enemy. We refuse to divide everybody into us and them, or separate every disagreement into two camps, or split the world into shirts and skins. Instead, we believe in unity, in community, in common cause. We open our arms to embrace others instead of closing our arms to keep others at a distance.

Wherever the Galilean went, he preached the same good news, bringing hope to the hopeless, light into the darkness, and life to anything that reeked of death. Always, he promised a new way, a new life, a new world, so long as we also believe in the good news. No longer did it have to be business as usual, or the same old same old; now it could be a bright new world where the last will be first, where the dead will arise, and where the downtrodden will be uplifted.

In his book, Barking to the Choir, Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest and activist in the barrios of south Los Angeles, tells about the time he was walking to his car at the end of the day and bumped into a young man named Lorenzo, who was on break from the bakery that Father Boyle had organized to help gang members get a new start in life. Father Boyle tells of their conversation in this way:

“After some small talk he says, ‘You know, my car just died on me this weekend. Middle of no-damn-where, by myself. So what do I do? Naturally–and you may not agree with this–I call my homies. First one says ‘Hey, dawg. I’m in the middle of something. I can’t go.’ Next one, same thing. Over and over. ‘I’m really busy, dawg, sorry.’”

“‘I called five of my homies and all said no. I didn’t know what to do. So–I can’t believe this myself–I called Manny. We work together in the bakery. I don’t have to tell you, but there is no one in the bakery who is a greater enemy of mine than Manny and his ‘barrio.’ No one. But I had his number, so I called him.’”

Father Boyle writes, “At this point Lorenzo slows the story down, as if he’s hearing it for the first time. ‘And you know what my worst enemy said to me when I called him?’ His eyes are suddenly and surprisingly moist. ‘He said, ‘On my way.’”

Today, the evangelist tells us that Rabbi Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the good news.” Lorenzo, stuck in the middle of no-damn-where, suddenly saw his world in a new way, finally hearing the good news in three simple words, “On my way!”

–Jeremy Myers