Psalm 51:1-7

…wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow…

I’ve seen some messes—I’ve really landed in a few. Some were my own doing, and the clean-up was also mainly my own responsibility. Some of the worst messes I’ve seen, though, have been the result of overwhelming forces of nature: storms, upheavals, floods or fires.

The same forces of nature occur in the emotions of human beings, and give rise also to messes of near-devastation. Outside help is called for in the wake of these messes. They’re too overwhelming and total for a single human being to ever clean up alone. When a person lands in a mess of this magnitude, and becomes aware that the resources of restoration are entirely beyond them, they have a brutal encounter with the absolute ground of being. We sometimes describe this experience as “hitting bottom.” It’s a place of no pretense. Pride and illusion are stripped away. 

When everything is shattered or ruined, wasted, lost or destroyed, an appeal for help is the one remaining link to hope that is left to us. Awareness of the scope of the mess and of the greatness of our need for help is a point of turning.

I experienced a time (and perhaps you have also) when I literally cried out for mercy on a daily basis for weeks and months—years, actually—because the devastation around me seemed so complete that I could make no order of it. I had no confidence in which way I should go. My spirit was broken—shattered, in fact. The storms of emotion had raged thoroughly, and yet it took some time before I came at last, limp and exhausted, utterly broken to bits, to a place of contrition—it was really all that I had left, yet I resisted it fiercely, clinging to my conviction that the mess had not been my doing. I’d been clinging for dear life to my own “righteousness.” My journal bears witness of that time in my life, and it’s not pretty to review. But I’m grateful that I recorded it, because it helps me to recognize the work of restoration and healing that’s been underway since then. I’m able to hear again the joy and gladness and the rejoicing of bones that had been previously crushed (vs. 8). It was some time before I became aware that the very mercy that I’d beseeched had indeed arrived, and I was standing in it up to my armpits! I laughed out loud that day; I remember that vividly, because it had been so long a time since I had laughed. I was some four months along into a commission for Mercy Hospital which took a year to complete. That art work (a series of six panels 4X16 feet) was a year-long turning which exists as a visible witness of the grace of healing that I received at that time in my life—through the art work, in fact.  That’s how Mercy came for me.

Hope for help from an Other is grounded on two pre-conditions:

1)  A degree of trust in the helpful character (mercy) of the one to whom we turn. Desperation may be one means by which we eventually arrive at that degree of trust, however frail it may be.

2)  A relationship with the Other, which, though it may be strained by the mess, is nonetheless the new essence of the stripped-down authenticity, or “ground,” upon which we now stand. From this condition, we’re positioned to receive the grace to begin again to build toward a restored future.

Hitting bottom, seen in this light, is a life-giving encounter with Love—a love mercifully poised with all the bleach this mess will require.

–Rachelle Oppenhuizen