Psalm 151: #LEMONADE
You [Lord] have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions of the dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. || Psalm 88:6,7
I remember these nights when I was teenager, it would be late enough on a summer night that it was completely dark. Armed with a couple cigarettes stolen from a friend's parents and a discman (google that if you need to), I walked the four or five blocks to a small private cemetery near my house. At this cemetery there was a large brick and marble table off to the side of the gravestones. I would come here late at night in my angstiest of teen days, sit on top of this table and I would listen to sad music, I would suffer through a couple Newports, stare at the moon and talk to God.
Correction. I would rail at God, rage at him, question him, blame him. I can remember the first time I cursed up into the sky, quietly at first, waiting for a lightening bolt to drop and end me right then and there. And when it didn’t I did it a little louder and then louder and then louder. An angry, brokenhearted girl throwing f-bombs up into the sky.
The Psalms are such an interesting place in scripture. They are the only large collection of verses that are solely someone talking TO God, there are didactic, instructive elements mixed in, there are also verses that seem to contradict the instructions Christ taught. It’s part poetry, part hymnal, part oral history; it is full of worship and awe, full of pain and anger, full of despair and hope. At its core the book of Psalms is a work of art, an unflinching exploration of what it means to be a flawed human and to love the God who created us, who knows the intimate workings of our flawed hearts.
Last week Beyonce released a stunning new album. Lemonade is a visceral experience both visually and musically. Artistically it is beautiful, emotionally it is overwhelming, and culturally it is so important. But I’m seeing this strange trend among Christians of negating all the importance and staggering beauty of the album because of her flagrant expressions of pain. She curses, she’s vulnerable and honest in depictions of her broken relationship, her anger. She is ferocious in describing her emotional process. In particular one conservative male evangelical blogger who I will not name nor link to referred to Beyonce’s music as “bile”, calling it “weird, aggressive, sullen, whorish, egomaniacal, vaguely satanic and deeply stupid”.
There is so much to say about Beyonce’s album Lemonade, most of it, nearly all of it, is not mine to say. I’m not equipped to analyze or unpack a lot of the album’s imagery and meaning. In this conversation it is not my voice that matters, there are epic and beautiful voices doing the hard work of dissecting Lemonade, voices like Austin Channing, Janet Mock, Zakiya Jackson (or her piece here), and Ashleigh Shackelford. I'm humbly listening to them and I would encourage you to as well.
That being said, I won’t be quiet when it comes to the conversation of honesty and transparency in art, transparency in life. I won’t be quiet and let go unopposed the misguided notion that good Christians don’t ever have or tolerate messy, complicated and ugly emotions. I straight up refuse to be silent while someone says that we shouldn’t ever find solace and comfort in art that mirrors our brashest, most crass pain. The truth is that we as Christians often put up boundaries around our ugly, unappealing emotions. We are a sitcom culture, we like testimonies that resolve easily and neatly, bow tied and in place. We like to believe that once a testimony is told it is over, that it’s never an ongoing battle. We like instant deliverance, not the daily act of laying our burdens down at the cross. We don’t like the rawness of pain, we prefer the happy ending. We too often believe and perpetuate the lie that our most terrifying and painful emotions are too much for God. Especially as women, we’re told in Christian culture that our negative emotions are dishonoring to the Lord.
Those nights spent crying in the moonlight, angry and raging, I was nursing bruises, and wading through the emotional bog of two God fearing parents knowingly abandoning me to physical abuse. At 13 I was incapable of separating the voluntary neglect of earthly parents from the posture of a Heavenly Father. And I was angry. I burned with it. And to this day I stand firmly in the belief that the reconciliation of my relationship to my abuser, the healing I have experienced began on those very nights that I screamed into the black. God did not look at me those nights and find me sinful, his heart broke for me, he cried with me, he scooped me into his arms and let me go until I wore myself out, like a little girl pounding her fists on the chest of a father. He built my brain and heart, he designed the process by which I internalize my experiences and transcribe them within myself, he engineered my emotional responses, how could it ever be too much for him? The Psalms are full of beautiful wisdom and Godly insight but I would argue that their greatest contribution to our faith is the instruction that forms them: the principle that God can take whatever we got, that we can honestly and angrily and tearfully and joyfully bring our every thought and emotion before the King of Heaven. Not only that we can but that we should. Was there a safer space than God for David to rage about dashing the little ones of his enemies against rocks, or beg for shame and horror to fall on his oppressors? Was there a safer space for him to put music to his grief and remorse and anger and let it play out so he could move through it on to the next stage? Exploring our emotional process with God is the healthiest, safest way to do it. And the evangelical world’s response to Beyonce doing just that is astounding and sad.
In a recent video Bono sits down to discuss the Psalms with one of his personal inspirations, Eugene Peterson, the man who wrote The Message translation. Bono lauds the brutal honesty of the joy and pain in the Psalms. “The only way we can approach God,” he says, “is if we’re honest.” Honest in our joy, honest in our struggle, honest in our worship, honest in our pain, honest in our anger. He asks why church music isn't more like this? Why don't the Christians write songs about their bad marriages? Their fear? Their anger with the government? He says that his suspicion of Christians stems from this unwillingness to be emotionally real. And I whisper “Amen” as I think of the angsty songs I listened to sitting in that dark cemetery. Secular songs because there was no Christian music that mirrored back at me my grief and confusion and pain, no Christian soundtrack to make me feel seen and known and safe in my process from heartbroken to healed.
At its most basic interpretation Lemonade is the story of a broken marriage, a woman so deeply hurt and still so in love that she is buried in anger and sadness. She progresses through a healthy emotional cycle that includes both raw pain and callous apathy, multiple times calling out to God. She ends in a place of redemption, reconciliation and hope. If that’s not psalmic, I don’t know what is. The Psalms are a mirror of the human condition, as is contemporary art. To dismiss art as unchristian, to ignore, for this same reason, the layers of meaning and importance in art because it’s too brashly emotional at the top is to say that our God can’t handle our emotions, to box him into a weak and easily offended deity incapable of navigating his own creation.
If you need to hear it today, if you’re experiencing bruises and emotional bogs and raw pain, then hear this: it is not too much for God. You and your emotional process and reactions are not too much for God. He can take it, anything you got, he can take it. He will swoop you up in his arms and let you rage till you are tired, till your anger dissipates to sobs and you grow weary of your rage and are ready to move into the vulnerability healing demands. There is no sin in our emotional process, in our pain, even in our anger.
If you haven’t listened to Beyonce’s new album you should, anger and cursing and all. Like the Psalms it is reflective of the human condition, raw and beautiful in its depiction of pain and growth and redemption. And like the Psalms there are many deeper meanings built into the very melodies, meanings and truths that we need to hear.
