Ezekiel 37:1-14
I am going to start with the caveat that I am not completely sure about choosing this one. The problem I am having with this particular passage is that it has been unusually important to me over the past six months, which means two very personal entries in a row, which seems like it might be a lot. However I'm also afraid if I leave this passage for four or however many years, when I get back to it I will be in a different place entirely and have lost what makes this passage special now - or who knows, maybe I'll have gone through the whole thing again, but at any rate I don't want to lose where I am in this time. So I am going to give it a go, and if it doesn't make sense, well - no one is asking you to read it, and in my own defense I told you that might happen in the introduction. Maybe if you come back in four years, or sixteen, I'll have given it a revision and it will suddenly be organized and logical.
This is a well-known passage so I'm not treading any new ground today. Looking at this in my middle-to-high school Biblical literalist phase, it was a weird passage, and literalist me pondered it for a long time. Ezekiel dropped in the valley, bones grow sinews and skin, breath. Okay I guess, so what? God created humanity in Genesis, obviously this is no particular challenge. Israel has a bunch of dead people and they are raised to life. Looking back - well sure, New Testament people coming back from the dead is almost normal, but it doesn't show up a lot before Christ, but then I am not trying to argue this now, either.
College, early adulthood, I finally figured out the whole prophecy-as-representation thing (I never claimed to be a quick study!). Israel is all old and dried out and they have forgotten God, and now God is going to show them, through power, to worship. They are going to come back home; zionism, sure why not. Prophetic parallels still in mainline churches - yes I was studying under evangelicals, how did you know? - and American and European history and Roman Catholicism and anyone I didn't think was sufficiently invested based on my ignorance, boom done, move on to Ezekiel 38. I did not think of it as a lesson for me because here I was, reading, worshipping already, right?
And then, slowly and by fits, I became the bones. I stopped breathing and I wasted away - not all at once, but there was certainly some point where I stopped reading, I stopped praying, I stopped fasting, for a few years I stopped going to church - I lived as a nominal Christian with no investment at all. And finally I was just a mixed up skeleton among so many of my fellows, 206 dry bones* scattered in the dust, not because I stopped doing but because I had finally stopped being.
When the older kids got to early elementary school I went back to church, and then I ran into the pastor of Duke Memorial at Forest Hills Park and actually returned to the church, and became invested in service and learning and all the things, and in some ways I looked very much alive - skin, sinews, bones back in their normal places. I was a hard worker, I was learning from great people, I was a faithful husband and diligent father. I had an honest job, provided for my family, taught my children and went to Bible study and led Sunday School. I gave time and money to the church, I was a Trustee for a few years. I had a good reputation and I think it is fair to say people thought of me as an honorable man. If you were to look at me I looked like a pretty much normal fellow, going about my normal business and doing normal things. And you know what? I thought I was, too. Skin, sinews, bones. By the numbers I was great.
But behind the scenes my marriage had serious problems, and almost from its beginning I had turtled emotionally. I was spending all my energy trying to "make my marriage work" - hello, legalism - and consciously shut down all my instincts for safety, and cooperation, and expectations, and, yes, protecting my children, and being treated like a human being, to the point that I either explicitly poo-poo'd these things or forgot about them completely. People talk about spouses who are doormats - I embraced it explicitly as the natural outcome of fealty to my end of the marital contract. If I were to put modern words around my married life, I would say that I was holding my breath, spending all of my time trying to stay silent and unnoticed and out of harm's way. And eventually I forgot that I should breathe, and finally that I even could.
The thing about doormats is, no matter how nice they begin, the mud and the dust and the stomping end up making the thing no longer pretty, and the owner** ends up looking to replace it. The old doormat, worn down and caked with dirt, gets tossed out as not even worth trodding underfoot. And so was I. If you are so inclined - and frankly I hope you are not - you can go look in the court records for the buckets of mud dumped on the children and me in the hope that something of it would stick. It is to God's, my families', my attorneys', and the Court's credits that, after many long months, it did not; I often wonder how many such injustices prevail because the innocent party does not have the support or wherewithal to defend, but I'll bypass that rabbit trail for today.
For a while after my final separation I was still in a defensive posture: with social services for a while, and then only with the court, then in the midst of final negotiations, and finally in the back-and-forth of legal arrangements. And then I was free, more or less. But I was still, in retrospect, holding my breath. For almost two decades I held my breath because I couldn't make a sound, lest I risk stirring up the evil that eventually beset us anyway. For another four years I kept on holding it, not even realizing I ought to breathe! Then one day last year, something snapped, and I gulped down a breath for the first time in a very long time.
I have looked back, but I do not know what particular day it was that I took that first gasp - sometime in mid-October I noticed that I was breathing, anyway. Breathing: the oxygen flooded my blood and so many things were happening at once. God restored the joy of my salvation, I don't know how else to put that. I was rejuvenated in my work for the church. I was reminded, in ways too obvious to overlook, that I am a steward of God's resources, and that I need to both take care of and be generous with them. A job lost, a job gained, plus stability: God's prevenient provision. A jarring revival of emotions that I thought were long gone: I cried, I cared, I hoped and thrilled and reveled and swooned; I felt them all, I loved and hated them all. A renewed commitment to prayer and fasting and fellowship. A zeal to write, a thirst for the learning of my forebears, a brightness to the scriptures and to art. I can't say I handled all these well, and I am still working through every one of them, but life doesn't always get it right - I am restored to life and right now I'm just remembering to worship with my next, ever-so-slightly-deeper breath.
I have called these past few months "waking up" in a few conversations, and maybe I'll keep on waking up for a long time yet - I wonder how much more there is that I just don't yet know, or have forgotten I knew. It really does feel like important parts of me were dormant for those years of my marriage, that while I was so intensely focused on survival I entirely lost the thread of life. I can't attribute my recent and continual resurrection to anything other than the work of the Spirit, and in October or November I bounced over to Ezekiel 37 - and then the rest of Ezekiel - to see if I could get any more insight into exactly what happened, though I don't find myself particularly wiser yet. Because of the temporal position I don't think that Ezekiel would have understood the winds and breath as "the Spirit," but the story nicely dovetails Jesus' discussion of the latter in John 3, and certainly in my case I don't have any other description for it - blowing wherever it chooses, not knowing where it started or where it is going, but nonetheless having an obvious effect. I love to know where I am going, and I love to know why things are, but I am learning to love that sometimes I have no idea! And as long as I am still breathing, it is okay - I am still stumbling out of my grave, but by grace maybe I will eventually make it all the way home. Take a breath, feel your bones, and know that God has made you to live.
That's the end of the thing, but since marriage came up I'm going to post script. Marriage is a union of equally-important individual helpers suitable for each other, as it was established right at the beginning; it that's your marriage that's great, get off the Internet and help people! But if your marriage is not that then it is already corrupted into something else. If you are playing doormat that is absolutely a bad thing, it is not Biblical, your children will not thank you, and it ends in destruction. Let my experience be the counter-example to the "God hates divorce" crowd - yes, God hates that the marriage was corrupted, but it was corrupted well before the first time the Department of Social Services took my children away and well before the judge signed the final orders - the contract is binding on both parties, and both parties have to uphold it in integrity. I'm not suggesting to cut and run at the first error or sign of difficulty, but remember that God made the whole you - emotions, thoughts, intelligence and all - and if you are having to completely wall them off for the sake of "unilateral compromise" (yes that is a real thing I used to say, a mere half-decade ago) then you are dishonoring God. I am not a counselor; go find one, frankly spill your guts, then listen to what they say and engage with them, even if they have a different set of personal values they will respect yours. And I recognize, that at no point in my marriage, would I have heeded the advice I have just given, but for my children's sakes I really wish I would have done - so if you are as hard-headed as me then maybe think about it for a minute before you just say "but it's okay for me, I can handle it" and close it off. At the very least, and I say this to anyone about anything, pray pray pray.
* Hat tip to my covert science instructors Garfunkel and Oates for that little tidbit. They are hilarious and brilliant but very often vulgar, including this particular song; you have been warned!
** Yes I saw that too, but rather than edit it I am going to leave it as a warning from my healing subconscious. If you are in a marriage and the other party is the owner, you are actually not in marriage but slavery - see postscript, talk with your pastor or counselor. There is help, and sometimes marriages can come back - other times they can't, and either way there's less collateral damage if you just deal with it rather than trying to wait it out. At the beginning of the end of my marriage I kept telling my kids "truth will out" (Shakespeare, not Jesus); there were times I was not sure I would see it in this life, but eventually those wheels did grind sufficiently fine, and - thanks be to God - it has freed me for joy-full obedience. If it helps, let my experience be both the warning and the hope.