'I thirst' by Aimee Sylvester [Retrieve Lament 2021]
Today’s guest is someone I’ve had the privilege of knowing for a brief time in Austin and now more closely even though we both moved to parts of the country. Aimee’s commitment to living out her relationship with God and others with an authentic, unconditional love shines through her painful lament today. I see the image of God, the father of the prodigal, in Aimee’s tenacious desire for reconciliation and wholeness. May God refresh and comfort us all in every part of our lives parched with unresolved grief and unmet offers of reconciliation
Would you read Aimee’s lament story with me, and ask God for an open heart to hear any words Christ might be speaking to you?
My Dad and I ( I'm close to my son's age here).
“After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), ‘I thirst.’ A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth.”
A Long Grief In The Same Direction
by Aimee Sylvester
I think about the epigenetics of trauma a lot now as a new mom, the sins of the father, all the griefs that pile up over a lifetime in all our lives like one million tiny paper cuts, and sometimes more like seismic shifts. This last year has felt unbearable to so many of us. It has felt like one long collision and hanging on for dear life to the promise of something better just around the corner. For me, it’s been a season that has reopened deep wounds around who I am, where I come from and questioning what I’ll pass on to my son.
I grew up in the south in the ’80s where physical punishment was still the norm. My Dad was a “functioning” alcoholic and discipline was often fueled by anger and failure to regulate his own emotions. I remember staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom after a particularly violent whipping with his back scratcher praying for God to come and take me away somehow, to transplant me into another reality. My desire to escape my body in those moments felt like such a strong force that surely God would have to answer and perform a miracle. My family wasn’t religious but I did attend Sunday school occasionally with a close friend. I heard that Jesus loved and knew me, but I didn’t know Him and he didn’t make a very big splash since nothing ever seemed to come of my prayers.
Pinning a corsage on my Dad at a girl scout event.
I also remember thinking that real abuse was cigarette burns and black eyes, yet knowing the way we lived was just not right. Thank God for my mother, her steady continuity and nurturing of my younger sister and me was a saving grace. She was enduring a hell of her own with my Dad’s abuse and many a night she packed us all up for a sleepover with family. I didn’t know about the time he backhanded her so hard they had to cancel plans to attend a family wedding. He’d burst a blood vessel in my mom’s eye and she wouldn’t be able to explain it away. Nor do I remember him pushing her over backward onto the open dishwasher while she was pregnant.
I do remember he told us we should be horsewhipped when we didn’t do the dishes to his standards or clean our rooms, and later he called me the “n” word when my car was messy. I can remember way too many violent whippings, him chasing me, a time where he grabbed me by the hair to catch me, and another time he threw me out the front door and locked it the night before high school graduation. There are good memories with him too; he built us a treehouse, let us drive on his lap on country roads in Texas, and toured us around his construction job sites. But I don’t have a ton of explicit memories with him because it was always me, my mom, and my sister, and trauma swallowed up a lot of memories too.
Our family at my Aunt's wedding.
This legacy of abuse and emotional neglect goes back at least a few generations. My grandfather once left my dad in the dark waiting under the bleachers on a little league field because he'd forgotten him on a night out drinking. He threw my dad out at 18 for exposing his affair with a flight attendant to my grandmother. I know where some of my Dad's pain and anger come from, sometimes that softens me towards him, though most of the time that pain just feels like an unshakeable curse.
More disturbing than being chased down like an animal or verbally humiliated is the lack of a trusting, warm connection with him. I long with all my heart to be in a place of tenderness with him. He tried to harden us off to our feelings because he thought that's how you survive the world. If we cried or expressed fear he became furious and threatened to give us something to cry about, and if we showed anger we were punished. I'm not sure where it originates but there is a strong vein of misogyny in his family that always made me wonder if he'd have loved me more if I were born a boy. He's antagonized most of the women in his life and now his second marriage hangs in the balance.
I was a deeply feeling kid, pensive and empathic. I chose to live with him during my teen years, after my parents' divorce. I was afraid for him to be alone, fearing the darkness would swallow him whole. Also, this way I could do whatever I wanted to for the most part. So I threw fantastic parties and started getting drunk with my friends or anyone who showed up, which often included my dad, his friends, and girlfriends. He lost his license and made me drive him to his DUI classes, a hung-over and mean passenger. He got me my first job at the golf course and bar he haunted so that I'd become self-sufficient and his taxi driver in one fell swoop. How’s the saying go “if you can't beat them join them"? So, for my high school years, I joined him in trying to outrun my feelings, but I’m just not wired that way and anger turned inward led me into two years of intense depression. Now I can see the huge role that my circumstances played in my collapse, but at the time I partly accepted that this was my fault, my brain must be to blame, or I was just too delicate (insert hysterical female trope here). I allowed my family to misname me as "kind of crazy". Now I know it felt unstable because it was unstable, but I was not inherently unstable.
Soulfull Shade by Aimee Sylvester, 2008
I went on to study Psychology at my dream college, absorbed loads of self-help, had thousands of hours of counseling, practiced art-making as therapy, studied Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zen, found meditation, and finally landed at the feet of Jesus. At last in my thirties, I’d found a community of people who told me that my sincerity was not Pollyanna and that my sensitivity was a strength or even a gift. These people were different and I felt the stirrings of truth and safety in my life like never before. When I started following Jesus I somehow thought I would finally be protected from pain. I subconsciously thought this might be the key I needed to unlock a door into my father's heart, healing us both and bringing repentance and reconciliation. It's been seven years now seeking God's face and there have been many other heavy losses. My Dad remains unhealed, verbally abusive, corrosive, and unable to respect boundaries. He still thinks I take things too seriously today because I'm sober, care about things like racism, kindness, grief, and truth.
Living with my Dad’s disease has meant living with continuous grief that waxes and wanes, and sometimes makes all the other griefs along the way feel very extra and unfair. It's brought the ashes and dust of Lent into severe focus day after day because the grave is never far away. Often I find it very difficult to lean wholeheartedly into the hope that Jesus promises, and even harder to lean into submission to God as an act of worship. That biblical word is very hard for me. When the person entrusted with the most power over your young life teaches the total opposite of resurrection it can be hard to hear about how the war has already been won. I live very squarely in the not-yet-ness of the kingdom, as my hope for a fully healed relationship seems permanently shelved. Will God ask me to wait until the afterlife to mend this? Why?
Christ experienced trauma, and He never tries to dress that up; I resonate with His exhausted two-word prayer "I thirst". The precious ones in Christ's family who encourage me to re-name myself have shown me that my feelings weren't designed to be brushed aside or toughed out, they can be invitations to hearing God more clearly. My angry impatient wrestling with God will never drive Him away; somehow it makes Him move in closer. All this time I thought God wasn’t talking because I'd learned not to trust my inner landscape, but slowly, He’s calling me deeper into the gifts he gave me as a child. I know I'll fall short as a parent as we all do, still, I pray I can show my son a different kind of strength, gentle and lowly. I'm starting to perceive God as bigger, wilder, more oceanic, and more available to us all than we think. This grief is linear with a predictable course much like my Dad's disease, yet God the artist is outside of time always transforming, rebuilding, renewing, and restoring. Somehow both of these realities are holy and true.
Aimee lives with her husband Jeffrey, two-year-old son Atley, their labradoodle “Choo choo”, and three chickens in the mountains of West North Carolina. She’s a gardner, an artist, a baker, and most recently a community organizer passionate about food security and racial justice. The name Aimee means “beloved” and she’s beyond grateful that in God there is no misnaming.
Read and Pray
The Fifth Word: I thirst. (Sitio.)
As the deer longs for the waterbrooks,*
so longs my soul for you, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God;*
when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
While my bones are being broken,*
my enemies mock me to my face;
All day long they mock me*
and say to me, “Where now is your God?”
--Psalm 42:1-2, 12-13
Reproach has broken my heart, and it cannot be healed;*
I looked for sympathy, but there was none,
for comforters but I could find no one.
They gave me gall to eat,*
and when I was thirsty, they gave me vinegar to drink.
--Psalm 69:22-23
O my people, what have I done unto thee?
Or wherein have I wearied thee?
Testify against me….
What more could I have done for thee that I have not done?
I indeed did plant thee, O my vineyard, with exceeding fair fruit:
and thou art become very bitter unto me:
for vinegar mingled with gall, thou gavest me when thirsty:
and hast pierced with a spear the side of thy Saviour.
Holy God,
Holy Mighty,
Holy Immortal, have mercy upon us.
--The Solemn Reproaches of Good Friday
After this Jesus, knowing that all was now accomplished, to fulfill the scripture said, “I thirst.” [John 19:28]
O Lord, we thank you for what you suffered on the cross. Thank you for lowering yourself to the weakness of something as human as the parched lips of a dying man. We don’t fully understand how it works, your submission to the Father in this cup of suffering, but we know that our entire lives depended on it. Thank you for enduring the cross.
Dear Lord, in your words and in Aimee’s words “I am thirsty” we hear the cries of our own heart. We too are thirsty, Lord. Too many times, we’ve made our needs known and have been given sour wine instead of life-giving water. We long for every soured relationship to refreshed and made alive again - including our relationship with you, our good Father. We need to be refreshed by your living water. We yearn for your Spirit to fill us once again with the hope that all shall be well.
We are thirsty, Lord, for you. Amen.