Family Room: Interpretation Of An Artwork

Matt Lumpkin Dr. John Goldingay OT Writings February 19, 2008 Interpretation of "A Prayer in the ICU Family Room" This is intended to accompany the painting of a small group of people painted in black and white connected by luminous yellow and orange beams that coalesce into a pillar of fire amidst darkness. During the two years before I came to Fuller, I was a full-time hospital chaplain in Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition to teaching me a great deal about God, myself and people, this experience left me with quite a few intense experiences burned into my memory. My painting is an attempt to portray one of those experiences in such a way as to elucidate how my understanding of the event has been clarified by my study of the Psalms. The ICU Family Room It was a friday night and I had been paged by the hospital to come and minister to a family who was gathering in one of the small, "family rooms" provided for families of patients in great duress (often in critical care). I knocked and was invited into the room where I found several women whose conservative attire and hairstyle told me they were part of a pentecostal holiness church tradition quite common in rural Arkansas. Only the women were present and I spoke to the mother of the patient who was the eldest and most upset. Several of her other daughters and miscellaneous children were in and out of the room, but I focused my attention on the matriarch. She informed me that their minister was on his way but, wouldn't arrive for another forty-five minutes or so since they were from out of town and he hadn't been able to leave until he had gotten off work (suggesting his bi-vocational status). Nevertheless she thanked me for my presence. I made a mental note of the coming pastor's estimated time of arrival because it would effect whether or not they needed further care from me, and also because outside ministers sometimes cause more harm than good. At times it is because they are too emotionally involved with the family to care for them. Other times they are uncomfortable with the hospital and or death and compensate by trying to evoke some kind of preacherly persona. In addition, pentecostal pastors have been known to contradict physicians and insist that patients are not dying, will be healed miraculously or even brought back from the dead. When these things do not happen (and they usually don't) it can be devastating for the already fragile family. All of these reasons along with the bi-vocational status and likely lack of training pre-disposed me to regard this coming pastor as a liability rather than an asset. There was a tangible sense of dread and darkness looming in the room as they awaited updates from the nurses regarding the patient. I left to gather what information I could from the nurses and to let them know I was with the family. When I returned, more family and church family had arrived and the room was over-stuffed with thirty or forty people. The pastor was not yet there. The sisters introduced me to the rest of the family and we waited. As their numbers had grown, so had the unspoken sense of darkness, fear, dread and pain. We all sat, packed onto

Lumpkin 2 couches, crammed against walls, waiting, as the fear of this young woman's possible death crept into our minds like a shadow. When the pastor finally arrived, he was young (maybe a few years older than I) and thin, dressed in tight wrangler jeans and a clean shirt. He walked confidently and quietly to the back of the room and got the latest update from the eldest sister, while the mother looked on in tears. He seemed to think about what he had heard for a moment, then said, "Let's pray." Hands reached out to hands and shoulders and knees as the room knit itself together into a web of connection. There was silence. The Prayer In plain, country English, the pastor spoke to God. Slowly, deliberately he began to lay out what was happening. Using the first person plural, "we" he articulated the fear and pain that every person in that room who loved the sick woman in the ICU was feeling. He put words to the emotions that had tied them into knots and spoke out loud to God about thing they most feared: her death. He then spoke of how much he knew God had been active in her life. He made a case for God's intervention based upon the kids she would leave that needed their "momma," and the way her family all relied on her. He told God what they wanted to happen, humbly but directly. As he thanked God for His faithfulness, I felt the shadow of dread and fear begin to lift as though he had somehow drawn out those emotions from the people in the room and released them to God, like lancing a boil. But he wasn't finished. He raised his hand and began to speak in tongues. Slowly and calmly at first, but as others joined him the room seemed to jump as a new energy seized the gathered family. Words poured fourth in great cathartic, prayerful intensity as his prayer continued. It seemed that he somehow was focusing or channelling the emotion and prayer and longing of all those in the room through him, to God. In that moment I was profoundly humbled. This man who I had feared would cause harm, had come and led them in a prayer of lament that led into thanksgiving, that both bound them together as one and released them from the bondage of their great fear. The Psalms This experience has stuck with me because I felt it to be one of the most profound examples of pastoral prayer I have ever seen. And yet I wasn't sure exactly why it had worked so well. Partly it had to do with the relationship he had with the family, and also partly it had to do with the cathartic emotional power of prayer charismatic prayer. But it was more than that. After studying the Psalms and reflecting upon this experience I began to see the way his prayer carried some of the aspects of the lament Psalms (see especially 10; 60; 89:38-52). His articulation of the pain and suffering they were experiencing, especially the torment of immanent loss for the community, was probably one of the most important things he did. As Brueggemann suggests, the "verbalization" of the hurt, fear or pain is a crucial step in naming it and moving beyond it (Brueggemann, 1986, 58). No one among them except the pastor was willing or able to voice these fears and when he did so on their behalf, before God, they all breathed a deep sigh of relief. There. He had said it. The elephant in the middle of the room had been named. And it is that naming and describing of the pain and loss of the people, often (in the Psalms) in heartbreakingly poetic language speaks to the way the Psalms inform how I understand his prayer.

Lumpkin 3 But the profound illumination that his prayer brings to bear upon the Psalms is the palpable shock-wave of release this evokes from the people, the congregation, the gathered, wounded body on whose behalf these sorts of prayers are prayed. Further, the only way his prayer of trust, help and thanksgiving could have been received as anything but a world-denying piety was by first recognizing and articulating that pain. It was a necessary step in moving those people out of the shadow of fear into a trust that God was going to bring them through this hour of trial. Our reading of the Psalms is so often colored by our coming to them alone as readers over a text, it is easy to miss how this hits a group of people in deep need of this sort of prayer. Once I connected this experience to the sorts of powerful and communal prayers in the Psalms it began to effect how I read them as I imagined anguished audiences after the exile wrestling with their own pain, loss and identity. I began to understand the power of this sort of prayer to unite people of faith divided by fear, doubt and uncertainty. This sort of prayer does this by drawing these feelings out of people through the voice of the pray-er, giving permission and validation for them and enabling them to move into asking for things like healing or rescue from a place of relational honesty. I saw no luminous beams of fiery prayer joining together into a column of flame, burning through darkness and fear that day. But I would wager that I and everyone present that day, felt that the pastor's prayer had joined us all in a communion not possible simply by being present together. It was a communion enabled by the sort of prayer we find in the Psalms.

Works Cited: Brueggemann, Walter. “The Costly Loss of Lament.” Journal for the Study of the OT 36 (1986) 57-71.