Nine hours with my friend, Mark (2)
Why does Mark’s story intrigue me? Why do I feel the need to parse this out, to interpret it? I wouldn’t do this for many people. I’m saddened when I hear of suicides, but I do not often rush to find out the reasons, the source, the stories. I let others do that. But this one is different. Mark was (is) my friend. But more than that… I feel a familiarity with him and his journey, his spiritual struggle, his creativity, his desire for people to see and experience the love and glory of God with the whole self, unafraid. He compels me in some ways because in hearing him, I see something of myself. I’m interested in getting into his world as he’s laid it out, to go the brink, to see if suicide can make any sense, and see, if I was in the same position, what word or person or anything I would need to pull me back from the brink.
Would I have an answer? This overlaps into our ministry at Soulation. We get into other people’s shoes to evaluate the real pebble in their shoe, which is often more than what someone is saying. I’m an apologist, among other things, and these kinds of dilemmas need more than textbook answers and impersonal lists of rebuttals. Doctrines are not merely at stake in the world, but souls in God’s image seeking after a God who seems to them too easily hidden.
Repairing the world. That’s the Jewish idea. And our faith is a Jewish one. It is what we are to do. In Mark’s last sermon at Elevate (where he was co-founder and pastor and returned to speak a couple more times–at least recorded and available), he spoke of this Jewish idea. And the only way we can bring heaven into other’s lives is by knowing the hell they are in at the moment. Cures are only available when the sickness has been properly identified.
Some simply cannot understand this approach. They want it all clear and simple and on the surface. Life isn’t like that. In books it often is, and in sermons. But on the street… only the complexity of suffering on the Cross can give us access on what it means to endure evil to the bitter end and to be that guy next to Jesus who simply says, “I deserve nothing” as Jesus loves him.
My hair stylist friend asked me this question yesterday: Why are you doing this? I was having a melancholy day. And if you cannot speak to your stylist, get a new one. That’s what they are their for. Doing hair is incidental.
I had someone write me that they could see themselves in a situation like Mark’s… reacting similarly if not for certain events that pulled them back.
I read another open letter about Mark, letting people know to look to the past Mark and not the present one. To look to the Message as unattained by the messenger. I’m sure this helps some. But why does this rub me the wrong way? Because I believe it too easily dismisses what Mark is saying, it keeps us from listening to what he has to tell us, if anything.
On his 1000 Days website, Mark lists his four values: truth, beauty, justice, community. After piecing things together, I discovered these are the values that originated at Elevate when he co-founded it. After Sarah died, Mark got inked in a beautiful full-sleeve Japanese-style tattoo, filled with symbols. He included the four values in Japanese. And on his trip to Agra, India, during his 1000 Days, he mentions practicing three of the four values while he was there.
Mark seemed to hold to them, to the end, perhaps clinging with the tips of his fingers, like a drowning man. But why was he drowning?
I suspected abuse in his past. A friend told me that Mark had spoken of that before. Yesterday I found that Mark is explicit about it in this talk, five months after Sarah fell. She’s on stage with him, offering support. Sarah’s fall tipped the first domino that he never recovered from. He doesn’t mention the relationship, but he has a music video of a series of cause, starting with actual dominos, that spans the length of the video, one little thing after another, banging and bashing around a warehouse. Maybe that’s the metaphor of Mark’s darkness.
Abuse does something to you when you are a child. And it does something to you as an adult. Suffer enough of it and it will twist your soul, lead you to believe what is untrue about the world, about yourself.
I wonder if this is why the Mark that I knew was often conflicted. He’d lie and then confess. He wanted people to think a certain way about him to avoid rejection. He was larger than life to make friends. He loved fun and his humor often caught me breathless with laughter.
Halfway through our college years, he shifted, becoming a “spiritual” leader. I believe he was really hunting for God, but he played into the fundamentalist trap of his youth, the trap that brings approval from family but leave you dishonest and hollow. He said to understand his upbringing, to read Frank Shaeffer’s book, “Sex, Mom and God.“I know many who fell hard away from God after going through fundamentalism. That is often a pack of spiritual abuse, which twists your soul, just as any abuse. And it distorts your view of God and yourself and how you think God thinks about you so that you end up seeking after a God who is very different than the one in the Bible. The abuse is so blinding because the Bible itself is used to perpetuate the abuse… you cannot go to the Bible as a defense for you interpret the text as the abusers taught.
It was later that Mark discovered that God loved him and he called that day the most important of his life. He posts Kim Walker’s moving rendition of “How He Loves Us” so we can feel it press against our chests. Prior to knowing God’s love, it was an unpracticed doctrine. It’s a doctrine to exploit and fear in fundamentalist circles.
But the real Mark, under that, was sincere. At least I believe so. That’s why we were friends, we connected on things that cannot be faked. I listened and shared the message of Rich Mullins often in our college years and one of Mark’s friends said he was unsure if Mark paid attention to Rich before knowing me. I was tickled to find that the very last post on Mark’s 1000 Days blog was a video about Rich Mullins being Mark’s most spiritually influential figure.
On one occasion, Mark had an opportunity to pray in college chapel, one of the few times in all of campus experience that a student got to speak in front of the student body without a pre-approved script. Mark came to me and asked what I would pray. He wanted to make an impact with that small opportunity and get it right. After a while, I told him that I’d pray that God would distract us with himself during chapel that day. It was a play on words… we are supposed to think of other things as the distraction away from God.
The next morning in chapel, Mark prayed. And he prayed this very thing, “God, we ask that you would distract us with yourself today.” My eyes popped open and I smiled down from the balcony, across a sea of heads, down at Mark praying in earnest. I looked around at 3,500 students to see if anyone was paying attention, to see if anyone was distracted from the suffocating routine of spiritual puppetry.
Through those years and beyond Mark touched many. He was gifted at bringing you close. I’m guessing that was the start of his doing ministry in a way that he owned it for himself, beginning to risk following Jesus beyond the establishment. Perhaps he had to become a fundamentalist, to start with what he knew, in order to climb out of it.
In his last sermon at Elevate, he spoke about the history of fundamentalism as a movement of excuses and hiding.
Yeah, he had climbed out of it, seeing it for what it was.
After college, I had heard rumors that Mark had become “charismatic” (which is next to become a devil, when you are in fundamentalist circles). But Mark was exploring and expanding. And he was willing to throw all his passion into whatever he did. I also heard he had speed bumps along the way, but I’ve details too few and sparse to piece that together. But I’m sure it was deeply felt, whatever the struggle, whatever the choice.
Part of that passion was a drama… almost as if he was watching himself in a play. It was that way in college. And now piecing more together, I see it was that way afterwards. He knew how to draw a crowd, to listen to people, to be liked by them. Even at the end, in his 1000 Days blog, he set another stage for his departure. He was a public guy and wanted it that way.
I think all the staging stemmed from living in unexamined beliefs from the abuse of the past. In his talk I linked above, he mentions these deep-seated issues that a therapist helped draw out of him. He says he was unaware of the damage of his childhood.
The abused often take responsibility for things that are not theirs to take. Guilt piles on guilt. The victim ends up blaming himself. And I can imagine the victim is trying a myriad of ways to make up for it.
Perhaps that’s why his life was a stage. Perhaps that’s why when Sarah fell, he took so much guilt upon himself. You can hear it in his voice. With his background, that’s how you are supposed to respond. And he was undone.
And when she died… just imagine…
My wife told some of Mark’s story to our therapist yesterday, to recap our week. Our therapist said it sounded like PTSD. Sure enough, Mark was indeed diagnosed with PTSD. Read about it. Many heal from it. Some do not.
Then mix these ingredients together: physical and spiritual abuse as a child, added spiritual abuse from a rigid institution, causing the fall and death of his beloved… how would you respond to this cocktail of difficulty? That may explain his hollow eyes in his “intro” video, staring at the camera, as a shell whose spirit had already departed.
I’ve felt like a shell before, with meaning sucked from life.
And if you’ve never suffered abuse as a child and spiritual abuse at the hands of “men of God” then you will never know what this is like and you will lack the sympathy to enter in and have compassion. I know the toll spiritual abuse can play on your soul. I’ve had my dark nights. And while some people do not take my warnings about this kind of abuse seriously enough (some who are still trapped in it themselves), I must say, emphatically, that for some, it is a life and death issue. Nothing short of that. How many more lives must be destroyed before we wake up and rebuke the devilishness in our midst?
I can imagine that the only tangible kind of love Mark could find was in romantic love with women. And we see that during his 1000 Days. But I think those feelings were always there, based on his long history. It makes sense to me. It’s not an excuse, but it is a reason. And I believe the intensity of love he had for Sarah was, for him, a free, open door. If it was like the movie, The Notebook, he had something very special indeed, almost transcendent. After watching that movie, Sarah turned to him and said, “You are my Noah.” That can dampen the pain of a million hurts.
Perhaps I’m speaking too candidly or diagnosing where I have no right. Perhaps I have this all wrong. But I suspect that Sarah was for Mark as Beatrice was for Dante. All along, Dante was hunting after Beatrice, her beauty and meaning. And she kept lifting him higher and higher until at least, at the end, he discovered it wasn’t Beatrice he was after. It was God himself. She was the sunbeam to the sun. She was what Dante needed to see him for, she plucked his deepest desires and awakened them for the Great Lover. His longing for Beatrice was really his longings for God. And maybe that’s what Mark meant when he said in his final video that “Sarah was best.” He was chasing Beatrice…
Someone posted on Mark’s wall a poem by John Piper about the dangers of loving your wife too much. I gagged on several levels, not least of which the presumption that Mark’s struggles can be remotely solved in such a way.
In that, I think it is foolish to pass judgment too hastily on Mark’s final chapter. No matter how much you are seeking after God, a tsunami of life may overtake you. You may reach a point where you are not longer willing what you believe or what is happening to you. You just drift, as Mark once said, looking for yourself but unable to find it. You hear it in his 1000 Days song collections… a gnawing that the ache will not go away.
Is our theology big enough to let even the last remaining crumbs of our love for God to buoy us up into His arms?
Sitting in all of this, I failed at getting much work done yesterday. It gnawed at me. I felt deeply for Mark and I had no answer for him. I believe, in fact, that he tried every answer that I could give. I thought Mark was against therapy when I listened to his “explanation” video at the end. He called a therapist a “shrink” which is a derogatory word from outsiders. But he had gone to a therapist and worked with him gladly. He even noted that one of his favorite television programs was In Treatment. I put it on my DVD queue.
As I finished up my work the best I could, I clicked over to Mark’s videos again. Unawares, I had started his “explanation” video in the background, while I hunted for Damien Rice’s song, “Elephant” to play. Mark described himself as the ache in Damien’s voice. Go find the song and hear it.
As Damien began to sing, suddenly Mark’s voice came on in the background, telling his story. The pacing of the two audios was uncanny and haunting and tragic and surreal. Complete and moving sentences between stanzas. Art as Mark would have it, though coincidentally made. And I lost my composure, moving from my chair to listen and pace the kitchen in tears.
And that’s part of Mark’s message. Tears. He admits he was a feeler more than a thinker. And that’s a language most of us need to learn. And when we don’t take time to learn the language of feelings, which his final story is told in, we will miss the story altogether.
“I love a Jesus that cries,” Mark said in this sermon on suffering. Suffering Mark knew. Mark posted up the song by U2. “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” And before evaluating the song based on the title, go read the lyrics. The Kingdom hasn’t yet come. And long before he died, Mark struggled to find what he was looking for, a good God that seemed to delight in the suffering of his children, who allowed suffering from his childhood to the day he departed… a suffering Mark knew intimately before God, feeling abandoned often but hanging on.
September 2nd, 2011 at 10:20 am
Wow, Dale, so much of what you wrote echoed what I have been thinking and feeling.
Just this morning as I was getting ready for work, I was pondering why Mark’s death (and the death of another dear friend) had touched me so profoundly to where I am still dwelling on the deaths of each of these people.
Especially in the case of Mark…I feel like he spent so much time and effort leaving us the bits and pieces about his 1000 days, that we should give diligence to hearing him out.
I am grateful that I spent many hours on Mark’s site that night looking through everything. I didn’t get to watch all the videos, or listen to all of the songs, but I did read his comments on each one. I do wish the site were back up again, but I have enough to contemplate with what I did see (as well as what you have shared).
I am not quite ready to expound on all of what I am thinking and learning, but I am grateful to walk through this journey with others like you…
September 2nd, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Thank you, Dale.
” I believe he was really hunting for God, but he played into the fundamentalist trap of his youth, the trap that brings approval from family but leave you dishonest and hollow…. The abuse is so blinding because the Bible itself is used to perpetuate the abuse… you cannot go to the Bible as a defense for you interpret the text as the abusers taught.”
This post brings me courage to continue seeking healing despite the seeming impossible difficulties of it… It hits on two of my own biggest struggles while seeking freedom: fear of rejection from family and “leaders” and the unending shame I read into God’s word whenever I open it. I didn’t know this man at all. Yet, from your description, I see myself. I don’t know how it brings me hope (that seems paradoxical), but it does. Thank You.
September 4th, 2011 at 11:08 am
Marie, I am so very sorry. I can relate to the very thing you describe. I believe with all my heart that there is hope (as I’m walking proof, as are many others), but the journey has its darknesses and a growth into courage.
I wish we could gather you and others around these theme for a few days, to speak into each other’s lives and begin to rebuild a healthy perspective of the beauty of Scripture and the freedom to be unscathed in the rejection of “spiritual” criticism… Maybe that will be a future Soulation Gathering.
September 4th, 2011 at 6:58 pm
I like your vision for a Soulation Gathering. I would be interested. Reading the above post, I realized where the hope came from. The growth and freedom you now show serves as a glimpse of where God wants to bring me. I strongly believe that God puts desires for growth and freedom in my heart because he wants to help me achieve them, not just dangle them in front of my nose. Sometimes it seems too hard and difficult, but when I see others around me who are walking that path and beginning to have victory, it makes the trip seem shorter and more bearable.
September 4th, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Marie.. amen.
By the way, do you ever listen to Rich Mullins?
September 5th, 2011 at 10:43 am
Not really. I have never really given him a chance. There are a few more independent “christian” artists and post-christian artists I listen to now, but the rest I have willfully ignored. I will give him a try. (-:
September 5th, 2011 at 10:51 am
Marie,
Rich was the Bob Dylan of Christian world… powerful poetry from a guy who actually knew God. His “Songs” greatest hits album may be a good place to start. I love most of his work, but as a collection, my favorite album is “The World As Best As I Remember It, Vol 1.”
And if you want to ease in slowly, listen to “Awesome God” (which was his most popular but one of his own least favorite)…
September 5th, 2011 at 11:44 am
Very insightful, Dale. As others may not know, I knew both you and he separately in college, even though you two were friends together.
You gave a good explanation of what happens historically with abuse. I, heard him talk about this on May 24, 2008; however, others who knew him well, said this may not have been actual abuse, but a later diagnosis stemming from possible bitterness over what was actually “discipline (spanking) in love” (I’m hesitant to ask his brother Doug, as it really doesn’t concern me). Regardless, you are probably dead-on with your prognosis.
My other concern was due to the your viewpoint regarding “fundamentalism” and “Spiritual puppetry.” We both know it existed on several levels (everywhere–not just PCC); however, my viewpoint of Spiritual sincerity and growth may be quite different from yours based upon our different experiences. Not everyone needed to be distracted from God while at PCC, but I do get your point–just didn’t want you to think it was everybody who was Pharasetical (a minority from my perspective). As I understand it (I’m not into titles given by others), a “fundamentalist” is one who holds to the basic fundamentals of the Bible. If that is true, then being “fundamental” is a a good thing. Too many times, however, these people let their sin-natured humanity show through–especially through being judgemental. I know many Christians who claim to be “fundamental,” but few (if any) who claim to be a “fundamentalist.” It has acquired a negative connotation, that is often promoted by those who seem to enjoy attacking God’s Word, in fact. I prefer the term “pharasetical” or “hypocritical” for that reason. Some (unbelievers, mostly) would even label these people as “Christians”. Ouch!
Just my perspective. Incidentally, are you friends with Doug Rife? Have you discussed with him?
Enjoying your blogs!
September 26th, 2011 at 10:10 am
Eduel, I’ve spoken to Doug. Sadly, the abuse was very real and damaging.
As for being distracted by God, I think we all need that (and quite often).
And I don’t think all who attended PCC were Pharisees, but the system encouraged it… and it confused many. And many who didn’t want to be Pharisees ended up acting like it unawares (I had a lot of re-wiring to do myself after I departed).
And as for fundamentals… yes, historically, in the first decade of the 20th century (when the book was published by that title) had to do with the “fundamental” non-negoiatiables of the faith. However, it has morphed from that meaning.
Most who claim to be “fundamental” today are in a fundamentalist camp and do not realize all the import that the words “fundamental” means. Those outside the camp, can mean the same thing but use different words, like “essentials” of the faith or “following the historic creeds.”
As for being negative, it first developed a bad reputation from those trying to give God a good name… it was the “fundamentalists” in the late 40s that attacked Billy Graham for going out to engage others. Graham didn’t want to hurt the fundamentalists of which he was a part, but he saw a problem was growing that churches who claimed to be fundamental were also missing the bigger points. It had nothing to do with the fundamentals, but what extras that were later attached to the movement against liberalism (e.g. the doctrine of separation which breeds a new set of views and attitudes).
I’m not a fan of titles either, unless they are shortcuts to get at an issue. When people become identical to their titles, and cease to be thought of as humans behind their titles, it becomes a problem for me. We can all change our beliefs… and we want to update our views of others when they choose to change and grow.
Thanks for your reading, Eduel!
September 6th, 2011 at 8:22 am
I love what you say in this post. One of the things that stood out to me was the term you used “suffocating routine of spiritual puppetry.” I was never able to come up with a single phrase for what we experienced at college but you hit the nail on the head with that phrase! My life like so many others consisted of spiritual abuse. I was in no way physically abused, but the spiritual abuse that was day in and day out in our lives really does something to a person. It wasn’t about a relationship with God; it was about following rules of the Bible (legalism) and staying away from those didn’t (which was everyone). I was so sheltered (living in a bubble) at home that even while at college I could hardly make friends. Thankfully God still found me in the midst of this mess, and I did accept Him into my heart and life at age 15. And my family has come along way out of legalism. All this to say, one cannot discount spiritual abuse as abuse that will affect a person into their adult years. Mark obviously had this kind of abuse and look how it affected him. It affected him in a good way by allowing him to NOT cling to his upbringing but to be “charismatic” about Christ. Relationship NOT Rules. I love that! I too wish Mark had stayed with his godly friends who could have maybe helped him through this. And another question, where was his family in all of this? It seems to me that he chose to separate himself from them. I hear nothing about his family in his posts (but I wasn’t able to see the 1000 Day blog either). There had to be a reason for that. Unfortunately we can’t have all the answers, and we can’t help Mark now. But we can listen and learn…yet still not waiver from our own faith in God. I believe that Mark is in Heaven with Sarah…finally at peace.
September 26th, 2011 at 9:59 am
Jenny, I’m encouraged by your response… I’m glad it resonated.
As for Mark, it’s difficult to define a life and the motivations that run more deeply that, perhaps, even Mark was unaware of. I’ll be reflecting on that in an upcoming post.