Darrell Cook, the BCM director at Virginia Tech, walked me through the campus on the day students returned to classes. Obviously, the students looked dazed as if living in a surreal world starving for normalcy again. You could hear the haunting sadness in each human voice like a groaning from someplace terribly dark. My eyes couldn't penetrate to the awful place where the groans were coming from. But there was no mistake what general direction the voice came from – the voice rose from someplace underneath; from someplace darkly cavernous – underground in the soul, underwater almost – the voice was moaning. It was Psalm 130 all over again, whose words also rose up from that very dark, very low place: “Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.”
When people cry to God “from out of the depths,” where might they be crying from? At Tech there was no shortage of deep places from which their groanings rose to God. There was the deep of death itself that claimed 33 classmates into the dark of the grave. There was that depth of despair — and to live in profound grief is to live in a chasm, a very dark and deep place. Mental anguish of any kind can feel like an abyss. Think of how we use the word “depression” for a psychological state. Depression literally means a pushed-down place, a pit – to cry from there is to cry from the depths.
Not everyone cast down in the depths can manage a cry. One feature of living in a low place is the loss of your voice. Why call out from down there? You're buried, smothered. No one can hear you, what's the point? You have fallen beneath the sunny space where people get to have a voice.
In talking with some of the students at Tech and certainly listening to them as they have been interviewed by reporters reminded me that some of us can't find our true voices till we reach the depths. It turns out that when we occupy sunny space, when things are going easily for us, our lives have a way of not saying much that matters. What we had judged to be living at the top turns out to be just occupying the shallows. It's the depths, depths of suffering, depths of outrage, depths of doubt, depths of love that brings out lives at last into real speech. The depths may well be our surest places of contact with God. God is, as they say, everywhere; but according to Psalm 130 the surest place to find God is in the depths and that is good news. Perhaps to find ourselves there is to find ourselves able at last to cry to God.
This is a concern not only for the students at Tech but for all of us because the problem is so huge. It lays us low to realize how damaged our world is and how impossible it is to make things right, how hopeless it is to make even ourselves really right. We glimpse into the human problem and we cry out with the students. The world is broken. We are broken. And none of us can put the pieces back together again.
To this reality, the psalmist, still crying from the depths, speaks a hopeful word. Grace, he says. There is grace with the Lord. How does grace really change anything? We're careening along in our messed-up world, our own off-kilter lives, and here come this word, “grace.” What are we supposed to do with it?
The first fact of new life is God's grace changes everything. It is not we who change the world ourselves. It is not up to us to fix everything that has gone so wrong. It is not our job to pull ourselves out of the depths. Instead, out of the depths we cry to God. We cry to God our despair, our grief, our loneliness, our desolation, our rage and the word that comes back is “grace.” The word that comes back is “release.”
With God there is release from this completely unmanageable, intractable, infinitely layered problem of our human condition. Grace doesn't mean that everything is okay. It means our problem is shared by larger shoulders than our own. It means God is with us, even in the depths of the mess. It means a whole new kind of life is possible, one that doesn't depend on our ability to manage things, or on our ability to fix our world, but on God's grace alone.
To cry out of the depths, believing that God hears our despair, has been the students at Tech's greatest gift to us during this crisis because is has been the first act of hope. They cry not just for themselves but for all of us: for how we damage ourselves and each other, for how impossible it is to make things right, for the brokenness of our whole sad world. But in the end they gave us not a lament but a praise in their “Hokie Chant” because many discovered in that dark place there is One who stands over all our mess, not just in judgment but in love. And what rains down is grace, forgiveness, and release. Now that is hope, even in the depths.