“WHY IS IT, when we talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to us, we call it schizophrenia?”
That quip by Lily Tomlin has taken on many layers of meaning for me since 1986, the year we learned our seven-year-old son Joel had Tourette’s Syndrome.
We noticed it first when he started playing soccer. At practice and during games, if the action was elsewhere on the field, he would stand at his position and look directly at the sun. It was painful to his eyes, and we had warned him repeatedly that it could damage them permanently, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Then came other things he didn’t seem to be able to control: blinking of the eyes, facial and body tics, contortions, jerks, ritual movements, random vocalizations, barking sounds, repeated clearing of the throat; and for a while the barely suppressed urge to touch the burner on the stove when it was hot.
What have I done?
Having no name for what we were witnessing, we were scared and perplexed. As I watched Joel struggle, I struggled with guilt. I wondered: Is it something I’ve done to him? Of all our kids, Joel was the one I had most often lost my temper with. Like his dad, he could be maddeningly bull-headed and combative. He was articulate beyond his years, and his words were often piercing and inflammatory. Words have great power in our household. I had frequently reacted to his words with words of my own. Over and over, in minute detail, I replayed mentally every confrontation we had ever had. Guilt and remorse pounded me like heavy surf.
Joel was scared, too. One night as Lauretta was tucking him into his bed, saying evening prayers, he spoke in the darkness, haltingly: “Mom, you know the things I do? … I know I’m not doing them.… I know Jesus wouldn’t make me do them.…” The sentence trailed off before he spoke the alternative to Jesus and himself. When she told me what he said, we held each other in quiet terror and slipped to our knees in the living room to pray.
The moment I closed my eyes I saw, as in a vision, a large coiled python, its head resting on its giant body, its cold remorseless eyes staring. It seemed to me to be wrapped around my throat and my little boy’s soul.
The worst came when I was away on a three-day prayer retreat at a desert monastery near Los Angeles. I telephoned home one evening and listened as Lauretta recounted an episode Joel had had that day with what we were later to learn was coprolalia, the obsessive repetition of obscenities. The obscenity in question was the f-word. Joel was a very moralistic child and was stricken as he whispered involuntarily, over and over, a word he loathed.
She had handled it marvelously. Taking him into the backyard she sat with him in a swing and said, “OK, let’s say it out loud.”
Joel was incredulous: “I can’t say that awful word out loud.”
“Well, can you quack it, like a duck?”
Joel has been blessed with an impish, zany sense of humor. Her suggestion was all he needed. So mother and child sat in the porch swing quacking the f-word—but not so loud that the neighbors or his siblings could hear. Then they mooed it like a cow. Then they clucked it like a chicken and crowed it like a rooster and whinnied it like a horse. Their laughter was tentative at first, then explosive. The obsession dissolved into hilarity. What a woman I married!
Holy display
But as we talked that night in the darkness—she alone at home with the kids, I in a phone booth in the desert—the weight of the day’s fear was heavy on us. Normally nothing keeps me from sleep but the lack of opportunity. I lay awake for a long time that night, and awakened often after I finally fell asleep. The questions and accusations coiled tightly around my heart: What have I done to my boy?
A prayer for God’s mercy could barely be formed in my mind, much less pass through my lips. I got up early the next day, dressed, and walked the stations of the cross at the monastery where I was staying. At each station, through tears, I thanked God that the blood of his Son, the blood of the atonement, had paid for all my sins, including what I may have done to my son.
I got back to my room twenty minutes before breakfast and sat down to read Scripture before I went to the dining hall. When I had left home, I had impulsively grabbed a devotional book off my library shelf and put it in my bag. I hadn’t used it for more than a year. It was sitting on the table beside my bed that morning, so I picked it up and opened it to the readings for that particular day. The Scripture for the day was John 9. The first three verses read: “As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ “
I knew that kind of question well. I had been asking it daily, with the tentative answer, “His parents.” What I had not yet considered was Jesus’ answer: ” ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.’ “
An extraordinary coincidence? That on the day I was struggling as I was, the day’s reading should be that? You’ll never convince me chat it was.
The tears came again, but now freely, joyfully. It was neither my sin nor his, but God, in his mysterious providence, doing a greater work. The coils disappeared; no more cold, remorseless eyes, but the face of the Father. God spoke, and everything that has followed with Joel has confirmed what he said. It wasn’t about my sin, but the work of God, his glory, and our growth in holiness.
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our consciences, but shouts to us in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 1 I have often wondered about those words of C. S. Lewis. Whatever else they may mean, they have come to mean this to me: that when he speaks thus, it is to rouse us to wrestle with him, to enter into a dialogue with the living God.
Throwing down the gauntlet
It’s like the thing God does with Abraham when he announces what he plans to do to Sodom and Gomorrah. Knowing that Abraham had family in those cities, he throws down the gauntlet and says, in effect, “I’m going to destroy those cities and everyone in them, your nephew Lot and his family included. Now, what do you think of that, Abraham?”
Abraham lets him know what he thinks. He says, “How could you do such a thing? Shame on you, God! Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? … Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
Abraham is perplexed and bewildered at what he hears; so he expostulates and attacks. Then he bargains:
“What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?”
The Lord says, “If I find fifty good people there, I’ll spare the city.”
Moderating his pugnacity a bit, Abraham tries another angle: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city because of five (emphasis mine) people?”
Of course, it wasn’t because of five people that God was going to destroy the city. It was because of the whole city. Clever, Abe, but God isn’t fooled. He answers, “If I find forty-five good people there, I will not destroy it.”
Fighting more fairly, Abraham tests God’s love and justice with more questions: How about forty? Or thirty? Or twenty? Or ten? Each time God answers no, he will not destroy the city if that many righteous people can be found in it (Gen. 18:16-33, partial paraphrase).
If Abraham’s prayer is nothing else, it is candid. Actually, it’s more like chutzpah than candor. Once the dialogue begins, it can, and should, get that way. It took me a while. Ac first I was so devastated by what I saw in Joel, and so comforted that it wasn’t my fault, that I could only whimper my gratitude. Lauretta and I adjusted. It’s amazing how one can get used to what once seemed unbearable.
Then God kicked it up a notch one night.
Lauretta and I were having dinner with some members of our church. The husband was a male nurse working in a penitentiary. He was a good man whose skill as a chef almost offset his people skills. When, over dessert, we told him about our son’s disorder, he gaped at us and launched into a speech, the substance of which was, “Oh no, not that! Anything but that! You don’t want a son with Tourette’s. That’s horrible. No, it can’t be that. Let’s pray it isn’t Tourette’s.” Apparently he had seen some shocking cases in the penitentiary. We gaped, too. His wife glared at her husband.
On the way home that night, the food sat heavily in my stomach as we contemplated the possibility that our son’s disorder could get really nasty. I was mad. My prayers went from “What have I done?” to “What do you think you’re doing?” Enough was enough. I had learned a good lesson about faith, I didn’t need a Ph.D. I let God know how I felt. Of course he already knew before I spoke, so he wasn’t surprised or shocked at what I said. My estimation of his abilities and sensitivities didn’t seem to upset him, either. He knows I have flawed standards and a limited perspective. He doesn’t sweat the small stuff.
I read somewhere that the ability of a couple to express anger can do wonders for their sex life. It seems there can be no warm fuzzies without their opposite (cold pricklies?). Both anger and tenderness are forms of passion. So with prayer. God doesn’t mind our anger. He even relishes it, if it drives us to him instead of away from him. Better an outburst than a theologically correct and spiritually pallid rationale, and a dangling conversation. No wonder we can get so bored with prayer. God is bored, too. He wants to engage our hearts, not just our brains.
God can handle it
It was that way with Jeremiah. He got so exasperated with God and the terrible treatment God allowed him to suffer, that he virtually accused him of rape. “You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced; you have overpowered me: you were the stronger” (20:7new Jerusalem Bible). Jeremiah was wrong, of course. God had done nothing of the sort. But that is how Jeremiah feels about what is happening in his life. And God gives no rebuke for him feeling the way he feels.
Ron Davis, a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, was objecting to a newspaper story that quoted him as criticizing the team’s management for trading away some of their best players. He told reporters, “All I said was that the trades were stupid and dumb, and they took that and blew it way out of proportion.”2 We can speak our mind with God and not be afraid that he will blow things out of proportion. He already knows what’s inside. But we need to let it out for the dialogue to proceed.
If our faith in God cannot be bewildered and perplexed, we have domesticated him, and our faith is no longer in him, but in our religious systems. President Franklin Roosevelt was weary of the mindless small talk of White House receptions. Wondering if anyone was engaging in any real conversation, he conducted an experiment at a White House gathering. As he shook a hand and flashed that big smile he would say, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” With but one exception, the people would smile back and say something like, “You’re doing a great job” or “How lovely.” The exception was a foreign diplomat who responded quietly, “I’m sure she had it coming to her.” If we are not shocked from time to time by the things God says and does, we have not been listening. How many of our prayers are like White House reception small talk? Does God feel about them as President Roosevelt did about the reception chatter?
Sweet perplexity
Ah, perplexity! Bitter, sweet perplexity. G. Campbell Morgan said, “Faith is the answer to a question; and, therefore, is out of work when there is no question to ask.”3 Questions are critical to faith. How else could it be with a finite human being coming to understand and trust an infinite God? No perplexity, no questions. No questions, no faith. So the God who cannot be pleased unless there is faith (Heb. 11:6) puts questions to us. To use C. S. Lewis’s categories, sometimes he whispers them, sometimes he speaks them, and sometimes he shouts them. Through circumstances, he nudges us or draws us or jolts us into prayer. It may be that telephone call chat shatters or that letter that disturbs. It may be the hurtful words spoken by a spouse or a friend. Perhaps it is the loss of a job or the failure of health. Suddenly we are faced with something that challenges our deepest securities, knocks away all of our props or violates everything we ever believed to be true about God and his ways.
When these things happen, we can be sure of this: that whatever else we do not know, we can know that God has taken the initiative with us to pray. Seen from this perspective, the book of Job is a book about prayer, among other things.
Where do the questions of faith lead us? To greater faith. Abraham’s and Ben Patterson’s wrestling with God take them to the place where they discover God to be better than they had ever before imagined. Of Abraham’s wrestling, Morgan says, “God is not only better than our fears, he is better than our hopes, better than the very best we had dared to suppose. We stop at ten. God takes care of the one.… As Abraham’s mathematics decreased from fifty to ten, his faith increased inversely.”4 Jacob wrestles and becomes Israel, a new man. When Job wrestles, though he has not one of his questions answered, he says in the end that it is more than enough, that he is satisfied and fulfilled. For while before he had only heard about God, now he has seen him. To gain even a glimpse of the glory and goodness of God is reason enough to wrestle.
It’s true, you know. God’s glory is enough. I’ll never forget sitting in an evening service in my church and knowing this was true. It had been a tough year. I didn’t like being a pastor anymore, but couldn’t think of anything else I could do. The choir was performing a beautiful piece. This is hard to explain, and may sound a little weird to someone who has never had the experience, but in the beauty of the music I got a glimpse of God’s transcendent beauty and goodness, just for a moment. It was like a spear of longing and delight had pierced my heart. The ache was exquisite. My first thought was, Lord, you are enough. I’ll do this lousy job forever if you let me walk with you and get just a peek at you once in a while. There is no pain or perplexity so heavy that it outweighs his glory. And it would seem that both are necessary for us to see it.
Holy war
So God “loves that holy war,” writes P. T. Forsyth, using the image of two Greco-Roman wrestlers. “Cast yourself into his arms not to be caressed but to wrestle with him.… He may be too many for you, and lift you from your feet. But it will be to lift you from earth, and set you in the heavenly places which are theirs who fight the good fight and lay hold of God as their eternal life.”5
Did my wrestling end that morning in the monastery? No. Or after I recovered from the nurse’s speech? No. Has God become grander? Yes.
Joel, who is now a freshman in college, agrees. I asked him if I could write about him and our struggle. He looked at me with level gaze and said quietly, but emphatically, “Absolutely, Dad.” He is growing into an extraordinary young man. He has both physical health and an intuitive sense of things spiritual that set him apart; not in spite of his struggle but because of it. I don’t just love him, I admire him. I want to be like him when I grow up.
God’s grace has been sufficient in countless ways. After we got a diagnosis and the word got out in the church, we found on our doorstep one morning a list of names written into time slots. It was a sign-up of church members who would pray for Joel, at fifteen-minute intervals, every Tuesday, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. That happened for years. For several, it continues to the present day. What it meant for Joel and his spiritual development and for the church was incalculable. This side of eternity, we will never know its significance. All the sermons I preached on prayer did not have the effect on the prayer life of the church that Joel’s illness had. The pastor became the “pastored.” What a concept: Wrestle with God and you will always find him to be more than you bargained for.
Joel’s symptoms have been manageable ever since. Whenever I am tempted to say that he has a mild case of the syndrome, I am reminded of the fact that he has been much prayed for. I also know that Tourette’s Syndrome is often unpredictable, that it can wax and wane over time and that there is no absolute “trajectory” for the disorder. It can get worse or better, or better and worse over the years. Joel knows that, too. But God’s grace will also be sufficient over time. How will I know chat? By continuing to wrestle with him over whatever is ahead. There’s always more than you bargain for.
Last summer I spoke publicly of our struggle for the first time at a Christian conference center on the West Coast. The response was more than we bargained for. People opened their hearts to us. One dear woman had a son with a rather severe case of Tourette’s. She was so shamed and embarrassed by his tics that she had never even acknowledged them to her best friend—a woman she met with in her home several times a week and who could not have been unaware that something was amiss with the child. There they were, close friends but closed off to each other. What had that meant to her relationship with God? It was a tender joy to see the fear and tension leave her face as she spoke with my wife.
Other things were set in motion by this perplexity. We know that moderate use of alcohol is probably not a realistic option for Joel, given the prevalence of obsessive-compulsive behavior among people with Tourette’s. As a result of this, I began to ponder whether I should even keep alcoholic beverages in the house. It took a lot of pondering, since nobody enjoys a beer more than I do. The pondering became wrestling when I began to think about my own use of alcohol. It dawned on me that I planned my days around the beer I would have when I came home from work. Around two in the afternoon I would begin to wonder if we had any beer in the refrigerator. Should I stop and pick up some on the way home? And when I got home I had to admit that I really didn’t want to talk to anyone until I opened a beer and had my “quiet time” with my cold little friend. I wasn’t drinking to excess in terms of volume, but I was in terms of interest. Compulsive, addictive? Perhaps. In any case, I am now a teetotaler, and life has become so much simpler. All because of the wrestling with God over Joel. Again, more than I bargained for.
The best has been the laughter
The best has been the laughter. When we were first confronted with Tourette’s, we never dreamed laughter would come, but it has. We have sat around the dinner table and laughed with Joel about the weird and often funny things that can happen to someone with Tourette’s. The episode with the f-word was the antecedent. Like many with the disorder, Joel is extremely bright, creative, and blessed with a zany, rapid-fire Robin Williams kind of wit. He has said, only half-jokingly, that he thinks those with Tourette’s are one step above, on the evolutionary ladder, those who are normal. I’m not willing to go that far. But hey, gratitude for God’s grace should make us a little excessive in our judgments.
Are we crazy?
Lily Tomlin’s crack about prayer and schizophrenia is probably accurate as it applies to the way many in our culture and in the church think about such things. I admit that I have even wondered out loud, Is that really you. God? Or just my wishful thinking? Unlike some theological points, questions like this rarely have a neat answer. But I’ve come to believe that God is not nearly as fastidious in matters of faith as we may like him to be, and that when faith moves mountains, there is bound to be rubble.
Earlier in my Christian experience, I was afraid to name something as the voice of God for fear I might be wrong and look dumb. Then it occurred to me that I was probably missing a lot because of my fear of how I might look. Which was worse—to always look cool and rational but risk missing the voice of God? Or to risk looking a little credulous and crazy once in a while, but hear God, at least more often than I had been? I’ve opted for the latter. Call it prayer and schizophrenia if you will, but I think trying to look cool was something we were supposed to have given up in junior high. Peter Marshall observed, “It is a fact of Christian experience that life is a series of troughs and peaks. In his efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, God relies more on the troughs than on the peaks. And some of his special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.”6
Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and Paul—all great and very special wrestlers—would agree. It makes me feel kind of special, too.
Copyright © 1998 Ben Patterson
Quoted by Edythe Draper in Draper’s Book of Quotations for the Christian World (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 1992), No. 8257.
Quoted in Parables, Etc., Dec. 1982, 7.
G. Campbell Morgan, Twenty-Six Sermons (Joplin, Mo.: College Press, 1969), 73.
P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer (London: Independent Press, LTD., 1954), 92.
