Difficult Days

The last several days: very, very difficult.

At lunch, a friend sat down with someone new to me, someone who, as it turned out, lost her husband ten months ago. A midlife marriage, no children, deep closeness, and then ~ just over, she said.

We talked, a little.

I didn't have much to say. I was aware, in some vague place I hate, of how little of her experience I comprehend.

It's a place from which I recoil because it's the one in which I am aware of how profoundly alone we are.

I wandered through it a couple of weeks ago when Musical Friend, on the second anniversary of her husband's death, was challenged by someone else about how she had spent part of the day.

And then a few days after that when the funeral of a friend was the occasion for further acknowledgment of how different our apparently similar experiences are.

And then this lunch. I said that my inner, deepest core is a place of such complete sorrow now.

I said that most of the day, although no one would know it, my mind is engaged in thoughts and images far from what lies before us or from what we are discussing.

And our mutual friend said that that will go away.

With all the confidence of someone whose children are all alive.

I said that I didn't think so.

The woman who has lost her husband said that hers, her inner core, is filled more with anxiety. She is, evidently, quite shaken by the speed and completeness with which life changes.

I said nothing. I know quite a bit about that, but nothing at all from her perspective.

I thought that it would not be wise to try to challenge her, or to insist that things will change.

I couldn't see any reason to sharpen the blade of loneliness that slices the space between us.

Eighteen-Plus Months

Sometimes I still need to write over here, in relative anonymity.

Still in the house tonight. The Quiet Husband went out of town to visit his family for the day, Gregarious Son is at work, and The Lovely Daughter is over the the house of the new man in her life.

I was thinking, earlier, about another spring, 2001. Once the kids started school, we always spent the last two weeks of March in St. Augustine, so tonight we were probably packing up. I looked at the photos from that year - they all look so young! The Lovely Daughter and friends in their middle school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, performed right before spring break; the boys, tenth graders, in soccer and high school t-shirts; all of them in the pool in Florida late at night and on the beach all day.

It was a great life.

I knew it was a great life. So much more than I could have ever imagined. So much love and laughter, so much energy and humor.

So much lost.

Speaking Into The Void

A couple of the posters on the FB site Oh No, You Didn't -- Things Said to a Grieving Parent Better Left Unsaid have mentioned conversations with people whose children have died subsequent to the deaths of their own children and who have said, " I realize now that I had absolutely no idea what you were talking about."

In an odd way, that's a bit comforting. Or at least reassuring.

It's not particularly comforting to know that our words are incomprehensible.

But I have read a lot of words in the past week about Lent, about the need to enter deeply into our places of loss and grief, about our need to wander the desert.

Why would anyone want to do that, I wonder?

It's such a relief to realize that my own reaction of bewilderment comes from the parched and barren land to which I have unwillingly relocated, and that I do not need to go further, because I am already here.

Believe me. You do not actually want to come to this place.

Three Things

Uno: I learned a great new phrase today: assumptive world. It means just how it sounds, and the context is the idea that trauma destroys the one you had. My advisor, preparing for a pastoral care course on loss, invited me to "attend" a webinar with her this afternoon on caring for suicide survivors. It was an excellent program ~ and that's where I learned this new (to me) phrase. The overview didn't contain any information through which I haven't lived, but it was helpful to see it all laid out; it gave me some insight into how very different my life has become from that of most people I know. And my new terminology helped me understand why I have inner (and sometimes outer!) meltdowns over perceptions and beliefs so at odds with my own. So often I don't understand why other people find certain words or convictions helpful, but now I see ~ as long as their assumptive worlds remain intact, they have no reason to imagine that the things upon which they rely do not have universal power. And there's nothing quite like a child's death by suicide in terms of blowing one's assumptive world to bits.

Dos: As I was leaving her office, another . . . um, let's just say that he's a pastor . . . came by and made one of the most impossibly inappropriate jokes about suicide I've ever heard. Actually, I've only heard two remarks in that vein, and they've both come from pastors. (And I'm the one worried about being pastoral enough to pass ordination exams ???) I have tried to explain that suicide is the one topic I know of (someone else I discussed this with mentioned the molestation of children as another possibility) about which joking is not acceptable. Unlike other areas of black humor in which survivors or members of a relevant group joke among themselves, I have never heard anyone affected by suicide joke about it. Only these two pastors.

Tres: Today I joined a Facebook group called "Oh no, you didn't ~ things said to a grieving parent better left unsaid." I guess I needed that today. The postings are ~ well ~ some of the statements are truly unbelievable. It seems that I am not alone at all.

Ways I Can Tell That Surviving a Child's Suicide Makes Different Demands

Much of the time I can hardly bear the things that most people apparently find comforting, reassuring, or joyful:

1. Assurances of God's presence in times of turmoil.

2. Assurances about resurrection, how we will be all be reunited, etc., regardless of theology of same.

3. Assurances that light can be found in the dark.

4. Valentine's renewal of wedding vows.

5. Weddings, new babies, anything that reminds me that the young man I love found himself on a path that precluded that all we had hoped for and dreamed of for him.

6. Actually, now that I think of it, confirmation or assurance of just about anything at all.

I think I get it. The completely destructive, upside-down-and-inside-out nature of a child's death by suicide simply eradicates all familiar terrain and brings into question absolutely everything.

Sometimes I feel like I spend almost all of my time crossing very thin ice ~ the exceptions being the times when I crash through into very deep and icy water.

I am glad ~ really ~ that other people find comfort in all those things that usually offer it to one degree or another. But seriously ~ please don't assume that your experience or conviction is applicable to mine.

(Yeah, it's been a rough few days.)

Preaching Ahead of Where We Are

Many thanks for all the support and encouragement yesterday!

Last week a friend and I were talking at seminary about our preaching. She acknowledged feeling as if she knows nothing and has no idea what to say ~ feeling like something of a fraud. (She's a terrific preacher, by the way.)

"How do you think I feel?" I asked.

"I think we have to preach ahead of where we are," I concluded.

And I've been thinking about that a lot. How we feel is one thing. Our faith is another. It's nice when they merge, but the reality of being grown-up is that often they do not. And so we preach for others out of the hope that one day they will again.

The conclusion of yesterday's sermon, which was about all those fish and how Jesus out of abundance invites us to share the same:

Do we know when we’re being interrupted by an invitation from God?

When abundance is plopped right down in front of us?

When our God of hope invites us to fish in deeper waters?

Abundance as a gift and an invitation – do we recognize it?

It might look very ordinary

We do not expect Jesus to appear in those mundane moments when we are at our most exhausted and feeling the futility of our efforts.

We are blind to the abundance that lies before us when we are worn down by life’s cares and challenges

It’s likely to be something we resist:

Our to-do lists are long enough, and as long as we wade in the shallows, we have some hope of accomplishing everything on them

Our plans are complicated, and we already know where we need to go and whom we need to call before the end of the day

To be honest, when all is said and done,

We often find it difficult to imagine that Jesus is calling us to anything

And yet there he is, standing on the shore – or in the office, or in the kitchen, or in the classroom, or anywhere else we do not expect him to be, and what he longs for is to give to us extravagantly, so that we may go and do likewise:

Put out into the deep water and let your nets down for a catch.

Welcome the interruptions,

pay attention to the one who is paying attention to you,

let him fill you with a sense of wonder and hope in place of your disappointments

and put out into the deep water and let your nets down.

(Image: Eric de Saussure, Peter's Catch of Fish, 1968.)

My Day

Got up and did a little work on a paper. It's a make-up for the midterm I simply could not prepare for two weeks ago.

Went to see the senior pastor at my field ed church. He says I seem a good deal "lighter" than I have for the past few weeks. Hmmm. Quiet Husband in and out of hospital, high school girl's funeral, father-in-law's funeral, ords, and now a friend is dying. I wonder what "lighter" looks like.

Ran some errands. Stopped to see the friend and his daughters, one of whom is one of the Lovely Daughter's BFFs since first grade. She has been coming home from DC every week-end and this time is staying into the week. The other daughter has been home from New Haven for two weeks. Life is complicated over there.

I liked it better when the girls were all little Montessori kids.

I need to pack and drive to seminary and finish that paper. I need to read several particularly depressing Calvin chapters. I need to think about Sunday's sermon.

I am having more of a reality than a denial day. Sucks.

I love what Karen said in the comments about needing to switch the channel back to denial after short periods of reality. I think I need to kick the damn set across the room.

Stages of Grief

I am very, very tired, after having gone to the funeral home with my friend and sat in the same little room that my husband and I sat in seventeen months ago . . .

I came home and said to The Lovely Daughter that I am pretty much not believing it these days. I just think he will come home.

"Total denial," she said. You know, those stages of grief don't happen in sequence."

"I know that," I said. "Denial seems like a high-functioning place though. I spend most of my time there. I'm not angry too often anymore, and I can tell when I'm in acceptance, because then I just cry, because I get it."

She nodded.

"I've pretty much given up on bargaining. It didn't seem to work," I said.

"Mom, that is SUCH a denial statement," she responded.

"You have to know you're in denial when you talk about bargaining not working as if it might have. Only a person in total denial could think that there is anything plausible about bargaining."

I love my daughter so much. A couple of nights ago we were watching something ~ I have no idea what ~ on tv and one of the characters vocalized a long litany of recent disasters in her life.

"Do you remember what it was like when a statement like that was just dialogue on a tv show?" she asked.

Not Just About Me

In Haiti, I figure, there are lots of people who need to talk about loss.

Lots of grieving people.

I can't go there to listen, but I wish I could.

This is the first time I've felt that way in sixteen-plus months.

That's something, I think.

And While We're On The Subject of the Challenges of Loss . . ..

I know that I have a number of good friends and readers who roll their eyes in disbelief, skepticism, irritation, and incredulity whenever the faith stuff comes up ~ and most especially in the context of things like my son's death, and death and loss in general. (Not that there is ever an "in general." It's always so painfully personal.)

If you've read any of Desert Year, then you know that I don't have a sentimental or squishy approach to faith, that I was besieged by a profound sense of God's abandonment in the year-plus after Josh's death, and that I am much more comfortable with questions than with answers. I am going to write more about all of that soon, but not now! ~ as I am confronted by the need to stop all unnecessary activity for two weeks in an effort to salvage my ordination exams, to which ironically, confident answers are the expected response.

I don't, however, want to depart for my husband's family and father's funeral and then The Library, without linking to one of the best things I've read in a long time about faith and consolation. I may have written that in the days after my son's death, I overheard my father say "At least she has her faith to comfort her," and that I shook my head as I kept walking down the hall, thinking that he didn't have the foggiest notion of the challenge of the Christian faith. Much of Desert Year was an exploration of that challenge, although I was far too immersed in pain to see or write a way out.

Ryan Duns, S.J. is an exceptionally thoughtful and articulate young man. I might debate his conclusion a bit, and suggest that there are times when consolation is not about confidence, which has a way of evaporating, but about hope when you can see nothing ~ and about not even your own hope, but that of others, who remain present to you and open to God and hopeful for life again, all when you have moved into some other dimension in which none of those things seem possible. Nevertheless, the post is a wonderful expression of an aspect of Christian faith seldom acknowledged. (I sometimes think that Ryan is channeling my first Jesuit spiritual director, something I recognize because I do it myself on occasion.)

At any rate, enjoy the music in the previous two posts ~ but don't think that I'm under the impression that faith is an easy road, especially when we live on life's most brutal edges.

I may be back sooner than later so that I can bemoan the need to write yet another exegtical paper in Hebrew ~ or I may wait till it's all over.

Endings

Those of you who know me on FB know that my father-in-law died Saturday afternoon.

My husband and I spent most of Friday focused on the funeral mass for the young lady whom he had coached in soccer for five years.

She was a freshman at a Catholic girls' school, and half the sanctuary was filled with its students and alumnae. They all sang their alma mater so sweetly at the beginning of the service and
then began to cry at the end as Stand By Me (the last FB status of the young woman, who had collapsed at school a few days earlier) was piped into the sanctuary. The other half of the huge sanctuary was filled with people who have experienced the seemingly incessant stream of deaths of young people which has plagued their parish for the past three months. My spiritual director was one of the priests presiding, and we had a meeting scheduled for late that afternoon, which was perhaps a good thing for both of us. I don't know about him, but I went straight to bed afterward.

My husband's father has been quite ill, but there has been much optimism for for him during the last couple of weeks. However, on Saturday morning my sister-in-law called to say that things had suddenly gone downhill. We got there a couple of hours before he died, surrounded by most of his family, and spent yesterday on funeral planning. I am home now for a brief day of organizing and cleaning and then back to my in-laws' home for at least a couple of days.

As we talked over the funeral, some dear family friends mentioned how much they had liked some of what we did at Josh's. I don't know how it is for other people, but for us it's as if he died this morning, and so it seems like all of these losses are happening at once.

I know I have moaned mightily about the overuse of Psalm 23 (a complaint echoed, to my surprise, by my mother-in-law yesterday), but in my Catholic ventures this past year I have become very fond of the version above. I seem to like it particularly this morning.

Florida Musings

Although I am far from home and school, I'm thinking a lot about ministry, because I am preparing for the PC(USA) ordination exams, which are now less than four weeks away, and I'm preaching in my field ed church on Sunday.

I'm not happy with my sermon, but I find that I'm enjoying the studying. As I (try to) pull material together and read through a couple of theological overviews, I'm discovering a new appreciation for my seminary education. And I see that I have changed not a little. (Gulp of relief: for awhile I feared that I might emerge from seminary like a couple of other people I've heard about, who upon their graduations said," I haven't changed one bit from the moment I arrived!")

Of course, much of the change has come via another route. Today I am thinking about that in the context of two other things. For one, Quotidian Grace is highlighting blogs of ministers who are mothers. I imagine that someday that group will include me, albeit not as I had planned or expected. And secondly, last fall, two young men in my class preached sermons in which they referred, one explicitly and one by implication, to seminary as a "mountaintop experience."

Not exactly, I thought at the time.

I suppose that it will be many, many years before I will understand what it has meant to study for ministry while grieving the suicide of a child. To explore all those meaning-of-life-who-is-God questions in an academic environment while stuggling through them at the deepest personal levels. To be engaged in hopes and plans for middle-age changes while saying good-bye to a very young life measured mostly by possibility.

God, it has been so hard.

I have no idea what the future holds for me. (Given the past sixteen months, I have to conclude that only someone completely devoid of gray matter would attempt to predict even the next five minutes.) But I hope that my ministry will be marked by a deep respect for the experience of the absence of God, an enlarged capacity for listening in silence, and a vocabulary from which religious cliches have been banished.

(Of course, none of those abilities, such as they are, will be of much help on the ordination exams. And what does that say . . . ???)

Anyway ~ that's the report from the Florida Keys this morning.

Florida Memories

It's been nearly 24 years since we took our kids (just the two 18-month-old boys boys at that time) to St. Augustine Beach for the first of what would become two decades of annual visits. One day, on a morning just like this - clear and cool and sunny -- I discovered, as I was getting dressed, that Josh was awake in his crib, and asked if he wanted to go out for a walk with me. Of course he was enthusiastic, and so at probably about 7:00 am I carried him and one of the strollers down to the beach and pushed him along the water for a mile or two.

The ocean sparkled in the sunlight, and Josh was so blonde and so full of joy.

Making Room at the Inn

When our children were growing up, it was very easy to make room. It seemed that the more our lives filled, the more room there was ~ for more energy, more light, more people: more joy. When other kids showed up, we folded them in to whatever we were up to. When my grandmother, well into her 80s and not terribly mobile, came for Christmas week a few times, we made up a bed in the dining room and worked dinner for a couple of dozen people around it. When Hannukah and Christmas fell at the same time, there were children lighting candles in our living room for both. I would like to think that if Mary and Joseph had shown up during Christmas Dinner, I would have asked one to light the menorah and the other to stir the gravy, and moved ourselves, as we often did, to the fold-out couch in the (chilly) sunroom so that our guests could have our room.

The grief that accompanies the death of a child alters everything. There is no energy for anything beyond survival; no desire even for that. There is no light. The people who swarm like bees over the house during the funeral week gradually disappear into their own busy lives. The sense of meaning and purpose that enables you to do even the most difficult of tasks evaporates. Pouring a bowl of cereal is almost impossible; the thought that you once made up beds for guests while planning decorations and food and music for large gatherings seems like something you must have read about in a novel.

And there is, sadly, no room at the inner inn, any more than there is in the house itself. Grief is a process that requires almost complete self-absorption. It offers no alternatives, no respite, no new life. Eventually, your body starts to do things that apparently look unremarkable to others, but your heart is a cold, isolated place, filled ~ and filled completely ~ only by the longing for what cannot be. It is necessary and good to be well-defended, because inside you are made up of thousands of tiny pieces of cracked glass that would shatter irretrievably into millions more if the slightest wind blew your way.

No room at the inn. No room until something not of your own making begins to shift.

The stories we have of the first Christmas ~ what are they? Narratives of actual events? Historical fiction? Beautiful tales for gullible children? Formulaic creations of later writers, looking into their holy scriptures and trying to make sense out of an unlikely companion and his even more incomprehensible resurrection?

It occurs to me this year that, whatever else they are, they are exactly the right stories about exactly the right people ~ all of them finding inner room in which to respond to God out of desperate poverty. Mary and Joseph ~ impoverished by oppression, by rigid circumstances, by potential humiliation and rejection. The innkeeper ~ by hassles and exhaustion, by too little capital and too few resources, by too many travelers needing too many things. The shepherds ~ by cold and emptiness and boredom, by too many sheep and too much ground to cover, by thin-walled tents and danger lurking in the night. And even the magi ~ we tend to think of them as regally-attired kings processing across the desert with gold-laden camels, but: let's be serious. They were trapped in their own way, far from home, dependent upon irritable animals and the uncertain hospitality of strangers, seeking solutions to unresolvable questions ~ and probably tattered and tired as well.

None of the characters in these stories, with the exception of Mary, whose Magnificat indicates that she anticipates the struggle and sorrow that lies ahead for her child, is described to us as a grieving mother. But who knows? The innkeeper, one of the shepherds, one of the magi ~ any of them might be a woman moving blindly through the worst of losses. And regardless of specific histories, every single one of the characters in these stories represents a kind of inner restlessness and poverty with which we are familiar.

And yet they all make room. Not just physical room ~ room in a cave behind an inn, or room for a detour with sheep or camels. They all make available space in the inner landscape of their lives in which to respond to something out of the ordinary, something compelling, someone far more significant even in newborn form than the most extravagant display in the heavens.

Bright Morning Star. The way in which Jesus identifies himself in the Book of Revelation.

Perhaps if we, when we are able or maybe even a little sooner, respond to the invitation to make even the smallest of spaces available in our lives for someone beyond ourselves and our immediate concerns, no matter how all-consuming and overwhelming they seem ~ perhaps we, too, will see it shine.

Merry Christmas.



Image of nebula from nasa.gov.

Meditation for the Longest Night

Tonight Musical Friend, whose husband died in March 2008, and I are going to a Blue Christmas Service together.

Mags held one at her church last night. I love that they call it a Longest Night Service, since it was on the calendar the longest night and since this kind of a life does feel like one endless night. (My brother asked me yesterday. "When does it end?" "It doesn't," I said. "It changes, but it doesn't end.")

Anyway, a beautiful meditation:

Here.

Long Week Ahead

Maybe I closed my Desert Year blog a week too soon . . .

Christmas services this morning and tonight at my field ed church, both with dramatic presentations by children . . .

Going to a UCC blue Christmas service tomorrow night with Musical Friend . . .

Two services at my field ed church Christmas Eve . . .

And then with, amazingly, Gregarious Son as company, a midnight service somewhere . . .

And then at 6:00 am on Christmas morning, a flight south.

I wish this week of the Incarnation were not so terribly, terribly difficult. I wish I lived in a remote monastery where it might be a week of solemnity and quiet joy.

Twenty-six years ago we learned right after Christmas that I was pregnant -- a month later, that there were two babies. I looked at the ultrasound pictures earlier this week. It is not hard at all to remember the exhilaration we felt, but it is hard to know now what it would someday lead to.

Two of my nieces have just learned that they are expecting babies in August.

Mixed feelings swirling around.

The Best Gift You Could Give

If you know someone who's lost a child recently ~ or ever ~ sit down this week-end and send them a Christmas note ~ email or snail mail, it doesn't matter ~ and let them know, as specifically as you can, that you remember their son or daughter.

It will be the best Christmas gift they receive.

Stuck, Stuck, Really Stuck

I think I made a big mistake.

I was feeling better ~ not a lot, but enough. I was thinking that last year at this time, every class, every comment ~ whether by someone else or by me ~ basically every minute back in seminary was followed by the thought "I can't do this; I need to withdraw right this second" ~ and that those feelings have receded. I was thinking that I was more or less all right, and so ~

I stopped being hyper-vigilant with respect to everything coming my way, and so ~

I was completely unprepared for Advent.

It is hard. It is so hard.

It is hard to be in church every Sunday for my internship. It is hard to be taking a class in which the professor has decided that we should begin each morning with an Advent hymn so that we can analyze it for mission-related components. (OK, well, I've decided that I need to be late for every class.) It's hard to read and see all the things that used to give me such delight. It's hard to imagine buying gifts or decorating a tree.

Yesterday a friend told me about the pleasure she had found in preparing an elaborate holiday buffet for a large group of friends last week-end. I used to enjoy things like that, but now I just want to send my 150-year-old heirloom china flying out the window so that I can hear it smash on the sidewalk.

Hmmm. I just looked back at what I've written and thought: people might think I have finally lost it. But truthfully, I am doing well, all things considered.

I just would prefer to be someplace like Mars. (Just not so cold.) And it seems that instead I agreed, in a moment of foolish optimism some weeks ago, to preach a sermon on January 3.

So any of you experienced preachers out there, if you want to share how you managed to share good news in which you actually believe during a time in which it seemed you could not put one foot in front of the other (although in fact you did, every day) ~ please: weigh in!

Ignatian Accompaniment Through Grief

I've had a lot of time in the past fifteen months to reflect on what it means to accompany someone through terrible loss ~ what it means in general, what it means for me as a devastated mother, what it means for me as a spiritual director, as a would-be pastor or hospital or hospice chaplain. What is good and helpful and considerate? What is not?

This post, I do believe, is going to turn into a paean to Ignatian spirituality and to those whose lives it shapes, whether Jesuits or others who do spiritual direction in the Ignatian tradition. In my case, it means two Jesuits in particular: my former director, who had the temerity to move away after helping me for two years, but has remained one of my great supporters through seminary and has been a source of wisdom and challenge via email and occasional visits during this past awful year, and my current director, who thought two-and-one-half years ago that he was signing on for a monthly hour of support and guidance for a seminary student, and had to turn into a consistent and faithful source of compassion, prayer, presence ~ and, yes, wisdom and challenge, too ~ during a year of such harsh and time-consuming need that I cannot even begin to describe it.

(And that description doesn't even take into account the many others in my life who have brought their Ignatian experience to bear upon our conversations and friendships. Maybe some other posts someday.)

What is so distinctive about this spirituality that makes it so pertinent to accompanying someone through the journey of grief?

In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius suggests a wide variety of types and forms of prayer. Some lend themselves more to certain situations or meditations than others, but I've never had a director suggest that I should limit my prayer in one way or another. Flexibility ("accomodation" is Ignatius' term) is key, and I have been graced by finding directors who are fearless in their willingness to venture into unfamilar territory.

Given the range of prayer in the Exercises, it is nontheless the case that imagination is a significant hallmark of the Ignatian understanding of encounter with God. When a person makes the formal Exercises, there are many opportunites to pray, or meditate (Ignatius usually uses the term contemplation here ~ not to be confused with the emptying form of prayer so popular in contemplative prayer practice today) imaginatively throught the life of Jesus. Imagine the place, imagine the sights and sounds, imagine yourself as a person among his followers or family, on the edge or in the midst of his circle. Imagine yourself watching, listening, speaking, participating. Who are you? Who might you be called to be? Imagine Jesus into the circustances of your own life. What does he say; how do you respond?

You might be able to guess where I am going here. If you're a regular reader, you know that I have often bemoaned the statement so frequently made to me after our son died: that "I can't imagine" sentence. In fact, its repetition by a few individuals has resulted in my consistent avoidance of them. (The Lovely Daughter tells me that people are trying, and that I could be more generous, but I have my own problems with imagination ~ I find it difficult to imagine either that they are or that I could.) As a statement of intended solace, "I can't imagine" is not as bad as "I know just how you feel" ~ but it's close.

This past week it suddenly dawned on me why my Jesuit and other Ignatian friends have been such a source of help to me. Steeped in the practice of imaginative prayer, it never occurs to them to say, "I can't imagine." They seem to slide into imaginative accompaniment effortlessly. They don't have to be parents or to have suffered this degree of loss or faced this kind of horror; they can imagine it, at least well enough.

It's not effortless, of course; even as a neophyte director, I know that it takes considerable intentionality and attentiveness to imagine yourself into someone else's life and concerns. It also takes great generosity of spirit: as you share the Scriptural and prayer lives of others, you begin to understand how differently we all respond to, understand, and encounter God. You seek, always, to reverence both the other person's experience and your own; to absorb the similarities and the differences, to recognize that God is reaching out to each of you, and and to know that you can listen contemplatively and imaginatively even if what you are hearing is nothing at all like what you yourself would have come up with. It's not effortless at all.

But there it is. Just as even I, with some considerable practice, can access the notes to a simple Bach composition on the piano and with them, an entire tradition of music, so someone practiced in imaginative interaction with Scripture can access a tradition of prayer that makes it possible to walk with someone through the universal and yet endlessly unique pathway through grief.
I don't think I've ever heard someone well versed in Ignatian practice say, "I can't imagine." I know that these are people whose imaginations are at work all day, who are accustomed to drawing on their interior resources in all circumstances, and to allowing them to expand whenever they seem inadequate to a particular situation. God's gift of imagination is how we find God in all things, even ~ somewhere, someday ~ in this wilderness of sorrow.

(Cross-posted from Desert Year.)

Mishbarim: Dismantling Your Life

Like most middle class Americans my age, I have invested most of my life in building. School, marriage, family, career, home. It all went pretty well for awhile. I was a reasonably generous person ~ nothing outrageous, no Mother-Theresa like complexes for me ~ but certainly I gave of my energy and my time and my money and my gifts to my family, my church, and my community. And why not? I had plenty to give; it hardly hurt me to spread a little of it around. Oh, every once in awhile I would find that I had over-committed myself in one realm or another and I'd have to invest some effort into stepping back, but that was about as difficult as it got. We are not talking Ms. Self~Sacrifice here. Except for a couple of times, when disaster hit and left our family confused and hurting ~ but we were capable of determined re-building efforts, and we were always surrounded by people who helped us. So re-build we did.

This is different. This is so different.

Everything has to go.

OK, not everything. Not much of anything exterior, really. The house is still (barely, per usual) standing , the Quiet Husband is still employed, I am still in school. The Gregarious Son and The Lovely Daughter are employed and moving forward, and working to heal a little. We are all trying to heal a little.

But the interior everything ~ it has to go. I have found virtually nothing in a traditional life of Christian faith and practice, at least as I once knew it ~ and I knew it pretty well ~ to sustain me. I remember that a year or so ago, a fellow blogger wrote frequently of feeling shielded under God's wing. No wing for me. One of my professors, when I visited him last spring to seek some academic advice, apparently felt obligated to offer some of what must have seemed to him to have been kindly words of pastoral assurance. It was all I could do to escape his office without throwing up. I have had a number of conversations with others who have experienced similar depths of trauma in recent years ~ and very few have found in church a place of respite or solace.

I have found nothing in my own efforts. I have been busily erecting walls of self-defense against the endless waves of sadness and anger but there is, in fact, no technology available for building walls thick enough to withstand them. I know that, of course. The primary emphasis of the program which I attended a few weeks ago on death and dying was on the need to go deep into and all the way through sorrow in order to make any sense at all of it and to absorb it into the rest of your life. That was not news. But the reality is that the dailiness of life requires a good deal of wall-building. The balance ~ between the barriers you need to secure in place to walk through the grocery or to withstand a basic class discussion on baptism (oh, right, actually I didn't make it through that one . . .) and the openness and honesty needed in order to confront and accommodate one's real life of struggle and sorrow ~ the balance is a tenuous one to maintain. It's no wonder that bereaved people tend to isolate themselves. I'm certainly much more content when I do.

I like that word, accommodate, at least for now. I've read several comments by parents of children who have died by suicide to the effect that acceptance of our loss will never be a possibility, but that accommodation is a realistic hope. I looked it up in the thesaurus and, while some of the synonyms make sense in this context and some do not, the one that resonates with me is attune. We do have to make room for and host this terrible reality, whether we want to or not, but it is perhaps an additional goal to attune ourselves to the nuances of loss and pain in this world, beyond ourselves.

To dismantle and to re-attune who we are, how we hear, what we see, how we know and how we understand. It seems to me an optimistic approach, given that our lives have been pretty well smashed into little bits of broken debris.

(And here's something interesting, for the academically inclined: For that mammoth paper I've finished on Psalm 88, I did a little research on the word mishbarim (breakers), because of the line in verse 8, "Every breaker of yours knocks me down." It seems that the word mishbarim is used in ancient Semitic writings in two fundamental ways: to mean either "waves" in the context of the sea, or "pangs," as in birth pangs (which of course, come in waves). In either case, it refers to powers that shatter or break. In one text in the Dead Sea Scrolls (no no no, of course I haven't read the DSS ~ but I can read about them), the images of birth pangs and the waves of a storm at sea are combined, and the mythologies of other Mediterranean cultures are filled with references to waters, waves, and floods of chaos.)

I am quite taken with that information; that for thousands of years people of a multitude of cultures have melded wave imagery for sorrow and brokenness with wave imagery for birth, and have woven both strands into their sacred texts.

Many (many!) years ago, before my children were born, I read some words of wisdom in some magazine article or other. In response to someone's Yuppie-oriented reluctance to have children for fear that they would change her life, the writer suggested that no one should have children until and unless she wanted to change her life ~ that that is the point, to want to change your life by bringing the abundance of love into it in a form that will change it in every possible dimension. To welcome mishbarim, both literally and figuratively.

Well. One does not want or welcome the mishbarim of the death of a beloved child. But here they are. Breakers and birth pangs, the complete dismantling of the old outlook and understanding.

Can it be reshaped, perhaps tentatively and gingerly, with something fragile and frail? That's what I'm going to imagine this Advent. I'm going to spend some time over in my Advent blog, and I'm going to take at least part of it to explore the Advent of the Heart words of Alfred Delp, S.J. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit caught up in the Holocaust. He shares a great deal in common with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose work we read a bit of in school last quarter; both were engaged in resistance work against the Nazis, both were imprisoned, both were executed shortly before the end of the war. (Interestingly, according to the introduction to this particular book, during his imprisonment Father Delp received assistance and care from a Lutheran pastor, and is probably quoting Martin Luther at one point. It would appeal greatly to my ecumenical leanings to know that Deitrich Bonhoeffer received care from a Cathoic priest as well. I have certainly heard him quoted in Catholic sermons. One never knows.)

At any rate, Advent of the Heart has popped up on my computer screen via various sources over the past couple of weeks, so I am taking that to mean something. There was nothing fragile or frail about Alfred Delp or his faith as he confronted evil and chaos during Advent. Nothing about Bonheoeffer or his, either. Mishbarim in both of its meanings, and neither of them ever forgot it, whereas I am much more inclined to let myself be shattered rather than reborn.

May this Advent be for the latter, even if in only the smallest of ways. For the tiniest flicker of candlelight in the midst of all this darkness.



Cross-posting at Desert Year.