Does God Suffer?

One of my great privileges over the past year has been to study with a brilliant new member of the seminary faculty. He appeared for the last quarter of my second year to teach a class on Christology. I'd already taken the course, but a friend mentioned one night that I might want to visit the new guy's class which I ended up doing almost every week following. He was teaching not only the subject at hand, but also how to evaluate various theological approaches. Finally! ~ I felt that I was getting that for which I had gone to seminary: the opportunity to begin to learn to think like a theologian.

I did an independent study with this professor the next (this past winter) quarter on the subjects of sin, grace, and freedom. I'm sure that I was a consistent disappointment to him, in that my complete lack of background in philosophy meant that the readings were virtually incomprehensible to me, but I did struggle through them. And then I audited his course on Stanley Hauerwas and took his course on Miroslav Volf. In the end, I was able to graduate with the sense that I had learned a tiny bit about Reformation and contemporary theology and a tiny bit about how to approach my own future study, and had found a friend with whom I could continue the conversation.

I had a question for him last week, and in response he sent me a paper he'd written in grad school. The overall question has to do with God's emotional life, but I thought we'd start with the question within the question: Does God suffer? It's been a topic of significant debate during the past century, and is for obvious reasons of great interest to me.

What do you think? Does God suffer? Does it matter to you whether or not God does? Are you comforted or reassured one way or the other? Does the question bother you? Go for it ~

Transitions

Well. It seems that people are out there. Who knew?

I started wondering a few days ago whether I should re-open and rename this blog: Desert Year and A Summer Later. I suppose that's too much of a hassle; besides, at the moment, I like how the title looks. I think that we can just accept that the first year or so of grief does not much resemble a calendar year.

I have a whole jumble of things to explore over the next whatever time. Maybe some of them, here or there, will be meaningful to someone else. I know that a number of the names I see in the comments to the last post represent people reeling from unfathomable losses. Let's see . . .

Still dealing with the, ummmmm (how can I put this charitably?) . . . oblivious I mean unformed among us:

Those reading my new, non-anonymous blog, know that I took a class on theologian Miroslav Volf this past spring. One evening before our weekly meeting, I emailed my professor, described the specific ways in which the reading assignment for the next day had tormented me, and asked him to please leave me alone if I had nothing to say in class. He responded with a compassionate email of his own. As it happened, the class the next afternoon moved along without incident until about the last twenty minutes. At that point, one of the young men began to talk about the issues to which I had referred in my email the previous night, and proceeded to pontificate about God opening a window whenever God closes a door, and about our obligation to help those who are suffering to focus on the window rather than the door. It was quite a lengthy soliloquy, going on for several minutes. Obviously this young man has not experienced God's slamming, bolting, and gluing a door shut with no window distributor in sight. The professor stole a look a me, but I was absolutely silent ~ mostly because the only response I could think of was to knock the guy out cold. Since our primary class topic was reconciliation, I thought that I should restrain myself.

I am working on this matter of how to teach people to respond appropriately to the pain of others without being too pathetic myself. It's a challenge.

Yet another transition:

This business of having finished my M.Div. is tough. Lots of questions. I have been wondering a lot whether I went back to school too soon. I still think that it will be years before I understand what it might have meant to be in seminary during this period. I continued to pile up the As, but I certainly could not appreciate what I was learning as I might have had I been in another frame of mind. Does that mean I appreciated it differently, and will use it differently, in ways that are meaningful? Or should I just have stayed in bed? That's where I am right now, and it seems like a good place to be.

And now what? Given the Presbyterian call system, no one is pushing me into the next thing. As far as I can tell, despite all of the time, energy, effort, and money that have been invested in my theological education, I could simply drop off the radar screen without anyone uttering a sound. We have committees that are supposed to keep track of us, but the initiative is entirely with those of us moving from one hoop to another. It's a bizarre process and a surreal situation.

The challenge of a child's death by suicide:

I have read and been the recipient of an awful lot of advice to the effect that God is always present, God strengthens you through suffering, God can transform even the worst into . . . something, blah blah blah. I could believe all of that about most things, at least if I were the only person concerned. Although I have at least two good friends who have had cancer whose response, and I believe I am being accurate and precise here, would be, "Bullshit." And even if I am correct, the cost is too high. As I said in one of my classes one day in which the discussion centered on what we gain through suffering, I probably became a far stronger and more independent and resilient person because of the early death of my mother than I would have otherwise. But ~ and leaving my mother's own well-being out of the equation entirely ~ I would be glad to have been able to trade the aforesaid strength and independence and resiliency for the chance to grow up with a mother.

All of the above, however, fades into complete irrelevance when one is faced with the death of a child by suicide. Where was God, or God's strengthening or transforming power? I am actually coming, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, to some thoughts about that, but they are not obvious or easily digested. We'll see.

Finding meaning anyway (finding God in all things):

Finally ~ sigh ~ perhaps this will be the main topic of the summer. It's a hallmark of Ignatian spirituality, this finding of God in all things. But, as that 80-year-old Jesuit friend of mine says, "First you have to find God in some things." Working on it.

It's that matter of trading, again. (Would it surprise you to know that I once made a good friend cry during a game of Monopoly, when I ruthlessly traded my way up to all hotels on the Boardwalk and Park Place side?) The truth is, I can see God in many things these days. And I would trade almost every single one of them, including relationships which are precious to me, for my son's life. The whole board, all the properties, all the cash, all the houses and hotels ~ you could have every last one of them.

It is very hard to get used to seeing God in things you would willingly trade away and trying to figure out if God is in other things that you cannot see or grasp.

**********

I wonder how this is done ~ this survival thing. It seems that, 21 months into it, I have no idea at all.

Just a Day

Early this morning, just before walking over to a particularly challenging exam for which I've been studying for weeks, I opened my Facebook page to discovered that an internet friend had posted the following quote:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I posted a response, to the effect that that was an awful thing to say, and then forced it out of my mind so that I could focus and write steadily for the next three hours.

After lunch, there was a bit more Facebook discussion, which got a little testy and then, relieved to have put my school quarter behind me, I packed up and drove home.

I spent some time talking to the nurse in my doctor's office ~ not great news, but not terrible either.

I thought about how to respond to an email from someone asking how I am. Since we haven't talked in months, I had to conclude that any attempt at a genuine answer is now way beyond my capacity. A reminder that if we don't keep up with people, we lose them.

I stopped at the bookstore to purchase Kay Jamison's Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide. A psychiatrist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder, she is an elegant and brilliant writer ~ but I've been told that this one is a very difficult read for survivors. I may set it aside for a few more months, but in the bookstore I did flip it open to a section on parents. The lifetime of guilt and sadness that awaits me ~ nothing I hadn't already figured out.

And all this time, I was thinking about that stupid quote on Facebook. When I got home, I read a few more of the comments that had been posted and realized that for the others in the dicussion, it was an intellectual exercise. They had found the quote provocative, while I found it repugnant and self-absorbed.

Last week I had dinner with a friend at school who casually remarked that she supposed that it might be suicidal for her to think of taking Greek from Professor So-and-So. I glanced at her and there was a brief flicker of recognition, and then she went on talking.

I wish it were a matter of intellectual debate. I wish it were a matter of casual slang. I wish I had not seen what I have seen, read what I have read, learned what I have learned. (And, given some of the descriptions of bodies and autopsies on the Parents of Suicides mailing list, I have gotten off easily.)

I wish I could be one of those people who sometimes say to me, Oh, we in our family came awfully close to having to deal with what you are faced with. There is an entire universe, filled with black holes and ricocheting meteorites, between "awfully close" and the reality.

Last week, I took one of those internet stress tests ~ you know the kind, that allocates points to life stress events. Under 150 is a good thing, 150-300 reflects increasing health risks, over 300 is not good. My score was 495 and I feel, on the whole, pretty balanced. As I said in response to that email that I didn't know what to do with, "One adapts."

In our case, to life lived in a very different world from the one inhabited by most of the people we encounter.

And not one in which suicide is something to be romanticized or joked about.

Seminary Tidbits

Last night, walking back to my room (I stay in a seminary dorm three nights a week), I asked a gentleman I ran into who all the visitors on campus were. Board meeting. And so I asked a bit about him, and he asked about me and, upon discovering that I am in my last year, questioned me, "Is it tough?"

I looked at him in confusion. What does he mean? I wondered. Is what tough? School? How could school possibly be tough, in the context of living? School is . . . this week, anyway, something of a distraction. It's fine, I said. As he walked away it finally dawned on me that he wanted to hear that our program is a challenging one. Oh. How would I know? I do it, it works out . . . .

I have been working, off and on all day, on the mammoth outline I have been creating for my Church and Sacraments class. I love that class; the professor is brillant ~ quietly and modestly so ~ and his construction of the course is a work of art. As I sift through my notes, I notice the rather stark divide that emerged over the term in our discussion section. There are those who long for a church in which the lines are clearly drawn, in which authority is clear and tradition is immutable. There are those who long to fling open the doors and see barriers crumble. (And there are those who have remained silent.) I think that we all see the pros and cons of each viewpoint, but I think that we are also all settling into something of what will be our ministerial identity.

I worry a bit, about this C&S exam that I am preparing for. While I was out walking today, when I should have been reviewing some of the material in my mind, this is what I was thinking about instead:

I feel brain damaged. I feel as though my brain has suffered a major contusion that will not heal. If you took some kind of scan of my actual, physical brain, there would be a large and permanent dent in one side. I forget things: words, sequences, trains of thought, entire conversations. I forget pretty much everything I study or read within a matter of minutes. (It is rather astonishing that I remember my own opinions.) This past week-end a major conference concerning an issue I care about occurred practically on my doorstep, and I did not go to one single event, because I have to guard my energy so carefully. It has slowly seeped into my consciousness that a year from now I will no longer have the luxury of an academic respite; I need to decide something about what's next. But I can't think about that, because I have to think about now.

And yet, I have to acknowledge: it seems that with one side of my brain sadly dented, the other is unfolding a new space. If I remember (ha!) what little I know about brain development, I think it would be fair to say that this new space consists of very dense gray matter. It is jammed with what I have learned about suicide, about grief, about survival, about listening, about things that matter when none of the usual does anymore. It is packed with a kind of courage I had no idea existed. It is filled with the things that a very few people have had the grace and love to share with me, things which may be of use to others someday (much as I might wish that not be the case). And it has developed an astonishing capacity to promote silence in the context of encounters with unbelievably stupid statements aimed my way.

About a year ago, I made my first foray back into the work to which I have been called. I spent an hour each day for a week with a young lady making a retreat; she was participating in a college program and I was her spiritual director. Each day she spent a bit of time in contemplation, and then we talked together about her prayer and her life. I would get up about about 3:00 in the afternoon, shower and dress and drive to our meeting place, listen and talk to her, drive home, and crawl into bed, conpletely depleted and usually in tears.

A week or two ago, I found myself, over the course of a few days, in three major conversational and email exhanges about suicide and its survivors -- all in the course of my usual day. Other people in the computer lab are reading Facebook, working on papers, listening to music ~ and I am writing about suicide in between working on my own papers. A year ago, one such conversation would have sent me to bed for hours. Now ~ they are almost an expected part of my routine.

So. I don't know whether school is tough, and I don't have a clue as to whether I will remember what Calvin had to say about preaching or Bonhoeffer about community a week from now, when it will count toward a grade. But I do know a tiny bit about how to listen to someone who is groping for both words and connection, something I wish I had known more about fourteen months ago. I have done some learning that has been very tough indeed. Not much of it in class, though.

Meditation 2: Academic

I have been trying to post this for awhile, but Blogger isn't overly enthusiastic in its welcome of documents from Word. It's also so academic that perhaps it is of no interest. But since the genesis of my paper and presentation (this Friday) lies in the events of fourteen months ago , it's meaningful to me. Finally, herewith, and nevertheless, the opening (for the time being) to my exegesis paper on Psalm 88:

Psalm 88 is a startling contribution to the Psalter. It is the only one of the 150 psalms that includes not a single explicit word of praise or thanksgiving.* It neither blatantly extols God nor celebrates God’s handiwork; it does not resolve a cry of anguish or sorrow into one of gratitude and triumph. It is a lengthy and relentless song of lament, accusation, and horror, unrelieved at any point by even a hint of explicit optimism. It has been called “an embarrassment to conventional faith” – “adamant in its insistence and harsh on Yahweh’s unresponsiveness,** and many commentators have sought either to interpret away its starkness or to rail against its inclusion in the Psalter.

However, Psalm 88 belongs in our Scriptures as a genuine, no-holds-barred expression of the sense of abandonment and loss that accompanies real-life devastation. It has a legitimate place in our compilation of the relationship between God and human as an expression of the darkness, the anger, and the bewilderment that accompany life’s most desolating events. It is only those not yet versed in the torments of life who could suggest that Psalm 88 be discarded. While “[i]n ‘proper’ religion, the expression should not be expressed . . . it is also the case that these experiences should not be experienced."**

Since these experiences are, in fact, experienced, it would be rejection of God, a conclusion that God’s silence is, in fact, the final “word” (in the Hebrew sense of event, thing, or deed) in the face of disaster, for the Psalmist to remain silent in turn. And it would be a denial of God’s interest or engagement in the depth and profundity of the worst experiences of darkness in the human experience to respond to God’s silence with a chattering insistence that “all is for the best.” To rail against God, to accuse God of disinvestment, to comment sarcastically on the consequences to God of God’s departure, to insist upon describing to God in minute detail the agonies of one’s existence – all of those movements in Psalm 88 bespeak an individual whose relationship to God has been one of such intimacy that he or she continues to honor it in the context of fury and confusion and refuses to accept without remonstrance silence on the part of God.

(*James Boice, Psalms (1994) 42-106 and **Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (1984), 78 and 53.

Year Two: Art, Prayer, (Hope), Now What?

A lot of people, people who would know because they are mothers who have lost children, have told me that the second year is the worst. You get through all the anniversaries ~ which for us started with Mother's Day and continued all summer long with the usual holidays plus all five of our birthdays and then the anniversary day ~ and then what? No resolution; it all just starts again and lies endlessly ahead.

At first that seemed to be the case. September was wide open, no end in sight, and some awful and unbloggable things happened. Twice in as many weeks it seemed clear that I would have to drop out of seminary. Most of the time I felt that the key to my survival was that I simply didn't believe in what had happened. As long as it wasn't true, I could put one foot in front of the other.

Now ~ maybe just today, maybe just a few days ~ a little different.

I think it's art.

I started but never finished a post a week or two ago about how I was starting to turn to art in prayer. A bit of an ironic move for a girl who is pursuing ordained ministry in a tradition in which words predominate, for someone who processes almost everything by writing (two or three blogs, stacks of spiritual journals), for someone who has barely picked up even her pocket digital camera in months (although some fall color photos are probably coming soon).

But I had been thinking about how much I longed to go back to Mount Angel Abbey to pray. And wishing there were someplace around here where I could find some icons. And starting to imagine that digital SLR I've been dreaming of for years.

Then, a few days ago, I received a beautiful little package from a blogging friend, which included little icon cards, including Julian with her apocryphal cat, and Brigid, whom I think of as one of my peeps. As I told my friend in thanks, I didn't need to find a store; I just needed to wait for the mail.

And now, this morning, a new (to me, anyway) Annunciation, a link to a whole series of paintings on the themes of The Spiritual Exercises, and a link to an online store with other amazing art, at which I've only just had a look.

When I was on Iona a couple of summers ago, I thought vaguely about organizing some of the photos I was taking around The Exercises. I am probably not together enough to do that yet, but I might be able at least to to think about it again. Right after Josh died ~ and by "right after" I mean, literally, a week or two ~ an artist friend invited me to a show and talk by a photographer who has done magnificent black-and-white work, much of it out of an undisclosed terrible loss in her own life. At the time, I found myself unable to fathom going out in public to a lecture and show, and I've forgotten her name, but maybe it's time to look her up again.

In fact, while I was trying to decide whether to return to seminary, it seemed to me that the only other two realistic options were (1) never to leave my bed, or at least my house, again and (2) immerse myself in photography. I'm not exactly sure how or why school won out; perhaps because I was so well adapted to verbal expression that I thought it was something I might be able to do again, while the idea of trying to make meaningful images was completely overwhelming.

Recently, though, with the end of my seminary career looming ahead and the knowledge that there will probably be a lag of several months between ordination and a call to ~ to WHAT? another dilemma . . . ~ I have been thinking that there is a window for photography in there.

Well, I quite like Robert Gilroy's Annunication ~ not surprising for someone who so likes Henry Ossawa Tanner's painting on the same subject, a painting which has made several appearances in my blogs. But the one I'm really taken with this morning is called Sorrowful Woman, Figures in Flames and The Light of Truth, from Week One of the Exercises.

I don't pretend to understand it much, but one needs to contemplate a work of art over a long period of time. For starters, I would throw out phrases like: Week One (of the Exercises) ~ a time of immersing oneself in God's good creation, in our own brokenness, and in our need for healing and reconciliation. Year Two (of my new life) ~ perhaps a time of some little healing and reconciliation of a terrible, terrible brokenness and of finding a jagged and rocky path back to God's good creation. Flames ~ destruction and terror, light and truth.

For me, it's a good painting to pray with. Maybe on the other side of those flames, in that yellow life, is a future.

Sucker Punched

From one end of the spectrum to the other.

About 9:00 tonight, I finished up the work I had assigned myself for the evening and decided to walk over to the library. There's a book I need for two of my papers and I wanted to copy the article in the new America magazine about Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele. He's at Georgetown this year and my former spiritual director, who's also there, had emailed me some of his poems during a particularly rough patch some months ago, so now I am a Peter Steele fan.

It's a beautiful Indian summer evening and it was nice to get outside for a couple of minutes. As I made the two-minute walk, I thought about how nothing difficult had really come up today. The chapel sermon was based on Lamentations and was about listening to people through hardship, an excellent sermon that a year ago I couldn't have sat still for, but it didn't contain anything that you haven't read in this blog -- there was nothing in it that isn't just daily life for me now. So I was feeling pretty content and relaxed, as those things go.

And then, as I was standing at the photocopying machine in the library, a young man in my class came in and announced to the friend of mine working at the desk that his wife had an ultrasound today and it looks like they're going to have a little boy in mid-March.

I was standing there copying my article on the outside, but on the inside I was doubled over in pain.

This man's wife had a miscarriage last year and, of course, I wish them nothing but the very best in this pregnancy and in their lives as new parents.

But I remember some of those first-pregnancy ultrasounds so well, especially the one in May that confirmed two boys. I remember how dazed I was -- we knew about the two, but not about the genders. I remember how excited my grandfather was when I called him. And I remember that being the only couple of weeks during the pregnancy in which I was comfortable. I had finally stopped the all day all night vomiting, and at 5.5 months I wasn't as huge as I would be a month later . . . and all summer long.

It's so odd, and so hard, that that was my life then and this is my life now.

What I would give, to be back at the place where future Snuglis and backpacks and strollers were the topic of the evening ~ to be back at the place where "lamentation" was just a word instead of a life ~

to be back at a place where I could be completely oblivious to the fact that my joyous announcement of impending parenthood might be causing another person some serious pain.

I suppose you're finally growing up, when you're more aware of that possibility.

I don't know what you do about it, though.

Very Very Very Nice

I have discovered that one of the fallouts of grief is, shall we say, a certain degree of cognitive dysfunction.

I forget things. Lots of them and all kinds of them, and when I know I am supposed to remember them, my anxiety levels go sky high.

I have a final exam in one of my classes this term, and today I realized that I needed to ask my professor for some leeway. I probably just need a quiet room and the assurance that I can take extra time if I need it, but I wanted to warn him that I had a complete meltdown during a final last year (although I did well, I was completely unable to assess at the time whether what I was writing was anything close to what was being asked of us), that I have no way of predicting what will happen, and that if disaster strikes I might need an alternative course of action.

It will probably be all right. I got through Hebrew by taking my tests in a quiet room away from the rest of the class. But I just don't know. And while I didn't go into the details today, the fact is that most of my classes raise topics and issues that for me are swampy breeding grounds for PTSD.

My professor could not have been more gracious, which enables me to calm down considerably for the remaining four weeks of the quarter.

The Lovely Daughter suggested last night that I can be, ummmm, somewhat disdainful of how little people know about grief. (Me? Really? Sarcastic and disdainful? Is that possible?) "Did you know, Before, what you know now?" she asked. "Nope," I said.

One of the things I didn't know was that my brain cells would dissolve, or move around, or something. Whatever it is they do, it's not good, and it goes way beyond the usual midlife muddle. If you were reading my other blog a year ago, you know that I kept getting lost. (I have lived in the same city for over 30 years.) I'm much better now, but I do forget entire chunks of things, or I just find myself immobilized in the face of stress..

Sometimes I forget that it happens. In a class discussion on baptism last week, I managed to leave with maybe two seconds to spare before I burst into tears.

It's just one more thing: to know that in addition to all the things you have to deal with, you have to remember to be aware in advance of the possibility for emotional and mental mayhem when you do deal with them.

Anyway. It is very nice when other people simply take your word for it and try to help you out.

Psalm 88

Psalm 88 is the text I am working on for my exegetical (interpretative) paper in Hebrew this fall. For those unfamiliar with seminary-ese: we take two quarters to learn the rudiments of a Biblical language, and then a quarter to work on the process of researching and explaining a text ~ the work one would presumbably do before writing a sermon.

I chose Psalm 88 because it is the only of the 150 psalms of unrelieved anguish. Each of the other psalms of lament, of which there are many, at some point finds its way back towards an offer of praise to God, a sense of relief, of thanksgiving, of homecoming. Not 88.

It was the only Scripture I could stand to read or pray with for months after Josh died.

Walter Brueggemann, that famous scholar of the Hebrew Bible, calls Psalm 88 "audacious." I personally find much in the way of hope hidden between its lines; only a speaker who has at one time felt the near and intimate presence of God would cry out in such bold and accusatory heartbreak.

A big chunk of my research is complete, and I'm going to write more about it. For now, this is the translation I think I've settled on. I've tried to arrange it so that much of the literary technique jumps off the page. Or computer. Not sure what Blogger will do with it ~ this may take a few tries. (Nope ~ I can't make it work.)

1. A song; a melody; for a son of the Korahites. To the leader, according to Mahalath Leannoth. A maskil for Heman the Ezrabite.

2. Lord God of my salvation,
in the day I cry out, and
in the night, before you.

3. Let my prayer come before your face;
Incline your ear to my ringing cry.

4. For my soul is sated with troubles,
And my life touches Sheol.

5. I am counted with those who go down to the Pit;
I become like those with no help.

6. With those who have died forsaken,
as with those profaned;
Those who lie down in the grave
whom you do not remember,
for they are cut off from your hand,

7. You have put me in a pit of lowest places,
in the depths of dark places.

8. Your rage rests upon me,
and every breaker of yours knocks me down;
each of your breakers humbles me.

9. You have put those who know me far from me;
you have made me an abomination to them,
one who is shut up,
and I cannot go out.

10. My eye becomes dim from afflictions.
I call you, Lord, in every day;
I spread the palms of my hands toward you.

11. Do you do wonders for the dead?
Do ghosts rise up praising you?

12. Is your kindness recounted in the grave;
Your steadfastness in Abaddon?

13. Are your wonders made known in darkness?
And your righteousness in the land of oblivion?

14. But I cry out for help to you, Lord,
And in the morning my prayer confronts you.

15. Why, Lord, do you reject my life?
Hide your face from me?

16. I am wretched, and
I am one who has perished from my youth;
I suffer your terrors;
I am helpless.

17. Your rage has swept over me;
your terrors annihilate me.

18. They surround me like waters all the time;
They surround me completely.

19. You put far from me friend and companion,
Those known to me –

Darkness!

Interlude

For some inexplicable reason, I am feeling pretty good, which is to say pretty neutral, this week.

I'm guessing that I have been on such overload that my psyche is protecting itself by taking a break.

I have absorbed a lot of sad news from elsewhere this week, and we are in the midst of family drama and sadness ourselves, so perhaps my frayed neurons have simply closed up shop for a bit.

I did almost start to cry in a class yesterday in which we are discussing issues pertaining to bodily resurrection. I managed to deflect most of my pain by talking about examples from the lives of other people rather than my own.

At some point I heard myself say that I have no beliefs about life after death right now. Later, trying to dissect what I had said, it seemed that the reasoning was obvious: It matters not in the least to me. All that matters is that my son is not here with me now. I know that other people find comfort in various beliefs about what is next; some (although I'm not sure who that would be) even find comfort in the convoluted framework posited by the Presbyterian Confessions. I don't. I give my classmates and professor credit, though, for their silence in the face of experience.

Now that I've written it down, it's hard to believe that not crying plus null belief constitutes a good week. I guess from a feeling perspective it makes sense; I am breathing, and much of the time I think I have forgotten to do that.

I suppose that this momentary sense of breathing in neutral means rough terrain lies ahead.

Don't Ge Me Wrong ~

Jennifer, who's given me lots of support, left a comment on a previous post on Search the Sea indicating that I'm leaving the impression that my seminary is a place of discouragment.

Not the case ~ except in isolated (and yes, frustrating) circumstances. On the whole it's a gentle and supportive place. Certainly it's a friendly place. But I do experience it differently than most.

One of the struggles in coming to terms with traumatic and severe bereavement lies in the effort to forge a new identity, the old one having been irreparably torn to pieces. The geography and terrain are the same, the circumstances of life seem vaguely familiar, but your own boundaries and priorities are in flux, and there are going to be painful clashes.It seems to me that there are three basic ways of dealing with a loss like ours. We are all of us strung out along the spectrum, but still: three basic approaches.

First, you can dwell entirely in your grief. It may seem to some that I do that and, of course, sometimes I do. But I read a lot about surviving suicide, and I know well that there are many parents who remain almost completely dysfunctional years after the death of their child. It's tempting ~ every move toward life feels like an abandonment of your child, and sometimes in the constant pull between the place of despair and the place of hope, despair wins. And for some, despair wins almost all of the time, a situation about which I can make no judgment whatsoever.

Other extreme ~ you can deny deny deny and proceed with life as usual. I know a lot about this M.O., it being the one my family of origin has always practiced. There seems to be some kind of (entirely erroneous) belief that by not acknowledging horror publicly or out loud, you can alleviate the pain. I suppose such an approach does make it easier for those outside the immediate circle of grief ~ but in my experience it makes it more difficult and longer lasting for those within.

And finally, there is the approach I am trying out, in my own blundering, confused,and erratic way: I really do try to integrate what has happened with the reality that remains. That means that I say words like "suicide" out loud and that I express my anguish ~ more than others would like, no doubt, but far less than I feel it. It means that I recount funny and sweet stories about my son without self-consciousness. It means that I do not pretend that everything I have believed ~ about God, about the universe, about other people and my relationships with them ~ has not been drawn into question. It means that I still try to sort out the completely irrational from what few things still make sense and that I am trying to rebuild from scratch.

And it means that I am incredibly sensitive to what goes on around me, to things that seem ordinary to everyone else involved. It means that the most innocuous remark can feel like a knife scraping my skin off and that a genuine conflict, no matter how minor, feels like the top of a volcano flying off. It means that a sermon intended to be encouraging, and so perceived by everyone else who hears it, sounds like words of eternal damnation and hellfire to me.

It's been a year now. More than a year. It will be always, at least in this life. Life and death completely and always intertwined, altering all pathways of perception.And most certainly altering the experience of a seminary education.

Cross posted from Search the Sea.

I Guess I Need a Blogging Break

Apparently there's something in the water ~

I started my day by skimming some blogs and this was one of the things I read:

"For reasons that I can scarcely claim to understand, I have often felt most aware of God's loving care and presence in moments of great difficulty."

Then I made another try at going to church, first time I've ventured into my own church in weeks, and heard a beautiful, beautiful sermon on much the same theme.

But ~ that awareness at this kind of a time is not one of the things that happens to me. Except on rare occasions.

And so it was an excruciating morning from start to finish, exacerbated by some unexpected music at the end of the church service and by the news of another life lost to suicide.

I guess I'm going to go back to seminary this week and generally keep my mouth shut.

My experience is apparently too far our of the norm to convey.

Or maybe it IS the norm, and that's why our churches have emptied out.

Anyway. Time for a break.

And ~ oh, yeah. I'm doing Psalm 88 for my Hebrew exegesis paper. The one psalm out of all 150 of them of unremitting lament. It will take three months. Maybe, ironically, there will be a path out of this hell that way.

Balancing Act Continued

Summer Hebrew was an intensive eight week course: six months of Hebrew packed into two. I have no aptitude for ancient languages, but I do have a certain degree of compulsiveness and a surprising capacity for work, and so I did well.

Toward the end of the final week, I sat outside at a picnic table for awhile talking with my professor and his wife, as I often did when I returned from my early evening walk. "You seem much calmer than you did at the beginning of the summer," his wife observed.

"Well, that's partly because I finally figured out how to study and learn the material," I said, "and partly because I have come to a new place in my grief. For a long time," I continued, "you resist it, because you cannot imagine that anyone could possibly tolerate this much pain and survive. And then you realize that people do, in fact, live like this, and you begin to understand that (as a friend so wisely wrote), while the weight of the burden does not ease, you can shift it in ways that make it possible to carry."

It was clear from their expressions that they had no idea what I was talking about. I'm getting used to that.

Today we received a note from a former roommate of our son's, a delightful and creative man from Paris. It's probably been six months since I found the language for telling such startling and horrific news in the form of a letter to someone so young, and he first apologized for his delay in responding. He has been in Shanghai for the past year and one-half, he said, and his mother had left some mail, including my letter, in a pile on the hall table for him. Then he added some lovely memories about our son and expressed his desire to stay in touch.

And I thought, OK, whatever: This is not my life.

I guess that sometimes we carry things around and sometimes we just pretend that we don't.

Chipping Sparrow

I did TWO thee-mile walks today. Hebrew makes me restless and so, after my three hour class and one and one-half hour tutoring session, I went for a walk and got rained on and then, before dinner, unable to sit still and study, I grabbed my notes and retraced my steps.

I was alternating between trying to grasp the text (carrying a xeroxed copy covered with a plethora of tiny handwritten notes) and pondering the questions that plague me these days. Hebrew must be memorized, but one cannot lose a child to suicide in the middle of seminary and not have one's concept and dreams of ministry utterly changed. The constant dualism of my train of what passes for thought.

And then I saw this little bird in someone's yard and turned my attention to it. The words "chipping sparrow" slowly emerged from the very dim recesses of my very much fogged and disabled mind. A mile or so later and another one appeared at the reservoir around which I walk. Chipping sparrows. Birds that in another lifetime I would have noted or checked off on a spring migration list.

Who was that woman? It seems so odd to me, that there are still chipping sparrows and that I still notice.

Just Saying

I'm really enjoying the few but cogent comments to the post below.

The only reason I'm not saying anything is that I find myself completely overwhelmed by this week's Hebrew. Understanding, on second review of things I thought were clear in class: about 60%. Ability to remember what I do understand: 0%.

So I'm reading whenever I take a break, and will contribute later.

In the meantime: Carry on.

Degrees of NonSeparation

I am not sure what all of this means. Perhaps nothing at all ~ but I prefer to think it means that in our sorrows we are all connected in mysterious ways:

I live in Ohio, and I am Presbyterian, and I attend seminary in Pennsylvania, where I am studying Hebrew in my school's summer intensive language program. And I am working on a certificate in spiritual direction at a Jesuit university in Ohio. And my beautiful and generous and funny son Josh died by suicide at the end of last summer. The Jewish name Joshua means "God saves." It is also a name of significance in Christianity (!), although at the time Josh and his twin brother were born, that was not our reason for choosing it.

Wayne lives in Pennsylvania and is Episcopalian and is an artist and teacher and prays with the Jesuits at one of their most beautiful ever retreat centers in Wernersville. It's due to the Jesuit connection that we found one another through our blogs.

Gal lives in California and is Jewish and is soon moving to Ohio, where her husband will continue his rabbinical studies. Their youngest daughter died almost a year ago, when she was about two months old, after a courageous battle waged by her family and doctors against a medical condition which had revealed itself before she was born. Their daughter's name is Tikva, which means "Hope." We found one another's blogs because of a mutual friend of a friend, who lives in St. Louis.

Yesterday I received a card from Wayne, a card with one Hebrew word beautifully written. Sadly, I struggle mightily with the ancient languages I am required to learn, and so I was unable to decipher it. Wayne sent me an email tonight to help me out.

The word is TIKVA: ת ק ו ה .

Some nights I feel the weight of this sorrow so deeply that I can barely move.

Some nights all I can do is hope that God's salvation means something much wider and wilder than I have ever been able to imagine.

I plan to put the card on my door at school, where I usually stay three nights a week, and contemplate tiny Tikva and tall Josh ~ and hope.

Scavenger Hunt

I don't usually write about my encounters in therapy but perhaps this one would be of help to someone.

I am about about to wrap up several months of bi-weekly meetings with a grief counselor and last week she asked me whether I felt that I had returned to seminary too soon. I wasn't sure what she meant; everything seems too soon, but I think ten years from now everything will still seem too soon. Including getting out of bed in the morning.

There is, it seems, a school of thought that by returning too soon to some semblance of regular life, whatever that once was, a person might be repressing her experience of grief, only to see it emerge in destructive ways later on.

As I've thought about her question, I've concluded that I've made good decisions. I remember little of the winter quarter of seminary, but I know that I was supported and encouraged by friends who, had I waited a year, would have moved on in their classes and activities. It was terribly difficult in many ways ~ my husband, a web designer, pointed out that while his work is something of a break, mine ~ Christology, ethics, pastoral care ~ is relentlessly about exactly what our lives are about: life, death, meaning, meaninglessness, purpose, despair, hope, anguish. No wonder I reassesed what I was doing pretty much minute-by-minute.

It's worked, I think, because I have tried to be honest and open without monopolizing center stage. I haven't, of course, always been successful. I have left classes and chapel services to cry in solitude and peace. I have been less than encouraging to hopeful pastoral care classmates who would like to believe that they can bring words of comfort to a grieving family. I am sure that I have offered unwelcome doses of reality from time to time.

I've learned to ask for what I need. More time, more space. Deadlines for papers and the stimulii of others in a classroom during a test are often just over the edge of what I can manage. More help. I realized this week that my spiritual director, an exceptionally quiet and reserved man, might best be described as heroic. I know this has been and continues to be a time-consuming and long and painful and frustrating slog for him.

I have discovered that people respond with surprise, even astonishment ~ or, rather, of course ~ when they learn the circumstances of my life, but that a degree of candid openness seems to dissipate fear. Yesterday I met with the senior pastor of the church where I will be doing my field work next fall and one of the topics that came up was my participation in funerals. He seems completely unintimidated by the challenge, appropriately aware of the need for sensitivity and also appropriately aware of the need for me to be able to do the full range of work in a church ~ all of which contributes to my own sense of hope and confidence.

Next week I meet with the committee which will (I hope) approve me to go forward with the next step for ordination. When I met with them in December, I spoke for nearly an hour about the events of the preceding three months, and then waited for them to say, "No way can you do this." Their reaction was quite the opposite; I hope that still holds. Assuming it does, I go before my entire Presbytery a few weeks later. A few weeks ago, in the first of this three-part meeting process, I met with my own church session, and our senior pastor came right out with a question about my son and how the past year has unfolded.

I speak, at times like that, about the same things I write about here. The bewilderment, the guilt, the frustrations. The communities and individuals who surround me. The work I am surprised to find myself still called to do

Did I short-circuit grief by scavenging for pieces of life too soon? I don't think so. After my mother and brother were killed in that car accident at the ages of twenty-eight and one, my grandmother coped for awhile by reading an Agatha Christie mystery a day. But she also took care of us, my surviving younger brother and me. Only on the rarest of much later occasions did she find the courage to speak of that bleak year. But she did live it, and she did much to give life back to us.

Perhaps the gift that emerges for others in the "return" ~ and I guess I wouldn't really call it a return, since that life is gone ~ is the honest demonstration that the pieces you recover are smashed and jagged fragments of what once was, but hold the potential for being soldered back together into something else, as long as you are willing to experiment with undesirable materials and shapes and to accept a finished product that looks ~ um ~ a little battered and wobbly.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend asking about my willingness to accept an imperfect gift. He had made something for me and then messed it up. It's not ruined ~ it's just not what he had planned.

He recognizes, I think, that I am the Queen of Imperfect Gifts ~ in both the giving and the receiving.

So no, I haven't short-circuited my grief. I live it every moment: on long walks alone, in hours of prayer, in classrooms in which I speak out and in meetings in which I listen. Wisdom does not mean pretending. Courage does not mean waiting until your pain is resolved (which would be when, exactly?) or the pieces of your life fall back into place.

So maybe I have learned something about wisdom and courage in spite of myself.

Wisdom and courage ~ picking up those slivers of glass that cut your fingers, rearranging them into patterns that defy conventional standards of beauty, and recognizing authenticity and generosity as the measure of wholeness. Wisdom and courage ~ the recognition that you will never succeed in reaching some destination of impeccably elegant completion, but that you will be utterly delighted when someone asks, "How are you at accepting imperfect gifts?"

Speechless

Would I have had the good sense to abandon seminary once and for all if I had known . . .

that in the middle of the first term of Hebrew, the verb used (because it behaves itself in a regular fashion) to explain the baffling concept of voice in Hebrew would be: katal ~ to kill

??????????

To kill.

To be killed.

To kill oneself.

To cause someone to kill.

To be caused to kill.

To cause someone to kill himself.

(A portion of the chart on page 71 of our workbook.)

Oh. My. God.

(And yes. I made it to the end of the class before bursting into tears. Just barely.)

It's Hard Because You Never Know When . . .

Hebrew language class last week: We are, as I've been writing about in my other blog, learning Hebrew by reading the story of the binding of Issac in Genesis 22. Our professor began the summer by talking about the story as a great narrative: the promise, the tension, the human effort to achieve the desired result, the apparent solution, the challenge, the final resolution. It IS a great narrative.

But we began with the promise: to Abraham and Sarah, of many descendants, as many as there are stars in the sky.

There will be no descendants for me, not through Chicago Son. Not through the tall young man whom I had once imagined teaching his children to play soccer on the beach. I think that if you had scanned my insides as that particular lecture began, you would have seen my stomach turn completely over, quite literally. At least that's how it felt, physically, in my gut. On the outside, I looked like a student taking notes. On the inside, I was on the verge of throwing up.

The whole month of June: God, Abraham, a son's life in the balance. Sarah, who never again speaks in the text as we know it, to either her husband or his God. Not really the most auspicious beginning for my study of Hebrew.

Today: a mammogram. Last August I had spent one of my last CPE mornings, as things wound down, scheduling all kinds of overdue medical appointments. I got one of them in before Chicago Son died, and then cancelled all the rest.

The technician today was lovely and did her job quickly and efficiently; only a couple of the scans were as painful as they all used to be. I'm sure she thought the tears clouding my eyes were the consequence of physical sensitivity; she dropped a couple of hints to the effect that I might make an effort to come back more regularly. I distracted myself by looked at the pictures: the high-def results are much more intriguing to the untrained eye than the old ones. But I don't have much interest in repeating the experience. All I could think about were the three children I nursed during years when it seemed that optimism was not unwaranted. One of them in particular.

Fantasy Life

1. Move to island community a couple of hours and a ferryboat ride away.

2. Pastor small church there. Host occasional island retreats of a day or a few. Write.

3. Come into the city for two or three days a week to do part-time chaplaincy at Giant Famous Hospital and some spiritual direction, maybe teach a college class as an adjunct, see my friends and go to dinner or the orchestra or the art museum (not all in the same weeek!).

Needs met: Solitude. Quiet. Church. Migratory birds. Kayak. Intensity of hospital on a reduced-time basis. Just enough big city culture and companionship.

Gifts offered: Worship leadership, preaching, teaching, congregational and hospital pastoral care, spiritual direction, writing.

Questions: Is there even a church of any kind on one of those islands? Would GFH take me on as a part-time chaplain? Would anyone be interested in publishing my writing?

In between me and there: Summer Hebrew. One last year of seminary. One year CPE residency. Debt. The garage that's falling down.

Just some thoughts, inspired by today's Friday Five.