Calibrating? Muddling?

A fairly new acquaintance says to me, "I don't know how you've managed to come back to seminary this year. When my mother died, I took a quarter off. A child? I don't think I could have done that."

A good, longtime friend says to me, "I don't know how you're doing what you do."

What do those statements mean? Do people think I don't love my son enough? Do they think I'm in denial?

I don't think either of those things are true.

I am rather cheerfully pushing my cart through the grocery, thinking that while I feel like shit, I feel relatively ok. Better than a lot of days. Then some piano music wafts through the air. I have no idea whether I have heard it before, whether it is glancing off some subconscious memory. But I want to let the cart go, sink to my knees, and wail a long and piercing cry. I don't, of course. I keep pushing the cart, and wonder how many people we see in our daily lives out there in the world who are silently keening.

Three women in the coffee shop. One of us lost her father a year ago; after she cared for him for months, he died in her arms. One of us lost her son seven-plus months ago. One of us is accompanying her husband through his chemotherapeutic battle against a particularly virulent form of cancer. We are laughing and beginning to plan a college graduation party for four young ladies we know and love.

What does that mean? Strength? Resistance? Oblivion?

I think that mostly it means that I love the women I know.

Oh, and the wisdom thing I've been muttering about? I think I get it. What you learn from this kind of suffering is that you know nothing. I mean: really nothing. If you have reached the age of 50, you are probably already aware that you have never known or understood nearly as much as you may have once thought you did. But this kind of loss clarifies it anew: we know NOTHING.

That, I think, is wisdom.

Timing

This coming week-end our church is hosting a women's retreat. Last year I was supposed to make a presentation, but had to cancel because Musical Friend's husband died. This year I offered to try again, since what I had to offer the first time can be re-tailored to fit almost any theme. Other than making the offer and having had it accepted, I haven't participated in the planning.

The theme, as it turns out, is Reconciliation - with self, with others, with God.

W-A-Y too soon for any of that.

* * * * *

I realize that I am feeling a bit resentful. Isolated. Neglected. Sorry for myself.

Our pastor mentioned in last week's sermon (which I read online) that she is doing some reading about grief work. I hate that term, "grief work." My "grief counselor" uses it, too. I think I hate it because it makes it sound as if the journey of grief is a project, something that you could pick up from time to time to work on, like gardening, or a legal brief, instead of the all-enveloping haze that you have to re-negotiate minute by minute.

At any rate, I think that she is doing the reading because she has recently spent a considerable amount of time with a family that has just lost a young child. I wish she had done it six months ago.

Maybe then she would have known that seven months out would be way too early to broach a term like "reconciliation."

* * * * *

Was it my job to be the educator? Our pastors were wonderful ~ spectacular, even ~ in the week after our son died, when there was so much to be done, so suddenly, and in such crisis circumstances. But I had the sense that the long-term process of grieving was not in their realm of expertise.

It was just a matter of intuition.

I suppose that I shouldn't use the word "just" as as modifier. After all, on the Meyers-Briggs, I am 100% intuitive. Not an ounce of concrete affects my approach to life. (Yeah, I'm working on that.)

The thing is, I think I was right.

* * * * *

They keep preaching on the wisdom that emerges from suffering. (Which is why I've been reading sermons online rather than going to church.)

I asked a friend last week, a woman who lost a child many years ago, whether she thinks her experience added to her store of wisdom.

"No," she said.

One would like to think that one might find wisdom, grace, perseverance, courage, in such circumstances.

Perhaps, eventually, such things emerge. Who knows?

No one who understands the cost would want them.

Epiphany Sunday

(Chartres Cathedral)

It's Epiphany Sunday: the celebration of the journey of the three wise men. I did not go to church today, for a variety of reasons, so I missed the march of the three kings down the center aisle, the ponderous song, the elaborate costumes, the sermons about gift-giving, the reminders that the kings were probably astrologers from the place we know as Iran and that the story, which appears only in the gospel of Matthew, focuses largely on portents of doom in its emphasis on Herod and its funereal gifts. I missed, most of all, the ritualistic end of a difficult season.

But I am thinking about it, and what I am thinking about is Wisdom. What was it that made those men wise, and why are we so taken with the idea that wise men, as well as angels and shepherds, showed up in response to the arrival of the infant Jesus? Whether anything of the sort actually happened is beside the point; the question has to do with the role of Wisdom.

It's a personal question for me this year. Many people have, in writing and speaking to me, made reference to the wisdom that emerges from sorrow. The reality, though, is that wisdom is not a guaranteed by-product of heartbreak. In fact, other possibilities seem more likely: alcoholism, drug abuse, self-absorption, loss of direction, and various other forms of decline. We all know people who in response to great loss have frozen into fear and immobility, or have spent decades acting out the inner experience of deprivation and chaos. And. if you think about it, how many people of deep wisdom do you know? The number is a very, very small one. In fact, to know one or two such people at any stage of life is a great gift.

And so I've been thinking about the wise men, who paid attention to a shift in the heavens, whose curiousity got them moving, who travelled a long way togther, who were undeterred by the politics along the way and unabashed by the poverty of their destination , who brought gifts no mother would welcome, and whose experience altered their route home.

Wherein wisdom? In the initial attentiveness and curiosity? In the experience of hardship in community? In the refusal to succumb to challeges that might have undone them? In the intuitive knowledge of a shadowy future? In the willingness to give? In the recognition that a change in the road home was required? In surviving to tell the story?

Wisdom. Elusive.