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.

Drowning or Not

I'm taking a course on the Gospel of Matthew, which is not a requirement, and writing an exegesis paper for it, which is about the last thing in the world I need to be doing right now.

The passage I chose as my topic is the one in which Jesus walks on the water toward the disciples who are cowering in their storm-tossed boat, and Peter decides to jump out and walk toward Jesus. The reality of walking on turbulent water (or, I suppose, any water at all) freaks him out and he starts to sink. Jesus, of course, rescues him.

I chose it because it's one of those passages that both sides in the Biblical debate seize upon:

"Look - he can walk on water! Isn't it obvious that he is the Son of God?"

"Look - they are trying to convince us that he walked on water. Isn't it obvious that the Bible is one gigantic and elaborate fairy tale?"

So ~ I figured it would be a good story to know something about. It would be good to read commentaries written hundreds of years ago and to look at the Greek (OK, just the tiniest bit of the Greek) and to think a little about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Buddhist and Greek stories about divine beings who walk on water. It would be fun in an I-love-textual-criticism kind of way.

But you know, in the end, it really isn't much about water or walking thereon. It's more about this, as one of the more recent commentaries (that would be Luz) says:

"[A]lone and unsupported in the water, [Peter] grows beyond himself and thus experiences both his own failure and the Lord’s support. It deals with the possibility of exceeding one’s own human limitations in faith in the midst of deep despair, fear, misfortune, suffering, and guilt."

And therefore ~ as it turns out ~ this is exactly the course and exactly the paper and exactly the passage I need to be working on right now.

Re-creation

Wayne has three friends who have recently suffered the deaths of young adult sons. I am one of those friends. He asked about the next one: should he share this blog with her? I told him to go ahead, but that he might want to mention it again in a few months, as she will probably remember little of what he says right now.

I leave out a lot, of course. This is only a little blog, and I write because writing is one way that I process things. But I don't want to scare people with the fierceness of grief. Someone commented on Kat's blog recently that she has never experienced a major loss. Oh, I thought to myself, she lives in such a different universe. When she sees the moon, or the sun, or a dragonfly, it looks completely different to her than it does to me.

I had known that before. My brother and I talked the other day about how our basic orientation, formed as the small survivors of the automobile accident that took the lives of others, is toward a universe of chaos and treachery. But the last months have been a reminder of just how much courage one needs to muster for the daily encounter.

I am rather musterless. I cannot listen to Vivaldi anymore. I tried Tschiakovsky's Fifth Symphony the other day ~ that's gone, too. At least as I used to understand it.

But (rousing myself again), I did think, after Wayne posted about the most recent death in his circle of friends, that I might share this. This has helped. A Jesuit friend sent me a bookmark a couple of weeks ago. The sculpture is The Creation of Adam, from the north portal of Chartres Cathedral (which he knows to be my favorite place). Think of your son resting on the knees of a loving God, he wrote. Another Jesuit looked at it and said, And you can also think of God re-creating your son. Yes, I said, that occurred to me, too.

You do not have to see it as the re-creation of a young man. You might see instead the re-creation of a young woman, or a baby girl, or a mother or a husband or a sister or an older parent ~ all of them represented by the links on my sidebar.

I don't know whether it helps. I don't pretend to know what might. But to does seem to me that the gentle caress of a loving and infinitely creative and hopeful God is a possible response to the chaos that threatens to engulf us. And so: the Chartres portrait, sculpted by an unknown artist 740 years ago. It's what I have to offer today.

The Abode of Grief: Fewer Hours, Condensed Time

I used to live long, wide, and spacious days.

I would often be outdoors and walking three or four miles by 6:00 a.m. I worked hard all day and well into the evening. I was a teacher, I was a graduate student, I was a church committee chair. I was often asked to do things that required advance preparation. (Will you make this quick presentation on Sunday? a friend would ask. I know it doesn't take you any time at all. Look how easy that last one was. And my eyebrows would go up. Those two minutes? At least two hours of advance writing and revising and practice. But it looked so easy, he would say. That's how it's supposed to look.)

And I had three children in college, all of whom filled my thoughts and dreams and hopes, every day, every night. When they were small I would call home three, four times a day, just to find out what they were up to. When they were in college I would glance at my watch and think, it's noon in Chicago and 1:00 in Columbus and 9:00 a.m. in Oregon. Is he in class, is he at work, is she even awake?

And I had energy for myself, and energy for God. Lots of energy for reading and writing and breakfasts with friends. Lots of space in my life for prayer and journaling. Time seemed so full and yet so expansive.

Now. Now it is nearly 9:00 am and I am just getting up. I was awake three hours ago but I knew that would make for too many hours in the day and so I went back to sleep. I will be up late into the night because I won't be able to sleep then.

Now I have to pace myself carefully. I am doing things: going to class, studying, writing papers, working with a couple of people, planning for the future. Each takes so much energy and requires so much recovery time. I forget what I've focused on within five minutes of reading or hearing it. I look at notes and say to myself: We had an entire lecture on that? I lose everything, little things and really important things. I stumble across them later and can't imagine how they landed in the place they did. I write papers and have no idea whether they bear any resemblance to what is expected. I make schedules for accomplishing things and then I stare into space.

I am still writing thank-you notes. The cost of each one is so high. Only a few lines, but each reminds me of something else ~ a relationship, an occasion in the past, someone else entirely whose claim on my time is perhaps more urgent. I did not know, before, that when I received an acknowledgment from someone for flowers or words offered in a time of sorrow, that the note itself might represent a morning's work. Or a week's.

People send me emails and cards and books and little packages. Some of the things written by certain people fill my thoughts for hours, for days. They become little prayers, flickering sources of connection to other people, to the universe, to God.

I think about my lost son all of the time, as I have for 25 years. My brain tissue has grooves worn in it, and I cannot stop thinking of someone just because he is not here at all. But his absence fills every crevice of my life and makes impossible demands on my imagination. I keep waiting for time to go backward so that we can pick up where we left off.

I think about my other children and my son's girlfriend all the time, too. I want to wrap my arms around them all and take care of them forever and in a way that will enable them to heal. What does that even mean? I have a long scar smack down the middle of my stomach, from the car accident when I was seven. (No scans in those days to reveal ruptured spleens, which I turned out not to have.) It was a distraction during my bikini days, it stretched to accomodate a twin pregnancy, and then another one, and now it looks as crumpled and faded as you might expect. I don't notice it. But this jagged scar, the one which all these young people have to carry into adult life? How much time before it fades? There is nothing clean and precise about it; all those jagged edges seem more like tentacles than boundaries.

I have been writing this piece off and on for a couple of days. Not an original thought in it. And yet, like everything else, it has sapped hours and energy. I had not realized that time and energy were so closely entertwined, and not in any way that makes sense.

(Image: Picasso's Blue Nude.)