Psalm 115

"I will walk in the presence of the Lord, in the land of the living."

~ (Responsorial psalm at today's Mass.)

A statement of reality? Of hope? Of determination? Of will? Of desire? Of wistful thinking?

I walk in the other land as well.

I have these dreams. I think that I don't remember most of them because they are too disturbing for daylight and consciousness. But I remember some of them,

You understand why everywhere I go is a field of land mines.

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.

Walk in the Light

I have been told many times that it was a beautiful funeral service. I wouldn't know, although I did do everything that I could to make it so. As with most of that week, I remember some things with great clarity and others not at all.

My husband, my mother-in-law, and I wrote pieces to be read by others. I have attended several funerals in the past few years at which family members have themselves spoken, but we were all too numbed by shock and pain. We could hardly imagine even going to the funeral, let alone speaking from the pulpit or lectern. And after a summer of ministering to the incredibly sick and dying at Famous Giant Hospital, I was very much inclined to let others minister to me.

I wanted to say something though, and a couple of nights after Josh died it came to me in a rush, so I crawled out of the bed in which no one was sleeping anyway and headed for the computer. One of my friends of the past two decades read it with great composure at the service a few days later.

****************************************

Josh spent his 11th grade year in France, and we all visited him over the winter break. His wonderfully loving and gracious French family welcomed us to a magnificent Christmas dinner, and we spent time getting to know his home city and exploring Paris and the coast of Normandy.

One of the places to which we traveled was Mont St. Michel, the tall and expansive medieval monastery that rises so astonishingly from the rock of a small island in the English Channel just off the northern coast of France. Josh had already been there with his school, and delighted in showing us the massive pillars and archways in one of the lower level, and the views out across the sea from the top. But his favorite place was the monks' refectory, or dining room, located high up in the monastery. "Wait 'till you see, Mom -- you can walk in the light!"

And indeed, you can. The refectory is lined with windows on either side, windows cut into the stone at a slight angle so that, as you walk the length of the room, the light seems to walk with you. The day we were there, the refectory was cordoned off with a rope, but no one was around, certainly no one official. "You have to see this," announced Josh, and so we ducked under the rope and walked up and down the thousand-year-old stone floor,with the light accompanying us, step by step, window by window. We walked in the light at the top of Mount St. Michel, as the monks must have done for hundreds of years before us.

Josh's love for the nuances of light and dark, for the possibilities inherent in design and material -- the parts of him that made him a wonderful photographer and potential architect -- were so in evidence that day. The sense of adventure that took him to camp in North Carolina as a small boy, and to Europe to study as a teenager, and to travel with his brother as a college student, was in full swing, as was his deep love for the people he cared about: his French family, as well as us.

Oh, Josh. If only the light had stayed with you for all of the short time you were with us. Walk in the light now, my darling Josh. Walk in the light now.




Refectory image here.
Mont St. Michel image here.

Anniversary Day

The morning is sunny and clear and crisp as she wanders into the back of the church where she meets one of the priests who have been her mainstays for the past year. The two of them sit in one of the pews of the cavernous sanctuary and talk and pray for an hour. That makes how many hours in the company of Jesuits over the past few days? She has no idea where they have found the time and the patience to listen and listen, and read email after email, month after month. She is not asking.

She spends the day taking walks and reading her email and FB notes and listening to multiple versions of Hallelujah over and over again. Her brother calls, as he does every couple of days. Her father doesn't. At noon the regular mail arrives, bringing more cards and one of the most extraordinarily beautiful letters she has ever received. Blogging has its rewards.

It seems that candles are being lit all over the place. Her own candle is lit and re-lit, as she and her husband come and go during the day.

As the afternoon turns to evening, she and her family go down the hill to the university, where with about 30 friends they take a leisurely walk past places meaningful to her son. The auto and aviation museum where, impassioned about planes, he volunteered during the summer before high school. The Gehry building which had fascinated him. The university soccer field, emblematic of the many fields on which he played across several states and two countries. The art institute where he studied photography while he was in high school. She spends most of the walk deep in conversation with her son's lower el (1st-3rd grade) teacher. He clearly treasured that small boy, and is trying as hard as everyone else to put the pieces together.

They start back up the hill through Little Italy and spend the rest of the evening on the outdoor patio of one of the restaurants, tiny lights twinkling above them. Friends from 20-plus years of Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Friends and teachers from Montessori days. Grown children who, until last year, had spent nearly every Christmas together. It's interesting to see where the longest and strongest connections have been soldered together; they seem to have been borne out of the preschool and elementary school parenting and teaching years. Those magical times somehow created the possibility that adults and grown children might one day face down sorrow together.

The day is filled with love and compassion, friendship and presence. If only her son had remembered in those dark hours how filled with riches his life was.

Hallelujah

I was surprised, I admit it, by the positive response to yesterday's post. The lyrics to Hallelujah are disturbing, regardless of which version you're talking about. (One website says there are 15 verses in total, appearing in various recordings.)

I think I first heard Hallelujah at the end of the season finale of the third season of West Wing. C.J. Cregg, the White House press secretary, and Simon Donovan, the secret service agent assigned to her in the wake of a series of threats, have fallen in love; to their mutual astonishment and relief, the perpetrator has been arrested, meaning that they are finally free to pursue their relationship. The President is attending a theatrical production in New York, from which he withdraws to discuss with Leo the decision he is making to assasinate a foreign leader. And presidential advisor Josh Lyman is arguing with his girlfriend, women's rights activist Amy Gardner, who has just lost her job due to White House machinations.

The clip below opens with Simon's murder. It's quick and it's violent, but I'm going with this version because the speed and power of the violence reflect the experience of sudden and startling death so well. The important part for me, though, lies in about 1:00-2:45. I've always been very fond of the character of C.J. Cregg, who is tall and elegant (I wish) and whose last name sounds exactly like mine (even though it's spelled differently), but in these scenes, with her response to the news of Simon's death and the images of the investigative scene where she is not present, there are mirrors to my own life that go far beyond the elusive personal qualities and last name. Our son did not die from a gunshot wound, but almost all suicide deaths involve police investigations of the scene and body, and almost all sudden deaths involve notifications to loved ones who are plunged into a state of numbed shock before the first spoken sentence is complete.

And the song? Some of the lyrics are a mystery to me, some are overtly sexual, and all of them blend the human longing for others and for God that becomes so potent in times of bewilderment and loss. I hear so many voices in this song, layering over one another through a phrase here, a verse there: the voices of David and Bathsheba, of Samson and Delilah, of men and the women they love, of women and the men they love, of brothers and sisters who love one another, of mothers and fathers and the sons and daughters they love. To me it's a song of lament for a time when loss and love crash against one another in a sudden and violent cataclysm of destruction. "And love is not a victory march; it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah" ~ the words could be Zosima's in The Brothers Karamasov, which I've quoted repeatedly in the past year. "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing in real life as opposed to love in dreams."

It's a Cold and It's a Broken Hallelujah