Christmas Message

I just posted this on my usual blog, but in case someone comes here and needs to read it:


It's three days before Christmas and I've just learned of the suicide this past week of another young man in his early 20s. I just want to say . . . it's hard. So impossibly hard. I am not sure that there is a more searing form of pain in this life. Although I was able to write of hope in my blog tonight, we are leaving town tomorrow for the third Christmas in a row, and I expect to be be scattering ashes into the Atlantic on Christmas Day. I am writing this so that you know, if you are a parent or other loved one reading this because your Christmas season has just been ripped away, along with the rest of your life, that there are others who accompany you. We may grow into hope, and into lives we never expected or wanted, but we remain heartbroken, and we know, as you do, about things no one wants to know. There is a light that the darkness does not overcome, but the darkness is very dark indeed. May you know that the love to which you once gave birth still flows outward and envelops your child, and may you be surrounded by people who will hang onto to you through the darkness.

If You're Still Here . . .

and I guess you are, because I got a lovely note from someone this morning telling me so . . .

1) Please visit my Advent blog, if you haven't already, here.

2) As I responded to the person who was kind enough to write, I have finally begun to imagine a framework for a book of some/a little/most/? of this material, so I was thinking about going private while I figure that out. But if this meets a need, I can leave it open.

3) If you have any suggestions, the comments are open.

Holidays - Round Three

Ay-yep.

Worse.

Others moving onward in the lives.

Numbness all worn away.

Reality is really real.

Think I need me a bottle of that good ole denial stuff.

All I Want

I am on a lonely road and I am traveling
Traveling, traveling, traveling
Looking for something, what can it be . . .

~ Joni

All I want is Josh. Not the Josh of my dreams, not the Josh of my memory, not the Josh of my imagination, not the Josh of my prayer.


I want the flesh and blood Josh of my life. I want him to go to work or grad school, I want him to marry that beautiful girl and adopt those Vietnamese children, I want to watch my tall blond son teaching his dark-haired boys and girls how to play soccer on the beach.


Why is that too much to ask?

Year Three: A Space in Which to Watch and Listen

I've realized from a couple of comments and emails that not everyone has made it over to the new place, so I thought I'd cross-post this one (which perhaps should have been posted here originally):

And so . . .

Late yesterday afternoon my son and I drove the few hours to my husband's hometown for his brother's retirement party. We stopped at nearby Chautauqua on the way so that I could purchase a gift for another party today and also the Barbara Brown Taylor CDs from the summer - a Sunday morning service, a Sunday evening Vespers service which has become a traditional time in which the preachers of the week to share some of their personal stories, and five weekday services.

BBT is one of the reasons I have just graduated from seminary. She was "introduced" to me a couple of decades ago by one of my stepsisters who was a parishoner of hers in Clarksville GA, and I've heard her preach several times at Chautauqua. I had planned to go for one of the week-day services in July, but found that that beautiful place, with its memories of summer after summer with our children and of the last time there, taking some ashes down to the lake on Thanksgiving night two years ago, was not yet possible for me. I had hoped to make one drive around the grounds yesterday, but it turns out that Chautauqua is also too much for my son.

Car rides with kids, even 26-year-old kids, are great opportunities for conversation. My son shared some of his feelings about this past week and his fears about the party toward which we were headed. I told him that my brother had called to express apprehension about my attendance at this event on this particular week-end.

As it turned out, Matt spent much of the evening settled into a couch with a cousin and some other young men he doesn't know, watching football on tv. I spent most of it sitting around a table with my husband's sisters and their husbands and one of their daughters, who's just started college. I watched the new babies and their families out of the corner of my eye, and here's what I saw:

The babies are beautiful and peaceful and never at a loss for arms in which to be held ~

The young mothers look very happy, a little tired, and at ease in their new roles ~

The grandmothers and great-grandmother are ecstatic ~

It looks (and I recall that it is) much easier to care for one newborn than two, especially when you are surrounded by extended family ~

No one shared birth stories with me, no one tried to hand babies to me, no one mentioned what it was like when there were two babies in the family 26 years ago.

Which caused me to wonder:

Do I exhibit a terrible stillness that renders me unapproachable? Are they sensitive to my feelings? Or are they just scared of the woman whose own baby grew up only to die?

Probably no one even notices. Perhaps it's only me ~ because I am so aware that if Josh were here, I wouldn't be able to get enough of those babies and their mothers.

And so . . .

I am thinking that two years ago I would not have gone near that party. A year ago I would have gone and been outside in tears within five minutes. Last night I made it through three hours and managed, I think, to appear quite normal. (Perhaps when my husband comes home tonight, he will offer a different impression.)

I see that this is a year in which to watch and listen, to absorb and reflect. I wonder at the randomness of it all ~ how my sister-in-law has a happy marriage, a job she enjoys, a beautiful home, three grown children, and now two beautiful grandchildren, and how she smiles and laughs. I wonder how many times I have been, in my own happiness, oblivious to the concealed pain of others. (I am not commenting on my sister-in-law or anyone else ~ only on myself.

Matt and I spent a lot of our car time talking about how much you share, how much you don't. What does he say to new acquaintances in law school? I am still stunned, he says, that my brother is dead, and by suicide. What do I say to new people, some of whom might become good friends and some not? How do I tell stories about my life?

I tell him that I have no idea. I tell him that one of my best friends is a woman I met on the first day of law school all those years ago, and that she became a person who immediately flew back from California when his brother died and accompanied me to the crematorium. But how would I have predicted any of that when we were young women studying law together? I tell him that some years ago she told me that she remembers in great detail the moment when we were getting to know each other over our morning cookie snack, a few weeks into school, and I told her that my mother had died when I was a child. It was a simple statement of fact for me, a stunning revelation for her. I don't remember the conversation at all; it is burned into her mind. What effect do our words have on people? I am a preacher: I should know the answer to that one. I find that I have no idea.

I tell him that I do not know what to tell, what not.

(This blog, form instance, is probably too much sharing. But in truth it reveals little of the depth of this experience.)

And so . . . watching and listening, and trying to figure out how to live. What to share because it helps me. What to offer because it might help others. What to keep to myself.

Year Three begins.

Suicide and Faith (Part III)

I think that it would be fair to say that one of the basic threads of discussion which I have pursued with my spiritual director for the past two years goes something like this:

Where was God?

Not exactly an original question in the wake of catastrophe. But then, originality is not a requirement.

My daughter is driving from North Carolina to Ohio as I write this. I have spent the past 26 years waging a battle against terror whenever any of my children are out of my sight. Having lost a mother, brother, stepmother, and aunt all to sudden deaths at young ages, I have no particular sense of assurance about human safety or well-being. Actually, I have none at all. But I did pretty well for 24 years, and managed to conceal most of my fears and not convey them to my children. And then one night something I wasn't even afraid of came true.

So where was God? I have asked tearfully and furiously and tiredly, over and over and over. Not with respect to myself. I couldn't have cared less about that. With respect to my child.

After about a year, I had reached the point at which I could at least acknowledge the promise Jesus makes in Matthew 28:20: "Lo, I am with you always." And hope that it might be true.

And then it was completely ruined for me by a sermon preached at seminary. It happens that that verse is preceded by one in which Jesus says "Go and make disciples of all people." The sermon was an energetic call to mission, and an argument that making disciples of all people is a predicatory requirement for Jesus' continued presence with us. "No 'Lo' without the 'Go!' " said the pastor,

I was completely devastated. I had just barely, gingerly, come to a tentative and fragile confidence that Jesus might have been with and fully present to my son when he died, and this preacher essentially told me: No.

It was months before I set foot in the seminary chapel again.

Now another year has gone by.

And I have slowly and tentatively reached the point at which I can barely grasp the hope that the Jesus who is always present to people at their lowest and most helpless was surely with my child; that the Jesus who always extends healing and wholeness to the sick and broken did the same for him.

I am able to say that largely out of my own experience, out of my gradual waking to the recognition that Jesus has been present to me in so many ways through other people since Josh died. And I am not nearly as broken as Josh was. So my only conclusion can be that Jesus is even more interested in him.

**********

I know that some folks are wondering why I am writing this. I sometimes wonder myself. Shouldn't I, as a spiritual director and almost-pastor, be offering emphatic assurance in the hope of the Resurrected Christ?

I think it's important, even if only in this little-read blog, to witness to the genuine experience of the most horrific kinds of loss. The path to a renewed and confident faith is a steep and rocky one, with many slides backward over rough gravel and gnarly roots. Pretending otherwise is of no help to anyone.

Suicide and Faith (Part II)

Part II because you have to read the post below to get this one fully.

My argument is that suicide is in a realm of its own when it comes to the survival of the religious faith of those left behind. I would not presume to suggest comparisons in other ways to other losses, particularly where children are concerned.

The challenge emerges out of what suicide is ~ a decision (not, I would say, a choice) against life, against one's OWN gift of life. If you are are Jewish or Christian, your Scriptures are replete with the exhortation to "Choose life!" If you have spent any time at all with someone who is dying, or whose illness or injury makes dying a very real possibility, you know that the impulse to choose life ~ this life, the earthly one ~ is difficult indeed to counteract. Most people, regardless of their beliefs about whatever comes next, will undergo tremendous suffering for the purpose of hanging onto this life. Their reasons are varied, but underneath them all lies a fundamental conviction that life is of value, and a deep, deep desire to continue to participate in it.

Not so for the person who dies by suicide. At least not in that last irreversible moment.

Many years after my mother and brother died, probably when I was in my twenties, my surviving brother told me that our grandmother, our father's mother, had once told him that after that car accident she was finished with God. She wanted nothing whatever to do with a God who would let such a thing happen. "But the Holocaust?" I said ~ by which I meant: the world is full of suffering and death, much of it on a vast scale. And yet the Jewish people are among God's biggest champions. "I dunno," shrugged my brother. "That's what she said."

My grandmother's response has not been mine. Although, like my brother, I grew up in a family in which the general theological stance was Too Much Senseless Suffering = No God, I came out in a different place. And I have been extraordinarily graced by God in many ways in the past two years. I have, after all, had an entire Presbyterian seminary at my disposal, and I have had the friendship and help of Catholic priests who are able to hear anything and everything with complete aplomb, and I have had the companionship of friends of every religious persuasion and non-persuasion.

But the question remains.

What about my child?

Like any halfway decent parent, I would without a glance backward trade every gift I have been given for him to enjoy them instead of me.

It is all one of the greatest of conundrums, and one of the greatest challenges to a parent's faith.