Advent 1.5 - Blogging

Just as I was thinking that, while I need to do some Advent writing and processing for myself, I might as well switch this blog over to private, a few hardy commenters showed up. So, I guess I'll try to keep going, and also let you know that I have a plan:

I'm trying to give some thought to the Advent Sunday lectionary texts, one at a time. If you don't know what those are: many Christian churches establish readings for each Sunday (each day, actually) over the course of a three-year cycle. Preachers who rely on that cycle of texts will be able thereby to guide their congregations through a large and representative chunk of the Bible via their Sunday sermons over the course of three years. The daily readings include a passage from the Hebrew Bible, from a Psalm, from a gospel passage, and from another Greek Bible text. The three year cycle enables a year to be devoted to each of the three synoptic (look it up!) gospels; readings from the Gospel of John appear around Easter. Since the liturgical year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, a new lectionary year has also just begun -- with Matthew as the gospel focus.

I'm also trying to be attentive to other Advent contemplations, and so on the days when I'm not ruminating about Scripture, I plan to highlight some other bloggers or websites. Today, I'm delighted to refer you to my friend Michelle's first Advent post over at Quantum Theology.

Finally, I'm writing from my own perspective. We are in Year Three of life without our son. I remember little of the last two Advent seasons, although I seem to have written quite a bit. If you have found your way here, you are probably experiencing some holiday difficulties of your own. What I write may seem too upbeat and hopeful if you are in a time of despair and hopelessness; it may be too raw and painful if you have moved on. I know, because you honor me with comments and emails, that those reading this are in every kind of place with every imaginable and complex kind of loss. I wish I could do justice to each and every person and situation, but the best I have to offer is the authenticity of my own experience, and my Advent hope that it will encourage you to delve into your own.

For now, you might wander over to Michelle's. She's writing about Alfred Delp, S.J. this year ~ someone whose courage and faith, honed as a prisoner of the Nazis, we can trust in our own times of challenge and anguish.

Make Straight a Path Throught the Desert

Today is the day in the church year on which we read about John the Baptist, that seemingly deranged cousin of Jesus, he of the animal skin attire and the crunchy locust meals, out in the desert crying for the path of the Lord to be made straight, for valleys to be filled and mountains leveled.

I have always been mystified by John's obsession with the destruction of some of the most beautiful of our planet's geographical features. Year after year I have listened to this text and wondered: What would you do away with? The Pacific Crest Trail? The valleys in which the lochs of Scotland lie? The Tetons? What kind of a proclamation is this?

This year, I think, I am starting to get it, for the first time ever. I wonder whether I would ever have had a glimpse of what it means had I not been stumbling around in another dimension for the past fifteen months.

I have used so many geographical and geological metaphors to describe this journey, a journey that I would run from as fast as possible if that option were open to me. Relentless tsumani. Insurmountable mountain. Rock-strewn trail. Impenetrable wilderness. And, of course, desert. Endless, dry, empty, lonely desert.

None of them is a road back to the light. None of them is a road to hope.

It seems that they must all be navigated. There is no other sound option; we have to swim, climb, and walk through the terrain of grief, inhospitable as it is, or we will not reach that juncture at which it becomes not merely agonizing but transformative. We don't get to dispense with the wild craziness that makes the aftermath of loss so intolerable; we don't get to pretend that we're all right or that it never happened.

But ~ and this is what I think John the Baptist is talking about ~ we do have to find the way out. We have to reach, with our eyes open, the place where the swells of water become gentler, where the density of the forest begins to recede, where the desert seems to offer something other than parched wasteland.

I don't think God wants us to level the Alps. In fact, Jesus always found God in places like mountaintops, deserts, and valleys ~ the story is quite clear on that point. But what he found there is a transparency of vision that we so often lack. That most of us, I think, lack completely when we are plunged into the darkness that follows the death of a child.

And so the invitation, perhaps, is to go to the places he went but also to see as he did, with clarity and gratitude, rather than with eyes clouded by tears and a mind crumbling under a weight almost too great to bear.

I have, of course, no idea at all what I am talking about. I was moved to write this post by the words of this father, who lost his nine-year-old son to a malignant tumor several years ago, and who I found via my friend and fellow traveler Karen, mother of beautiful Katie. He is much farther along the road to gratitude than I am. But as I skimmed his essay again, I couldn't help but notice how many allusions he makes to things which have appeared in my own thoughts and writings: the suffering of other parents, the Holocaust, the omnipotence or lack thereof of God, the compassion ~ or not ~ of God, what prayer is and isn't. And even the Wizard of Oz.

Oh, for that elusive pair of ruby slippers.

We have to find clarity without them.

And so: Advent.

Advent Year Two

I don't remember much about last year's Advent, other than it being part of a long continuum of awfulness. This year feels transitional, though. As if we aren't somewhere else yet, but we could be.

We're going away again, this time to Islamorada in the Middle Florida Keys, on Christmas Day. I'll be in my internship church on Christmas Eve and then perhaps, go ot a midnight service somewhere . . . and then leave at 3:30 am (!) for the airport. Gregarious Son will fly with me; the Quiet Husband and The Lovely Daughter, who have enough time off, will have already left to drive, and will pick us up at the West Palm Beach airport later Christmas Day.

Such a convoluted effort of avoidance!

Last year, our Christmas Dinner consisted of grilled seafood shish-ka-bobs, just the four of us relaxing on the deck on a warm Key West evening. It was a far cry from the raucous and joyful Christmas Dinners in our home over the previous two decades, in which nine or ten families had gathered every year, but it was for us a quiet experience of healing.

This year ~ I don't know. I find myself poised between wanted to hibernate again and wanting to move back out into the world ~ but differently. I have completely lost interest in the traditional gathering at home, and find that I am thinking much more about the vast brokenness manifest in this world at Christmas.

Maybe we will hang out with the homeless next year. Or maybe I will be doing a chaplain residency at Famous Giant Hospital and be more than willing to sign up for a Christmas shift ~ which could mean spending the day with a Muslim here from Saudi Arabia for heart surgery.

I'm not quite ready for any of that this year. I can tell by how much of Christmas I am avoiding: by how we haven't even talked about whether we want a tree, by how I have been walking out of chapel services and classes where Advent hymns are sung ~ music being the most problematic aspect of the whole season, given its evocative nature. I can tell by how my stomach twists everytime I read another piece of writing about the hopefulness of the season ~ and I wrote one of them myself a couple of days ago, in the form of the Prayer of Confession for Sunday's regular worship service.

So no, I'm not ready yet to accompany anyone else through a difficult Advent season. I'm ready for blue sea and blue sky. But I can imagine, albeit faintly, other possibilities.

Sorting (RevGals Advent Retreat II)

I don't think of sorting wheat from chaff in terms of sorting people into groups, those included and those not, those who get it and those who don't, those who are elect and those who are not. But I do think of it as something we can address in our own lives, whether interiorly or in community.

This second reflection reminded me of a couple of things. First, some months ago, one of the Jesuits in my life reminded me of the parable of the sower, and told me that it is about tending my own inner garden as well. He has been gently, and sometimes not so gently, challenging me for months to find alternative pathways through my grief. I am a very slow and laborious gardener. Manure abounds.

Secondly, in my Church and Sacraments class, we spent some time last month talking over what the Ten Commandments mean and how to look at them in light of Scripture and the Reformed Confessions. The pattern which more or less holds is to look at each one expansively, interiorly, and then in a positive sense. So, in very brief, as I wrote with respect to "Do not steal" on my final exam, one might also understand that particular commandment to mean "Do not steal the limelight (an expansion of the original), do not envy someone else her achievements (a reference to interior stealing), give generously wherever you can (a positive take)."

So. Sorting wheat from chaff.

In the grieving process: How might one pursue healthy ways of grieving that give expression to genuine sorrow as opposed to repressive ways that damage one for life, or obsessive ways that trap one in unresolvable quagmires? In community, whatever those communities may be? Alone, in prayer? In giving, something out of nothing?

Fragments

There are, as I have found over time, people who in response to great loss write brilliant and illuminative sermons, offer prayers of deep insight and faith, compose music expressive of our deepest hopes.

Most of us, however, do well to say what we see, to collect those fragments of language and sound and vision that speak to us, to offer up the pieces that reflect an unsure and tortured encounter with the mystery of death.

If we write it down, or speak it out loud, that is something.

Gratitude

I would go back, if I could. I would go back to August, when I was worn out from my CPE summer and looking forward to a weeklong silent retreat. I would go back to anticipating my second year of seminary, an exciting internship, and more time at home than I had last year. I would go back to being the mother of three living children ~ irritated at one of them for not making it to his cousin's wedding, sorry that another could not join us in North Carolina, curious about another's new romance. If prayer offered magical solutions, I would pray to go back. That life we had ~ it didn't seem that we were asking so much. No boat, no vacation home, no fancy cars; not even the needed plumbing repairs. Three healthy children and the prospect of their futures to enjoy. That was enough. Everything else could have fallen away and that would still have been way more than enough.

But prayer is not magic. Prayer is God with us, us with God. Prayer is listening and noticing. So we don't get to go back but maybe, in the light trying to break through in December, I can notice some things.

And here is what I have noticed this week. I have, as a consequence of my son's death, received what I think must be some of the most extraordinary missives ever written. Emails, cards, letters -- the form of transmission doesn't matter. The words do. Some are about my son, some about those of us left behind, some about God. There is apparently something about magnitude of loss that drives ordinary people to eloquence.

I literally carry some of this writing around with me. There are moments, many of them, when I think that I will not make it to the next one, and then I read what people have sent me. I read them as prayers, regardless of how they were intended. I look for what God might be saying, in a phrase or a paragraph, and sometimes I see them, small clues to the mystery that binds us together, whether the people who articulated them knew what they were doing or not.

If you have a friend who is longing for someone else this Advent, especially someone who died in the last year or two, sit down this week-end and write a note, or send an email. It might be the most important thing you do this month.

I'm Just Saying

I think it would be a good thing if people felt constrained to ask and listen rather than to offer advice or assurance about a situation with respect to which they know nothing.

If you have not balanced on the crumbling edge of a precipice, please don't tell me how to do it.

How Long?

I found that this past week-end, for the first time since my son died at the beginning of September, I felt a longing for church: for worship in community. The first time I had felt that genuine desire in almost fourteen weeks.

One of my friends tells me that it was six months for her.

Another has gone back every Sunday since the beginning, and sobs through every service.

I've been to my own church a couple of times. There is something both reassuring and excruciating in finding the same patterns and music as before, in hearing familiar texts, in listening haphazardly (the best I can do right now) to a powerful sermon.

This past week-end I decided to go to a Saturday afternoon Mass. Three days back at school earlier in the week had taken their toll, and I knew that morning services were going to be too much to manage. What I didn't take into account was that hundreds of Catholics choose to meet their weekly Mass obligation on Saturday afternoon. And I didn't know that the service had been preceded by a parish service day in which 950 people had fanned out across the city to offer themselves to various organizations. By the time they got to the Mass that preceded a community dinner, they were pretty charged up.

So it was all a little too energetic for me. But the sermon and the music both spoke to me, and it was very good to be in a place where people were praying.

I don't know how long it takes before the fit feels right. Time of day, energy level, lighting, liturgy, community. Like almost everything else that we take for granted, the combination of stimulii feels like an assault when we are fragile and off-balance.

How long? Ever?

Memories Unspoken

Within a day of returning home from Thanksgiving with my in-laws, I received two emails from friends offering holiday solace and expressing the hope that our dinner had at least been filled with stories and memories of our son.

No.

Not a word, with one exception: He did come up in the context of a story told by his twin brother.

What was that, that reluctance to name the one person who was foremost in everyone's thoughts? I know that he wasn't forgotten, but the jovial insistence on behaving as if all were as usual only enhanced my feelings of sadness and isolation. In the absence of conversation about the person never absent from my thoughts, I found that I had hardly a word to say.

Such an odd disjunction. My in-laws are the steady family of churchgoers, those with a lifetime of committment to religious community behind them. But it's me, the one with the disjointed history of religious engagement and observance, the one with the family whose narrative defies that of any soap opera, who longs for ritual and articulation.

But it wasn't my home, and so I skipped even my usual toast to Digory Priest, my Mayflower ancestor, knowing that one toast might lead to another, or to an atmosphere of "should we say something?"

The silence made things so much worse. For me, anyway. (I do know that in grief one can only speak for oneself.)

**********

The first draft of this entry turned into something of a rant, targeting the inadequacies of everyone involved. Including, yes, myself. Probably more harmful than helpful. Perhaps instead I should just offer what I would try as a hostess under similar circumstanes. From a practical standpoint, what might have helped?

An advance phone call, I think, asking what might be done to honor the empty place at the table and maybe bring us some comfort. Along with an acceptance of the reality that comfort might be a hollow word. Even better, knowing how many such decisions have to be tackled by the heartbroken immediate family on a daily basis, a phone call offering a plan -- a plan to which we could have acquiesced, or which we could have rejected -- would have been most welcome. A simple acknowledgment of the difficulties of the holiday season, a suggestion for consciously incorporating the new reality into them, a spoken willingness to share the burden. Sometimes words do matter as much as actions do.

We haven't forgotten him. We don't forget him for a second. You can say his name aloud. Please say his name aloud.

The Friendship of the Lord

God is faithful; by God you were called into the fellowship of God's Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

~ I Corinthians 1:9

(an Advent I reading)

Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life whole they live it? -- every, every minute?

Stage Manager: The saints and poets, maybe.

~Thornton Wilder, Our Town

I wonder whether there is anything which we do not take for granted.

I thought that I was way over on the appreciative side of the spectrum. I considered it one of the gifts of early childlhood loss. My mother and youngest brother, gone in a flash when I was seven. Some twenty-five years later I became a mother who practiced mindfulness long before she heard the term. It could all vanish so quickly; how well I knew that reality. My genuine sense of appreciation for the good gifts of motherhood did not relieve the tedium of years of wipes and dipes, but it did make it possible for me to look and listen, always, for the grin, the gurgle of pleasure, the boast of achievement, the shy smile of success, the blond hair in the sunlight.

But it wasn't enough. We can never be aware of one another, appeciate one another, enough. I could have taken note of every single minute, every single second, and it would not be enough to compensate me now for the loss of my child.

We take this season and the birth of our God into human form for granted, too. Put aside the commercial excesses, extended this year to the horrors of violence in the marketplace. Put aside the trivia and sentimentality. Even when we pay attention, our own daily preoccupations prevent us from comprehending what we are about at this time of year.

Paul could not have sounded the claim that we are called into fellowship with the Son of God unless there is, in fact, a Son of God. A God who shrugged on human form, was carried in human arms, grew into human companionship, died at human hands. A God who as our human friend remains faithful and always with us, even until the end of time. Paul's assertion is astonishing, really, and yet there it is.

Even when we are so lost in sorrow that awareness and appreciation are far, far out of reach.

Even when we cannot know.