storm & sun

Emotional hangover. That's what I call this.

Austen wakes in the wee hours, before we see the first hints of sunlight creep through the bedroom shades. I leave her room, hardly able to keep my eyes open. But when I return to bed, pull the sheets and the comforter up to my chin, releasing the sigh that means I'm settling in, sleep still doesn't come.

My Dad had a heart attack on Monday. A hundred and one little miracles later, and he's still with us.

If just one little thing had gone differently that day ...

But it didn't. It didn't, I remind myself, attempting to avoid long, imaginative trips into a nightmarish might-have-been. It is what it is (sedation, wait-and-see, we don't know yet), but those short forays into the hypothetical nightmare remind me to fall on my knees thankful for this limbo.

And here I am, over three thousand miles away. I could do no more were that geographical gap closed, and yet the knowledge that he's far away in a hospital bed has me searching airfares, considering any and all means of traversing the distance between us.

I fell apart last night, thinking of how I want him to get better, of how I wanted him to wake up so I could hear the laugh that I could identify blindfolded out of a thousand laughs in a crowded room. I thought of how the last thing I talked to him about was our malfunctioning fridge, leaking water all over our kitchen floor. Did I tell him I loved him before I hung up?

So it's early, and these tears prick, this lump hurts my throat. Driving home yesterday, I saw dark and ominous storm clouds on the horizon and right in the midst of them, those illuminated by the sun, shafts of light boldly piercing through the spaces between the bulbous tufts of white.

Yes, I thought. This is what this is: the storm and the sunlight, all in the same view.

* * * * *

Updates on Dad's recovery HERE

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 5)

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Read Part 3
Read Part 4

And then one day, He was back.

It wasn't all glory and trumpets and flashes of light. It was one of those mornings where I was awake well before I wanted to be. Unable to slip back to sleep, I rubbed my eyes and rolled out of bed, wandering into the living room. I had just finished reading through the book of Luke and decided maybe this would be a good day to start the book of John. So I opened my Bible and started reading. And I didn't stop reading until I finished.

The Transfiguration

By then I was sleepy enough to try closing my eyes again to see if sleep would return. I reclined on my left side on the couch, Bible wrapped up in my right arm. I woke up about an hour later, and there He was.

Oh. There you are, I said out loud.

He was back -- just as if He had never left.

Having a sensed experience of His presence again infused my prayer and study life with new vitality. My prayers no longer boomeranged off the wall and fell at my feet. My frustration and anger had dissipated. After a couple of weeks like this, I dared to ask Him about the past year. Why the silence and darkness? What was the purpose and good of leaving me in the dark when I needed Him? Every time I asked, I got the sense it wasn't time for me to know. It was easy for me to be thankful for what we had together again. Though my curiosity continued to seek satisfaction, I let it go when I saw the answer I sought could not be forced.

It was just a couple weeks later that I was practicing lectio divina in a passage of John 10 -- the one where Jesus identifies Himself as the good shepherd. I had spent time focusing on various aspects of the passage and the one I found myself drawn to initially had to do with Jesus seeking out others who weren't there, but that He still counted as part of the fold.

But in spite of my efforts to focus there, I kept getting tugged back to a few verses before that:

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 

Sensing that Jesus had something for me here, I followed Him, directing my attention to the words on the page. I read these words slowly over and over again and in the middle of one of my readings, He interjected all of the sudden: I know you, Kirsten. I KNOW YOU. If I could have seen His face, I imagine it would have been just inches from mine. I would have been able to feel the warmth of His breath. I imagine His hands would have clasped mine to keep me from turning the page, to make sure I heard what He was saying to me. I'm sure I could have felt the nail marks in His palms myself.

I know you.

I stopped. And I burst into tears. For a whole year or more, I felt like He had forgotten me. Like He had really, really forgotten me. And here He was telling me -- not just every one of His sheep, but me -- that He knows me. He knows me. It was as personal as it could be. There was no mistaking He saw me, that He heard me -- and not just now, not just in this present moment, but the whole time.

A week later, I was practicing lectio divina again, but this time in Mark 10 when Jesus rebukes the disciples for speaking harshly to those who would keep the little children from coming to Him. I found myself drawn to the last verse of the passage:

And he took [the children] up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

When it came to the oratio portion of the exercise, I knew I had nothing to lose. So I told Him: This is what I wanted from You this last year. This is what I needed from You. I was hurting so deeply and I felt so alone -- I just wanted You to wrap Your arms around me and love me. I ...

It wasn't long before a very clear picture formed in my mind. I was still in my rocking chair in the sunroom, but this time He was holding me. In this picture, He had taken me up in His arms and held me, my head resting against the warmth of His chest, hearing His heartbeat, letting the tears come. He didn't say anything, but simply held me there.

I fell into tears again. After a year of feeling not only invisible to Him, but untouched and untouchable, I saw Him holding me -- not only in that moment, but for the whole year before. He held me. And that's all it was. That is exactly what I needed and what I had been asking for. And finally, there it was. There He was.

Those two experiences with Jesus brought a healing to my heart that I don't know how to describe. Though I still don't have many clear answers as to the why of it all, I do know that my year of darkness brought a hard-won and much needed purification. In that year, my sin was always before me in a way it had not been before. I saw my own ugliness all the time. The act of taking it to confession helped me to experience healing in those dark things inside me that whether I knew it or not, were damaging my soul.

A visual prayer exercise I completed after my two very personal experiences with Jesus.

And it was a trial of my faith. In that year, it became so very much more than words and doctrines and giving my agreement to a list of things I believed to be factual or true. My spiritual life had been a life of the heart before this year of darkness, but now it was fuller. It was more. My heart had stretched and expanded, and the muscle had grown stronger through repeated testing. It was an act of the will and it was an act of the heart.

I realized very early on that it was not anything I had done or didn't do that caused the darkness and similarly, that it wasn't anything I had said or done or didn't say or didn't do that brought Him back again. He came back when He knew it was time, and when it was time, He communicated those things to me that my heart most needed to know. Even so, there are still so many questions. I still am not certain if this was a true dark night of the soul, or of it was something else. Though I can see plenty of the good fruit that came out of it, my curiosity regarding the question of why is still somewhat unsatisfied. But I can let that go. Not only is He back, but He was here the whole time. He showed me that.

And now I know with unshakable certainty two very important things:

He knows me. 

And He picks me up in His arms like a small child, never to let me go.

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 4)

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Read Part 2
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For all the true good confession and the other sacraments brought me, there was still one big problem: I was still covered in darkness where my relationship with God was concerned. He still felt remarkably absent. When I imagined Him with me, I saw Him sitting in a corner curled in on himself like a comma, holding his elbows, looking down. Present, but not engaged. Aware, but not acting. Hearing, but not answering.

This continued on for months and months: through my early days of grieving, through going back to work, through James coming to Florida three months ahead of me, through learning we were expecting our second child. So I kept praying; I continued to go to confession and I knew I could always find Him in the Eucharist. These weren't small things, I knew -- objectively, they provided me with the communion I knew I needed. But I still felt the loss of Him.

When James and I were separated by some 3,000 miles -- him beginning a brand new job in Florida, me wrapping up my eleven-year career in telecommunications and our life and home in Seattle -- people told us that a three months separation "wasn't that bad" and that it would "go by quickly." It was easy to say when they weren't the ones suffering the separation. Yes, I was still married. James was still my husband and I was still his wife. We Skyped, we talked on the phone, and took advantage of those means available to us to stay in communication. But we lacked the experience of intimacy that we had enjoyed through our entire marriage up until that point. I don't care how much we spoke on the phone or saw each other's faces via webcam: it was not the same thing -- not even close.

My relationship with God felt so much the same way during this period of silence: like we were a married couple separated by too many miles, but with no end in sight to the separation. I might still be God's child, and He might still be my Father, but I felt a million miles between us. I lacked the experience of intimacy we had once enjoyed. He never reached out and touched, He never offered His arms even when I begged for them. My feelings suffered. It was not the intimacy we once enjoyed -- it was not even close.

One night not all that long ago, it reached a boiling point. It had been over a year since this divine silence had started and I was talking to James about how all of this felt. The floodgates opened and I let loose all my pent up feelings without the least care to edit them. I'M SO SICK OF THIS!! WHERE THE F*** IS HE?? I screamed. My face was flushed and I clenched my fists against the side of my head, pulling at my hair. I kept swallowing back the same large painful and bitter lump. Searing hot tears sprung into my eyes. I MEAN, SERIOUSLY -- WHAT THE HELL DOES HE WANT FROM ME?! 

There were no answers waiting for me on the other side of that question -- not even difficult ones.

I had remembered that during another dark season of my life, I had turned to the book of Job. Though he is patient both with God in His silence and the friends who would have done better to remain silent in the ashes with him rather than postulate as to the many things for which God might be punishing him, Job reaches his breaking point, too. He's had enough and he wants an answer. And who can blame him? After losing all his property, possessions, and his entire family, God has remained completely silent. If he's not being punished and he hasn't cursed God, turning his back on Him like the devil had tempted him to do, then what gives? What's the point in God permitting Job's suffering to extend so far as it has?

It is about the point when we're all really getting tired of the friends insisting on Job's sin and with Job countering their claims in insisting on his rightness that Elihu shows up and (finally) injects some sanity and wisdom into the scene. His answers don't come neatly packaged, and while as answers they are true, they aren't terribly satisfying. What it really boils down to is that as good a guy as Job is (and he is!), he isn't perfect. And because God loves Job, He cares about sparing his life from what Elihu refers to as "the Pit."

Read Elihu's words:

"In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on mortals,
while they slumber on their beds,
then [God] opens their ears,
and terrifies them with warnings,
that he may turn them aside from their deeds,
and keep them from pride,
to spare their souls from the Pit,
their lives from traversing the River.
...
"God indeed does all these things,
twice, three times, with mortals.,
to bring back their souls from the Pit,
so that they may see the light of life."
(Job 33:15-18, 29, 30)

 And again ...

"He does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous,
but with kings on the throne
he sets them forever, and they are exalted.
And if they are bound in fetters
and caught in the cords of affliction,
then he declares to them their work
and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly.
He opens their ears to instruction, 
and commands that they return from iniquity.
If they listen, and serve him,
they complete their days in prosperity,
and their years in pleasantness.
But if they do not listen, they shall perish by the sword,
and die without knowledge.
The godless in heart cherish anger;
they do not cry for help when he binds them.
They die in their youth,
and their  life ends in shame.
He delivers the afflicted by their affliction,
and opens their ear by adversity.
(Job 36:7-15, emphasis mine)

It is God who, in the opening pages of the book of Job, affirms Job's righteousness (1:8, 2:3). Elihu here says that even the righteous have transgressions and sins -- that even they need instruction and to "turn from iniquity." So really, neither Job nor his friends were entirely right -- but they weren't entirely wrong, either. While Job wasn't without fault, it wasn't the case that God was punishing him. God was, in fact, doing the most loving thing in weeding out any further iniquity and pride in the man He affirmed to be "blameless and upright."

The phrase that hit me over the head like a mallet was "He delivers the afflicted by their affliction." Think of it: suffering is not the thing from which Job needs to be delivered. Rather, suffering is the means of deliverance: from sin, from the pit of hell. God wants Job to be truly holy, to keep him from going to the place to which unholiness leads.

God wants Job to be holy because He loves him.

Well, then. That was interesting. That was very interesting, indeed. It wasn't at all what I was looking for, but it was a point of much-needed light.


To Be Continued & Concluded in Part 5

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 3)

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Read Part 2

Bitter. Hard and bitter and resentful and hurt. Anger. Fury. Resentment and bitterness and hardness. Bitter bitter bitter, hard. Self-righteous. Selfish. Hard bitter bitter bitter anger and fury.Violent. Hateful. Hate hate hate resentful bitterness.

This grief and its cousin, my spiritual darkness, were incredibly good at one thing: bringing up in me every remotely dark and evil thing that was then or ever had been in my soul. They burned under me like a fire, melting me to a molten liquid and making all the vile and dirt in me rise to the surface. It was horrid to look at and even worse to taste in my mouth. But like David, I could not ignore it: For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me (Psalm 51:3).

Ever before me. Ever. Before. Me. Swirling round me like gnats. Ever before me.

And it drove me to the confessional. Perhaps I didn't go as often as I should have, but every time I went it was a welcome relief to spew out the sin I had confessed to God a hundred times in private, but that somehow still left a foul film in my mouth. Perhaps it was because instead of being met with the hollow echo of my own words and His resounding silence, it was a chance to hear sound counsel and receive compassionate understanding instead. Most of the time, my confessors knew my circumstances and could put in perspective for themselves where this was all coming from. When this wasn't the case, I explained what had happened.

"My son, my firstborn, died of a heart defect recently. Everything went wrong. Everything. God made my baby with a heart too broken to sustain his life. How does a loving God do such a thing? And now God is gone and my friends are having perfectly healthy babies and I hear complaining about such entirely stupid and trivial things -- they didn't have to live in the NICU and just days after giving birth to their first child, wait up all night while blue-smocked surgeons with long faces kept coming to tell me my child might not make it. I did everything right and I know it doesn't matter, but damnit, I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I never got to take him home and dear God, I wish my worst problem was spit-up or a diaper blow-out or having him cry in the middle of the night, but he's dead and he won't be crying anymore. And it's not fair and now I feel so bitter and hard against people who have what is normal and I don't say anything to anybody about it -- I don't say anything to them because anything I do say to them about their experiences with their children will probably make them feel guilty and I'm not sure that even if I try my best to say something kind that instead it will come out full of the hard and bitter lump in my soul that is growing stronger and developing sharp teeth -- so I don't say anything. I don't say anything to them, but ..."

I struggled for words.

"It's corrosive, isn't it? Like an acid."

"Yes! Like an acid that is burning a hole in me, and ..."

This is how it went most of the time for me. It wasn't the contained and outwardly pious exercise so often portrayed in film -- I spewed out all the filth and ick that had been building up in me that I couldn't stand to carry with me anymore -- that, in fact, I feared would burn a hole through my soul that wouldn't ever close up again. I preferred my encounters face-to-face instead of from behind a screen, even with my face all puffy and red and wet, mascara streaking down my cheeks. It wasn't required of me, but it was part of me being honest, part of being utterly transparent. After so much time of feeling hidden and invisible, I needed to feel seen, even if it was like this -- especially if it was like this.

My confessors never excused the things they heard from me -- they never sugar-coated it or treated my sins as anything other than they were. They never told me that feeling hateful and bitter and resentful against God and my neighbor were okay because of what I had been through. But they did put it in perspective for me, encouraged me to continue speaking with transparent honestly to my God of the empty chair about how it all felt. I knew they were right.

I walked away each time feeling like what I imagine the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus felt -- her sin was publicly on display, her shame obvious. There was nothing and no one at all she could hide behind. But the one person who had a right to do it if anyone did didn't condemn her. He knew exactly what she had done and yet extended grace to her when she had cause to fear that she would be dragged to a bloody death in a pit of stones.

And it felt like a little bit of me came back each time I walked away from the confessional not only unscathed, but seen. I had not only escaped death, but was given a chance at an entirely new life.


To Be Continued

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 2)

Read Part 1


I know it feels like He's gone. You feel alone, abandoned, ignored. You feel like you inhabit the blind spot that goes unchecked: that He doesn't see you and doesn't care to see you. You feel punished. But that's not what's real. It feels like He's gone, but He actually is here. I know you want to fall apart in the safety and boundary of His arms. I know that it feels like you are dissolving, falling to pieces without anything to catch the fragments as you are pulled apart. I know it feels nothing like it, but He actually is here. I know you're afraid, that you feel like you're falling and dying, but you are safe. 

Much of the time over this period of a year or more was spent with a relentless internal dialogue attempting to keep a lid on my emotional blender. Though I knew my feelings of abandonment and anger were valid enough and permitted those emotions to churn and stir as they may, I also kept reminding myself they weren't the final arbiters of reality. In other words, just because I felt like God had abandoned me to my sorrow did not mean that He had. And so I lived in that exquisite tension between the opposites of what I knew by faith and what I felt, reason and emotion each pulling against each other in a tug-of-war that had me at the middle, threatening to pull my limbs from their sockets, and send my mind well beyond the bounds of sanity. It was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting.

I knew there was only one place I could go. 

I turned to the One who all my feelings protested had left me behind -- an irony not lost on me. I felt a bit like Peter in John's gospel. Offended at His teaching that if they do not eat His flesh and drink His blood they have no life in them, a large contingent of Jesus' followers leave His side. Jesus asks Peter if he is going to leave as well, and Peter says, "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." There is a sense of resignation and acceptance in what he says; a sense of "I don't understand this eating Your flesh and drinking Your blood thing. Frankly, it sounds more than a little crazy. But I know too much now. I've seen too much now. I believe too much to leave now. I know who You are."

And so it was with me. This feeling of Christ being absent had heaped the pain of abandonment and neglect upon the still raw pain of my loss, but honestly -- where else could I go? He was the only one who had what I needed. 

So every day, I went to Him in the sorrowful mysteries. 

I had taken up the practice of the rosary shortly before becoming Catholic, having found there what many Catholic faithful had found before me: among other things, an experience of deepened intimacy and union with Christ. But in this season, time spent in the sorrowful mysteries did not mitigate the intense feelings of aloneness. They did not serve to lift the heavy fog in which I was mired, nor did they bring to me the God-hands that I hoped would keep me from separating like newsprint left in water too long. But I did find in them someone who knew what it was to feel abandoned and alone, someone who in a moment of intensest agony cried out loud, asking why God had forsaken Him -- and even in proclaiming that, did not sin. 

And so I prayed through those mysteries just as one might sit down and direct the most intimate concerns of her heart out loud to an unoccupied chair in an empty room. It always felt as though I was talking to no one, that my words boomeranged off the wall and came back to me, falling into a jumbled heap at my feet every time. I related to Jesus in His passion as you might relate to an historical figure in a textbook, finding commonalities in our feelings about what we suffered, but unable to forge a real relational connection.

No matter how many times I picked up my piles of words again, I never got a response from the One to whom they were directed. I heard only the words themselves and the sound they made as they echoed back at me from the emptiness of that room, clattering against each other and falling to the floor in front of me with a loud metallic clang. But continuing to offer them was all I could do. I found no comfort in offering them, but I did find what I presumed to be comfort's distant cousin: an allowance to grieve and a permission to feel abandoned -- and to say so. It was knowing that the Christ who felt so absent to me -- who seemed no more present to me than George Washington -- felt the same thing at one time, too.

I didn't like this reality at all, and often let my God of the empty chair know exactly what I thought of it. I expressed anger and frustration. I told Him I felt neglected and forgotten. And like a small child, I just as often said nothing at all, but stretched out my arms, expressing my desire to be held and comforted, to experience the promises of solace and healing that seemed to leap from the pages of Sacred Scripture. But just as with my grief, I didn't see what choice I had. I decided to lean into the reality I had rather than the one I wished for, knowing I could no more make God show up in the way I desired Him than I could will the earth to stop spinning or make the sun move around the earth. There were no secret magical incantations or prayers I could offer, no list of bullet points I could follow that would change any of it. He is not anyone's puppet. I knew it wasn't anything I had said or done that caused His seeming disappearance and in the same way, there was not anything I could say or do that would bring Him back to me.

But I still needed Him, and it still hurt.

And so I set up camp in the sorrowful mysteries. I was utterly alone and in the cold there, but it was the only place I seemed to belong. As I held each moment of His passion in my mind, I wept and prayed with Him, felt the rending and tearing of flesh from bone with Him, and felt with him the mockery of the gawkers. With Him, I carried my cross and cried out in agony as we both hung there, our arms pinned down wide, wondering out loud where was God now.



To Be Continued

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 1)

Depending on when you asked me over the course of the year between Ewan's death and the first anniversary of it, I might have felt everything or nothing as I realized that important anniversary was approaching. It's hardly surprising that losing my son and nearing the first anniversary of the night he died in my arms would give rise to a wide range of emotions, each of them bubbling up from the depths of me and popping when they rose to the surface, meeting the free air. Perhaps even less surprising is the number of questions I had for God to which his death gave rise.

Though "why?" is a natural question and one that, in the throes of some black and turbulent nights, was asked frequently enough, it was never at the top of my list. I can't imagine that there's a single answer God could give me that would satisfy the empty arms that had been prepared to cradle my baby, or the aching breasts whose milk had dried up. If my son wasn't coming back to me healed and whole, then even the best answer God Himself could provide to the question of "why?" would be utterly unsatisfying.

It wasn't the actual loss that I questioned, or even why God tenderly knitted Ewan together inside me with a heart too broken to sustain his life so much as it was the question of where God was in the weeks and months that followed. I read any number of Psalms or other scriptures that spoke of His care for the brokenhearted, or how He captures every tear. I read of a God who provided His brokenhearted faithful with comfort and solace and protection. So why did I feel so utterly abandoned? Why did I feel like, after He attended to us in those final moments of Ewan's life, that I was anywhere but beneath the shadow of His wings?

I can't tell you how many nights I sat in the rocking chair in a dark and empty nursery, clutching the armrests with white knuckles, weeping hard enough to break the windows. I can't tell you how many times I fell to the floor in a heap and pounded my fists until I thought they might break through the floor, begging for some form -- any form -- of comfort and solace. I can't tell you how many times James held me in bed, my body curled up tightly in the fetal position, my spirit wracked with a pain deeper and more exquisite than I had ever known as I kicked and screamed and thrashed and wept and clawed and begged. I wondered when the grief might kill me -- it was not a question of "if." It was the loss of my son, yes. But it was also that I felt like Jesus was leaving my broken heart unattended in the aftermath. If I ever needed some divine arms around me, it was in those moments. But if they were there, I didn't feel them -- not in the slightest.

My God, My God -- why have you forsaken me?

This went on for several months, this knowing but feeling nothing of Him, but feeling all that weight of hell instead. It was like having a husband you love, but never seeing him. You might see evidences of his presence from time to time: a plate with food left on it that you know is not yours, or his shirt hung over the chair. Perhaps you hear his footsteps echoing in another room or detect his scent on the pillowcase next to yours. He might leave you a note saying, "I love you," but it's been ages since you heard him speak those words to you in person. You know he's there, but you never see him. You have forgotten the shape of his face under your hand, and how his fingers feel interlaced with yours.

That is how it felt with me and God -- like the relationship that was supposed to be the most intimate and important of all relationships had been all but abandoned. I was doing my part, and it seemed that He was failing to hold up His end of the bargain.

I had been walking with Christ long enough to know that just because I didn't feel Him didn't mean He wasn't present. I prayed, I continued to attend Mass regularly and participate in the sacraments. I continued to open the pages of Scripture to read and to study. I recognized and thanked Him for the things He provided. My faith and my devotion were not built on feelings, after all. I reasoned that perhaps I was feeling too many other things to feel Him. I thought that maybe the unending, infinite grief in our lives had crowded out my very finite ability to sense the supernatural. I thought that maybe when the raging sea died down to a calm, that I would perceive at least a shaft of sunlight and in it, the God whose presence I craved.

Frankly, I was surprised when I didn't. I grew increasingly frustrated with trying to make sense of what felt like His prolonged and unmistakable absence -- trying to take something that felt so horrible and painful and make it out to be good and loving somehow. Oftentimes, having no words for my prayer, I would take to Him an image of me holding out my heart in front of him: dripping, shredded beyond repair, throbbing limply and weakly with what little life remained. Nothing ever happened, though. He never came and held me, never took my heart in His hands to mend it. He left me there, holding it with cupped palms and outstretched arms that ached and burned with its weight. It didn't matter how much I begged. He never took it from me, and never stretched out His hand to heal it.

It started to feel like I was making excuses for Him. It was infuriating.

I gave myself pep talks about keeping up faith despite my feelings. I knew with certainty what was true -- though in different ways, I had experienced enough crucible moments prior to Ewan's death to doubt His love and care for us in this one. But my fury grew, and I was having an increasingly difficult time understanding how His seeming absence could be for my good, or how it could be loving to leave me alone in the middle of a wide sea, heart dying in my own hands, when He had the power to save me.

To Be Continued

what it looks like

The night before: tears, muscles that were too weak to work, bones that softened to a jelly, sobs that sucked the air out of my lungs. I needed help standing up again.

The morning after a night like this, I look like I've been in a fight. Puffy eyes, dark circles, lines that age me.

Underneath all that, I'm still in there somewhere.

Mourning & Motherhood

And poor C. quotes me, "Do not mourn like those that have no hope." It astonishes me, the way we are invited to apply to ourselves words so obviously addressed to our betters. What St. Paul says can comfort only those who love God better than the dead, and the dead better than themselves. If a mother is mourning not for what she has lost but for what her dead child has lost, it is a comfort to believe that the child has not lost the end for which it was created. And it is a comfort to believe that she herself, in losing her chief or only natural happiness, has not lost a greater thing, that she may still hope to "glorify God and enjoy Him forever." A comfort to the God-aimed, eternal spirit within her. But not to her motherhood. The specifically maternal happiness must be written off. Never, in any place or time, will she have her son on her knees, or bathe him, or tell him a story, or plan for his future, or see her grandchild.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Jesus wept.

Ewan Eliezer Petermann was laid to rest on Saturday, October 9, 2010 -- just three weeks from the date he was born. To say all of this is difficult to take in is an understatement.

This picture of our priest incensing Ewan's casket reminded me of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. The priest, like Jesus, believes in the resurrection of the body. He, like Jesus, knows this is not the end of the story. But the sadness on his face reminds me of Jesus who, though he was about to raise him from the dead, wept at the tomb of Lazarus.

Though it doesn't take away the feelings of loss, it helps to know we have in Christ a savior who does not distance himself from our sorrow -- one who not only holds us as we weep, but weeps with us.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

Dispatches From a Dark Night

I know I write about this a lot. This is how I process through it, really. And I’m processing it again. But here it is: I really don’t know what faith looks like in this place.

It’s a sad reality that when I discuss our situation (and I’m sorry if you’ve heard about “our situation” from me a hundred times, but here’s the rundown: expecting a baby with a severe heart defect that will require surgery almost immediately after his birth, my husband’s lack of employment, not knowing how to pay our already-mounting medical bills or other basic expenses while I’m on unpaid maternity leave), some adopt what we’ve come to call a “Pollyanna” attitude about it. God will take care of you. Things are going to be okay. It will all work out. Let go and let God. If you have to go back to work two weeks after he’s born and still in the NICU, you should view it as a blessing in disguise. You can handle this.

While I appreciate the good intentions of those who offer these words, more often than not, all these attempts at simplicity and comfort manage to achieve is a minimization of our situation that infuriates me. Any one of these dilemmas would be bad enough, but the union of them all together makes for a thorny reality that none of us can brush aside. These words are band-aids on bullet holes, and it is in those moments I want to invite the people who say these things to inhabit my reality deeply for a time, to take upon themselves my thoughts and emotions and questions, to follow me into the closet when I close the door, fall on the floor, and fall apart completely, weeping from a depth that is bottomless. I wonder if they would be able to say those same things. I wonder if they heard those same words from someone else, if they would find them a warm blanket or a blast of cold.

We have faith. We have believed: in God’s provision, in His wisdom, in His timing. And we are still in a place where we don’t know how any of this is going to work out or in many instances, how we should act: we have no clear sense of whether or not we will even be one of the fortunate sets of parents who will come home with the baby they birthed, the baby whose movements they have felt and experienced for months on end, whose life they have witnessed squirming and stretching through his mother’s skin. This is a reality that we don’t dwell on, but must acknowledge. We cannot presume upon anything.

We are working, thinking, and praying with every last fiber and blood cell we have, wondering what God wants us to do. There are no promises about the outcome. There are no clear directives on what decisions to make. And it’s not because we haven’t been listening. We have been asking God and listening, interjecting our pleas and waiting. We are in a season where, like the mountain I sometimes see on my drive to work, God looms large in the distance, but is ultimately still and silent. I know, rather than feel, Him there. He is under a cover of clouds and veiled with an impenetrable an inky night. Job experienced this, mystic spiritual masters like St. John of the Cross wrote extensively about it, and recent saints like Mother Teresa lived it: the dark night of the soul.

I used to be afraid to say that that’s what this is. That’s for spiritual giants and I’m just a normal person. But now I don’t need to ask or question it or be afraid to call it what it is now, because I know. Dark nights are for normal people, too. Dark nights are those places where our ability to sense God in any way is gone, and where we are continually brought to the end of ourselves and asked to go still further. Where we feel like we have been stripped of everything we possess, and asked to give still more. God is deeply present in these dark nights, but in a way that is imperceptible to one in the thick of it.

It would be a mistake to say that there are not shafts of light that pierce the dark night – many moments of laughter, of profound joy as we prepare to embrace the mystery that is this child, that is parenthood. But it is joy that lives in the hollow of a crucible, in a place where layers of dross rise to the surface in the boiling heat and are skimmed off, in a place where we find the ends of ourselves again, and again, and again. And we know: we have deeper yet to go.

Perhaps these ends, these peelings away will increase our capacity for joy. Perhaps in coming to these ends we will learn to lean more fully into our invisible God, and come to know what it means to draw on His strength instead of defaulting to our own. Perhaps we will taste the faith the ancients did when they reasoned God could raise the dead and so held knives over their only children, when they stood in the blast of heat from a fire meant to incinerate their flesh and said, God can save us. But even if He does not, we will not bend the knee.

keeping it real & raw.

I wonder if I'll regret writing this with all this hanging around me, the ink still fresh and wet on this news, the unfolding reality giving rise to an exponentially increasing number of questions, as well as new and complex feelings. My emotional landscape is changing constantly and dramatically, ranging from sharp peaks to deep valleys with a few muddied level places in between. At a time like this, everything feels volatile, and change is the only thing that is a constant. None of it feels real.

Yesterday's fetal echo confirmed what the first doctor suspected. I'm not going to name the diagnosis here because I don't want it to show up anywhere on a Google search (even if it's the 10,394th page listed). There is a whole range of fetal heart defects that exist, and this one exists on the side of the range that, if your baby has to have a heart defect, you definitely don't want to land on. It is severe. There are holes in places there shouldn't be. There are vessels a mere fraction of the size they need to be.

Unless a miracle happens between now and his birth, Ewan will be spending the first weeks of his life in a hospital. He will need multiple tests and operations to deal with these abnormalities. Defects. Whatever you want to call them. Whatever the label, I hate them.

I can't tell you how much it hurts to know that I won't be able to take him home with us. That I will need to leave the care of my midwives more than halfway through my pregnancy and deliver in a hospital. That within hours of his birth, he will be transferred to a different location while I recover from labor and delivery. That in his first weeks of life, I will need to get in my car and drive to the hospital to see him, to touch him. That after he's born, he won't immediately occupy the room we have set aside for him.

I know he will be well cared for. I know these steps will be necessary if he's going to live and thrive. I know we are fortunate to be so near a facility that can handle this, and that we live in a time where babies who wouldn't otherwise have a chance of making it can grow and thrive thanks to some extraordinary advances in modern medicine. I know there is nothing I could have done to change this. According to the doctor, these things "just happen." No one really knows what causes it, only that it's something that likely started within the first three or so weeks of my pregnancy.

None of this makes it any easier. Believe me, I wish it did. It would make things easier on all of us; we wouldn't be huddled and weeping in the corner, and you wouldn't be shifting in your seat, searching for the right words or wondering if it's okay to hug us. We are walking a path no parent wants to walk, and having to make choices no parent wants to make.

I know that our feelings will continue to shift, change, and evolve. I know we aren't the first to experience this. I know that we will experience substantial hope, and that we will find peace and laughter in unexpected moments. I know that our son is a gift and a blessing, and already a joy to his parents. But it still hurts in a way no earthly tongue can describe, and only a supernatural and heavenly power can change or heal that.

This is a portion of what I wrote to my dear friend Christianne this morning:

I am jealous of every parent who's never gotten bad news, of every parent who has had a healthy, normal baby, of those who have never had to navigate this path, of those who have not had to weigh the sometimes tremendous cost of choosing life when its beginning looks so bleak and challenged. I've heard some of the traditional platitudes that inevitably come forward in the speech of those who mean well: things like "God doesn't give us anything we can't handle." Pardon me, but what a load of bull. Maybe He allows these types of trials precisely because He already knows we can't handle it -- that we would need to lean on Him chiefly, that all our dependencies would be on Him and not on what we could do, that we would humble ourselves and ask for help from those friends and family that surround us and stand with us. If there's one thing James and I are strikingly aware of, it's how completely helpless we are in this place. We can do nothing to effect the change we desire.

I'm confident of God's infinite love for this little boy. I know His heart for children. I know this news does not surprise Him. Sometimes this knowledge is a tremendous comfort, and at others, it makes it all the more difficult to reconcile with the truth that I'm waking up in a world where babies are born with severe heart defects and don't get to go home with their parents after they're born. And somehow, inexplicably, the world keeps turning and the birds keep singing when the sun comes up.

And so here we are, at the head of a path we did not expect, wondering what kind of story will be told in the steps we take.

Lord, have mercy.

a little illumination

The story of the passion and crucifixion is one Christians know well. But I had never heard this before and thought maybe if you didn't either, you might like to understand a little better our Lord and our God. Learning this (the content of this video) made me choke, gasp, and weep. It humbled me utterly.

(The video is approximately 4 minutes long)

Note: This sermon series (as you may notice) is from the book of Luke. Since I've been spending time studying the book of John, however, I am sharing the account given by the disciple whom Jesus loved.

When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, "Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be.” This was to fulfill the Scripture which says,

"They divided my garments among them,
and for my clothing they cast lots."

So the soldiers did these things, but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, "Woman, behold, your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold, your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), "I thirst." A jar full of sour wine stood there, so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a hyssop branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, "It is finished," and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

John 19:23-30 (ESV)

bottles of tears & desert places

What a cop out, I thought sardonically.

One sentence from the pastor's prayer reverberated through me: God, You are the answer to every question.

Whatever.

I felt a hard and bitter lump at the back of my throat; hot tears pooled behind my eyes, stinging at the corners. I had plenty of questions. And I had reached out to God with those questions, time and again. Making no effort to disguise my need, I stretched forth my arms and held those hungry questions in my hands. They were hard and cold and He had not offered satisfaction for a single one of them. Starved of answers, they started to feed on my heart, picking at it like buzzards. He knew it and still, He held back and let them nibble at my innards.

At least that is how it felt. Though in my mind I knew God was present and that He cared, in my heart I felt abandoned. And I was so tired of trying to talk myself out of feeling that way.

I don't often attend the monthly evening services at church, but I went that night as an act of faith. I wanted to touch the hem of His robe, to see if His power would course its way through my body and make me whole. But my Comforter seemed out of reach. I imagined Him standing in the shadows, arms crossed and motionless as He took in the sights and sounds of the scene before Him: my arms reaching out for him, my faltering voice calling to Him from a raw throat. If not answers, then comfort please, I begged. Come and find me here.

I wrapped my hands around the edges of the chair in front of me to steady myself. What could I do but wait? I didn't need to know why this was happening anymore or even when it would be over, but could He give me a word, a hope, a bit of comfort -- anything to sustain me? How, God? How is this good? It felt at times as though He loved me in a more generic "I love the whole world" kind of way. I started to feel small and invisible, as if God were too busy with hurricanes, wars, and famines to attend to me.

I started to trust in His presence in the same way I might trust that the Titanic sank: as a true and historic fact, but one that had little in the way of a compelling connection to my present. Nothing could or would change the truth of it, but it was a cerebral truth, one that was acknowledged more or less academically. Asking my heart to believe it was to invite a tension and conflict within myself that was incapacitating. I couldn't make any sense of it, and so I didn't want to encounter it. My heart was a puddle and my head was already splitting; I could not afford nor bear to invite additional strain.

I've been studying the book of Job in this season in order to find a new lens through which to view my own experience. As I wrote my most recent post reflecting on God's silence throughout the bulk of the book, I pondered in the final paragraph:

I wonder what [God] is doing in the shadows as He listens to Job's friends all but accuse him of some vile sin time and again. I wonder what was in His heart as He watched Job scrape at his sores with bits of broken pottery. I wonder what He was thinking as Job and asked why?, over and over again. I wonder how He held himself in silence when Job requested an audience with God so Job could make his case. I wonder how His heart felt as He counted and collected Job's tears.

The last sentence was a new thought for me and honestly, a bit of a throwaway as far as I was concerned. It's something I tacked on at the end of the paragraph, due in part to the fact that I had recently said to someone, "If it's true that God gathers every teardrop, then there is an Olympic-sized swimming pool in heaven with my name on it." The jest belied how deeply my heart was hurting; I desperately wanted it to be true.

Less than twenty-four hours later, I received an e-mail from Sarah that nearly made me fall out of my chair:

... you came to mind. I started to pray, that god would be with you, that you'd feel his nearness, that he'd protect you from the enemy. And then I prayed something I haven't prayed before ... I don't know if I've ever thought it before. I prayed that you would know that each tear you cry is precious to him, that you would know he's catching them all in his hand and collecting them because they matter to him, because YOU matter to him. I SAW it, you crying, him catching.

Now, this never happens to me ... not ever. I mean, I get images, but I don't think I've ever been woken up to pray something like this before.

And then I read what you wrote ...

But the amazingness did not end there. The day after that, I went to Stuff Christians Like, a blog I look at only infrequently. I read this post about feeling too small for God, and what should I read but:

... every now and then I come across a verse that shakes my deep belief that I am beneath God’s radar. One that I love is Psalm 56:8. Here, in what hopefully makes me look pretty smart, is the King James Version:

“Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?”

But maybe you’re not old school, so here’s what the New Living Translation says:

“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.”

I think that’s beautiful. Can you imagine that? Can you picture God doing that? Taking His giant hands and tenderly picking up every single one of your tears? Knowing why they came, understanding what they mean, placing them in His bottle, so that He can comfort you.

In the space of a day, I had been reminded twice that truly: He gathers every teardrop. He gathers my teardrops. He spoke to the ache and the need that I simply had no words to describe. I was reassured that my tears mattered to Him, that they had not escaped His notice. He spoke to the need behind my pleas for healing: He answered my doubts about His presence, about what His love for me looked like, about whether or not I really mattered to Him. I had gone from feeling deserted, as though I was an infinitesimal blip in a crowd of humanity to feeling like I was the only soul on the planet for whom God cared.

My health issues continue to be a part of my current reality, and I won't pretend that those don't matter. I suppose from that vantage point, nothing has changed. But the world as I knew it was turned upside-down when our great big God became small enough to let me know that He saw me, that He collected every single tear I cried and regarded them as something precious. There was nothing generic about it; it is by far the most intimate God-experience I've ever had. He drew me to the desert and whispered His love to me there. And everything changes radically when you know for sure that you're fiercely and dearly loved.

reprise

I'm in this place again. Turns out the relief was short-lived and I am back where I started.

Frack!!

Add a failed laptop power cord (can't even turn the thing on), some very creepy guys who think they're all that and a bag of chips (do I have to deal with this right now?), a gaping hole where a really cute cat should be (I miss how he would cozy up my lap when I read a book), and some seriously misplaced hope into the mix and you have one very tired and emotionally volatile woman. If I could figure out how to do it, I'd infinitely prefer to run away. But I can't, so here I am.

And that's about all I've got.

in a dry & weary land

Hi friends,

It's been awhile -- at least it seems that way to me. I could hardly believe it when I saw my last post was two weeks ago. But as blogging seems to have slowed down in general for the summer, I'm okay with it.

I'll be honest: I've had a hard time of it lately. My health is not improving; in fact, my insides are behaving as though they're forty or fifty years older than I am. As I was discussing the latest slough of symptoms with my naturopath, he told me that the conversations we're having about my health now are ones he usually has with patients in their seventies. Simply put, my body is failing at some of its most basic processes: digestion, elimination, absorption, and some others that I just don't want to talk about here.

The word chronic has been used.

On a good day, I'll tell you that this body makes me long for heaven. I'll tell you that I am finding blessing in unexpected places. I'll tell you that I know and trust that God will redeem this.

But on the days that aren't so good or as hopeful -- on days like today -- I am angry. I'm frustrated and weary and truth be told, just plain furious. I wonder what my later years might look like if this is my life and my health now. I wonder what the point is of trying to be healthy at all when my body is failing anyway. I wonder where God is when I cry out for mercy and heaven is silent and still again, again, and again. I wonder with the Psalmist, How long, O Lord? How frickin' long?

I'm tired of investing money and energy and hope into remedies that seem to help at first, but later have no effect on my body.

I'm tired of the way hope inflates and deflates inside me.

I'm tired of having a carrot dangled in front of me only to have it yanked away time and again.

I'm tired of being chronically unwell. I'm tired of the sounds of my own complaints.

I'm tired of trying to find blessing or anything good in this place. I'm tired of taking the long view, of wondering how God might use this to bless others in a distant time known only as someday.

I'm tired of the tension that exists between knowing God is there, but having the feeling as though He's absent, silent, and idle. I'm tired of how any prayer I offer hits the ceiling and falls in a heap at my feet.

I'm tired of spending time in the offices of every doctor who has a chart for me, of talking about my bowel and menstruation habits at length, of being subjected to test after invasive test, of lying exposed on cold tables, of hands pressing in on my body.

I'm tired of the looks from physicians who are as baffled and frustrated as I am.

I'm so tired of trying every possible option to be well and as far as I can tell, of it meaning nothing.

I'm tired of how isolated and alone this makes me feel, of how difficult it is to feel engaged in my own life, of how much I don't want to accept that this is my life.

I'm tired of being the oldest thirty-year-old that I know.

This doesn't mean that I don't want to know how you are, and it certainly doesn't mean I don't want to celebrate with you or hear about your days. This doesn't mean that I don't want to talk about other things or that I've lost sight of the world beyond the boundaries of my skin or that I'm incapable of laughter. I may be quiet or I may be absent from time to time, but I'm still here and I love knowing that you are, too.

I know it's difficult to be with people like me in these kinds of places. There's nothing you can say or do, no solution you can offer that will make it better. I understand this, and I can appreciate the difficulty. That being said, please know that I don't expect solutions or cures or words that will illuminate all of this perfectly. I don't expect you to know how to fix this.

I'm just glad that you're here, listening and sharing in this life with me.

what she needed to hear

I've been remembering her. I can't say much here right now about what or why she chose not to remember. In a way, it started with declaring aloud thoughts about my body. That brought me to writing a book proposal and finally to confronting a place where memory failed me.

And then I started to wake up. Numb places came awake with sharp pinpricks of feeling. So I sat with her. I began to earn her trust, slowly. She began to speak, and I just listened. I didn't turn away. I let her cry out loud, and I cried with her. We still have yet to find the bottom of the wound.

There is more work to be done and I know that there will be tears on the path ahead. But I'm thankful that at a time when she was tender and receptive, these words crossed her path again. Words that she had heard before, but ran over her like water over a rock. And now she is like a sponge, soaking them in. Daring for the first time to believe that they are not only true, but meant for her.

that I would be good

alanis morissette

that I would be good even if I did nothing

that I would be good even if I got the thumbs down

that I would be good if I got and stayed sick

that I would be good even if I gained ten pounds

that I would be fine even if I went bankrupt

that I would be good if I lost my hair and my youth

that I would be great if I was no longer queen

that I would be grand if I was not all knowing

that I would be loved even when I numb myself

that I would be good even when I am overwhelmed
that I would be loved even when I was fuming

that I would be good even if I was clingy

that I would be good even if I lost sanity

that I would be good

whether with or without you