lent reading, week three

To hear Brandi read this week’s essay, click here: https://youtu.be/Y8c6U0j31Ps

Week Three

Two years ago, I was frantically trying to reorder my family’s life so we could soak up every moment with my nephew Judah, who was dying as a tumor grew in his brain. When he died, the grief was utterly consuming. It still is on many days. He is talked about and longed for every single day.

My grief changed me. Is changing me. I’m different in the way I trust God and think about my community and wonder about what we are all doing here. Those questions are for another day though. Today I want to tell us that grief can change your body and your brain too. It can make you exhausted without knowing exactly why. It can consume you in a fog, making it impossible to think clearly, to remember what you are doing, or to stay focused on a thing. Grief distracts.

500,000 people have died in America in the last year from Covid. Millions of people have lost their jobs or closed their business, while millions of others feel their mental health fraying by the day. 300 million dreams of what the year ahead would offer have been disrupted. Grief abounds.

If you find yourself distracted, unable to focus, as if you are moving in slow motion through a fog, you might be swirling in grief. It comes uninvited. It lingers without explaining why. This week of Lent, I gently suggest you get in touch with your grief. It is not unfaithful to do so; students of lament know it to be a faithful act of worship. We suffer. We long for healing. We are made for eternity and our mortality wounds us, sometimes permanently.

As you explore your own grief, I do hope you will sense God’s gathering, comforting presence there. You might not, and that will hurt. You might find other bodies to grieve with though. You might ask for help, or notice someone else seems to hurt like you do. Henri Nouwen reminds us that we welcome and heal and sustain others through revealing our hurt, sitting with our pain, exposing our vulnerable spots. Healing doesn’t come only from our effort to reclaim our focus or in our determination to keep going. Often it comes from the communion of grieving with others. It is tempting to turn inward, knowing how overwhelmed you are, how incapable of connection you feel when you’re not your best self.

This week I hope you find new energy to lift your eyes and see that you aren’t alone in your grief. That in God’s design, you are comforted as you seek to comfort. Your capacity to receive love increases as you choose to love sacrificially. Perhaps the Beloved Community begins when we witness, move toward and help bear the staggering loads of others, staggering though we may be. If Nouwen is right then the pressure is off to understand who created our grief-burdens, how we efficiently manage them, or where/when/how we drop them. Maybe a way forward is to see the burden of another and then get so close that we begin to carry part of it just because we are there. Many of us are hurting, and I pray this week we see Lent as a time not just to renew our awareness of God, but to experience the fullness of God as we bring our distracted, overwhelmed, hurting selves into full relationship with wounded others.

Grief distracts. It is worth noticing if all the ugh you feel is actually rooted in grief. It is also worth bringing your distracted self to sit before God, around other hurting folks, and offer thanks that you aren’t alone.

To Ponder:

“To only have a theology of celebration at the cost of the theology of suffering is incomplete. The intersection of the two threads provides the opportunity to engage in the fullness of the gospel message. Lament and praise must go hand in hand.”                                        -Soong Chan Rah

“Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life.” –Henri Nouwen

To Read:

Mar 3 Job 42:1-3

Mar 4 Isaiah 40:21-31

Mar 5 Ps 142

Mar 6 Hosea 5:15-6:3

Mar 7 Luke 6:20-31

Mar 8 Ps 143:5-10

Mar 9 Ps 25:4-18; 19:7-14

sharing pain and joy: the miracle of st. jude

As my family struggles to find sure footing after the death of Judah Thacker, wildly loved son, brother, nephew, cousin, grandson and friend, I will share past essays written about him. I hope they remind you, as they do me, that Judah’s life and death continue to shape the way I see the world in marvelous ways. The following is from the fall of 2018.

When I grieve I tend to lose my keys. I forget people’s birthdays and kids’ lunch boxes. I tend to wander around aimlessly like our dearly departed dog, Copper, whom my brother consistently called, “Vacant.” I lose thoughts mid-sentence, without even knowing I trailed off (I am baffling to be around, a thing I know because I regularly look up to see my kids looking at each other with a side glance at me, saying-without-saying, “Are you watching this? Mom is losing it.”). Splendid.

Therapists tell me that my psyche is working hard to process grief that defies processing. That this effort requires a lot of work, and so there isn’t brain energy left to hold the grocery list, or to remember that the stop sign is not going to turn green, and that it’s my turn to go. This incompetence is challenging for me, a productivity addict.

Still, there is a beauty in it. I have come to wonder if perhaps the fog through which I move when I am overwhelmed with sadness is an unconscious attempt to protect the self.  That my deep essence knows I can’t do the juggling, so my hands don’t reach for the balls. My executive function knows it is broken, and so it signals to those around me, “Don’t give her anything to do. It won’t go well.”

It makes sense to try to protect ourselves, to pull back when we hurt. When I was young and my brother was leaving for college, I tried to do trial runs of surviving his absence all year. I would pull back, aloof, acting like I didn’t care that he would soon leave me behind. I thought it would make it easier. It didn’t work.

Sometimes the universe feels dark. We feel surrounded by tragedy, or hesitant after so many revelations of bad news. Whether it is personal pain or the wail of living in a world of such atrocious injustice, there are reasons to grieve. We walk wounded, nearly ducking at an innocent breeze, aware that trauma can lurk in any shadow. The hiding away doesn’t work though. Sometimes we suffer. Sometimes life is excruciating. Sometimes we can’t run fast enough to outrun the pain.

In Memphis, TN, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital stands as a defiant beacon of hope. St. Jude is an amazing place that regularly delivers miracles; it is also a warehouse of personal tragedy. Outside the complex of buildings that houses so much pain—kids hurting and parents aching for the threatened life of their beloved child—exists a marker of the route of one of the most painful corporate experiences in American History. The road that runs alongside St. Jude is littered with signs that say, “Trail of Tears: Original Path.” In this specific location we confront deeply personal pain surrounded by expansive, generational, shared pain.

The first time I drove past St. Jude, I glimpsed the sign but didn’t catch the entire thing. I couldn’t believe it. A few hundred yards down the road, there was another marker. Long before St. Jude was built, long before the street was paved, thousands of Natives, forced from their land by the US Government, walked that road. Held children as they died on that road. And now, along that street, personal tragedy and historical trauma bear witness to each other. How do we witness such pain? How do we face evidence of corporate and historical trauma in the face of our own, personal disappointments or tragedies? 

It is easy to try to protect ourselves. To decide to shut down. If you are a parent walking into St. Jude with your kid, you probably don’t have any room to encounter or lament the Trail of Tears. Instead, you want to hide, to burrow away. One can’t face so much sadness. Our bodies and souls and psyches can’t take it. This is true.

However, I have learned it is also true that hiding away in my own personal grief does not make it easier. Instead, it is a beautiful thing to bring my hurting self to see all the other hurting selves and to be together there. To be a hurting human with other hurting humans. Especially when it hurts or causes discomfort, I now believe we must lean in to the pain in others that sees the pain in us. It might feel safe to hide within our own boundaries, but it is a sure way to dehumanize the soul as it braves the wilderness alone, forging a self outside of community. When it all feels like it is too much, it seems safe to discipline ourselves to be aloof. However, to be aloof is to deny your own humanity, because the human in you must resonate with the human in others. Especially in pain.

We have far too few expectations for our capacity to empathize and heal. Perhaps instead of shutting down in our pain, we now choose to bring it with us into our communities. Could we allow ourselves to be together in it? Could we expand our capacity to grieve the personal and the collective? Pretending to ignore corporate grief does not make it go away, nor does it alleviate our own encounters with suffering. It comes for us whether we are ready or not.

Perhaps we can learn to take a page out of the St. Jude playbook. They find a way when there is no way. They celebrate kids and have parties in sick wards, and laugh and play while kids endure unthinkable pain. They refuse to shut down in the face of suffering. They look it square on, with tears, and then continue to fight for every kid as long as they are able. The fight often brings more pain, but fight they do. They know increasing the capacity to fight for every kid does not diminish the ability to engage one kid with compassion. Could the same be true in us? Instead of withdrawing in our pain, could we find more healing through engaging in the pain of others? Could our burdens be more bearable if we lean in to stand with all those who bear impossible hardships each day?

Ignoring corporate angst, avoiding the pain of systemic injustice, does not protect me from my own personal loss. Is it possible that our own encounter with unspeakable personal pain teaches us how to grieve, lament, hope and then resist the systems of injustice that continue to wreak havoc on all of us? Rather than working to erect walls that promise to keep us safe, I suggest we increase our capacity to witness and engage with the pain of others. It might actually help us survive our lament, teaching us to hope again, with companions along the way.

lessons in grief

My nephew died on Friday from a brain tumor first discovered nearly 6 years ago. After undergoing radical brain surgery and devastating chemotherapy as a 4, 5 & 6 year old, he had a few years to be, as he put it, “Just Judah. Not Judah with cancer.”  17 months ago though, symptoms began, leading to a series of horrible discoveries:

14 months ago they were told his tumor was growing again

12 months ago he was so ill he was given a feeding tube

10 months ago they discovered his tumor had transformed into a deadly, high grade tumor that would end his life in the year ahead

9 months ago he began radiation to give him a few good months with his family

6 months ago his family waited in vain for him to experience those good months

5 months ago he started an experimental treatment that could possibly save or prolong his life

3 months ago he had an amazing 2 weeks traveling with family

6 weeks ago he was hospitalized, nearly killed by the side effects of his treatment

4 weeks ago he was told his tumor had doubled in size and he had weeks to live

3 weeks ago his family rushed home to be together

2 weeks ago his parents took him to Legoland and to the beach to soak up every moment

1 week ago he went camping with family, growing more ill by the moment, but trying to hang on

5 days ago his parents told us to come home to say goodbye

4 days ago we gathered and wept

2 days ago his parents held him as he died.

Today it feels impossible to even access feelings. The grief, the exhaustion, the worry about all the kids and adults who are wrecked by the loss of this amazing boy, is too much to bear. The missing him consumes us.

 There is a passivity that overtakes you when you grieve: Food appears and is taken away; faces lean in with red rimmed eyes and then vanish; arms embrace and then release; memories are shared, laughter comes; images flash, tears fall; thoughts roam but the effort to speak is too much.

Trapped in my brain, quiet, I have recognized a few moments of light.

I share them now, with every intention of unpacking them later. I hope they serve as a counter narrative to the loss, an act of resistance against the overwhelming sadness. Short episodes or thoughts, each one serves as a possible path forward, toward wonder, and maybe even hope.

• 8 days before her son died, my sister urged me to go do something fun, saying, “Go breathe different air. Feel joy, ‘cause joy isn’t gone, it’s just smothered by this unthinkable darkness.” In the service, my sister Ellen, reading Mary Oliver, reminded us that joy often arrives suddenly and unexpectedly, and that when it does, the right move is to give in to it. It doesn’t matter that your heart is broken and might never be whole again; when a toddler loves yelling, “Poop!” at inappropriate times, you have to laugh! Joy, she said, isn’t meant to be a crumb. It comes in plenty, always enough. Let it happen, no matter the ravaged state of your heart.

• In thinking about the service for Judah, I was reminded again and again that God is either drawn to us when we are honest about our loss, our anger, our pain, our doubt, or we really have built our “faith” scaffolding on utter bullshit. If faithful worship requires 100% joy and confidence every moment then I think “faithful worship” was built in a lab wholly removed from human experience. God has to be more comfortable with nuance and uncertainty and pain than that. Thank God for theologies of lament and for Beattitudinal doctrines, and rely on them when life happens to you.

• When you lose someone you love, withdrawal presents itself as a wonderful option. Stop caring. Hide away. Protect your heart at all costs. But all of that is a lie. Healing only comes with more love. Love makes us vulnerable, but it is also the only salve that heals. Expanding love also creates space for new ways to imagine family. Walking wounded with others has made us realize we have new sisters and brothers, folks who feel like family because they love big in the midst of pain. When you are wounded, love more, not less.

• People are astounding, and the right response to sacrifice is gratitude, not shame. People flew home from amazing trips to stand with our family. People drove 8 hours in one day in the middle of a holiday weekend to hug our necks. People showed up, and my first response was often shame. When we “feel bad” at the sacrifice of others on our behalf, we miss the chance to feel loved, known and grateful. Look the sacrifice of others in the face, appreciate the grace and love you are given, and receive it.

• The social worker from Hospice admitted that losing a child is devastating. She said we all need to pay attention to the ways grief and pain can wreck us and our relationships with others. She brilliantly added that we might also pay attention to the “collateral beauty” that is certainly unfolding all around us. What a marvelous idea! Horrible pain does damage in ways we cannot even fathom, but it also sets the stage for beauty more stunning and restorative than we can imagine. Pay attention and give thanks when it comes.

Here’s to Judah, to a life remembered and cherished and mourned by many. Here’s to surprising joy, to collateral beauty, and to sacrifice, coexisting with pain. The presence of one doesn’t end the possibility of the others. The darkness is thick and overwhelming right now, but the light remains, and I am grateful.