My Lenten Baby

I fully expected our baby to arrive during Holy Week or Eastertide—after all, first babies are notoriously late... But our unnamed baby came during Lent. He needed to come early for his sake and mine. Looking back on it all, I know it was a severe mercy that nothing in our birth plan got to happen. It was a mercy from God that I had to be cut open, as I had an internal infection no one knew about, and baby had two knots in his umbilical cord. It was a Lenten kind of mercy, where all our prep and planning turned to ashes, but we were alive.

It was a howling whirlwind for those five days in hospital, a nightmare of emotions, doctors, nurses, specialists, and unhealthy food (seriously, why is hospital food made out of nothing nutritious?). It was overwhelming with so many lights, so many instructions, and medications I'd never have chosen, all accompanied by almost no sleep. Tohu vavohu. Chaos. Lent.

We were finally released to go 'home'—a house I'd never slept in before. Not only did we end up in the hospital (the last place I wanted to have our baby) two weeks early, we left our Summit cabin and came 'home' with baby to our new house full of still-packed boxes. We were supposed to have a proper farewell with our cabin, to have all the boxes unpacked, and a home ready to welcome our baby. Instead, we were bleary-eyed wild people, one of us with emotions off the map of the known, wondering where to find the soap, the blue jeans, and our cast iron skillet. Nothing felt normal and our bedroom didn't even have a door on it that first night. Lent—long days. 

I missed Holy Week. I missed Easter. I missed Pentecost. I was stuck in Lent. I found out that I don't like my Lenten self. I've never known I could be so scary and unfeeling. But there were moments, whole days, where I wouldn't recognise the person inside my brain and body. She was unstable and mean and angry. The darkness and despair of Good Friday indwell me far more than I imagined.

This Lent feels long and tiring in a way I've never known Lent to feel before, even in some dark times. And while I know we've entered Ordinary (ordered/numbered) Time in the Church calendar, there is still part of me that just feels Lenty.  The part of me that cried to my sister that I don't like being a mom (I actually do, but I'm a wimp and this is hard). The part of me that gets frustrated with our little guy when he wiggles nonstop and kicks me during feedings. The part of me that has yelled at my husband because everything is out of my control and I don't know what he's thinking. It all feels like Lent is still indwelling me, and I just want to get to Eastertide's glory or Pentecost's crazy awesomeness. Maybe I'd even enjoy hanging out in Ordinary Time, though it's not usually my favourite, since much of it takes place in horrid, hot summer.

Maybe I need a little more time to soak in Lent... "Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." Like Mary Oliver, maybe I need to realise that seeing even the darkness in me is a gift, causing me to fall on the Mercy of God. 

Things have evened out a good deal since Baby T's arrival. Walks help. Visits from friends have helped. Sleep helps. Worship helps shine the Easter light into those dark places of my Lenten soul. Work helps (until it doesn't). Hikes and coffee shop visits, and weirdly, grocery trips all help me feel more even-keeled. But now I know that the ashes of Lent are smeared deep and dark across my soul. Hope is not a thing with feathers, as Emily Dickenson famously wrote. Hope is a Person, real and solid, someone to be grasped—to grasp me when I'm sinking into my Lenten darkness. Hope is a Person: Jesus the Messiah—the Light of the World we're reminded of in Advent, when the calendar resets...still in darkness, but with an eye ever toward the Morning Star.

The Scars Deep in Your Heart

Wednesday
Tonight I made corn salsa with cilantro and lime, heated raw tortillas and spread them with homemade salsa verde, and added savoury pronghorn with jalapenos and cheese. The flavours were fresh, alive on my tongue. Thus I shared a meal with a friend. Over tea, however, we shared tales and tears. My tears were flavoured with sorrow and fear—that fear of forgetting. Fear of trying so hard to be okay that I lose any semblance of who I am.
After two or three weeks of not entering fully, not encountering grief the way I had been, I put the kleenex box back on the windowsill. I wore colour—rather than black and grey—for the first time in over two months. And I felt like a traitor. Disloyal to my grief, and ultimately, disloyal to Aaron. Sometimes I fear that I am forgetting, and sometimes I fear that this bleeding wound will never heal. I simultaneously hope it never does and long for the blood to clot, the scar to form.

These are the scars
deep in your heart
This is the place you were born
This is the hole
where most of your soul
comes ripping out
From the places you've been torn
And it is always yours
But I am always yours

The shape of these words has become so familiar to my ears that they are often background noise at work. But when I stop to listen to them, they still make me ache. It is as if the scar forms from the inside out; deep in my heart the blood is either being staunched or it is left to pour out.
Though I have been living on the surface for much of the last few weeks, I wonder if it is because the grief is going deeper in and I don't want to follow it. I want to be distracted. I want to be shallow—it's easier, it doesn't hurt so much. Yet it isn't really healing—and it could end up hurting other people. But even more, it feels like forgetting. And forgetting tastes like fear rather than life.

_______

Saturday

I moved the kleenex box back to my bed from the windowsill. I'm not expecting a sudden influx of tears, but one never does expect the tears. They come when they want. . .and sometimes they dry up, even when you feel like you need or want to cry them.

Today I'm wondering what it looks like to move deeper into grief. My initial need to internalise and then verbalise is still latent, but there has been a shift. Now I feel like I'm focussed on myself, rather than on remembering everything I possibly can about Aaron. Partly because I can't live in the past, but partly because remembering hurts. Remembering reminds me of how wrapped up in myself I was—too wrapped up to see that my friend needed more than an ordinary amount of help; to see that he was reaching out to me specifically in those first few years.

My understanding of 'normal' friendship was formed from my Semester friends. They set the bar severely high for everyone else. When we all began to be beacons of beauty, truth, and goodness in our own locales, it was hard to continue investing such devoted time to long-distance friends. Yet many of us did so for years. I felt the loss keenly when school, work, marriage, or children diminished the time we had once devoted to one another. I know the changes and the growth in our own communities and families had to happen—that is healthy and good. But the 'creeping separateness' deserved to be grieved.

With Aaron, the separation was gradual at first, then terribly abrupt near the end of his time in the Air Force. Maybe I blame the AF more than I should, but they did not help my friend while he was in their care. Though, to their credit, they did serve him well after his discharge. There is also regret when I think too much about Aaron's AF years. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what. I have no idea what I really could have done, but I still wish I had done something.

Then there is the regret when I think about the five-ish years between the time I last saw Aaron and when he ended his life. I wish I had visited him when I could have—before I ever moved to Colorado. I wish I had called sometime in those last five years, even when I wasn't sure if he would talk to me. Maybe he wouldn't have, but I wish I had tried to show him how much he mattered. And perhaps more than anything, I wish I had said 'Thank you' when I realised how much Aaron had quietly given me. I had the window of about one year when I had that chance...and I didn't take it.

When I remember, the pain comes spilling over in salty brine. And it is good to care, but it hurts.
If it doesn't break your heart, it isn't love
Now if it doesn't break your heart it's not enough
It's when you're breaking down with your insides coming out
It's when you find out what your heart is made of

Maybe I'm tired of my insides coming out, of my soul dripping out of the places I've been torn. But I pray for the Spirit to stand me on my feet, to help me to step into the ache. Because the distractions I've chased make me less human. I begin to be inhumane toward others. . .or I fear reaching out to others, because to reach out means to care. To care means to give another person the power to hurt me; because they, too, will go away and leave me with another rend in my heart. I don't have enough blood to sustain the loss over and over.

But I will go recklessly on, loving and being loved. Because what if I didn't? What value would there be to life? God made us to be loved and to learn to love. It isn't the love that hurts, it is the deep, intolerable scar of the Fall that makes love painful, because now there is loss. Now there is total separation in some cases. Recently it has come to me what a brilliant image Lewis paints of the Fall with Ransom's bleeding heel in That Hideous Strength. He is wounded with an interminable (on this planet) injury which bleeds slowly and continuously—like the Fall pierces us with the interminable injury of sin, a wound that cannot be staunched this side of full redemption.

Sometimes, in an effort to get out of myself, I try to give to too many people. I try to love from my own flesh, my own 'strength'—every time I have tried this (innumerable times), I fail and relationships detonate. Rather, I am learning to love others in and from my weakness, because in my weakness I see that I can only do anything through the strength and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Just because someone wants or even needs a friend, doesn't mean I have to be, or should be, that friend for them.

With Aaron, I tried to be a loyal friend, and I should have. We had a solid groundwork of life-together friendship. Right now I find I need to be a loyal friend to those with whom I have a friendship groundwork already laid. In this season, to reach out (beyond common courtesy) to new friends is leaving me mentally on the surface when I need to dig deep. . .deep into the Word; deep into the things I have been learning; deep into my wounded heart. Not to enlarge the hole, but to follow it down to where the scar is beginning to form. . .deep in my heart.

___________


— "Always" by Jon Foreman

— "Yet" by Jon Foreman and Tim Foreman

Photo: "Farewell, Goodbye" Wolf Creek Pass Overlook, Colorado (2007)

Created for a Place I've Never Known

"I've got my memories

Always inside of me

But I can't go back

Back to how it was...

...Created for a place 

I've never known"

Memories—I have those, too. But they are intangible. A stack of letters, smooth under my fingers, they are tangible. They hold your ruminations, a hundred quotations, illustrations, and aspirations. But letters cannot give me a bear hug. So I have your blue plaid flannel shirt wrapped around me. But where are your strong arms, my friend?

I can't wander back to the Lodge and find you there. Can't find you perched atop a woodpile at my parents' house...or at your parents' house, either. Believe me, I've looked. I've seen your bookshelf, the beautiful things you crafted, your writing desk, the footprints you left in the closet, your handwriting on the mirror. But you have gone on without me—beyond the veil to a place I've never known. A place I yearn for in the beautiful, aching moments. You've run ahead to a place I long for more earnestly now than I ever have.

Looking back over your letters has become something of a yearly tradition around our almost-shared birthdays. Ever since the day I first met you, I have known you were different than other people. Sometimes that difference was frustrating, as I just wanted an answer about your favourite food or your week's adventures. But more often, your different-ness was perceptive and inspiring. You once sent me a heart-full poem, asking for my advice, only to have me mutilate it—blind until years later to the depth of sorrow and beauty commingled therein.

I should have known that the soul of an artisan-poet, so well-versed in the language and habits of the King's world, wasn't long for this fragmented, still-fallen one. Perhaps part of your restless wanderlust stemmed from never quite feeling like you belonged here. There seemed no corner of the earth that could quite be your very own, my elven-friend. So you chose to step out of this world to find the place you had never known, but longed for all your life.

"This is home

Now I'm finally where I belong

Where I Belong

Yeah, this is home

I've been searching for a place of my own

Now I've found it

Maybe this is home

This is home"

Like Jewel says in The Last Battle, 'I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.' But there you are; you've gone further up and further in, without me. I envy you. So. Much. And I look forward to the day when I will get into Narnia and you can teach me the ways and words of the Kingdom. Who knows how long that will be, life is too dear to leave it without Aslan deliberately calling me away. But when He does—O friend!—come meet me. Show me sylvan glades where the dryads play. Teach me all the colours I haven't seen before. Tutor me in the names of the trees and the contours of the Kingdom. And help my trembling, tied tongue to learn to lisp the language of Heaven, until it becomes familiar to taste the words.

You have always shown me the world through different eyes. You have shown me beauty and wonder—ever my guide into Faerie Land. You have asked the questions I didn't even think to question. You have valiantly lived, trying to reconcile confusion and the constant hurricane of thoughts and fears. 

"And now after all my searching

After all my questions

I'm gonna call it home

I've got a brand new mindset

I can finally see the sunset

I'm gonna call it home"

Do you remember the time that you told me that your family went to the beach on or around Christmas, and that you saw a wall of water rising up and the sun behind it? Those lines from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader  sounded so naturally like something that would actually happen to you. And now you're in Aslan's own Country, the Utter East. Perhaps you sailed so far West from the Grey Havens as to arrive in the East. But you left me here without you, friend. In many ways, you left me for another world years ago. I always hoped you would find your way back far enough to reach out your hand to me once again. But we can't go back to how it was. And maybe that is for the best. I don't know if I could have borne the changes in you since that last visit. They were already apparent then...and they hurt to see. But know that I never stopped loving you and being your friend, even from a distance.

Perhaps it is better that what I do remember is you running to ring the unringable church bell in Pagosa. You, sitting on the floor, reading The Silmarillion aloud to me. The vast amount of ham you could eat! 'Phoners' and enthusiastic letters. The artistry of your hands and the music you played. The enthusiasm you had for music and lyrics and poetry. 

You were hard for me to understand, my friend. But not hard to love. You were hard for me to know how to help in fits of depression. But it seemed to be a joy for you to help me—even when I didn't always know it was your hand reaching out to me. You visited me when I was lonely. You gave me one of the greatest adventures I've ever taken, and were an integral part of my other grand adventure. You gave me the gift of your friendship, even though it cost you dearly to be open to loving another living thing. When you withdrew that gift, I felt abandoned, betrayed, unwanted. But now I know it was not because you didn't care, you cared more than you knew how. A part of me ceased all those years ago, and now part of me has died with you, friend. There are things that will never heal this side of Aslan's Country.

Missing you hurts like Hell, Aaron. Because it is Hell that stole you from me, from your dear family, and from a world that needs to see through your eyes. 

'This is worse than Mordor!' said Sam. 'Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home and you remember it before it was all ruined.' I remember you before the enemy set about to ruin you, to try to take you. But though you have gone further up and in, while I am left in the Shadowlands, neither has the enemy succeeded. You are now safe forever from confusion and heartache. You get to know how fully loved you are. You belong. 

Your seed has fallen into the ground in order to bear much fruit. In so many ways, the Lord has already borne good fruit through you, my friend, but the harvest continues. I can't thank you enough for being you. I love you. So. Much.

"A truer, nobler, trustier heart 

never beat within a human breast" 

—Lord Byron

“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” 

—C S Lewis, The Last Battle

___________

Song lyrics: This is Home by Switchfoot
Quotation 1: The Last Battle, by C S Lewis

Quotation 2: The Return of the the King, by J R R Tolkien

Why?

Oh, the questions we ask You, Begetter of the universe. 

You, Who spun waves and particles into golden light, we question if Your hands are big enough to hold us. You, Who breathed life into our spirits and our dusty frames, we pause to ask if You care about us. You, Whose finger carved words into the dirt, we ask if You care enough to write our stories, to show us what You want from us and for us.

You, Who entered time, slipped into skin, felt rejection and loneliness—we presume You have left us when our blind eyes cannot see You, and Your presence is not palpable. You, Who are called the Light of the world, we ask where You have gone when we wander in darkness. You, Who carefully marked the trenches of the world, poured its foundation, and sent the Cornerstone, why do we think You are incapable of answering our question marks?

Why does our friend have to walk through that valley? Our family member suffer that pain? Why do our own hearts, crushed, drip red in the darkness and in the blaze of day?

We ask when You will show up, why You allowed tragic loss, why there is emptiness sucking at our hearts like a black hole. Why does the darkness feel overwhelming, when the Light has rendered darkness outmoded, dead, and chased away?

There was a time when You stepped into our world. When eternity became now. You bought us back from hopeless death. And still we question. Still we scream. Still we shake our fists and walk away. You, Who never promised life would be easy, we expect to right everything, now. You, Who never explained Yourself to Job, we expect to spell out every answer to our every why? We expect You to operate like we do, to think in our human boxes, in our narrow line of sight. You, Creator, Sustainer, Holy One, Alpha, Omega... You, immortal, immutable, invisible, we ask to explain Yourself to our finite minds, to contain Yourself in a kernel of knowing that will fit inside of us. But You cannot be contained in our minds, in our paltry understanding, or in our broken hearts.

You are bigger than that—vast, eternal. You fill us, overfull, and splash out onto those we touch. Your love only multiplies. The ringing of Your Truth reverberates throughout the galaxies, resounding through the entire universe. How can we think it is all contained in one book, in one heart, in one mind, in one planet? 

It is not that we do not need to know why—sometimes we cannot know an answer so immense. We are too close to see the whole, to see clearly. We cannot explain away pain, abandoned hearts, our death valleys, or all the other dark shadows that cross over our lives. Neither can we explain why the storm clouds come to us, or why the Light doesn't break through and scare all our monsters away. Maybe we aren't strong enough to endure the illuminating rays that would break those clouds, eliminate that darkness. Perhaps we are being made ready to bear the weight of light—something weightless in our world—that, coming from the heavenly realm, is so dense that it would crush us. 

In a moment of unknowing I whisper, But why, God? Then, I choose to hang my question on these spoken pegs of Hope, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us. I do not always know what that Mercy looks like in this moment, in this day, in this shadow world. What form will Mercy take? Sometimes His Mercy is severe. Once, it took the form of flesh, nailed to a cross—suffering with us.

God is not "out there" but right here, with us—even when I cannot feel Him or see Him, and the clouds do not part. He is not against me—or you. He does not say why He does what He does, or why He allows various things. He withholds His mighty hand at times, and I don't know why. I only know He will not leave us all alone.

Lord have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

Grant us Your peace.

Christ Now and Then

"I wanted life itself, the colour and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn’t want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.”

~ Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (page 136)

There are many other, arguably better, quotations from A Severe Mercy. However, this one reminds me that I, too, don't always desire Jesus as I ought. It is sobering. Do I want holidays from the school of Christ? Sometimes. O God, help me to want more and still more of You!

In light of this struggle, I found another well-loved quotation from A Severe Mercy apropos:

“The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians--when they are sombre and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths. But, though it is just to condemn some Christians for these things, perhaps, after all, it is not just, though very easy, to condemn Christianity itself for them."

~ Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

On the days I would rather have a holiday from the school of Christ, I find that I am not exhibiting the first characteristics Vanauken says are indicative of Christians. But even when I want holidays from the Master's school, the truth of Christianity does not shift or change. I shift, I falter like a shadow, but He is the light that dispels even my darkest desires. Persons may [rightly] reproach Christians, but no slander sticks to the Truth of Christ.

~ Johanna