The Longest Lent

Lent began six months ago today.

Six months ago I was in a cool, dark sanctuary, listening to my vicar say "You are going to die." I didn't know how accurate that statement would be for this year. We rose, row by row. Ashes were traced across my forehead, I returned to my seat. We rose, row by row, again going forward—this time to receive the bread, the wine. In darkness we stepped into February chill. Ash Wednesday was the only evening Lenten service I got to attend in person this year. Not a single evening of Holy week was spent in that dark church sanctuary with fellow believers. We weren't present together in the darkness of Easter morning that bursts into light and noise and exuberant alleluias.

Oh, yes, I "attended" Holy Week services and Easter morning on-line. But that isn't the same—not even close. I haven't worshipped, truly worshipped, physically together with other believers for six months. It feels like the longest Lent in the history of the church calendar. It feels like Easter was an anticlimax or like it didn't even happen... Like it was swallowed up in the darkness, buried in the ashes of burned hopes, dreams, plans, businesses, cities, and people.

This weekend we will gather to remember our friend Mike Adams, who took his life in this season of darkness. He is a standout to me, because he is someone I know. . . But he is one among many. The number of suicides this year are, in some demographics, outpacing the number of virus deaths. Don't tell me this virus is killing people—I know it is—but the power plays surrounding the virus are killing more people in other ways, whether physically through suicide or because of division that makes one citizen stab another for not wearing a mask; or internally, spiritually, emotionally isolating us from one another. . . Keeping us apart at home, six feet away, cancelling events, or putting masks between our faces, stifling our expressions of vulnerability, kindness, concern, and even anger or fear. If no one can see our expressions of pain, how can they reach out to us? And are they afraid to hug us? If I can't see the look of loss on someone's face, how will I know "You too? I thought I alone knew that grief. . ." and be able to wrap them in love?

How do we invite others into our pain, into our sorrow, into our deep joys, into a place of hope, if we cannot be close, see the human expressions of these things across each other's faces? To be isolated while six feet away from someone—to be denied physical affection and warm greetings—is worse than being alone at home. It is the extreme loneliness of being alone in a crowded room. It is like the searing pain of being close to your lover, but being just unable to reach them, to touch them.

This season feels like birth pangs gone wrong, come too late. It feels like something is terribly wrong with the baby, it isn't moving. . . The thing we've been looking toward, the hope at the end of the morning sickness, the joy at the end of labour, the person to join our family has been snatched away, and we are left to bury our dead in isolated grief—with no hugs and no real place for grief or anger to go.

It feels like the longest Lent. But in the normal Lenten season we are together in our lament. We gather together to acknowledge that something isn't right. We encourage one another to take heart that the King is coming. We hope for one another, when someone can't hope for themselves. But this is isolation—not the solitude or quiet reflection of Lent—and it is the work of the enemy of our souls. Dividing, separating in every possible way.

Where is the hope? Where is the empty tomb of this season that has killed us in more than body? Where is the Easter morning coming out of this mourning? Where is the light in this darkness? Where is the King?

Maybe this horrible, longest Lent is in some way our taste of what the disciples felt when Jesus died. See, we know the end of that story, but they didn't. We know on Good Friday that Easter is coming. They didn't. And maybe this interminable Lent is our true unknown Good Friday and Holy Saturday. It is our season where we can't see what is happening in the spiritual realm. We can't see the Easter about to come.

Maybe we will die before we understand what it was all about, but we must know that Jesus will never be held down by death. Jesus will never be defeated by the enemy of our souls. Death and satan will one day be undone. The Kingdom will come in its fullness. And that won't be an anticlimactic Easter in the time of covid. It will be the greatest celebration of life and love and sacred community. . . It will be seeing face-to-face and still living.

Easter is coming. . .

Kindness Makes Me Cry

What a month it has been. . . In the last 30 days I have flown on 2 airplanes, been in 1 wedding, attended a second wedding, eaten Chipotle during 2 wedding weekends, danced for at least 2 hours, hand-written 25+ pages (double-sided), talked on the phone for 33 hours, worked more hours that I want to count, welcomed 1 new baby into our community, and lost 1 friend to death.

Two weeks ago I experienced one of the hardest weeks of the year. In the span of seven days I was asked to resign as an editor over a difference of opinions, had to kill a suffering mouse with a rock, offered a listening ear to an upset friend, found out a different friend ended their life, and had to have a hard personal conversation with yet another friend. I called it the week from Hell, because so much of that week was shot through with death in one form or another, and that is the work of Hell.

But this past week was balm to my soul. I didn't work overtime. My sweet neighbour came over for dinner and a walk. My Scripture circle met under a double rainbow, sharing some things I've been chewing on this week—or more accurately, things that have been chewing on me. I wrote my heart out. I got to spend three precious hours with one of my best friends. A couple of friends and my family were so kind to pray for me and check in on me often. My sister sent me a box of sunshine. The friend who needed a listener sent me cheese, chocolate, and flowers in the form of a totally unexpected gift-card. The CEO of our company wrote me a kind note and gave me a gift-card for my ten year anniversary at work. And today, my boss got married. 

Just like the Hell-week had redemptive moments and hours, this balm-week had its dark moments and its bitter tears. But there were so many good conversations in both weeks. So many walks and cups of tea and scudding clouds across the moon. There were invitations into sorrow and invitations into deep joy. There were things that scared me, but I did them. There were things that wounded me and others, but we are walking with one another into healing.

This evening, in the midst of deep joy and fun on the dance floor, without warning, familiar notes washed over the room. I've never seen so many people scatter for exits so quickly when there was no emergency. . . The DJ couldn't have known that playing "Don't Stop Believin" would be incredibly painful for nearly a dozen people. He couldn't have known that a few days ago we found out our friend, Mike, was dead. "Don't Stop Believin" was Mike's theme song. If I heard it blasted from the classroom once a summer, I heard it half a dozen times a summer. I like that song, but tonight it made me sad. Yet, in a way, it was like Mike was there in spirit. Like maybe he was dancing, too. 

This week so many beautiful, good, kind, and joy-filled things happened. It doesn't fill the maw of Hell-week. No. In some ways, it stuffs goodness down the throat of the aching blackness and still overflows everywhere. And in some ways, that gaping emptiness of Hell-week carves a pit in the many of us it touched. The wound of death does not heal here, not fully. I will always bleed a little of my heart out for the friend I lost nearly two years ago. Our world will always bleed a little for the loss of Mike. Goodness doesn't fix the not good. 

Sorrow and grief over many things still clench my heart and make me cry. But the kindness of family and friends also makes me cry. The deep gift of love, the deep joy of watching my friends get married makes me cry. I cried hearing my friends exchange their wedding vows and hearing their people toast them. And I cried tears of loss watching the father-daughter dance, because I want to get that experience and I don't know that I ever will. And simultaneously, I cried tears of anger and hurt that a person who might have given me that chance declined to even try. And I cried the achingly sweet tears that come when you hear grown men say "My life is what it is partly because of you, and I love you" to another man in front of a whole crowd of people. 

Hell-week wasn't all bad. And balm-week wasn't all good. Even something so beautiful and deeply good as a wedding brought all kinds of mixed emotions—joy, pain, sweetness, grief, and hope... Hope of these friends birthing light in the darkness our world is falling into. And lest it all sounds like this hope or joy or kindness springs from my friends, it doesn't. Its source is God the Father, showering His deep affection on us (often through other people) where we are—whether that is a place of pain or gladness, or a mix of sorrow, joy, sadness, loss, hurt, and hope all co-mingled. And let's be honest, we're often an amalgamation of emotions, not feeling one at once, but many (even conflicting) emotions at once. That is the agony and the beauty of being human.

Grief makes me weep. Sorrow makes my heart bleed. But alongside these, kindness makes me cry.

Here's to the Firelight

“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air

Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,

And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet

Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit

Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed

In a tumultuous privacy of Storm.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Snow Storm

_______

We watched the first red blaze appear, 

Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam 

On whitewashed wall and sagging beam, 

Until the old, rude-furnished room 

Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom; 

While radiant with a mimic flame 

Outside the sparkling drift became, 

And through the bare-boughed lilac-tree 

Our own warm hearth seemed blazing free. 

— John Greenleaf Whittier, Snow-Bound

It is snowing down in big flakes from the street lamp circles tonight. There is the hush that comes with it. Kept within my cabin by the drifting snow, there is no radiant fireplace—no flickering flames to 'drive away dark spirits'. The dark spirits of loneliness crowd into  my little house and it feels like all friends are shut out, indeed. There is still a cosy "privacy of Storm" feeling, but whenever I think of Whittier, there is a bittersweet ache. You see, Whittier reminds me of you, my friend.

My copy of Snow-Bound is in a slim green book. A book that used to be yours. A book with your mother's handwriting in the front, inscribed with the year I last saw you. How can six years go so quickly and feel so eternal? So much has changed in those years—especially in my family. Too much has stayed the same—especially in my bad habits. Six years ago last week, I flew to Alaska to see you. I was worried for you. When I finally found you, waiting in your truck, my worry increased. The lack of sleep from many flights wasn't helping, but even so, my panic mode rightly kicked on. Something was desperately wrong with the friend I once knew. He was gone. . . Gone away, leaving someone else in his stead, someone I didn't know.

What I didn't expect was that I wouldn't see you again after our initial time together. You dropped me off with your friends and left me. Though they graciously looked after me that day and the next, dropping me off at the airport in good time, it wasn't strangers I had come to visit. Yet it was only strangers whom I found. You were a stranger to me—not letting me hug you, not making eye-contact with me, not making sense, not feeling safe. You simply left me.

What I didn't expect was to have you cut me off after that visit. You made sure I got home okay, but from that time on you didn't call and you didn't respond to my letters. It would be years before I found out that you never even opened my letters after that point. All because I wasn't someone else. Being myself—your friend—wasn't enough. I wasn't enough. I sat at the airport that February, tears running down my face, feeling horribly abandoned. . .because you had left me.

No one seemed to understand what a devastating loss it was to me, your friendship. So I swallowed my grief deep inside of me. What I didn't expect was to feel abandoned for all those years. You would cross my mind with great frequency, and I felt a wall. . .a barrier that I couldn't cross. And you wouldn't cross it. Or maybe you couldn't cross it either. I reached out my hand again and again—hoping—but yours never met it. You left me to reach out into the unfriendly darkness, alone.

What I didn't expect was how much I trusted your last promise to me. As long as she was safe and alive, I need not fear for your life. But I guess it got to be too much, living. And maybe you forgot that promise. All I know is, one September day, you left me—irrevocably. I didn't expect that the previous five plus years of ache would come spilling out in wave after wave after wave.

In one sense, you died years ago, but I didn't know how to grieve that living death. So, I tucked it away inside of me, because no one else cared, no one understood that aching, living loss. But in your physical death, people cared, they tried to help, they listened, they hugged me. . . At last they understood that I was experiencing a deep, deep loss. Wave after wave after wave of grief left me gasping.

What I didn't expect was to find this gem in abandonment: Abandonment (n.): from 1839 as "condition of being forsaken." In music, Italian abbandonatamente is the instruction to play so as to make the time subordinate to the feeling.

Not the feelings subordinate to the restrictions of time. . . No, time must surrender, be sub-ordinate to the feeling.

The first six weeks of grief were like a hurricane, one pounding wave after another, huge and crushing. Then I finally had a lovely day hiking with a friend, a day where I didn't cry—and I felt so disloyal to you. I visited your family a few weeks later—the time together was both healing and intensely painful. Remembering heals, but it leaves a bigger hole, a deeper ache. I felt like you had died all over again.

Then I'm not sure what happened. . . Maybe it was self-protection, but in December I was mostly numb. I wanted so badly to remember your visit ten years before, but it was like it had been erased from my mind—and not only mine, but everyone else's. There were no photos of our time together, few memories. . . I just wanted people to talk about you with me, but it was like you were gone, like you walked out of our memories. And again, it felt like no one understood why it mattered so much that we were friends, why it hurt like Hell that you were gone. It was still so raw that all I wanted to do was cover up my hurt, yet I wanted to share it, too. . .

What I didn't expect was the waves of loneliness. In my home. At my parents' house. At work. With dear friends who didn't understand. With friends who expected (even more so now) me to 'get better' or 'get over' my grief. I didn't expect this clawing, craving loneliness that nothing can fill. I didn't expect the emptiness, the feeling invisible, the feeling abandoned to drive me to distraction. But it has.

If numbness felt horrible—like fuzz between me and everyone and everything—distraction feels. . .not horrible. It even feels normal. Not exactly like nothing happened, but certainly like I'm pretending on the surface that nothing happened. I am silly at work, I laugh with friends, I flirt with the mailman, I try to reach out to others, I fill too many hours with noise—audible and visual. But in the distraction and in the intense loneliness I have been reckless, terrifying myself. Behind it all, I miss the grief (though it still washes up at odd hours). The steady waves of grief have been my connection. My companion. The distraction hasn't been all bad—it has pointed me outward; it has made me face some things internally; it helps other people feel more normal around me (I think)—I have too often felt like a "death's head" as Lewis described it in A Grief Observed. I don't want people to feel like they need to avoid me or to feel awkward around me because I am grieving. So, I've hidden my grief over your loss yet again. But I feel out of step from God, from others, and from you, because I stepped out of the flow of grief. 

For months I tried to maintain the feelings, tried to grieve well, to the point that I was exhausted. So, I took a break. . .but the break has ceased being restorative (like a sabbath day) and has morphed into laziness (like a month of Sundays). I keep wanting to go back to the grief, but I've changed and the grief has changed, and I can't go back. I can only go forward. . .but I don't know how. I feel lost about how to grieve now, about where I should be at this point. I can't compare my grief to others'—I just want to know for myself where I need to be. I don't know, though. I simply know that I feel lonely like I never have before. I feel abandoned. And that feeling does not yield to time. Six years later, I still grieve that you left me.

Six months later, I grieve that you abandoned life. I don't want to ignore the emotions or push them aside until I can 'deal with' them. I need to know these feelings—not to be ruled by them, but to know them—and I need time to be subordinate to my emotions. It can take as long as it needs to take to grieve. And the grief is allowed to change. There must not of necessity be colossal breakers all the time to prove that I care about you. I don't have to cry every day to prove my friendship and affection. There will always be a hole in my life without you. And there will always be so much of me that has been shaped by you that you cannot be wholly gone. You may have left me, but you also changed me. You shaped me in so many ways.

Distractions can be okay for short stints. By the kindness of God, this season of distraction has had its healing moments, in spite of its recklessness. Still, I want the upcoming season of Lent to be one where I learn to hold grief and gladness together. Not one or the other, but together. I want time to be in subjugation to the feelings. If I need to feel sad, even in front of other people, then I will. I don't have to be 'over' my grief by now. I will never be 'over' the grief that you are gone. There will always be the absence of you in my life. Even if your presence was quiet, and sometimes unnoticed, it was monumental to me. I miss you so very much, Aaron. I pray that the flame of your fire is radiantly mimicked upon the sparkling snow of my life.