A response

My friend Tess, who I called the best writer I know in an earlier posts, wrote me an email after my last blog. I've wanted her to do a little guest writing on my blog anyway, so I thought this was a good start....

"I just read your thing about grief and I feel heavy and weighted with your pain. At the same time there was the same old hopefulness about it that reminded me of you before you were a mother. Before you were a grieving mother. I remember you saying recently that you now understand, deeply and thoroughly understand, what it looks like to need God desperately. That we have this in common now. Your ration of grief is unbearable alone and would be worthless and purposeless without the intention of a god that also rations joy in abundance.

Don’t you think we were born with grieving hearts because we were born human and so far away from god? We came out behind the eight ball. From birth we were already bearing an unending cross of deficit and grief. It’s like you said, if you were comfortable in this pain then it would be home. But this is uncomfortable because this acute pain was not the intended norm. I think about “hell” (excuse the quotation marks, it just seems odd to write that word so officially and blatantly, like it’s the town 20 minutes away) and that it would be feeling pain intensely and in solitude and that would be so normal that we would be disturbed by peace. So, naturally that would make “heaven” (the next town over, about 45 minutes away) feeling no pain and even the thought of pain would be upsetting.

We know darkness. I hate this for you and I hate it for me and I hate it for how it puts a rash of sadness on our souls. I can look at some people and see their sadness, you know? You can’t really see people this way until you have drowned in it yourself. You look at someone and think, damn, they are just white-knuckling the day and praying for bed and begging for mercy. I become infuriated with god that he seems negligent and absent-minded for not tending to these people immediately. Why let them suffer? Do you need them to cry to know they are weeping? I can see it, why can’t you God!?

I think about my own life and how hopelessness floats in on a breeze and then dissipates. How my mind is tangled and wired wrong and I know this and have no control over it. How I have known for years that there was god but could not reach out to him. How my sin overwhelms me and makes me hopeless…even when I am not actively involved in it.

Yesterday I was talking to Laura and she asked me if I have ever “felt okay in my own skin.” I don’t think I have, if I have it was fleeting and forgettable. As discouraging as this sounds, it also makes sense to me. Why would I feel “okay” at any point…I was not created to just settle here. To be okay with crushing loss. To be satisfied with milk and bread. To be drawn to retirement as if it were the “big goal.” None of this makes me feel okay, yet this is how I live. I live like I can arbitrarily brush off the sorrows and chalk them up to “shit happens.” I live like I am self-sufficient and all knowing and all doing and all okay. I live like my main objective is to be comfortable when I’m 60. As if when I get there I will all the sudden be okay in my own skin. Which would be odd, because by the time I’m 60 I will be wrinkled and probably have lung cancer and probably have 30 cats. The thought of it makes me want to plan a Thelma & Louise cliff drive at 59 years old in order to avoid the whole ordeal. The point is, although we will see grief come to fruition over and over, we will not get to see joy do the same thing, at least not while we’re here. It doesn’t necessarily comfort me to think “there is joy in heaven,” because I am a shortsighted human that can only project in terms of years rather than in terms of eternity. The only thing that softens the blow is that I am not expected to watch the sorrows cascade around me by myself. And as far as we can define it here, this is joy."