Category Archives: healing

Ten Years Later

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In the summer of 2002, I worked in New York City through Lutheran Disaster Response (then Lutheran Disaster Relief) leading day camps in congregations that had experienced serious loss on 9/11/01. Not just the loss of the understanding of the world as they knew it, but loss of life.

I worked with children who had parents who came home and parents who didn’t. I talked to spouses who waited and were reunited. And some who weren’t.

All week I tried to put some order into my feelings. I never tell these stories. They are too raw, too hard, too stark. Two weeks after the camps ended, I moved to Nome, Alaska. I didn’t process when I could have and trying to do so now is like trying to rework plaster that has set.

So as I turned over the hard shape of this experience this week, I wrote this in my journal:

Anyway, I want to write a blog post about my memories, but I am not sure what to say or how to talk about the end of my memories. That I had to shut some of them away so that I could move forward. There are memories that are paralyzing in their truth. We have to dim them, fade their edges, fondly tuck them away and allow a burnished fire to peek through the keyhole of our memory trunk. We cannot live with their undimmed fullness in our lives. It is too much. This is not to say that we would ever forget. We just are incapable of remembering so intensely that it hurts. Constantly.

In order to live, in order to do service to life and to the memory of the dead, we go on and we put on foot in front of the other. We are not disrespectful. We have not forgotten. As long as we breathe, we remember, but we also want to live.

In living, we allow those who have died, both too soon and in their time, to continue in us. Through DNA and stories, through impressions and legacies, through gifts and habits.

That is all I have to say. 

Amen. 

Book Review: The Long Goodbye

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This month’s book review is of The Long Goodbye: A Memoir by Megan O’Rourke. Amazon’s description of the book is here. Information on O’Rourke is here. Yes, this is another book by a person writing about a universal experience from their point-of-view. I find that while experiences are corporate, journeys are individual. In The Long Goodbye, in particular, we meet a young woman (early 30s) who wants to believe that her thinking isn’t magical, that the right combination of intellectual pursuits, physical stretching and emotional openness will bring her mother back to life. It doesn’t. Grab a Kleenex or two and a comforting beverage. O’Rourke’s grief landscape is austere and harsh, with emotion-whipped rocky outcroppings and deep caverns of despair.
I came to this book somewhat reluctantly. I read O’Rourke’s initial forays into discussing her grief on Slate magazine and, doing my own grieving at the time, I found them inaccessible and, seemingly, self-indulgent. I could not connect with her pain and found no anchor in her writing to process my own.
Some of that work was incorporated into the book, but I did not recognize it in the longer form. I also found the book to have a depth and breadth I didn’t remember from the articles. I suspect that, for me, this was a better time to read this work and, perhaps, for O’Rourke a bit of time made the difference as well.
O’Rourke is a poet and her writing is full of metaphor that is heart-wrenching and inspiring in its attempts to describe the realities of watching one’s mother die and living in a world without the vessel that brought you into being. She writes, “I also felt that if I told the story of her death, I could understand it better, make sense of it- perhaps even change it. What had happened still seemed implausible: A person was present your entire life, and then one day she disappeared and never came back. It resisted belief. Even when a death is foreseen, I was surprised to find, it still feels sudden- an instant that could have gone differently.” (p. 139)  
The first half of the book is O’Rourke’s memory of her mother’s diagnosis of colon cancer and her death. The second half is O’Rourke’s grief and attempt to gain a handle on her emotional reaction, which both challenges and baffles her. As she feels the role-reversal as a child caring for a parent’s intimate needs, O’Rourke notes that she needs a mother, her mother, to help her process the fact that her mother is dying. She wants the final weeks and days to be full of meaning and tinged with significance. Instead, she finds herself watching television with her mother, talking about Christmas decorations, feeling frustrated. “Time doesn’t obey our commands. You cannot make it holy just because it is disappearing.” (81)
O’Rourke comes from a family that has little connection to a religious community. Her mother has, in part, turned away from the Roman Catholicism of her youth and so O’Rourke describes in detail the family’s love of reading, their outdoor summers, their love of one another. These are the objects of her devotion, the things that define her faith. The depth of these experiences is vast, but their breadth cannot quite cover the shock of the loss of her mother. O’Rourke notes that her brothers and her father all grieve differently and differently still from her. They all have the same injury, she says, but each manifests different symptoms (104).
In the months after her mother’s death, O’Rourke finds herself skeptical about rituals and yet longing for markers to note her emotions, the truth of her experience and inexplicability of what has happened and what lies beyond. She writes of her envy of her Jewish friends who have the Kaddish, of the words and prayers that give one’s mourning some shape and recognition. She writes, “I longed for rituals not only to indicate I was still in mourning but also to have a nonpsychological way of commemorating and expressing my loss. Without ritual, the only way to share a loss was to talk about it… At times, though, this sharing felt invasive. I did not want to be pitied. In those moments, I wanted a way to show my grief rather than tell it.” (157)
There is truth in what she says about our culture’s inability to deal with death. In our fear of doing the wrong thing, we often do nothing. All but the most religious among us have no desire to think on the inevitability of death. All but those of the strongest faith cling to the life of which we know, still having a tiny amount of uncertainty about the life to come in which we believe. Furthermore, in this day and age, death is as prevalent as ever, but in our Western culture it remains distant for many people until it is actually personal. We can avoid wakes and funerals for a long time until death comes to our nearest and dearest.
I often hear people talk about the fact that they long for a way for people to understand that they are dealing with a death without them having to say so. Mourning clothes, wreathes, pins… all these things served as societal markers to remind us to be gentle with grieving persons. Now, in our rawness, we are expected to yield in traffic, to be pushed in the grocery store, to pay our bills on time, yet all the while wanting to scream, “But my BELOVED DIED. I cannot see them. They are not here. I don’t want to do this. NONE OF THIS MATTERS.”
One of the metaphors that captured O’Rourke’s imagination was from C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed (among the best, if not THE best, books about dealing with personal grief). Lewis writes that a loss, the death of a beloved, is a like an amputation. “If the blood doesn’t stop gushing soon after the operation, you will die. To survive means, by definition, that the blood has stopped. But the amputation is still there.” (279)
One of the things that I frequently encounter is people who are surprised at how long the intensity of grief goes on. If we use the image of amputation, it becomes somewhat easier to comprehend that a grieving person is learning a new way to live. You may remain in the same neighborhood, but your address has changed. You may now reside in the “House of Deceased Spouse” or “My Mother is Dead” or “My Child No Longer Lives”. The new residence resembles your old one, but the layout is different enough to trip you up a little bit for much longer than you expect. The familiar look seems sinister because you can’t comprehend how anything could remain the same or, worse, move forward when you desperately long for markers of the change and for a pause in the world.
I have not even begun to convey the beauty of much of the writing in this book. O’Rourke’s book is worth reading if you’re interested in reading another perspective on dealing with grief. It is beautifully written. It is not the kind of book that you give someone (most people) immediately following a death. They need space and the rawness of this book may not be helpful in the immediate aftermath following a death. I think O’Rourke also stirs up good discussion points for people of faith. What are our mourning markers beyond the funeral or memorial service? How do we help our friends and neighbors at anniversaries and in bleak nights? What kind of words can we use to discuss grief and our fears? What light of truth can we bring to the world about tenderness to the grieving? What can we offer to those who are tangentially connected to faith communities?
Fine print: I purchased a copy of this book for review. All thoughts are my own. I have not been compensated in any way for anything said in this review. All quotations come from:
O’Rourke, Meghan. The Long Goodbye: A Memoir. Riverhead Books, New York, NY. 2011.

Originally posted on 5/23/11 at RevGalBlogPals.

God and Bodies (Sermon, Lent 1A)

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Song of Songs 5:1-6a; Matthew 4:1-11
            The book most of us grew up calling Song of Solomon is now more frequently being referred to as Song of Songs. When we called it Song of Solomon, we did so because we thought it was written by Solomon or at least attributed to him. However, as the book has begun to be more deeply read and examined, we’ve come to realize that at least 60% of the book is written from a woman’s point of view.
            In fact, though the action of the book can be a little difficult to follow at times, the female narrator has a distinct voice as she makes her case for being allowed to be with the man she loves. We may long have attributed the book to Solomon because it’s kind of a racy book and, according to biblical sources, Solomon knew his way around a, ahem, bedchamber. (See 1 Kings 11:3)
            That worried feeling that you having right now, the one that I might start talking about sex, that feeling has accompanied biblical interpreters for years when they come to Song of Songs. A book that so frankly approaches human desire and physical longing makes everyone a little nervous. And, when the clergy was mostly male and celibate, a book that makes feminine sexuality couldn’t be interpreted as anything but allegory.
            So, for much of history, allegorical interpretation was the way Song of Songs was read. It was considered a demonstration of God’s love for Israel, Christ’s love for the church or even the Spirit’s love for the individual soul. But look at what we read today. Does anything in that passage make you think of God’s love?
            Stay with me here for a moment. I don’t think Song of Songs was initially included in the Hebrew Scriptures because it’s allegorical. In some deep way, this book expresses a truth about how human relationships reveal divine love. In some way, this book’s uncomfortable stanzas about the desire of the body for fulfillment help us to be in touch with our struggle in what it means to be human.
            Songs of Songs is part of the Wisdom literature, like Psalms, Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. We don’t interpret Psalms allegorically. We read the psalms of joy, the psalms of lament, the psalms of anger and fear and the emotions resonate with us. We learn from the Psalms that there is no human cry that God has not already heard and, therefore, we should not be afraid of our prayers. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are interpreted as wise sayings or philosophy. We don’t make them allegory. And we read Job, again and again, to understand how we can keep going in the face of tragedy and for the assurance of God’s presence and awareness of our pain.
            If allegorical interpretation is not generally a part of Wisdom literature, why would we apply it to Song of Songs? Is it possible that this book, this poem of poems, was brought into the Scripture because it celebrated the mysteries of human love, an experience we believe God created us to enjoy?
             Song of Songs is very similar to other ancient Middle-Eastern love poems that were used as funeral or wedding songs, affirming the power of love in life and over death. Is it possible that this book, this poem of poems, was brought into the Scripture because it celebrated the mysteries of human love, an experience we believe God created us to enjoy?
            That’s the hard part. Most of us have absorbed and internalized negative ideas about bodies, about sex, and about our physical selves that we are unable to separate those feelings from what we think about God. That’s the first temptation of the devil with regard to our physical selves. If we can be made to believe that God is only interested in our souls, we will either ignore our bodies to their detriment or we will think what we do with them doesn’t matter.
            If God didn’t want us to have bodies, God wouldn’t have given them to us. If our physical selves didn’t matter, then God would not have sent the Son, in the flesh, so that we might know more fully God’s love. In addition, Jesus’ temptation in the desert wouldn’t matter because we would have nothing to gain from knowing God’s body was hungry, tired or bruised. Furthermore, if God had no interest in our bodies, then we would be able to God’s work with our minds. How’s that working out for any of you?
            The second temptation of the devil with regard to our bodies is that if God so loves our bodies, then sex corrupts them. True enough, through lust, shame or misuse, sex can cause us to sin and to feel separated from God and from other people. However, that’s not the only thing that can happen. The church draws boundaries around sex not because of its corrupting power, but because of its creative power. I don’t just mean creative power in the sense that you can procreate through sex. I mean that sex makes co-creators with God. A healthy sexual relationship between two committed adults nurtures respect, hope, confidence and future fulfillment. In that love-making, we get a glimpse of God’s hope for us, God’s desire for the fulfillment of creation, God’s deepest desires for our redemption. That’s powerful and God desires that for us as much, or more, than we desire it for ourselves, not some cheap imitation of it.
            The third temptation of the devil is that if our bodies matter, then our bodies define us. Each of us, right now, could probably fill a sheet of paper with what we would like to fix about our physical selves. Some of us might have a slightly longer list, some of us shorter ones. Some of the repairs might be cosmetic while others are for deeper physical struggles. Some people really struggle with their physical image and the way they feel about their bodies gets in the way of their ability to believe in God’s grace. If you have changes to make, make them and if things can’t be changed, let them go. The woman speaker in Song of Songs had very dark skin, a flat chest and hair that looked like a flock of goats running down a mountain. She thought she was beautiful, as did her lover, and we’re still talking about her as a paragon of beauty. God defines us through Christ and Christ’s body alone.
            Song of Songs deserves our attention as the deep, erotic hymn to human love that it is. This hymn of hymns keeps us from ghettoizing our sexual selves, keeps our bodies at the forefront among our gifts from God, reminds us of women’s voices in Scripture and in the world and serves as resistor to temptations from the forces that oppose God. That’s pretty good for a book with only 117 verses.
            At its finest, the Scriptures remind us of what it is to be human, both the highs and lows, and where God meets us in our humanness. “I opened to my beloved, but my beloved had turned and was gone.” That verse alone reminds us why Song of Songs isn’t allegorical. Human love, even its best form, bring disappointment. God’s love for us does not fade, not for our spirits, not for our bodies, not for eternity.
Amen.