This week our group’s conversation danced between trauma, grief, lament, and processing the lecture from Dr. Newby. As squishy and evasive as a conversation around these themes can be, as much as trauma can resist the forming of words and categories, so too went our conversation this week. As much of a collage of seeming disparate movements and half-baked ideas, so too perhaps this blog will seem. Perhaps more personal than prudent, more gut than head, it is in the end what I have to give.
Dr. Newby’s freedom and comfort with his own body, his own inherent power and ease with his own beauty, struck me as it stood in juxtaposition to my own rigidity and self-consciousness. There is something that strikes me about how the culture of white, male, corporate America slowly eats away at our ability to let loose, to get over ourselves, to give ourselves over to the moment. Part of this is surely just my own issues, but I have observed that men who are older and have spent more time in their careers generally seem more locked up than their younger counterparts — and I’m not at all convinced that this is simply explained by generational differences.
It seems that there is something in the water of corporate America and certainly in the professions which I’m closest too, that slowly eats up people’s freedom. The stiffness, the inability to take personal risks, to let down the guard — these walls if not addressed only build with age — they don’t naturally crumble on their own…and they take more work to tear down, and will grow seemingly of their own accord with no effort at all.
I so want to be fully free — to dive into the waters of passion and grief and joy and celebration and mourning and give myself fully over to all of life. I want to risk being the fool, the holy fool who lets go of all that is not love. But the pathway to this place of freedom is a painful one. Each wall must be encountered in turn, and broken down brick by brick.
Three years ago I discovered I had cancer…and not just any cancer, but the same deadly cancer that killed my mother when she was just 51. Within a few months of this discovery, after an initial surgery and a premature all-clear signal, after a re-occurrence and a second much more massive surgery, I was looking at historical 5 year survival rates of less than 20% for people in my shoes. Even now, the historical odds are still against me, this far out of surgery, though I must be approaching the tipping point when I’ll finally be able to say that “more likely than not” this thing is behind me.
This has been my taste of trauma: that likely my four little kids would grow up without a father, and that my beloved would be left alone…so very alone… and faced with the task that seems impossible at times for even two parents.
We both know that if I die, I would have the easier end of the deal.
I’ve written in other places about my battle with cancer, but I’ve never publicly written much on the topic of grief, of anxiety attacks, or the deep beauty of these gifts. As Mary Oliver put it, “Someone I love once gave me a box full of darkness…it took me years to realize that this too was a gift.” I suspect this writing has been still too personal…
The path of suffering has helped me shed some of my rigidity. When the pain is large enough that it can’t be ignored, that it demands center stage and refuses anything less than full attention and even submission…when I was ready to not just work away at it in 50 minute bite sized pieces, but rather dive to the bottom of the well and risk not coming back up…then I was finally ready to begin…
My path led me to do work with wise women, well versed in grief through their marginalized status in our culture. I had to leave the steel and glass high rises of affluence and travel to an island on the other side, where the mud was my foundation and companion. I had to learn with others who also limped to that yurt in the woods, also licking their wounds, how to light the fire of the sweat lodge, to strip, to don the sack cloth and ashes, to submit, to dance, to drum, to sing, to wail, to groan, to roar, to heave, to writhe, to rise, to fall, and eventually to rise again…And when I rose, when we all rose, we were all visibly transformed. We had all gone over the rapids, and popped out the other side. My partners in grief, all but one being women, were literally shining, dancing, happy, joyful when just a few days earlier we were sick, heavy, clouded, and sunken.
This liturgy that played out over the course of several days, borrowed from Sobonfu Some and other non-Christian, non-white cultures, was the medicine needed for us all…and I see little hope that it or anything like it will ever be adopted on a wide scale in our churches, therapy offices, our “end of life celebrations” that puppet as funerals, or any other public place.
As a culture, we simply do not know how to grieve. We do not even know how to interact with those in grief.
In the capitalist, “win forever” culture I live in, one cannot be seen groveling in the mud and then be with the same folks in a board meeting Monday morning with your suit and tie ready to kick ass and take names…it just isn’t done. It can’t be done. The gap in between looms too large. And this absence of good grief work has other consequences, too many to name here. But no wonder men have underground fight clubs…when we suppress our grief, it will eventually (violently) emerge in other forms…even if these can’t be publicly acknowledged. The shadow is all the bigger when it isn’t acknowledged.
I have a friend who is a poet from/in Scotland. His wife recently died, and he has been in his terms, “wailing.” He is part of the same international community I’m involved with, and at one of their monthly gatherings around the fire, one of his brothers said to everyone, “Well brothers, Sandy is wailing, we ought to wail with him.” Last summer we met in Ballard for a cup of tea, and he told me about this moment in his lilting Scottish brogue.
What stood out to me, is how placed in a similar situation, most American men would want to comfort their friend or perhaps listen to him, but likely we would not join him in grieving something that wasn’t ours to grieve. Other cultures know that we’re all connected, and that one person’s suffering is meant to be grieved by the community, not consoled, listened to, “prayed for”, or referred to a professional to be dealt with.
Grief is a team sport, and meant to be played by amateurs.
Where does this leave me?
As I stood in class I was again aware of places I’m not yet free. I was conscious of my internal walls I’ve busted through before but which still require (thankfully increasingly less) effort to break through. Thankfully, due to my experience of grief and cancer, I’m more free than I was a few years ago, with fewer no-man’s-lands in my life than before. This can be the fruit of suffering, that as one door closes, five more open, that as we experience loss we end up finding life, that the way up starts with descent.
And where does this leave us?
One version of the gospel that seems to be getting in our way is the ideal that Jesus has done it all for us. That his death on the cross meant that we would be saved from having to face death or our wounds ourselves, that our lives are healed, our debt repaid, that we can clap for joy free forever from suffering…This might sell well in a capitalist country, but I see no evidence that supports it in the real world.
Isn’t the invitation of the Gospel rather for us to pick up our own cross and follow him? To hang up there with him, and he with us? Aren’t we to expect difficulties, not ease? And the promise was not that we would have to grieve little, but rather the blessed were those who truly and deeply mourned, with all their being, for they would be comforted.
In a church setting this doesn’t seem like it can be simply briefly touched on via a song of lament, which must then be resolved before the end of the service so people feel good on their way to Sunday brunch. Nor can it be relegated to the season of Lent — no more than joy should be relegated to Christmas. Mourning and dealing with trauma and suffering must be found in the Ordinary Time of the church calendar too. Not that these small touchstones are bad places to start, but they are not sufficient for the task.
If like Hans Urs von Balthasar, we are locating this era as being in the Holy Saturday of history, the challenge is that we must give more floor time to grieving the “not yet” rather than always celebrating the “already” and the “that which is to be.” I have trouble believing that on Holy Saturday, those close to Jesus were talking about “remembering the good times,” “looking at the bright side” and “celebrating a life well lived.” Nor would there have been drab non-answers such as, “I guess it was God’s will,” or “Everything happens for a reason.”
Thank God he wasn’t surrounded by Americans.
We can do better than that. We must. And there are those already doing this whose lead we can follow.
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