“I wonder if it’s all true.” – Nicholas Wolterstorff
“Tragedy will come,” the speaker said, standing behind a lectern in the college chapel where I sat with my classmates. Within a few years, death came for the first of us, and a type of tragedy none of us expected so early in life came for us all.
“I now know about helplessness––of what to do when there is nothing to do,” writes Nicholas Wolterstorff in Lament for a Son, the book he wrote after the sudden death of his 25-year-old son.
Wolterstorff’s book—along with A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis and A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken—is one of three books I read during my senior year at Calvin College. All three writers, renowned philosophers, theologians, and academics, found themselves completely adrift, unmoored by a level of pain that language fails to reach, grappling with the kind of grief for which no one can prepare.
I don’t know why I was drawn to these three books that year. I certainly had never experienced anything like what the authors described. Maybe I read them for the same reason I watch sad movies or listen to melancholy music—to try to coax a bit of feeling from my soul, which often seems unable to fully experience human emotion.
When one of my dearest friends succumbed to cancer just a few years after graduation, I was left searching for balance on a suddenly cracked and shifting foundation, unsure that I would ever find my footing. In my grief, I didn’t turn to a Sunday school lesson and I furiously rejected anyone who tried to tell me this was God’s plan. Instead, I returned to these three books.
Wolterstorff, Lewis, and Vanauken prepared me for true loss in a way that a childhood in the church had not. In the wasteland, when my faith threatened to shatter, the only thing I still knew was that God could handle my desperation.
In the months and years since my friend died there have been moments when I’ve wanted to walk away from belief. It’d be simpler: no thorny questions to answer about pain and suffering in a “good” creation. But the truth is I’d be lying to myself.
Vanauken struggles with the same desire in A Severe Mercy, the book he wrote about his wife Jean “Davy” Davis, and her death at age 43. In it, Vanuaken comes to the same conclusion, “And then I found I could not reject God. I could not. I cannot explain this. One discovers one cannot move a boulder by trying with all one’s strength to do it. I discovered—without any sudden influx of love or faith—that I could not reject Christianity.”
I realized that leaving my faith behind would only superficially sever a belief that would still linger beneath the surface, no matter how much I wanted or tried to forget it. And that belief demanded a reckoning.
A Grief Observed is the journal Lewis kept after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. Lewis, Sheldon, and Davy were actually friends, and he and Sheldon exchanged letters after Davy’s death. In a tragic coincidence, Joy Davidman died just a few years after Davy. She was 45 years old.
“Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly,” Lewis writes. “Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”
The amiable teller of children’s stories and approachable author of theology is barely recognizable in the pages of A Grief Observed. This Lewis is broken. His mind struggles to remain above a surging tide of doubt, his words are laced with anger:
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms [of grief]. When you are happy, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be––or so it feels––welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting on the inside.
Ultimately, Lewis is struggling to come to terms with a god who is barely recognizable to him, and his fear is that God may not be who he thought he was. He continues, “The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him…So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”
When my friend died, I realized my infantile conception of God was as a kind of divine Santa Claus. A magical being who existed to give me nice things. Instead, God answered my most desperate prayers for my friend with a terrible silence.
Years later I described my relationship with God as an uneasy truce. A wary, and often weary, acceptance that God simply is and that my life, and the lives of those I deeply care about, are, at best, of secondary importance.
Despite all of this, I have hope. Not hope that my loved ones and I will be protected in this temporal life. God offers humanity many promises, but personal security is not one of them. This is something it shouldn’t have taken me so long to learn. Much of the world, and most of the world’s Christians, live a significantly less secure and comfortable life than I do. Instead, my hope is in knowing that creation is not as it is supposed to be.
There is perhaps no belief in the Western church that I bodily rebel against more fiercely than the idea that death is part of God’s plan. Wolterstorff responds to this as well: “Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic.”
Death is not, and has never been, part of God’s will for this universe. The appropriate response to death is not platitudes, or Hallmark condolences. The appropriate response to death is primal revulsion; rending of garments, sackcloth and ashes. Even to God, death is a disaster––it undoes what was very good.
Yet, the prevailing mood in the Western church when it comes to grief is an odd blend of stoicism and blind acceptance that masquerades as faith. To doubt, to drift, and to struggle are all seen as signs of unacceptance. Which raises the question, what kind of god do we believe in? Do we believe in a god who can’t handle honesty? That can’t handle anger, or fear? Or do we believe in the same god as the Psalmist, who cried out, “My soul is in deep anguish. How long O Lord? How long?”
The deep anguish is your soul rebelling against something utterly unnatural.
Even people who accept that grief is natural often treat it as a temporary affliction, as part of a pathway that guides us “back to normal.” But, one does not often heal from the level of loss that these writers experienced. The wound may dull, but it remains open, ready to flare at the slightest provocation. The absence is ever present, individually and in the web of relationships that once radiated from the person who is now gone. “We don’t just each have a gap inside us, but together a gap among us,” Wolterstorff writes. Grief changes us on a private level, and in the way we relate to those with whom we share it.
And for the grieving, the specter of the one they’ve lost is never far away. “Suddenly here he is again,” Wolterstorff continues. “The chain of suggestion can begin almost anywhere: a phrase heard in a lecture, an unpainted board on a house, a lamp-pole, a stone. From such innocuous things my imagination winds its sure way to my wound. Everything is charged with the potential of a reminder. There’s no forgetting.”
Grief’s non-linear nature took the longest for me to understand. It’s been nearly 20 years and I can still be undone by a song, or a picture of a pier on the Lake Michigan shore. I’m no longer waiting for the absence inside me to fill, but instead realize it will always be there. It’s a simple revelation. After all, how could that absence disappear? It’s something to endure.
I tend to roll my eyes at hyperbole, and it is tempting for me to dismiss the notion that these three books saved me in a spiritual sense. However, in moments of honesty, I know it’s true with a certainty that I very rarely feel about anything. There was simply nothing in my youthful conception of Christianity that could have held me inside the church.
Wolterstorff brings Lament for a Son to a close with a portion of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Shock of this magnitude creates a duality of existence, like being alive in two places at once. I still live in that moment years ago when I learned my friend had died. And yet, minutes and hours inexorably pass. Days roll off the calendar. A year, five years––twenty. Each existence is real, yet each is only a portion of the whole. I am fractured, split between before and after. Still, and still moving.