Bittersweet

I finished reading a book called ‘Bittersweet’ by Shauna Niequist last week while I was waiting during visitation to sit with a friend in jail.  Four months ago another friend, a student here at ETBU, had given me the book in hope to help me walk through our miscarriages with the aim of healing.  I wanted to honor the author and the broader story in all our lives by including some portions of her thoughts which have been good companions to me during these times.

“Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful… a sliver of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich when it contains a splinter of sadness.  Bittersweet is the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul.  Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through…. Bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity… [it is] courageous, gutsy, earthy.” (p.11)

“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about.  What’s hard… is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.” (p.54)

“Grace…. it’s forgiveness without forgetting, which is much sweeter than amnesia.” (p.83)

“Sometimes pain makes us selfish, myopic, and utterly unable to understand people whose pain is different than ours.  It shouldn’t be that way.  It should be that all pain softens us to all pain.” (p.123)

“God’s will, should we choose to engage in it, will generally feel like surgery, rooting out all the darkness and fear we’ve come to live with.” (p.231)

“The question is not, will my life be easy or will my heart break?  But rather, when my heart breaks, will I choose to grow?” (p.233)

“If you’ve been sitting quietly, year after year, hoping that someone will finally start speaking a language that makes sense to you, may I suggest that you are that person?  If you’ve been longing to hear a new language for faith, one that rises and falls like a song, may I suggest that you start singing?  If you want your community to be marked by radical honesty, by risky, terrifying, ultimately redemptive truth-telling, you must start telling your truth first.” (p.240)

Five Seats of Emotion

             mind
             throat
                heart
                 gut
            womb

5 times over my sadness is felt
I cannot turn from it
It follows my every move
I haven't the energy to run
Either way it'd be useless
Its shadow is deep, quiet and miserable
And life hobbles on regardless

Truth

Truth is always now, never about the future

It is not a tell-some or even tell-all decision

It is a moment by moment choice

It doesn't rationalize or weigh options

It simply exists unaltered, unadulterated

Truth is home to freedom

The Moth

I didn’t know what it was at first, almost like a rattle. I drifted back to sleep, that prayerful kind of sleep that you have on lazy mornings where no alarm is set but the sun through the curtainless blinds. Then the sound again, slightly more alert I realize it’s fluttering. Back to sleep. Now it’s near my face and my eyes crack open to see a moth darting across the room clearly out of place. I watch it for a while thinking about how I feel like that sometimes, like I belong in another world as I struggle against my confinements. My mind wrestles that topic. Again sounds of rattling, and I turn from those thoughts and watch as the moth thrashes about the venetian blinds throwing itself over again into the obstacle standing between itself and what it’s drawn to. Getting nowhere, it stops and (for all I know about moths) ‘sees’ that if it heads to the edge of the blinds it can get closer to its apparent goal. Once the moth is at last behind the blinds up against the glass it returns to its flight frenzy… cacophonous little fellow.

I think to a friend of mine, drawn to entrapments bathed in light. I’m not so unlike him. Seeking whatever it is we seek only to be scorched by the heat that saps our energy and causes us to forget the exit from which we entered. Or maybe it’s pride. Or both. Either way, same effect, the moth slowed down. I laid in bed knowing the moth would probably die in that window. If my husband was here I could say, ‘honey go get that moth’ and he’d take hold of it in his hand and might take it outside. I could be willing to get out of bed and open the blinds, offering a limited kind of freedom. But instead I decided to read a book and let time have its way with the moth. An hour later I hear a tingy flutter, not fast and furious like this morning, but slowed and clumsy. The moth emerges between slits in the venetian blinds and falls to the window ledge and then to the floor. The ‘experiment’ is done. No intervention necessary. The moth got out on its own. Of course, an hour later the moth was dead.

And this is the crux of my questions. Not what can we do as really the possibilities are endless. But what should we do if we’re not ourselves stuck against the deadly temptations of a hot window pane and blinds that somehow seemed like the most desirable thing at the time? What do I do for my friends, the people God’s grafted into my life, when they stop caring about me or themselves and pursue what ultimately will become their destruction? How many times do I forgive?, because to me right now, seven sounds like a lot of grace. And what does forgiveness mean; does it require repetitive action, even rescue? What about the unforgettable answer Jesus painted with His blood? I’m no savior, not even if I wanted to be, so how far does this action on His part translate into my life with others? What does it mean to love even with the near certainty that the loved one rescued will continue to abandon safety and pursue the flame? That’s what really kept me in bed this morning, not apathy. Personal pain and encompassing sorrow are my heartaches as I watched the morning moth struggle and die. I don’t want this for anyone, especially not those I care about, but I don’t know what to do.

Grief Sanctuary

A quiet Hebrew cemetery a 3-minute walk from my front door has offered me solace and comfort. A sense of solidarity is found when I can mourn where many have stood or fallen and wept over loved ones on this same sanctuary ground throughout the century past.

Words etched in stone there possess meaning for me.

‘In the midst of life we are in death’

‘O, what is life since death so soon o’ertake; Our best beloved and sweet communion breaks?’

‘How desolate our home bereft of thee’


But with the grief, hope is no second runner. My favorite is here.

‘Say not good-night,
but in some brighter clime bid me good morning’

This is how, God willing, I want to greet ones we’ve lost.

This cemetery testifies beyond the grave words I long for…
How I desire this yes, for myself,
but even more so for my descendants.

‘In life, a prince of charity, the orphan’s rock and pious guide;
in death, in all eternity, a son of God and man’s true prize.’

I’ve struggled with these losses. But I am thankful for them.
The depth of my person is paradoxically richer in this poverty.
My God who cries has had me as companion, and I have had him.
It is not a child for whom I wait,
Though days of late might have me wonder if I could weep forever.
The child-etcher, the one who creates within his own creation,
whose fingerprints I bear and will also recognize on those I bear;

It is he I wait continually for, as he also waits for me.
 

Luke 22:42

I am in I am

I am not more than I am
but because of one who is
I am
in reality more like Him than the other