Holy, Normal, Set Apart and Here
My friend is grieving. For the purpose of this essay, I’ll call her Sophie. We met a few years ago at a homeschooling co-op where I initially felt like an outsider. I’d usually arrive a couple minutes late—or who am I kidding, probably more than a couple—wrangling children who may or may not be wearing shoes, and she’d be there smiling, peaceful. But not in a way that made me feel bad for not being smiling and peaceful; rather, just like a light that suddenly turns on in a previously unlit room doesn’t shame us for not being able to see so well in the dark, her light helped me see better.
There were rules to this co-op I didn’t understand. I’m actually embarrassed to write this down, but here goes—boys couldn’t take dance and girls couldn’t take parkour (and here I am, a dancer, a firm believer that dance is for EVERYONE, EVEN YOU, DEAR READER, I DON’T CARE WHAT A SMALL CO-OP I NO LONGER ATTEND MAY SAY ABOUT IT, SO THERE (whew, that felt good)—and I found a kindred spirit in Sophie as we both leaned further and further toward the exit, just about spilling out one spring day when co-op commenced for the year and we were both like, No, I don’t need details for the meeting about the fall. I don’t need any details for anything about this co-op ever again. Also boys can dance and girls can move very quickly and athletically from point A to point B, a la parkour, if they so choose; those are the only details we need to discuss further, thank you. Okay, okay, I didn’t actually say that. The truth is the director didn’t even offer me details for next year’s session and I didn’t ask for them. There are some things in life you just know, and that knowing makes words superfluous.
Like when my recently-separated-husband-at-the-time texted me in the middle of the night while I was feebly attempting to buoy my spirit with a trip to Disneyland with my family. I’d found out about his affair and needed space and Disneyland was far enough away, and considering it is the “happiest place on earth,” I figured the contrast to my own broken heart would at least be hilarious if I could survive it. Plus, my niece and nephew love it, so there’s that.
I noticed my phone buzz while laying on the floor of our hotel room, huddled under thin blankets, so I squinted at the words from the guy I’d married hoping for the best, feeling like the best was a guarantee. In the bag, as they say. (Spoiler alert! The bag was not hiding the best. But the bag wasn’t the only bag. There was a bigger bag I couldn’t see at all at the time. There always is. It’s okay to hope, it’s okay to breathe, it’s okay to go to Disneyland and bear the weight of forced cheer to see your niece and nephew happy and it’s okay to spend your nights reading a book about a little romance and a lot of pluck and still feel a thrill when the heroine kisses a good man.)
“Are you gonna divorce me or what” read his text.
Lololololol.
A perverse something inside of me wanted to laugh. And also say the acronym: fml (don’t google that, mom). I know that is terrible but I figured they were just letters and I’d only thought them and, really, the Old Testament book of Job is full of the fml sentiment, if not the actual letters in that order (“Curse God and die!” is the actual quote from Job’s wife to Job. If that isn’t ancient language for fml, I am not quite sure what is). And sometimes life is just so so hard and you have to swallow it anyway and when I was growing up I’d look at whole meals set before me with a loathing reserved only for the devil and his ways (one of which, I was convinced was creating a dish my mom was particularly fond of making called tuna fish casserole. Certainly this fish (from a can!) concoction covered with something awfully crunchy and chock full of mayonnaise couldn’t be from God, and if not from God, we know it must be from the devil, because a dish with that many little weird crunchy things on top could simply not be neutral). My parents would try all sorts of things to make the meal more palatable—one being dousing everything in ketchup (I still love ketchup, saving grace and childhood meal time hero that it is!) until the ketchup enabled me to take one or two bites—enough to make my parents say, Okay, you ate something, Jess. Now go and play—you’re done, dinner is done, and we don’t have to endure another one until tomorrow, thank GOD—and maybe, just maybe, allowing myself to think the acronym fml is another version of ketchup as I am forced to swallow certain dishes life has handed me (the dissolution of my marriage, for instance).
I pulled my blankets closer around me, the only person suddenly cold in Southern California.
“I don’t want to text about this” I replied, not ready to say—or even write the words. But the same reason he texted the words to me late at night was the same reason I didn’t want to text them back: we both knew.
Weeks before, I had finally stopped accepting his lies. To no avail, I’d asked him to say the truth out loud because even when the truth is terrible, it still cuts you clean and eventually lets you heal, unlike the lies that fester and grow gangrene within until one day you try to walk to the place you’ve gone a thousand times before—home, let’s say—and discover it’s gone.
Disappeared.
And what you’ve been sleeping in and cooking in and walking around in your underwear in has been an illusion for a long time and the only thing that was true was the underwear—so you pack it and quietly go back to your parents and spend a long time questioning everything but the underwear, which remains blessedly consistent.
Anyway, that night, I slipped off his ring and weeks later, when I read his text in the middle of the night in Disneyland, I looked at my bare finger and had a feeling the ring would never be mine again.
And that well-meaning co-op director and I also both just knew. I don’t think we even said a proper good-bye. Sophie and I didn’t either because we’d see each other again and again, I’d make sure of it. And her sons could dance if they liked and my daughters could do whatever the heck parkour is, if they liked.
Recently my friend Sophie came over to help celebrate my daughter Noa’s fourth birthday. I had told her I’d like her to come, but if she’d rather not be around some smiling faces and a rousing version of HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! while she herself is grieving, I understand. She said she thinks she could use a break, get out of her head, come practice some normalcy and all that, and I said we are happy to provide that space.
Sophie walked out of the cold and the night and the darkness that falls like a curtain by 5pm every day now and walked right into our house. It was so good to see her, to hug her, to tell her I am happy she exists; happy that she does it the same time and relatively the same place I do.
Sometimes I think about how long the world has been turning and I look around at the people I get to share meals with and confide in and even disagree with but absolutely arrive at the exact same space when it comes to certain books or songs that take my breath away—and I marvel because it is a miracle that in all of time and space, we, us—you and me—get to be here now, today, bearing witness to each other, surviving the news, admiring the way our children and their children and all of us continue to become.
There is a flower—the agave ocahui—which is commonly referred to as the century plant. It blooms once in its lifetime and it can take up to 30 years to do it (though for a long time, it was thought to take a hundred years to bloom once, thus its name). Anyway, it is a miracle to witness it bloom, and so it is with us. I look around and see we are all each other’s century plant; it is also a miracle to be the ones who, like that Ram Dass quote goes, are “walking each other home.” And who’s to say exactly what it looks like to bloom? Who’s to say that blooming is not just as much the days when we keep breathing and trusting and holding onto hope with tired fingers and even wearier hearts while learning to navigate a brand new, horrible dance called grief as it is the days when smiling comes easy and we understand perfectly why Mary Oliver warned us to not be afraid of joy’s plenty. For we feel it in our bones when we read, “if you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it…It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.” (Don’t Hesitate, Mary Oliver)
There was a moment at the party when I noticed Sophie talking to someone and start to cry. I noted with relief that the person with whom she was talking is no stranger to all kinds of feelings, and shadowy ones don’t scare her. Sophie took a beat and then reemerged with dry eyes, joining in other conversations, and continuing to be present. Later that night she texted me, apologizing for crying at a four year old’s birthday party. I told her the joy helps us understand why grief matters and the grief helps us understand why joy matters and it all belongs together, if we can but bear it. I thanked her for being willing to come around us in her vulnerable, holy state.
Yes, holy.
Often we think of the word holy to mean morally good, pious, righteous—and these synonymous are understandable, but not exactly what the Bible means by the word holy. The Hebrew word for holy is kadosh, which comes from the root word, kadash, which means: to be set apart for a specific purpose. Now I am not saying that all terrible things are sent from God, serving some great cosmic purpose (so cheer up!), meaning our grief is always purposeful in and of itself. I do believe that God as Creator takes all terrible things and draws good through and during and in them—including our grief—but I don’t believe that our suffering is wrapped up with a neat bow that looks like closure or even our own understanding on earth. Sometimes life is just very hard and we don’t know why, other than we live in a world that is broken and eventually breaks our heart.
But suffering—grief—sets us apart, and that is why I use the word holy. That is why I am honored my friend comes to our home in this, a holy season. (Please do not misunderstand my use of the word holy for good. Though God is and will reveal his goodness to her in this painful, albeit holy time where she is set apart, grieving—her world having fallen in, with time rushing and halting, rushing and halting; and when she dares to look around in a rare moment of stillness, she finds a space that is small, all the large and looming things beyond her own tight circle having suddenly lost their meaning, looking as foreign as the words of a language she has never heard staring up at her from the pages of a book she was suddenly handed and forced to make sense of.
Outfits that look good? Why.
Tropical destinations? Who cares.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner over and over again in perpetuity? Who has the time or the stamina, really.
Her world is too small right now, and maybe it’s not that these other things have become other—maybe it’s that she has become other in her grief. Set apart for the specific purpose of being with family, praying in silence, allowing herself to, as one of the early Christian desert fathers, Theophan the Recluse said, “…descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing, within you.” Now is a time to starkly realize her own limitations, to feel their bitter ends, cut herself on their jagged edges, and so also find the contrast of herself to the vastness of God, see Him reach beyond where she ends, all the way into forever, already there. Now is the time to stand in the center of reality, and there, find the blessing theologian Dallas Willard spoke of when he said “God is yet to bless anybody anywhere other than where they actually are;” Here, she is other, set apart, able (forced?) to throw all illusions out the window, having finally seen them for the flimsy, unhelpful things that they are. Here she is forced to ask for the peace, the healing, the gifts she needs but does not have (and believes she will have, even if not today)).
So no, this season is holy, but it is not wholly good.
The twentieth century poet and writer W.H. Auden wrote:
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
I am arrested by these words. By the bold veracity of them. Change is so hard; almost none of us choose it. Even Christ Himself, when faced with the knowledge of His final hours on earth and the abject suffering He would endure, famously asked, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done.”
That nevertheless. So few of us can get there voluntarily. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours be done. This is a narrow place, a hard space to squeeze into. Our selfishness, our fear, our mistrust doesn’t allow it.
But grief can take our hand and walk us there. It can finally set us apart to that place where we have no choice but to do this: be changed or die. Climb the cross of the moment or die.
And there, like the poet said, we let our illusions die.
We realize a little more the truth, how little most things vying for our attention matter. We walk down from the mountain, the cross, the tragedy that has eclipsed our world, and we reach for a veil, like Moses after he met with God. For surely we are changed, surely the people around us cannot understand where we’ve been, surely we must dumb it down a little bit, stifle our tears at parties, pretend we are somewhere else other than the only place God ever blesses us. Which is here, here, only here, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard—especially when nothing makes sense other than facts that make us cry; but we respond like St. Peter so long ago, “Lord, there is nobody else we can go to. You alone give us words of life.” We say like Job did, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” And we find a kind of holiness in the season, not because we are any better than anyone, not because we are particularly good or especially kind, not because we are placid or totally fine with everything, but because grief has allowed God to set us apart, and we do not fight it. We cannot fight it. We read the words of Christ, we marvel at how He who had the power to change everything, simply chose to submit, to change nothing and instead, in a scandalous act of holiness that has set Him apart forever, say, “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”