natalie's narrative

This I Used to Believe

On the way home from class Friday night, I caught This American Life on NPR.  The theme this week was "This I Used to Believe."  I wanted to share Act II because it was my former self in a conversation with my new self--faithwise.

A woman, grieving an inexplicable death of her close friend, is a former Catholic who thinks she may be agnostic now.  She has a (frustrating) conversation with an evangelical Texas football coach.  He goes all arrogant and apologetics (Josh McDowell style) on her, when all she seeks are a few answers to her questions about God and why do bad things happen to good people.  

I know that answers to her questions probably don't exist in this lifetime, but I grew so sad for the woman.  In the middle of pain and hurt and grief, nobody CARES whether Genesis 1 is literally true or whether postmodernism is wrong.  All she needed was a fellow human being to just listen and BE with her in her questioning and doubt.  Act II demonstrated why (aside from the church's love affair with militarism, patriotism, and consumerism), I have no desire to be involved in an evangelical church.  You can throw all the answers and arguments and facts at me you want, but if you have no way to address the gaping wounds in the world, you won't get very far!

The episode can be found here: This I Used to Believe.

It's okay

This is Christmas number three without my dad, and I’ve noticed a little bit of a change with how I’m approaching/reacting to the holidays this year. I’ve started to realize that things will be okay.

Never will my life go back to “normal,” but I’ve noticed in little ways that the holidays feel different to me this year. I can actually listen to Christmas music, and I got excited this year about putting up a tree. I know these are little things that have nothing to do with the point of Christmas, but before, petty details like this would make me cry or make me want to waste my day on the couch, in the dark.

I was so lucky to grow up with good memories and meaningful family traditions, so those little things would remind me of the past—something it feels like my family and I will never get back. But when the calendar started rolling around to November/December this year, I didn’t have this automatic urge to just skip right to January. Grieving-wise, I actually feel like I’m seeing progress with recovering. And I don’t think the distraction of having to memorize 3 months’ worth of learning into 3-hour exams has anything to do with it. No, I really think that I’m at the point where I can say, “It’s going to be okay.” In the past couple of years, I’ve had some dark, dark times where I never thought I would be able to say that again, so this is a big deal for me! If anyone out there is still in skip-to-January mode, that’s okay too. You’re allowed to be a grinch…whatever gets you through :)

But don’t even get me started on another aspect of Christmas--the disgusting consumerism that has taken over! Ack!

Crazy-making

A couple of weeks ago I intentionally skipped a small group that I normally attend, since I knew the discussion question was to be this: “Imagine that a friend of yours just lost their 2-year-old daughter in a car wreck. At the funeral, he or she is in tears and asks you, ‘Why did this have to happen?’ How would you respond? Why?”

Maybe I should have been there, just to give my perspective on loss and to connect with others who have also grieved the loss of a relative or friend. I just didn’t have the energy, though, to counter some of the responses that would have been offered. Granted, before I lost my dad, I too would have tried to answer that question and would have likely ended up with an insensitive answer, so it’s unfair to blame people who have simply not had certain life experiences. 

Either way, I’ve been pretty taken aback by some of the things well-meaning Christians have said to me and other grieving people. It seems to reflect a deficiency in our theology. We immediately want to gloss over the bad and jump directly to making it right. Maybe our circumstances of being in the comfortable USA, where we rarely experience suffering, have made us this way. Such an approach, however, can be damaging to the recovery process, since it can ignore legitimate feelings that may need to be addressed or hashed out with trusted friends.

I shouldn’t be afraid to share that I don’t believe in God at the moment, or that I’m really angry at Her, or that worship songs in church can either disgust me or make me cry. It should be okay to completely disagree with you that God took away a loved one in order to teach us something. 

I’ve linked to Jenell Paris’ blog before, and recently she shared her thoughts on those who want to consider infertility a blessing. She has grieved a loss in the past, and makes a great point: 

“It's crazy-making to tell people that what they experience as bad is actually good.”

Externalizing pain

I read a blog by Al Hsu, author of The Suburban Christian and also a book about grieving. He had some challenging thoughts on grief, drawing from Walter Brueggemann and Henri Nouwen.

Hsu writes that, if pain does not transform us, we will transmit it to other people:

"Walter Brueggemann says that the Hebrew psalms of lament were a way of ordering their grief and verbalizing their sense of loss and protest with how the world is and bringing these emotions before God. This certainly connects with Jesus' beatitude that blessed are those who mourn, who get outside what's going on inside, for the simple practical reason that unless we externalize our interior pain, we are not in a position or posture to receive comfort, whether from God or anyone else."

He also connects pain to our global context:

"Western Christians tend to have a poorly developed theology of suffering. We see suffering as abnormal, something to be fixed or therapeutically overcome. In contrast, for the vast majority of Christians throughout history and around the world, suffering is simply a fact of life. And I think it was Henri Nouwen that said that our experience of suffering, pain and loss should help us have greater solidarity with the suffering of the global church, as well as Christ himself. That we should not see loss or suffering as unusual, but normative."

I encountered this view of suffering when I worked with refugees. I had just started the job when my dad passed away, so amid all the other things I was feeling, I had a sense of guilt for grieving his loss. I mean, I grew up in a comfortable home, never went hungry, never had to walk for three days to a refugee camp. I had to learn to give myself permission to grieve. It was then that I could connect better with some of the people we worked with.

I think our culture is pretty bad in terms of how we are "supposed" to deal with grief. We have one well-meaning relative who thinks that the one-year mark of losing Dad was supposed to magically somehow be the end of our grieving. I wonder, if I had not found an amazing group of people who are also going through a loss, if I would be one of the "transmitters" and not one of the "transformers." I may not have been encouraged to externalize what was going on inside (which doesn't mean that I'm not still working on it!). Just some thoughts I have been having in light of my dad being gone one year and also recently losing a church friend.

Thoughts from Nouwen

A dear friend gave me a little book by the late Henri Nouwen, a Catholic priest who is popular reading on campus. Even a few pages in, Turn My Mourning into Dancing already has some great, healing words. Nouwen's theme seems to be fully facing grief, rather than avoiding it:

We hear an invitation to allow our mourning to become a place of healing, and our sadness a way through pain to dancing. Who is it Jesus said would be blessed? "Those who mourn" (Matt. 5:4). We learn to look fully into our losses, not evade them. By greeting life's pains with something other than denial we may find something unexpected. By inviting God into our difficulties we ground life--even its sad moments--in joy and hope. When we stop grasping our lives we can finally be given more than we could ever grab for ourselves. And we learn the way to a deeper love for others (xv).

...and...

Ulitmately mourning means facing what wounds us in the presence of One who can heal (xv).

...and Nouwen seeks to answer the question, "How do we make this shift from evading our pain to asking God to redeem and make good use of it? (6). I'm not ready to answer that question these days, really. But those quotes really spoke to me when I read them, since I've been trying to avoid some things that I should face. Hopefully they may speak to others, too...

Still processing...

...what has been going on these past few weeks.

On Sunday, March 12, my dad had a heart attack and passed away. He was 43.

I'm still numb, etc., from all this, but at least wanted to link to what Todd has been working on over on my dad's blog, Divine Conspirator. It's going to be a team blog and a tribute.

All of my dad's posts are still there, too, which have been great to go through and read. It's good to see his thoughts, and know that he is not only in our past, but in our future, too.

Thank you to everyone who has been there--and will continue to be there--for me and my family. What great friends and family we have!